Norman Lear, one of the most consequential men in America, has died
Norman Lear, who brought Archie Bunker, Meathead, and Fred Sanford to American audiences, has died at 101. He was a talented man (although not necessarily an original one), but why he really matters is that he was also one of the most consequential people in America, helping to push our entire nation to the left, including the Supreme Court.
Norman Lear was born in 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut, to a mother who had immigrated from Ukraine and a father whose family had come from Russia. When he was 20, he dropped out of college to enlist in the United States Army. He was a radio/operator and gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress and flew 52 combat missions.
After the war, Lear kicked around in Hollywood for over 20 years, working as a successful writer and, eventually, a director. He became famous, though, because he recognized that a British show called Till Death Do Us Part, about the comedic conflicts between a working-class white guy and his socialist son-in-law, could be rejiggered for Americans. And so All In The Family introduced America to Archie Bunker, the angry reactionary white guy, and Meathead, the quintessential correct-thinking modern Democrat.
All In The Family was hugely successful. The writing was sharp, and the issues were the same being fought in America’s larger culture. On every issue, Archie—abrasive, insensitive, and selfish—represented the worst of America, while Meathead (played by the abrasive, insensitive, and selfish Rob Reiner) was the future. Sure, Meathead was an irritating, supercilious, pontificating know-it-all, but he held the right ideas about everything: race, sex, Nixon…you name it.
Image: Normal Lear (cropped). YouTube screen grab.
To the surprise of Lear and others behind the show, audiences loved Archie, but they absorbed Meathead’s lessons, as Archie himself did. It was okay to laugh with Archie but, at the end of each show, you (and usually Archie, too) knew that he was wrong and Meathead was right. As Ben Shapiro wrote in Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, “Never before or since has a show so clearly stated its objective: the mocking of traditional values, the shocking of the bourgeois, the full frontal attack on authority.” (p. 103.)
The show also reflected the elitist takeover of the Democrat party. Shapiro writes,
Now, for the first time, the blue-collar guy was the villain, and his son-in-law, the aspiring graduate student, was the hero. While All in the Family had the trappings of the lower-class comedy, it was actually an elitist approach to politics. (p. 104.)
The show was so popular that it eventually led to two spin-offs: Maude, which brought third-wave feminism into American homes, and The Jeffersons, which seeded modern race theory for Americans. And speaking of race, Lear also mined Britain’s Steptoe and Son, about a curmudgeonly British junk man and his son, and turned it into Sanford & Son, about a curmudgeonly black junk man and his son. Maude, in turn, led to Good Times, which further propelled the leftist black agenda. Meanwhile, lest gays feel left out, Soap propelled gay rights into America’s living rooms.
I was a teen in the 1970s, so I grew up watching every one of these shows. And unlike today’s TV audience, which is completely fragmented by race and age, my parents watched them, too, as did people of different races. These shows, through very good comedic writing, winnowed their way into American psyches. Moreover, many of the points about lingering racism were valid, as were the bits about things such as sexual assault or women dealing with breast cancer. But mostly, everything on those shows was what blossomed into the cultural and political madness that has its grip on America today.
In many ways, these shows were the genesis of the Manicheanism—the absolute political binary of good and evil—that governs the Democrat party and the secular Jews who are blindly loyal to that party. It was no longer the case that people shared a vision of America but disagreed about the means to achieve it. Instead, these shows made clear that the social values that had once held sway in America were evil and that those who embraced them were evil, too.
It's this Manicheanism that still affects so many of today’s secular Jews. They’re afraid of religion because they associate it with past Christian and current Islamic antisemitism. To them, only the state offers a refuge—and because of superb leftist propaganda after World War II, they’re too ignorant to understand that both Hitler and Stalin (who led huge anti-Jewish pogroms) based their actions on socialist principles, for Marx built socialism into his theories. Conservative Jews, on the other hand, understand that conservative American Christians, the Bible, and the Constitution are a bulwark against 2,000 years of genocidal madness.
Lear’s Manichean, secular-Jewish fear of religion led him to found People for the American Way (“PFAW”) in 1980. Its stated purpose was to oppose the Religious Right’s effort to push back against two decades of the left’s successful efforts to erase traditional values from America.
One of PFAW’s greatest victories was its major role in keeping Robert Bork off the Supreme Court, something in which Joe Biden also figured prominently. In Bork’s place, we ended up with the activist Justice Anthony Kennedy, the man who gave us the passionate romance novel that was the decision green-lighting same-sex marriage. He also sided with leftists on abortion, affirmative action, and capital punishment.
By all accounts, Norman Lear was a nice man. He lived a life without scandal and made millions laugh. His tragedy, and America’s, is that, while he started out as a classical liberal, he ended as a leftist, and he used the trust and power he acquired to advance that leftist agenda in America.