culture – Page 2 – Lone Candle

How the Tea Party Paved the Way for Donald Trump

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Lone Candle

“The Tea Party that arose in 2009 seemed initially focused on bailouts, health care, and taxes. But new research suggests that concerns about cultural change and distrust of distant elites, the same themes that drove Trump supporters, were also central to the Tea Party—not just in the electorate but among activists and even for aligned Members of Congress.

What made the Tea Partiers in Congress different from your average Republican, the so-called establishment Republicans, was not their position on fiscal or economic matters. Instead, it was they had different positions on civil rights and social policies.

…

In the book, Change They Can’t Believe In, Chris Parker and Matt Barreto had previously shown that the Tea Party’s mass supporters stood out for their racial concerns, not their economic views. Gervais and Morris finds that it was not just voters, but legislators who stood out mainly on cultural concerns

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In terms of the Tea Party organizations, I think they were absolutely interested in lots of fiscal conservatism, and this is really what their ultimate goals were, were to see fiscally conservative policy passed, but they saw in the Tea Party movement, or the feelings of resentment in the electorate as an opportunity, and I argue it was the same case with House leadership as well. Going into 2010, Paul Ryan, Eric Canter, Kevin McCarthy and John Boehner as well, saw an opportunity here, saw an energy that could be utilized to retake the House and perhaps pass fiscally conservative legislation. It’s sort of a means to an end, sort of this latent resentment here, is there to be mined and utilized, even if they don’t necessarily agree with the rhetoric or agree with the goals of the Tea Party in the electorate.

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the Tea Party wasn’t just a group of angry people wearing three quartered hats and waving flags. It was and is this sustained alternative energy within the Republican Party.”

https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-the-tea-party-paved-the-way-for-donald-trump/

Charlie Kirk Shooter Exposes MAJOR Problem

Posted on September 14, 2025September 14, 2025 by Lone Candle

One through-line with many assassins and mass shooters beyond ideology is that they are young men with access and familiarity with guns who radicalized on the internet. This is happening with a variety of ideologies. The internet and access to guns are key causes in many of these tragedies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPc1hIR68wY

Why Americans Are So Violent | Glenn Loury, John McWhorter & Jens Ludwig | The Glenn Show

Posted on July 9, 2025 by Lone Candle

U.S. murder rate is way higher than other developed countries. Our non-gun murder rate is normal, but our gun-murder rate is huge.

Much gun violence is not rational. It’s not clearly motivated by money or lack of fear of the justice system. It’s just two guys getting into an argument who fail to solve it peacefully and someone pulls a gun.

Parts of certain cities are overwhelmed with crime, so children are often left to fend for themselves. This develops a culture and an intuitive sense that if I don’t respond to provocation with violence, I will be taken advantage of. This leads people to instinctively respond to perceived provocation with deadly force.

Although gang violence is a big problem, most shootings are not gang related.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2raVsK4gnmo

Is anybody watching the same TV shows anymore?

Posted on July 2, 2024 by Lone Candle

“When the golden age of television started in the late 1990s, all you needed to keep on top of good TV was a premium cable package that included HBO. When streaming entered the game in the early 2010s, you could get by with a basic Netflix subscription for $8 a month, maybe a Hulu subscription if you were a true TV buff. Now, there’s still cable and there’s still Netflix and Hulu — but there’s also Prime and Paramount+ and Disney+ and Apple TV+ and Peacock and Max. Oh, and if you want to keep your Netflix subscription fee low, you have to watch ads now.
It’s all a lot, way more than most people can keep track of. A 2023 Nielsen report found audiences now spend an average of 10.5 minutes searching for something to watch every time they sit down. At least one in five audience members have been so overwhelmed with all the choices the post-streaming world has for them that they’ve chosen to forgo TV to do something else instead.

Under these circumstances, it takes a lot for any one individual show to cut through the noise and find a critical mass of people waiting to watch it, much less discuss it. When they do decide to discuss it, they’re going to different places than they used to.”

…

“One of the sticking points for the Writer’s Guild in 2023 was the rise of so-called “mini rooms” as an increasingly standard practice over the last 10 or so years as the streaming platforms began to build their libraries. A classic TV writer’s room can include seven or eight writers, but mini rooms include only two or three writers plus a showrunner.

Mini rooms typically emerged when a show was in limbo waiting to be greenlit, either for production or for a new season. The idea was that the showrunner could take on a few extra writers and a few weeks to plan the season they were pitching, which executives would then evaluate before they committed to filming episodes. The writers for a mini room were hired as freelancers and paid to scale, and there was no guarantee they would stick around if the show continued on to regular production. One of the biggest issues with this practice, the WGA argued, was that mini rooms cut young writers off from the classic apprenticeship system of TV writing.

Young writers were by and large not attractive to showrunners who needed to staff up a mini room to churn out a season’s worth of scripts fast. If young writers did get hired, they didn’t get mentorship from the older and more experienced writers they were working with, because those writers didn’t have time for it. By the time the episodes they wrote went into production, they were no longer working for the show and had no chance to come to the set, see how their script worked in practice, and adjust their practices for the future based on the new information.

The new WGA contract essentially killed off mini rooms, but for the next few years, we’ll be living in the creative ecosystem they birthed. That’s a world where upcoming talent had limited opportunities to learn the craft of their medium, and it has started to show.”

https://www.vox.com/culture/354928/post-peak-mid-tv-quiet-the-bear-succession