“A date gives you a corsage, not a multiple fracture.” – Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
At the LEGO® hospital, almost every operation is plastic surgery.
If you’ve ever felt like America’s cultural compass is spinning like a drunk uncle at a Latvian wedding reception, you’re not wrong. I believe most of my readers can remember back to the 1970s and 1980s.At that time, Americans had a (mostly) shared reality, love it or hate it.
That shared reality kept the country rowing in roughly the same direction. Getting out of Vietnam was a political choice, and (we know now) hard-GloboLeftist Walter Cronkite was instrumental in getting us out after hard-GloboLeftist president LBJ got us involved. The media could start and stop wars, at will.
Now?
It’s a fractured funhouse mirror where the Super Bowl® and presidential elections seem to be the last gasps of collective attention, like family reunions where everyone shows up but nobody talks afterwards. The rest of the time, we’re each siloed in our respective algorithm alcoves, each getting a different view of reality, sort of like the way she looked after six beers and the way she looked at 8AM.
I’m always polite to people who wear glasses, after all, they paid money to see me.
How’d we get here?
Blame the usual suspects: tech titans and open-border overlords who can’t get enough of cheap labor and expensive ballots.
Picture this: pre-1930 America, a patchwork quilt of immigrants fresh off the boat around 1900, all crammed into cities like Ellis Island escapees. Cultures clashed harder than a bad blind date. Languages tangled, traditions tussled, and the “melting pot” was more like a slow simmer with occasional boil-overs. How bad was it? Immigration was essentially shut down with the Immigration Act of 1924 which sharply restricted numbers and essentially banned immigration from most non-Western cultures.
At this time, however, technology makes its appearance: enter radio, then television. These were the great homogenizers of America. From FDR’s fireside chats in the ’30s to Reagan’s ranch riffs in the ’80s, these boxes beamed a single narrative into every living room with little competition. Three networks – ABC®, CBS©, NBC™ – dictated the national conversation.
Commie Cronkite signed off with “And that’s the way it is,” and America, by and large, believed him. Why? Mainly because there were no other options except some fringe samizdat.
Radio had replaced the town square and TV turbocharged it. Now it was I Love Lucy laughs for all, and heavy-handed M*A*S*H moralizing nationwide, with Johnny Carson‘s couch as the national nightcap.
I heard the national origami championship is tonight. It’s on paper view.
This centralized media forced most of the immigrants into and ersatz Americana because there weren’t Slavic-language radio stations in most places. Right or wrong, it forged a (more or less) unified American ethos from 1930 to the mid-1990s.
Sure, it was sanitized suburbia with a side of Cold War conformity and liberal-left inclusion, but it worked: shared heroes (John Wayne, anyone?), shared villains (Commies), shared laughs from non-stereotypical minorities who were, after all, just like us (Cosby before the fall and his final TV show: Women Say The Darndest Things).
We were one nation under three channels, indivisible, with sitcoms and soaps for all.
Then the cracks came.
First, cable TV in the 1980s splintered the spectrum, MTV™ for the kids, CNN® for the news junkies, ESPN© for the jocks. But the real wrecking ball?
Then, the Internet appeared in the mid-1990s, and was supercharged by smartphones in 2007.
Suddenly, infinite choices: blogs, YouTube®, TikTok©, X®. Everyone is a broadcaster, nobody is the boss. Literally no one tells me what to write, I’m free to bring up uncomfortable truths. This resulted in something the GloboLeft hates: attention is atomized. Their rescue, though, is that now Faceborg™ and Google© could manipulate results and (mostly) keep ideas within politically acceptable limits.
Annnnnd she runs an NGO whose mission is to restrict speech.
The Super Bowl® still pulls 100M+ viewers, a rare ritual that the NFL™ is trying to destroy by featuring increasingly divisive halftime shows. Elections? They glue us to screens every four years, like national therapy sessions.
But otherwise?
