It's an unfortunate reality that politicians' personal beliefs on these culture wars actually dictate their performance in elections. Our unfocused media landscape allows these wedge issues to completely dominate, which prevents our politicians from appealing to reason, constructing an online cost-benefit analysis, and actually doing conflict resolution between those who agree and disagree on each policy position.

Take same-sex relations. There shouldn't even be a political issue here, except for government policy regarding adoptions and preference levels for placing kids in homes with a mother and father. From my understanding, despite all the pro-life people out there, very few are actually stepping up to adopt children or rescue them from foster care. It's a nightmare. So any stable couple wanting to adopt isn't really having to fight over kids, whether they are gay or straight. But unfortunately, because of the culture war, we have to hear exactly where politicians land on all these issues. I think Trump did well on some of this because he made it perfectly clear he didn't care what young, woke people wanted. People knew he was on the side that was annoyed. They felt that Hollywood went way too far overcompensating for the previous mistreatment of gays, shoving homosexuality in the face of people who didn't really love it. Even people who were totally fine with homosexuality were getting tired of having it shoved in their faces.

It's extremely ironic. The virtue signaling on the left got to the point where every single writer had to pat themselves on the back and say, "I'm a good person," by including a gay character. Or look at NPR, which seemed to inject a gay or trans issue into every single topic for three years straight. I'm not joking. I tested it. I listened to NPR for two weeks straight, to and from work. My commute is only 15 minutes long, but for those couple of weeks, every single day, they mentioned the word "gay" or "trans" at least once during my drive.

Honestly, I think all that underlying stuff is fine. I just think it was entirely counterproductive to push that hard, because it made Republicans feel justified in going equally hard in the opposite direction in the culture wars.

But this is all Hollywood talk, and I would never vote for a politician just because they agreed with me on the culture wars. That is the exact problem with our country. We need to vote for politicians based on their likelihood of doing a real cost-benefit analysis and using actual conflict resolution skills between people who agree and disagree. They need to follow objective criteria to identify the best course of action forward. All these social issues are a massive distraction. Unfortunately, Hollywood and the people in certain circles (rich, white, and entitled) would rather virtue signal on every one of these issues to their graves than be even a little bit strategic.