Back in 1989, President George H. W. Bush talked about a “thousand points of light.” He meant it as a tribute to America at its best: the churches, charities, volunteer squads, neighborhood helpers, and everyday citizens who quietly held the country together. It was a gentle, optimistic image: millions of small acts of service lighting up the dark, proving that the American character didn’t depend on Washington but on the decency of ordinary people.
Bush believed the culture was strong, the institutions were stable, and the nation’s story was still intact. A thousand civic lanterns, he thought, were enough to keep the republic lit.
He was wrong — not because the vision failed, but because the rot was deeper than he realized.
Today, we aren’t dealing with potholes, hunger drives, or literacy tutoring. We’re dealing with a culture whose narrative engine has been hijacked. Our media ecosystem manufactures reality. Our universities produce activists instead of thinkers. Our entertainment preaches despair instead of heroism. Today, we have a generation raised on stories designed to break the soul instead of strengthen it.
A thousand points of light won’t cut it anymore.
We need ten thousand sparks, sparks that can catch, spread, and be blown into flame. Not the gentle glow of civic volunteerism, but the fire of cultural renewal: scattered individuals igniting meaning wherever they stand.
The truth is simple: if we want America back, we have to seize the story first. We need to make the narrative ours again, a story of our truth and light and downright heroism as a culture.
Voting Isn’t Enough
For decades, the American Right lived off one comforting illusion: Elect the right man, pass the right bill, or flip the right court, and the ship will turn around. It never did.
Because the real battlefield was never the ballot. It was the imagination.
You can win a vote on Tuesday and lose the entire culture by Friday if the institutions that shape meaning — Hollywood, academia, Big Tech, the press — are telling a different story every single day.
Politics is only the paperwork.
Culture is the script.
And the institutions that write the script no longer believe in the civilization they inherited.
The Real Battlefield: Who Gets to Define Reality
At the core of our crisis is a fight most people don’t even know they’re in:
Who gets to define reality?
Every civilization has institutions that define reality — deciding what is true, what is good, and what a people should live and die for. In medieval Europe, it was the Church. During the Enlightenment, it was the philosophers and scientists. In ancient Athens, playwrights and orators shaped the public mind. In Imperial China, the Confucian scholars taught the moral code. Even in early America, the pulpit and the printing press worked together, pamphlets and tracts reprinting and reinforcing the most powerful sermons by renowned clergy.
Healthy societies put these reality-defining institutions in the hands of people who believe in the culture they steward, people who can be trusted with the very core of the culture.
Today, ours are controlled by institutions that despise it, and they dictate everything:
- what you’re allowed to say
- who the “villains” are
- who the “victims” are
- what history means
- what morality allows
- what the future must look like
This is not politics. It’s narrative capture. Control the story, control the society.
If we want a different future, we have to build the reality-making institutions ourselves. As I've said for a very long time now, change the story, change the culture.
What We Lost When We Lost Breitbart
Before most conservatives understood the cultural battlefield, Andrew Breitbart did. He knew the Left wasn’t winning because its policies were good; it was winning because it controlled the story. Breitbart, a rare outspoken conservative in the hyper-liberal world of Los Angeles, was brave enough to push back and charismatic enough to bring others together.
While others chased elections, he built:
- alternative media
- investigative teams
- cultural commentary
- training grounds for new voices
Breitbart understood the single rule that shapes the modern world:
Culture writes the script. Politics follows it.
His death left a vacuum — and that vacuum swallowed a decade. Only now are new presses, creators, platforms, and dissident storytellers rising to fill it.
How the Cultural Capture Happened
Breitbart understood something else: Nothing about our decay was sudden. It was slow institutional capture:
- Academia fell first — through faculty hiring and quiet ideological consolidation.
- Journalism shifted from reporting to advocacy.
- Entertainment internalized the ideology and rewrote the hero.
- Publishing followed, replacing aspiration with grievance.
- Big Tech locked the worldview into the algorithmic bloodstream.
- NGOs and bureaucracies enforced compliance.
This was not a conspiracy in any traditional sense, though it was almost certainly fueled by outside actors. It was a convergence, and it's possible it would have happened naturally. Regardless, it is the reality, and the origins don't matter nearly as much as correcting the problem.
Parallel Polis: The Only Way Out
Once institutions rot beyond reform, you don’t fix them. You build parallel structures — a parallel polis — outside the captured system.
This was Václav Benda’s strategy under Soviet domination. This Polish dissident understood that when institutions collapse into lies, the people must build the next world quietly, persistently, in parallel.
But Benda had an advantage over us: his enemy was visible. It was the totalitarian Soviet state, a massive bureaucratic force that literally executed its way to dictatorial power.
Ours wasn’t.
For decades, soft totalitarianism hid behind compassion, expertise, safety, and credentials. It bent minds without breaking bones. It rewired assumptions without announcing itself.
Only when COVID struck, with government-enforced mandates, lockdowns, censorship, and coercive pressure points, did millions finally see the structure that had been shaping them for years. (And we should be thanking God that we are an ornery people who do not easily bend to others. We already see all around us the weakening of individual power that has happened in nations, and sometimes states, that do not have First and Second Amendment protections.)
Now there’s no excuse for blindness.
We don’t need to rebuild the old cathedral brick by brick. We need ten thousand sparks outside it — fires bright enough to guide people when the old façade collapses.
This is the parallel polis. And it’s already forming.
