Caligula at the Grammys
Caligula at the Grammys
And at Empire's End...
“The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that once believed they were eternal.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley
I didn’t watch the Grammys. I watched other people talk about them the day after. I watched made-up dramas about the things that supposedly happened there. Ben Affleck and J. Lo were fighting. He was miserable in the marriage now and it would all be over soon. There was some Harry Styles drama. Some Jay-Z drama. Some Taylor Swift drama. But really, all eyes were on one thing: Madonna’s face.
Fearlessness? This is not fearlessness. This is fear itself. Fear of age. Fear of no one caring about you. Fear of being normal. Fear of being ignored. Fear of being old.
Somehow, Bonnie Raitt won for Song of the Year, beating out Lizzo’s About Damn Time, Harry Styles As it Was, Taylor Swift’s All Too Well, Beyonce’s Break My Soul, and Adele’s Easy on Me.
A gracious and surprised winner at 73, Raitt’s win provided the night’s biggest shock. See kids? Sometimes miracles do happen. The response on TikTok was to flood the zone with outrage at an audience having no idea who just won such a pivotal award.
Raitt stood in stark contrast to Madonna whose entire career has been based on being a chameleon who could dance well but whose appearance seems to have been the thing she valued most. I’ve been a lifelong Madonna fan and have always turned to her to find my own confidence and fearlessness. But now, all I see is someone who doesn’t seem to know her own worth. It was never about her face.
Bonnie Raitt has spent her entire career ripping out guitar solos and writing great songs. You don’t have to be defined by your appearance. You can be defined by your hard work and talent instead. People might not know you on Tik Tok but what is going to be more valuable in the end?
If you wall yourself off, as the Left has done, and enclosed yourself in an insulated, isolated bubble it’s easy to imagine that you’ve “won.” Madonna walled herself off from reality too. She surrounded herself with “yes” people, and found filters to display herself on social media how she’d like to be seen.
She can convince herself after a while that she too has won. She has defied biology that demands we snuff out the pilot light on female sexuality after a certain age. Look at me, she says, I’m in my 60s and I still look like this.
Just as Madonna had to face the music - as the crowd shrank back in horror - so too do those on the Left who haven’t quite realized that their religion only resonates strongly with the true believers, but there is a whole world outside of it that probably remains traditional in their beliefs and wants no part of it.
Madonna handed the baton of sexual scandal at the Grammys to Sam Smith who performed what can only be described as an actual Satanic ritual on live television sponsored by Pfizer. Yes, Pfizer, is the same company that is in a whole bunch of sticky business where the vax is concerned, especially among the young. What better way to cement their good image among Gen-Z than sponsoring a Satanic ritual on live television?
How to shock a generation that has pretty much seen it all by now — that’s the question and the line must keep moving to keep them entertained. By now, it all feels like the debauchery that captures a society just before the world changes, you know, like Berlin in the early 1930s?
Sam Smith, like so many who came before him, including Madonna, had to shed his good-boy image by becoming a bad boy. His video of Unholy has 125 million views on Youtube.
The song and video’s meaning appears to be that “Daddy” cheats on “Mommy” by going to the body shop to have an affair with a girl who is his “sugar baby” that he buys expensive gifts for. But the twist is that the girl is a transgender female.
Listen to the applause when the first transgender person wins a Grammy:
It wasn’t just shock value they were going for. They wanted the rapture. All award shows now seem to be otherworldly in this way. Devout rituals of teary acceptance speeches about marginalized groups, at last, reaching yet another milestone.
In their endless quest to make history with “firsts,” they are forced to keep moving the line. Ordinary rights for women have been sucked into transgender rights. LGBTQIA seems to have become the most sacred - partly because it can involve all of the majority-white population, rather than exclusively BIPOC.
But every God needs a Devil, and theirs is convention. Anything hetero-normative, cis-gendered, or even traditionally gay is old school.
Even if the most popular musicians at the Grammys were a couple of ordinary hetero-white people - Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, it is always necessary to somehow show you are on board with Queer Nation. Otherwise, you’re either boring or a heretic.
But really, underneath it all, it’s just the same old thing dressed up differently.
They must continue to blur the line of what everyone is supposed to be okay with and then test people’s reaction to see if they’re bigots or not.
You must be totally okay with bringing kids to drag shows, no matter what, otherwise you’re a bigot who thinks drag queens are perverts. They want you to be okay with the gender transitioning of minors because gender is a construct and no one regrets it ever — your kid will commit suicide if you deny their lived experience and if you even question it you are a bigot.
