The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1814 - Country Music Is Absolutely DOMINATING. Here's Why.

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Pop culture has been in decline across movies, TV, and music. But country music seems to be the exception. We will discuss why. Ep. 1814 "Choosin' Texas" by Ella Langley has been #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart for 15 non-consecutive weeks. It's the lead single from her second studio album Dandelion. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/7scFxt9VhL4FJwuPSfRlfN?si=2Goa9eSLTGSB0oAHnCks2g&utm_source=copy-link Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/choosin-texas/1895159736?i=6763094066 - - - Today's Sponsors: Nextiva - Never miss a call or lose a lead. Go to my sponsor https://nextiva.com/walsh and let Nextiva XBert be your AI receptionist. Use my link and get your first 30 days totally free. Christian Healthcare Ministries - If you're looking for an affordable, biblical alternative to the way most people approach health care costs, it's worth taking a serious look. Get started today by visiting https://CH-Ministries.org/WALSH Balance of Nature - Go to https://BalanceofNature.com today and get an additional 10% OFF the Whole Health System™ subscription when you use code WALSH - - - DailyWire+ 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is still available! Get 3-Months of DailyWire+ for just $17.76 📜 Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A couple of months ago, we delivered the obituary for rock music, a genre that was never going to survive the post-Obama cultural shifts in America, which punish experimentation and risk-taking, as well as anything that's important to white people generally, while rewarding manufactured solo acts that are easier to market on social media and also much easier to manage and control. There's no doubt that the death of rock is a bad sign. You might even call it a leading indicator of cultural decay in this country. Of course, some people, some conservatives especially, might argue that rock music itself was a driver of cultural decay, and in some cases, they might be right. But generally speaking, rock was, still is where you can find it, a truly great art form in my view. And more than that, it is an American art form. Rock was both a product of American culture and a producer of American culture. Each decade, going back to the 50s, saw a new stage in the evolution of the genre, reflecting changes. shifts in the culture at large, whether it was the Prague rock and heavy metal and arena rock of the 70s or the new wave and hair metal of the 80s or the alt rock and grunge of the 90s and so on, you can go back and listen to the rock music of a particular decade and come away with a better understanding of the cultural mood of that time. Now, our current decade, as we talked about, is arguably the first in 70 years that doesn't have its own unique rock sound, which is not a thing, I would quite emphatically argue. It's yet another symptom of an exhausted, decadent

culture with no new ideas and basically nothing left to say. Now that said, there are some subgenres of rock that, while not often producing huge mainstream hits, although sometimes they do, are still churning out great music. Nonetheless, folk rock is one of those subgenres, one of my favorites. And I say that really just as a way, since we're talking about music, to wedge in a mention of Glenn Hanser, who's one of the great folk rock and singer-songwriter musicians of our time who just sadly died in a motorcycle accident yesterday. He started in a movie called Once back in 2007 that if you consider it a musical, and I do, is one of the only musicals that I ever personally enjoyed. He was a great artist, and if you're not familiar

with him, you should go look him up as soon as the show is over. So that's your homework. But any case, while rock has fallen on hard times, along with a number of other once thriving musical genres, it's not all bad news. There is another traditional American genre that is somehow thriving right now, and it's worth thinking about how it has managed to succeed in an environment that has all but destroyed so many other forms of music. This is the counterbalancing narrative to the decline of rock, and it is, dare I say, as I would rarely say, a cause for some optimism, which is that as rock has faded, country music is now dominating the charts. And this is a resurgence that's not entirely new. It's been building for several years now. You can make the case that,

though, that country music is now the strongest it's ever been, certainly in terms of its popularity relative to other genres, that's for sure. Ella Langley's Chosen, Texas, has now spent 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which is a record for a year. female solo act, excluding holiday releases. The previous record holders were, We Belonged Together by Mariah Carey, and I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, although the latter was actually written by Dolly Parton, whose original version is superior, in my opinion. But each spent 14 weeks at the top spot. Ella Langley's now been at 15 weeks, and her surprising triumph has been a cause of consternation for some people on social media who are clearly not

thrilled maybe to see a down-home country girl from Alabama take this particular crown. And it's caused some heartburn for some critics who fashion themselves country music purists and have decided that Langley is not authentic enough or something. But in fact, she's actually quite authentic. And the song, whether you happen to enjoy it or not, is in many ways a classic old-school country song. We'll talk more about that particular song in a moment and why it's successful. But suffice to say, it's not an outlier. As Billboard reports, quote, country hits claimed the top four for a second time in the Hot 100's history, two weeks after the genre first achieved the feat. Below choose in Texas, Taylor Swift's, I knew it. I know you, is number two for a fifth consecutive week, if you could call that country, which I think I would not. After it spent its first two weeks on the Hot 100 at number one in June, Stella Lefty's first top 10 Boston surges six to three for a new high. And Langley and Morgan Wallens, I can't.