Related: Sun Without Shadow: How Sanitizing Evil Destroys Storytelling — and Culture
My Story: How One Ordinary Person Saw the Problem Early
Many years before COVID exposed the machinery, I saw the cracks in the stories, just in the books I was reading. I am not a politician, an academic, or an institutional insider. I was not born into wealth and power, nor have I gained any of these things during my life. I was and am a military spouse, a reader, a writer, an editor, a lover of myth and meaning, a country girl born into a family that in the early years didn't even have an indoor bathroom.
But I'm good at seeing things. And I could see that the storytelling engine of America was breaking: heroes were mocked, virtue was inverted, truth was replaced with ideology, despair sold as maturity, narcissism rebranded as empowerment.
So I did what seemed right to me, with the help of others: I started building — small, steady, unglamorous, reaching out to others who seemed to feel the same way I did. Yes, this extreme introvert started talking to other people. And others began to find me. Not because I was special, but because the hunger for truthful storytelling was real.
Movements don’t begin with institutions.
They begin with sparks.
Anyone can be a spark if they just have passion and an understanding of what's wrong and a vision for what should be.
What We Must Rebuild: The Moral Architecture of Story
A civilization stands or falls on its stories.
The cultural Left dismantled:
- the Hero’s Journey
- the Heroine’s Journey
- the moral arc
- virtue ethics
- beauty
- redemption
- meaning
We must rebuild all of it:
- real heroes who struggle and sacrifice
- real heroines who heal and restore
- clear moral lines
- noble virtues
- an understanding of the beautiful and the true, that which is eternal and unchanging
- stories that elevate rather than corrode
- imagination rooted in truth, not ideology
Rebuild the stories, and you rebuild the civilization.
Politics Alone Will Never Save Us.
No law can outpace belief.
No regulation can generate virtue.
No politician can rebuild a moral imagination that the culture has already hollowed out.
Every conservative political win evaporates the moment it hits the cultural machine. Because politics is downstream of the story.
If we want a functional republic, we must restore the culture that makes republican citizenship possible. We have to preserve and rebuild the common mythology of our culture and revive the desire to spread it. We have been beaten down by people who call us colonialists and racists and evil capitalists, and many of these people have betrayed their own heritage as well, converting the self-hatred they have been taught into a hatred of their culture, a desire for anything else, even if it destroys the beauty and prosperity our ancestors have created, a nation that billions desire to live in.
The Call to Arms: We Need Ten Thousand Sparks
We don’t need one hero. We need ten thousand sparks:
- writers
- editors
- publishers
- reviewers
- filmmakers
- artists
- teachers
- programmers
- pastors
- parents
- readers
- community builders
Each spark is capable of igniting its own circle of light because fire spreads sideways. We must fill the culture with creators and leaders who believe in truth, beauty, courage, family, duty, faith, and the inheritance of Western civilization.
This is the army that will outgrow the rot.
The Mission: Seize the Narrative, Rebuild the Civilization
We surrendered the American story to people who despise it. That ends now.
We must rebuild:
- new presses
- new canons
- new myths
- new institutions
- new heroes
- new communities
- new moral imagination
The old story is dying. Our job is not to mourn it; it's to fix it. To revive it, to honor it, and to rebuild it for our children and their children. When the façade of the captured institutions finally collapses, the next generation will need light. We are building that light now.
What You Can Do — Even If You’re Not a Storyteller
Writers are only half the equation, maybe not even half. Readers are the carriers — the fire-spreaders.
Here’s what anyone can do:
1. Read widely and intentionally.
Reject cultural poison: cruelty, nihilism, moral inversion, self-idolatry, and “compassion” that excuses evil. Seek out stories that honor courage, virtue, family, sacrifice, faith, beauty, and the greatness of Western civilization.
Your attention shapes the future.
2. Buy the books that deserve to exist, and support the media outlets that compete for digital and newsstand space.
You’re not buying paper. You’re funding the next chapter of the culture.
3. Review and share.
A three-sentence review of a book can do what a thousand-dollar ad cannot. Reviewers have outsized power. Very few readers stop and contribute their time and effort to reviewing books; reading puts you into a passive consuming mode, and most readers simply don't think of it. But your opinion matters a lot, on books that are good and true as well as books that support the corrupt mainstream culture. Let others know how you really feel about these stories; don't be afraid of hurting feelings or of putting yourself out there. This is, frankly, a matter of cultural life and death, and every little spark counts.
4. Support creators.
Subscriptions, mailing lists, shares, recommendations — all of it matters. You are the spark that can spread the flame. Share the things you find that are good and true, and don't be afraid of potential blowback. Remember that you, too, are a cultural warrior — and when you're catching a lot of flak, that just means you're over the target.
5. Build communities.
Book clubs, reading circles, homeschool groups, church shelves, and online forums are all ways to help others find the great stories you've found or the great publications you frequent. Culture grows where people gather. In fact, culture and community are much the same.
6. Retell the stories you love.
Pass them around. Speak them. Live them. Especially share them with your children.
7. Be a living example.
A sane, rooted, courageous life is its own story. Let people know who you are, and it will give others courage to embrace the truth. Part of the problem in Hollywood is not that everyone is progressive; rather, it's that the conservatives and even traditional liberals are afraid to speak out. This cuts off half or more of the story of our heritage in a key part of our culture. Don't let that happen if you can help it. And be not afraid.
Remember: Every time you read, review, share, support, or retell a good story, whether it's a fiction book or a great news story, you strike a spark.
Enough sparks become flame.
Enough flame becomes fire.
And enough fire becomes a civilization reborn.
We writers, here at PJ Media, as well as novelists or the best social media influencers, are telling stories. Alone, however, we are shouting into the void.
You make the stories matter.
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