All Who Can, Please Rise

Each week, I eagerly await a video from conservative Instagram personality Austin Fletcher (@fleccas) called This Week in Culture. It’s a compilation of outrageous cultural snapshots from social media and major news outlets, and always includes the classics - rioting in Washington Square Park, gender bending Tik Toks, and drag queen story hours at New York Public Library branches and churches alike. 

I used to watch from my apartment in the city, thinking of my home. That would never happen in Nebraska. But pride comes before the fall, and this week, I was humbled. 

“Saw Nebraska in the Daily News this week,” my friend whispered to me while we were sitting in Sunday service. 

“Do I want to know?” 

“Yes. Drag queen story hour!” 

She was cut off by a directive from the pulpit before she could elaborate: “all who can, please rise.”

The story, which I later sought out, detailed a drag queen story hour at the Lincoln Children’s Museum that had been thwarted by a barrage of objections from concerned citizens.  According to OutNebraska, the event was scheduled to promote creating, discovering and learning through “the power of play.”

Conservative and libertarian critics see this trend differently. At best, it’s a nuisance. At worst, it’s part of an overt progressive push from the coastal elite, attempting to indoctrinate young children with sexualized LGBTQIA+ propaganda. Especially concerning to these factions are the events which take place at religious institutions, like the Unitarian Church of Lincoln and the South Street Temple.  

One thing is certain about this particular showing, death threats and all - insanity begets insanity. Both the queens and conservatives put Fleccas to shame. 

As a New Yorker by way of Nebraska, I’ve watched as cultural trends shift inward toward the Midwest. This is not always bad - in fact, as a kid, I wished fashion would trend toward us a little faster. But what happens when the cultural shifts don’t reveal themselves in rhinestones and feather boas? Instead, what happens when a trend with more consequential implications and much greater power is presented quietly, covertly?

Take recent developments at the Bureau of Land management, for example. 

The Bureau (or BLM, ironically) administers more surface land and subsurface mineral estate than any other government agency in the United States, totaling one-tenth of America’s land base. It also manages livestock grazing on 155 million acres under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, signed into law by FDR as part of the New Deal. Their jurisdiction includes nearly all federal land west of Nebraska, and creeps continually closer to the heartland.  

When led by an expert administrator, BLM has the authority to preserve the integrity of unsettled land, authorize pipeline and geothermal energy projects, educate millions of students in outdoor laboratories, and provide nearly 470,000 jobs in oil and gas industries. Millions of Americans depend on BLM to act objectively in its administration of these resources.

Unfortunately, BLM is in a leadership drought and has a history of abusing its power. It has seized land and cattle from rightful owners, imposed unwarranted fines, closed off public roads, and illegally sold horses for slaughter. It’s oppressive enough when merely mismanaged by administrators like Neil Kornze and Nada Wolff Culver. 

And now, President Biden has nominated progressive environmental warrior Tracy Stone-Manning to its helm. She has made one thing clear: she’s more interested in activism than administration. Consider her the new head-pastor of the church of environmentalism. 

In responses to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, she was transparent about her intentions - to “limit development on BLM’s 247 million acres of public land” according to the Wall Street Journal, and to implement Biden’s radical green agenda with religious fervor. Even more concerning are her ties to environmental terrorism. She has affiliated with EarthFirst!, according to 1989 and 1993 probes into a tree-spiking incident, during which she agreed to an immunity deal to avoid criminal felony prosecution.

This begs the question: when you nominate a radical environmentalist with known associations to ecoterrorism to an administrative position, what are you trying to administer? 

In Stone-Manning (and in Xavier Bacerra and Miguel Cardona, for that matter), we see Biden’s cultural push under the thinly-veiled guise of stewardship. These are not elected officials, but bureaucrats with cultural power and the ability to consolidate it. They are heads of a new kind of church. 

As a person who loves Nebraska and this country, that should concern you. Where leaders conflate the short term appeasement of a partisan base and consolidation of power with absolute moral truth, culture will shape politics, and historically, the spirit of the age has proven a flimsy foundation upon which to base the direction of a country. 

Can Nebraska, a state where we stand firmly upon our founding principles, withstand the cultural currents threatening to pull the country under? Will the centrifugal force of the midwestern spirit be dam enough?

“All who can, please rise.”

Image: Fine Art America