Love You Anymore, Rebounds three spots to its number four best. Two weeks earlier, choosing Texas, I knew it, I knew you, and I can't love you anymore. We're in the same spots joined by Langley's Be Her at number three. And eight other weeks, all in the past three years, country titles took the top three, starting in August 5th, 2023, dated Hot 100 via Jason Eldine's try that on a small town, Wallin's last night, and Luke Holmes fast car of the nine weeks all time with country songs at either numbers one through three or numbers one through four in the Hot 100. This week marks the fifth in a row dating to the first week in July. So there are other metrics we could talk about, too, including the fact that country has been the fastest growing U.S. genre in on-demand streaming since 2023. The longest running number one songs in the last three years on streaming services have all been country songs. And meanwhile, as country music is surging, several other genres, not just rock, have been collapsing. But again, it's not a good thing, to be clear. I mean, one of the downstream consequences of the implosion of the monoculture, a topic we've talked about at length, and for good reason, is that perhaps somewhat paradoxically, pop culture has become less eclectic, less vibrant, and less varied, even as the culture has fractured. You may expect the opposite to happen, but that's not how it's worked out. In the 90s, there were many thriving genres of music that were all producing massive mainstream hits, grunge, all.

rock, rap, punk, pop punk, metal, adult contemporary, even like ska and techno and Europop had their moments in the sun on occasion. All of these genres and a few others you could name were thriving and occasionally or frequently, depending on the genre, would dominate the airwaves with huge crossover hits. Now today, most of those genres have receded into their niche corners of the music scene. Some of them essentially no longer exist. For years now, the only truly mainstream genres left or pop, rap, and increasingly country. And now even rap is experiencing a stark and noticeable decline. R&B and hip-hop have dropped from 41% of Billboard 200 album-equivalent consumption units to just 30% as of the summer. Recently, rap music went a period of some weeks

without a single song on the Billboard Top 40 list, which is the first time that that's happened since like 1990. Now, the reports of the death of rap music have perhaps been exaggerated. It's not dead, but the decline of the genre is very real. There's no question about it. Now, in case you're not familiar with the lingo, by the way, album equivalent consumption units are a metric that's used to measure the popularity of music, taking into account the fact that pretty much everybody is using streaming services now. Nobody's actually buying albums. So they've come up with a formula tries to convert streams into album sales. And according to the latest version of this formula, which changes sometimes.

If songs from one album are streamed 1,200 times on paid subscription services like Spotify or Apple Music or whatever else, that counts as one album equivalent units. It's treated exactly like one album sale on the Billboard charts. Now, how did they come up with 1,200 as the baseline? It may sound like they just sort of chose it arbitrarily and randomly, and well, that's exactly what they did, as far as I know. But that's how things are tabulated now. And by this metric, I must note that also Latin music is on the upswing.

We have to acknowledge for reasons you could probably guess. Latin songs account for roughly 10% of all U.S. music streaming as of the first quarter of this year. We all remember the Super Bowl halftime show. Or we don't really remember it because it was boring and forgettable. But nonetheless, it was a victory for Latin music. And if you go back to 2015, before the Biden administration allowed tens of millions of foreigners into the country, Latin music accounted for around 4% of the overall music market in this country. The vast majority of these new listeners, we can assume, are probably not Americans, although, of course, you won't

find any official statistics on that point. Now, granted, I'm not the guy to judge the quality of Latin music today as compared to the Latin music of the past. I frankly find the whole genre quite tedious and dull. It's just not my bag, which probably doesn't surprise you. But I will say that even as Latin music is technically growing in popularity, it still has not reclaimed the cultural heights it reached in 1993 with the Macarena, in my opinion, which is a Latin song technically. And also happens to be the only Latin song in history that I could theoretically dance to. Emphasis on theoretically. If you're running a business, a missed call is a missed customer, and there are very few things that will make a customer stop giving a business their money faster than calling them and getting nothing. When that happens, they're likely to think you've gone out of business or that you just don't want their business. Either way, you're taking the risk that they may very well move on to another option.