The GloboLefties lap up MSNBC® memes, righties rally on Rumble™ and there is no overlap. Also, there are no more “water cooler” moments since the odds of anyone watching the same things as you are very low.
Worse, massive immigration since the ’90s poured gasoline on the fire. Post-1965 reforms flipped the script: waves after wave from Latin America, Asia, Africa from clashing cultures. Traditional American values? Now they’re “racist,” “xenophobic,” “bigoted,” “transphobic,” “climate-denying,” “patriarchal” poison.
Family, faith, freedom? Hate crimes.
The people didn’t vote for this mosaic meltdown; The GloboLeftElite engineered it. Cheap labor lured corporations; votes lured Democrats. As Lenin reportedly quipped, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
Here, the “rope” was imported workers who tilt 80% GloboLeft, hanging the old republic with demographic destiny.
By 2026’s doorstep, consensus is kaput. COVID crackdowns under Biden tried to muzzle dissent: shadowbans, deplatforms, “disinfo” dossiers. But the dam burst.
GloboLeftElite’s iron fist? In the United States in 2025, it appears to be wholly rusted. Political correctness, once their shield, lies in tatters.
Why?
Dissenting elites like Musk and Trump flipped the script. X™ became a free-fire zone.
He has a lot of X employees.
Ideas flowed unfettered, exposing the emperor’s empty ethos. “Woke” went from weapon to punchline; folks stopped fearing the “racist” label like it was yesterday’s news.
So, where does this cultural shatter take us?
Short-term: more balkanization. Red states redline GloboLeft policies, banning DEI diktats, booting illegals, building walls (literal and legal).
Blue bubbles boil over with sanctuary silliness and virtue-vomiting, with California leading the country in giving free money to illegal freeloaders.
No national narrative means that, right now, there are no peaceful national solutions.
America does have quite an advantage, though an armed citizenry and what remains of federalism, where I expect state freedoms will increase as the central government weakens. American was built as a country that could fight back against overlords with the preservation of the 1st and 2nd Amendments being so crucial to us not falling into the horrific tyranny we see places like England currently entering.
Ah, a raft filled with Marxmen. (meme as found)
My take, long term? Free ideas forge fresh foundations, with a Tradright renaissance entirely possible: young men gymming, girls gardening, families flourishing in flyover fortresses.
I do see that the GloboLeft’s grip will have to slips as their “diversity” devolves into division because the moslems in Dearborn and Somalisota hate gays and want Sharia. The GloboLeft cannot understand, at all, why their pets hate diversity.
We’re not done. The rope the GloboLeftists sold? We’ll use it to climb.
“Flogging / blogging”. LOL.
I actually liked Walter Cronkite. (Dan and the other 1980s follow-ons at all the networks, not so much). I don’t see his historic personal take on Vietnam (which I remember seeing at the time) as CBS flipping a switch to turn the war off but instead him waking up and standing up to the flawed government narrative being deliberately fed to the masses. The domino theory was the 1970 version of the 2020 COVID mind maze, and that narrative totally shifted when Nixon went to China. Why fight commie countries in bloody wars when you can get rich milking them as they embrace “socialism with Chinese / Vietnamese / wherever characteristics” by welcoming them into the WTO in 2001 and 2007?
That’s what’s led to the real downfall of America – not so much the (Biden flood of) secondary unassimilated immigrants coming here expecting welfare and minimum wages in exchange for votes, but instead the transfer of many times more American jobs to lower wage foreigners who stayed in their own country and H-1B visitors who come to ours. THAT’S the metaphorical rope we have hung ourselves with, and that component of our downfall is based on misplaced greed rather than misplaced compassion.
Cronkite highlighted a legitimate need for a reevaluation of deeply held beliefs in our foreign policy at the time. From that point, we have embraced Asian communists as our manufacturing zone, have flirted with nuclear war by trying to drain European communists first with the Cold War and currently with the Warm War in Ukraine, and finally have drained ourselves by responding to 9/11 with a GWOT ending in ignoble retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan, praising an ISIS terrorist as the new leader of Syria and electing a Socialist Muslim to be the mayor of NYC.