If someone declares they are non-binary, you MUST adhere to their chosen pronouns or you are a BAD PERSON. There are no gray areas, no room for any kind of nuanced discussion. It is either/or. You are with them or against them and if you are with them you have to be with them all the way.
So then when they save the actual Satanic Ritual on live television sponsored by Pfizer you’re supposed to be okay with that, too.
Joy Reid might want to remember the moment she declared the culture wars over. She might be missing what’s really going on. They have created an ongoing house of cards that might play out like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Just as the Emperor demanded people compliment his fine attire or else, such artifice ultimately led to the Empire’s collapse. When you make it impossible for people to tell you the truth, its much easier to become disconnected from reality.
Here is an interview with a mom - a former “true beliver” of the new religion of the Left. She is gay and raised her sons to be “gender neutral,” and allowed her sons to take the lead. But over time, she realized that it felt more like a cult to her and it conflicted with her own instincts as a mother.
She wrote this piece anonymously on Substack:
I fear for the future, the future for a sensitive, feminine, socially awkward boy who has spent his early childhood years actually thinking he was a girl. I fear for what our culture, our institutions, his peers, and the internet will tell him. I fear the power of the state, that seems hell bent on destroying the parental child relationship. No matter what the future holds, I will never ever stop fighting to protect my sons.
I am no longer a true believer.
This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation. I have left this cult, and I am never turning back.
You know it’s a cult when they try to separate children from parents, which is exactly what much of the Left is doing now.
The truth still matters, even if it’s become unpopular. The truth here isn’t that Sam Smith and the Left have embraced Satanism in the mainstream, but that they have decided their religion must be America’s new normal.
We must have their ideology designated as a religion so that it can be taught in schools the same way other religions are taught in schools. We need a firm separation of Church and State, just as we need to uphold freedom of religion.
They can worship however they please but we must put a stop to this ideology capturing every cultural and political institution in this country. We can’t be afraid of them. We have to stand up to them, for the sake of our kids and their futures.
Full disclosure: I am not anti-trans. My daughter would never speak to me if I were. I don’t take a hard line but I take a cautious line. And if Sam Smith wants to play that funky music, white boy, I got no problem with that.
I just want us to be braver in how we talk about this viral ideology so many are afraid of. We all will be judged by how we responded to this moment because there is no way all of this isn’t going to result in massive lawsuits years from now.
Our Caligula isn’t a Roman Emperor who sleeps with his sister and epitomizes excess. Our Caligula isn’t even Sam Smith, stuffed into a glittery jumpsuit, a Halloween costume devil.
No, our Caligula is Pfizer. And every other institution that uses “wokeism” as its shield.
The corporate class indulges the young in their fantasies and their larping to gain their trust, lure them in and own them for a lifetime. Therein lies the truly grotesque thing about the Grammys.
When they marry themselves to the newfound zealotry of the Left, no one will ever question them but will fiercely defend them as one of their own.
At the very least, corporations could have the decency to be offended by a Satanic ritual on live television. But “woke Capitalism” demands they too stand up and applaud. Otherwise, the mob will turn on them.
I am not a religious person but to me it is very hard not to see that perhaps the biggest problem facing our country and indeed the world is a deep spiritual rot. People without any faith or belief in a purpose greater than themselves seek out all sorts of remedies to fill the gaping holes in their souls. With no belief in objective truth, they believe that a boy can be a girl and vice versa merely by wishing it so, they believe that they can recapture their lost youth with injections and surgeries that turn their faces into grotesque masks. These seem to me all signs of a culture teetering on the edge of collapse.
Perhaps the most important indicator of a society in deep trouble is the decline in life expectancy in the past few years. COVID has played a part in the decline, but we have also witnessed large increases in overdose deaths and deaths related to alcohol abuse, in other words deaths of despair. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
So much has gone wrong in the last few years politically and economically but at least with those issues, I can at least imagine a solution even though it seems very far away. I don't know what it takes for a culture to get its moral compass back once it has been lost.
I think this essay is timely, accurate, relevant, clear and compelling. Thank-you for courageously sharing your talent. Reminds me of No Country For Old Men; good people are going to suffer for being kind and caring; and the outcome of the battle is in doubt. Lucky for me I’m Catholic and this world is just an el stop to the final destination.