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There are plenty of cliche boilerplate country songs that sound like they were made primarily to serve as the soundtrack for an Applebee's commercial because that is why they were made. there are plenty of country songs that have infused so many pop and even hip hop elements that they barely qualify as country songs at all. But even so, many of the popular country songs in recent years have been faithful in tone and theme and sound, basically, to traditional country music. They mentioned L. Langley, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, and others. This is not just a story of country music achieving widespread success by stripping itself of every defining feature and becoming a soulless corporate product. indistinguishable basically from AI slop. I mean, there is some of that happening, certainly.

That might be part of the story. That's an element. But we're also witnessing a genuine resurgence of the genre at its core, of the traditional genre. And this is significant in part because historically, country has been dominated by rural Americans, especially in the South and the West, or it originated. What we're seeing now is a major victory for Southern culture, which we'll talk more about in a minute. And that's a culture that we as we all know has been vilified and beaten down

in mainstream discourse for some time now. Certainly since Obama's presidency, but even before that, country music in the South grew out of the folk ballads from Scottish, Irish, and English immigrants. They were Celtic ballads sometimes that transformed into something distinctly American, which gave voice to the unique American experience. One of the first country songs that could be called a mainstream hit that I think sold like a million copies or something, the first to ever do that, was called The Rec of the Old 97, it was released in 1924. It was about a train derailment in Virginia. So this was a genre that was, in many respects, invented to tell the American story,

especially its tragic elements. And in the West, country music had its origins in the lifestyle of ranchers and cattle drivers on the frontier. The songs had relevance to specific portions of the country in ways that, a lot of music executives didn't realize it first. But in the 1990s, when the music industry turned on the sound scan system, they immediately realized how popular country music was in these particular areas of the country. Rural radio was the stronghold for country music,

even though there were several artists with wide crossover appeal, like Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. But as of 1997, there were more than 2,400 radio stations devoted solely to country music, broadcasting throughout the United States, accounting for more than a quarter of all commercial radio stations in the country. And around the same time, country music accounted for roughly 20% of all record sales. Meanwhile, in February 1996, this country music was surging in small towns across America. New York City's biggest country music station stopped playing country music full-time.

They moved over to dance music. The biggest radio market in the United States, there was no full-time country music on FM radio. So country was indeed a phenomenon in the south and the west of particular. and now it's coming back. So the song, Choose in Texas in particular, is a solid vehicle to spearhead or at least participate in, if not spearhead, this comeback. And I'm not going to pretend that it's some historic, extraordinary achievement in songwriting or anything like that. It's not an artistic masterpiece necessarily, in my opinion. But it's a genuine country song.

It's a good little song that is now objectively one of the biggest hits of this century. It's also not some insufferable girl boss anthem. If anything, it's like an anti-girl boss anthem. And it's not a brain-dead pop song pretending to be country wearing the style of country music like a skin suit, as we've seen in plenty of other cases. In case you've someone I never heard this song, here's a short snippet, which in my professional legal opinion will not get me sued into oblivion by Columbia Records. But we'll see how that goes. Watch. So it's about a woman who's pining for a man who's choosing someone else.

It's a song that feels less like a lot of modern pop country and more like a spiritual successor to Dolly Parton's Jolene, which, given that Jolene is one of the greatest songs of all time, is not bad company to be in. And a song like Jolene resonates through the generations because it's about feelings and, you know, problems and troubles that people connect with. It's about someone who's pleading and desperate and heartbroken. That is a human experience. Now, a lot of modern pop and hip hop music and plenty of the worst and most fraudulent country music, by comparison,

consists of the artist bragging about themselves. I mean, it's false and it's fake, and it doesn't speak to anything deeper in the human soul, which may be one of the reasons why the public is tiring of those genres. I mean, there's only so much of that that you can listen to. There's only so many decades we can hear that kind of thing. One hit song after another where the guy is talking about how great he is, that after a while you just get bored of it. It's not connecting with anything real inside you.