America First in the 1970s instead of the 2020s woulda arguably been a better response.
Cronkite was a commie, he accomplished his mission.
CIA (lefty) mouthpiece.
Yes.
Walter was (mostly) before my time, but when he got to let his hair down with his GloboLefty friends, he really showed how he was. An awful man.
Vietnam right or wrong? That’s another post.
Fully agree, but you are leaving out the ugly middle part that is inevitable.
Yeah, that’s the part that will be . . . interesting. And very subject to initial conditions.
A sane culture would slap the tyranny right out of Nina Jankowitz. Along with the ‘men’ that empower her.
Not gonna argue that.
‘The people didn’t vote for this mosaic meltdown; The GloboLeftElite engineered it.’
Very much so. Each stage rolled-out on cue. Hi-tec farming.
A globo techno-elite going back to the Royal Society . . . or to Pharaoh’s Court, it’s all the same show. Building their perfect Daemonium.
Oh, it’s been thrown back, again and again.
“….a rare ritual that the NFL™ is trying to destroy by featuring increasingly divisive halftime shows. ”
I still watch a few NFL games (against my better judgment) mainly because NIL and big money have ruined college football. NFL was getting better after they backed away from the worst offenders (e.g. kneeling during the anthem) , but it seems the wokeness is actually starting to increase again.
Advertisements are all ghetto based, there are social justice slogans printed on everything (and they commentators even note that the NFL is actively striving to increase “social justice”) . Then there are the end zone chimpouts after a touchdown and the active takeover of the sport by professional gambling. It’s the most complete lack of self awareness ever, that a league is preaching to me about social justice, when their players, advertisers and partners are some of the most sleazy and unethical people imaginable.
For anyone that living in a major NFL city, how is the attendance at the games? The cameras rarely pan the stadium anymore. In the rare occasion that I do get a glimpse into the stands, I often see lots of empty seats (although in fairness, there are some games that do appear to be sold out).
I was surprised when I came across the all sports radio channels this fall. They were no longer rah rah rah for the team, they were all rah rah rah for online betting.
I only see one or two NFL games a year on TV anymore. Because of that.
What a wonderful game and tradition college football once was. I am grateful to have witnessed it.
I thought it was strange at the time, but my parents couldn’t stand Cronkite. Huntley and Brinkley were the national news, and regardless of the hype, they didn’t trust Kennedy. Call it conservative. or whatever, but they didn’t trust, or promote, anything the Democratic Party promoted. Communism was evil, self-reliance a demand, and frivolous wants never something to be proud of. Even in the short period since their death, I doubt they would recognize the country since that time.
By the late Sixties/early Seventies (HS/College for me) I was watching John Chancellor on NBC. I thought Cronkite had crossed the line in declaring the war lost.
Pa Wilder, I think, didn’t trust any of them.
People remember Cronkite and Vietnam because of Johnson’s famous quote. But I believe Frank McGee of NBC that had a much greater impact than Cronkite on “editorial” rather than “journalistic” coverage of Vietnam at the time.
I came to know McGee over the years for his ongoing anchor coverage of Gemini and Apollo NASA space launches; I still vividly remember watching his epic “The Threshold” Apollo 11 special at my grandparent’s house when aired the night before its launch. I went on to routinely watch on weekends both McGee’s “The McGee Report” (with frequent civil rights and Vietnam in-depth stories) and Cronkite’s The 20th Century / The 21st Century (extremely influential to me), so I followed both of them. Certainly McGee was painted at the time with the “liberal” brush, even more than Cronkite, because of his ongoing focus on the 1960s civil rights turmoil.