Now, when I praise the Ella Langley song on X, a few people responded that her song is also degenerate nonsense because it's about a woman drinking away her sorrows. And, yeah, that's part of it. I'm not trying to make the case that the song is like a Bible for how to live your life, but which is not really what music is meant to be. But first of all, like it or not, drinking away your troubles has been a regular theme of country music

for like 70 years. I mean, it's certainly been a topic that's been revisited by country musicians for a very long time. And second, again, pining for something, feeling heartbroken because you can't have it, is human. It's real. And those are the aspects of the human condition

that music is supposed to illuminate and give voice to. So in short, it's a song about yearning. It's a song about longing. Now, this is a topic for a longer monologue, but I've been thinking about this for a long time. You know, as a culture, there's no question that to some significant degree, I think we've lost this sense of yearning. And pretty much every song and every genre for decades, for centuries, used to be about someone who wanted something, usually another person that they couldn't have. Or it was about someone who had what they wanted and then they lost it.

So it's like a tragedy. Or it's about someone who has something they want, but they're afraid that they might lose it. Or they have something they want and they're grateful that because their life used to be bad and now it's better because they have this thing and there's some gratitude to it as well. I mean, you might even make the case that music is basically the sound of longing. Even wordless music, like the great symphonies, conjure the feeling of longing, of yearning, of heartbreak, of desire, and not base desire, but desire for love, for beauty, for God. It's what music is, is what it's supposed to be. Music was an art form that existed to express the deepest and often frustrated desires of the human soul.

The two previous record holder songs we just mentioned, we belong together and I will always love you. you. We're about longing. Go all the way back to the early days of modern music. You know, can't help falling in love by Elvis Presley or yesterday by the Beatles or every breath you take by the police. A bit of a creepy example, that last one, but it's an example nonetheless, longing, yearning. Even the upbeat, the like uptempo kind of songs, upbeat ones, used to generally be about what the artist longs for, what they're pursuing, not what they already possess. I want to hold your hand. Wouldn't it be nice? Jesse's girl. I I mean, you could name a thousand examples across many decades.

Not all of them are towering works of genius. Jesse's girl isn't exactly Beethoven, but you still see the theme of longing and yearning there. But then a distinct shift began sometime in the late 90s into the 2000s, until by like the 2010s and 2020s, virtually every popular song was no longer about longing or yearning for what you didn't have or didn't want to lose, but rather about bragging about what you all.

had. Entire genres of music, at least in the mainstream, produced almost nothing but boasts and bravado. So instead of, I want this thing I can't have, which used to be like every song, it became, I already have everything and everybody else wants what I have. This is a dramatic 180 degree artistic shift that happened very noticeably that seems to have gone largely unnoticed, or at least it's not talked about. Now, for millennia, since the invention of human art in any form, it would have been extremely unusual for an artist to produce a work of art designed with no other purpose than to boast about himself. Now, sure, like pharaohs and emperors may have commissioned works of art to show off their status and their power, but the artists

themselves, even if they were sometimes egomaniacs hungry for respect and admiration, as artists can tend to be, as humans can tend to be, were not generally producing art whose sole and most explicit message was simply that the artist himself is great and rich and cool and everybody wants to be like him. That is a modern phenomenon. Art didn't become that until very, very recently. And so you look at the most popular songs in recent years, the last five, 10, 15 years by Drake or Megan the Stallion or Cardi B or whoever else. The only message in the music is that the person who made the music thinks that they're awesome and rich and attractive. And they want you to know that. They don't long for anything. They have everything.

You are the one that longs to be like them and have what they have as far as they see it. One of Ariana Grande's most popular songs sums up this shift with the chorus. I see it. I like it. I want it. I got it. That's it. Now, for decades, musicians sang about things that they saw and liked and wanted but didn't have, or did have but were afraid they might lose or have lost and now they're sad about it or whatever. Now they have everything and they don't want anything and that's what the song's about. Even though most of these people are actually desperately sad and dysfunctional and hate themselves, but they won't talk about that in their music a lot of time because they lack the courage or introspection or artistic talent to dig that deeply.

Now, not to get too lost in the weeds, I did say that, you know, this discussion mostly belongs in its own monologue, but here we are doing it here. But you even see something like this shift reflected in children's entertainment. This is going to seem like kind of an obscure connection, but I actually don't think it is. You know, once upon a time, every kid's cartoon used to be centered on characters who were frustrated by the limitations and realities of the physical world, often because they wanted something that was always out of their grasp. That's like the central plot of most of the classic cartoons. You know, Road Runner and the Coyote, Charlie Brown and the football, Sylvester, the cat and Tweety Bird,

pinking in the brain, the silly rabbit who doesn't understand that tricks are for kids, et cetera. I mean, that wasn't a show that was a commercial, but still, that's kind of like what cartoons were. You know? Now, every kid show instead is about characters who have no conflict or frustration in their lives, and everything is fine, and they get whatever they want all the time, and everything works out, and they're never hurt, and, you know, nothing bad ever happens. This is the point that Matthew Crawford, the author makes in one of his books very convincingly. And he points out that in the early days of Disney, Mickey Mouse was like a slapstick character, constantly getting. bruised and beaten and defeated by the world around him, right? That's also Looney Tunes, like in the, you know, in the early days of Looney Tunes. So all it was. Like these characters are getting beat up constantly and it's supposed to, and it's hilarious, right? As a kid,

you laugh. Well, today, kids can tune in to the show Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and they can watch Mickey, you know, trapes around a magical building that can do anything and give Mickey and the other characters whatever they want all the time and nobody ever really has any problems. and certainly no one's ever hurt or frustrated or left wanting something they can't have. The children today have grown up watching entertainment where the world gives you whatever you want and you're never left wanting or longing and they tend to bring those expectations out into the real world. One of the clearest commands in scripture is also one of the simplest. Bear one another's burdens. It's one that Christians have been living out for centuries.

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you know, demanding and insufferable, maybe. At the same time, I don't think that that's the only major reason for country music's sudden rise in popularity. As with anything else, there are probably many different factors of play. Another factor is that almost like, unlike almost every other genre, modern country is generally wholesome. You can listen to the music with your kids in the car. You don't feel like you need to take a shower after hearing one of the songs.

Of course, it's not hard to find degenerate country songs. You know, save a horse, ride a cowboy, 10 rounds with Jose Cuervo, as well as a certain song by Trey Lewis about a loose woman who's known for making the rounds in various cities, most notably Dallas. But even some of those songs, some of them, are wholesome, compared to many of the most popular and ubiquitous pop and rap songs of recent vintage. And meanwhile, Ella Langley is uploading videos like this one where she tells her fans how she came up with the intro and outro for her latest record. Splice his home video footage in with her playing the song at her recording studio.

Watch. Froggy went to corn and he. Apples on the table, beaches on the shelf. Apple's on the table, beaches on the shelf. You want any more than you sing it yourself. I see, 30 years ago, degeneracy was transgressive. It was shocking. It's like a thing that nobody was expecting. It was countercultural. Popular artists in various genres would intentionally shock and offend and provoke by flouting social norms and challenging basic rules of etiquette and morality. But the problem is that today, degeneracy is the drumbeat of our daily lives. We see it often and everywhere. There's no escaping it. You go on the internet and you see the most. shocking and awful things imaginable, the most gratuitous things imaginable. You could just see it pop up in your social media feed. It's all just part of the background now. It's

background noise, unfortunately. Meanwhile, you can't go for a walk in any major city without running into at least 10 drug-addicted homeless psychopaths, any one of whom could stab you in the throat and get away with it. So there really are no rules of etiquette to flout anymore. Morality is largely and falsely considered a matter of subjectivity. Well, if morality is subjective, then there is no law to obey, which is the whole point. That's why people claim that it's subjective. But then there's also no moral law to transgress either, which is a problem for artists whose whole shtick is to be nothing but transgressive and have nothing else to say. And in a situation like that, then indeed, wholesomeness becomes the only truly transgressive thing. It's actually shocking.

Or at least it's an escape from the norm. Anything that's encouraging or edifying in tone, And anything that gets at the longing and hope and desire in the human soul is a novelty to modern audiences. And for the record, when I say all this, I don't intend to do the typical conservative commentator thing of like latching on to some famous person who we believe to be vaguely aligned with us and lift this person up as a champion for the right wing cause. I have no idea what Ella Langley's politics are. I wouldn't be surprised if she were liberal. Probably is. I'm not looking to any country music star or any other celebrity to be my political champion. None of them will surprise me when they endorse Gavin Newsom or whoever in 2028.