McGee spent a solid month in Vietnam embedded in an Army unit and shared his findings and editorial criticism against the war (with an “inclusive” black-viewpoint) in the “Same Mud, Same Blood” special I watched when it aired in early December 1967.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk97G6DhVmQ
The shocking Tet Offensive started a month later in January 1968. Between NBC’s previous documentary and Tet, Cronkite was pretty much forced to do his own whirlwind “Report From Vietnam” in late February 1968…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2ev-GalTng
…containing his famous “mired in stalemate” on air editorial still remembered today.
McGee reported and said pretty much the same thing months earlier when the official government storyline was still in place before being exposed as phony by Tet. McGee reported it correctly first, a journalistic feather in his cap. Gotta give credit where credit is due.
Years later McGee said his on-air goodbye NBC and went on to die from cancer the following week. My mother literally cried at the report of his death, the only news figure she felt so strongly about. Say what you will about the politics of 20th century network television, it was more unbiased that the torrent of news slop we get today; and the family ritual of gathering to watch the nightly news produced a national and personal cohesion we are sorely missing today. As John has cataloged so well in his post today.
John,
I’m not sure what is going on with your blog but the pictures are not showing (a major loss of enjoyment for me) and there are large blank spaces where they usually are.
Clicking on the icon and “OPen image in new tab” takes me to:
https://i0.wp.com/wilderwealthywise.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/FRACTURES.jpg?w=700&ssl=1
And a “This site cannot be reached” note.
This is in both Opera and Firefox with Firefox (both sparkly brand new and updated regularly) …
That’s odd – it’s working fine for me on phone and laptop with Chrome, Brave, Opera and Edge all chiming in . . . ? Might I be being censored by a company or country?
I have the same problem, but it is not just your site.
I’ve even checked several internet providers . . . hmmm.
you were very close to the answer but it was part of that “patchwork” quilt that came in the 1900s that was the author of our current situation, check out streams like “Black Pilled” and “Warstrike” on Rumble and you will see it more clearly. (assuming its lack of knowledge rather than intentional deceit on the order of a Kronkite that’s at play)
I rarely miss Devon.
The (((GloboLeftElite))) engineered it.
FIFT.
And cronkite was not only a communist but a satanist.
Hadn’t heard the satanist accusation . . .
Using Brave,, everything is good.
I believe the UK has been throttling this site for years, though that’s anecdotal based on traffic. Maybe if I published in Arabic.
The point of Komrade Kronkite’s efforts to stop the Vietnam War was not because it was wrong or unjust or killing Americans. The point of his efforts was the fracturing and then deepening the divide between the generations and the political perspectives.
Death by a thousand cuts. Kronkite’s slant on things, a movie here, a sitcom or a record album there, a khommie professor tossed into the mix with increasing frequency to serve as both the spark and the fuel for the eventual bolshevik overthrow of FUSA.
Word. Like poison. Give it in small doses. Keep repeating. Eventually the victim succumbs. The small doses, which have been going on since the days of Teddy Roosevelt are reaching fruition: Government lies and the bread and circuses distractions of a corrupt, demonic MSM. “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” – H/T to H.L. Mencken.
Moving slowly toward the goal, herded by the Frankfort folks.
My fav back then was Eric Sevaraid at CBS. Less of a lib, well respected. Met him in Spring ’72 when he spoke in Starkvegas. Charles Kurault stayed out of politics at CBS as well, great on his CBS Sunday Morning segments. UNC grad.
My father (a Henry Cabot Lodge R) preferred Huntley/Brinkley. Dad ran the US Raiload Retirement Board. Retired in ’63, never made more than $14K ($100-110K today). High point of my young life was shaking Sen. Everette Dirksen’s hand when I was 9. He took me onto the Senate floor with dad to shake hands. Big stuff back then.
Wanted to be elected Prez, period.
It’s a different world, but with respect to an early post, is it all fake?
And gay.
fake AND gay! (i’ve heard another semi-famous podcaster use that description…)
sincerely,
carolinaTURTLE
Cronkite was the voice for the Owl at Bohemian Grove. No matter if you believe in the Conspiracy Theory of B G or not, the fact these people all get together to party should be a warning sign we all heed.