My point is simply that country music generally and historically is more traditionally patriotic and wholesome, especially compared to other popular genres, and that might help explain its rising popularity. Now, for a long time, much of mainstream art across various mediums has either been a showcase for degenerate bravado, as we've already discussed, or else what you also find on the other end of that pendulum swing, something rather grim, you know, for a sort of grim forum for brooding and despair. Perhaps one of the reasons that horror has become one of the most popular and bankable film genres is that audiences are looking for a respite from the false, thin, braggadocio of mainstream entertainment. There's something wrong with horror films, in my view.

In fact, you could argue that given their focus on the supernatural and how seriously those films take the spiritual realm, that horror is a religious genre. even sometimes a Christian one in some ways. But there is another option outside of that dichotomy, and maybe the success of country music reflects that. It certainly reflects something else from a geographical perspective, as I alluded to earlier,

that success of country music is another cultural triumph for the South. If a guy who's commuting in Chicago is listening to Langley or Stapleton, then that's a major victory, unlike anything we've seen in this country in a long time. And I mean that unironically. You know, as conservatives, we're so used to sort of wallowing in defeat that we rarely remember to mark the victories. And this is one of them. Country music is playing in New York City again, all those years after they banished it from the airwaves.

You can go to inland Maine and half the radio stations are playing country music. And it's probably not an accident that this comes at precisely the same time that the South is achieving economic and political domination as well. The South is becoming significantly more populated at the moment. as people living on the coasts and other urban centers like Chicago flee the disastrous consequences of leftist rule. The data on this point is striking in the last five years the South has grown in population by double the rate of the rest of the nation. For 2020, 2025, according to the census, more than 80% of population growth in the United States came from the South, 80%. And meanwhile, in terms of net migration, people going in versus people going out, states like California are underwater by more than 225,000. residents in just the past year. New York has negative net migration of 135,000 people, Illinois,

New Jersey, Massachusetts, all lost at least 30,000 more people than they gained from incoming migration from other states. Now, it doesn't mean that those states experienced an overall population decline. They didn't because foreigners imported by the Biden administration largely picked up the slack. But if you're one of the few remaining Americans in any of these states, that's not much consolation. You know, in all these states, quality of life is plummeting because people can't speak English, can't afford to pay taxes. All of these Democrat-run states are running massive budget deficits. New York has lost something like $100 billion in gross income because of migration out of the state. California has lost about the same amount.

Meanwhile, Florida has gained nearly $200 billion. Texas has gained more than $50 billion. In fact, the GDP of the Southeast just eclips the GDP. of the Northeast for the first time in American history just a couple of years ago, specifically Georgia, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee just surpassed the Northeast in terms of their share of the national GDP. Now, we know why this is happening. People want to live in a part of the country that has a viable future. Living around death and decay and incompetence is extremely demoralizing.

And it contradicts a natural human impulse, which is to strive for something better than you currently have. Call it yearning or longing or desire or whatever you want. But there's an unmistakable drive in most people to improve their circumstances for themselves and future generations. If you live in a state like California, Illinois, they're in all likelihood you don't see how things can get any better because every year they're getting worse. So people who are optimistic and forward thinking, on the other hand, many of them are getting out of town. And unsurprisingly, in other aspects of their life, they're seeking out content that isn't intended to demoralize them or glorify depravity or this ridiculous boastfulness. And that explains why the most conservative

and most traditionally American regions of the country are dominating the rest in many respects. And it explains why there's a newfound demand for wholesome, you know, original content rather than the degenerate drivel we've been subjected to for decades. Is it the most important victory that conservatives could possibly win? No. Are there many other things? things we need to fight for instead of conducting hearings where nothing has ever accomplished? Absolutely. But all the same, it's an important aspect of all this. And it's a very welcome sign.

And for once, as tempting as it may be to indulge in gloom and doomerism, that's something we can celebrate. That I'll do it for the show today. And this week, have a great weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday, Godspeed. Once upon a time, the world. was a country. Not just a country, but a big one, an empire. And in that empire, there was an upper middle class family where two boys were raised by their mother, loved books, Uncle Tom's

cabin in the Bible. Their father admired the country's leaders, they were patriotic and happy. Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized. One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader. He was hanged. The other brother In the same books, they decided to lead a movement. First they came from universities and no one seemed to care. Then they took over the unions. And again, no one seemed to care. Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities.

And again, most people just ignored it. Change, after all, was something they could believe in until it was too late. Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.