CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
As President Trump enters war with Iran, it appears that America is lacking a counter-culture.
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, the White House didn’t even feel the need to run this decision by Congress, let alone the American people.
In fact, with every citizen caught up in their own corners of social media, there is no united voice of dissent for the President to contend with.
Without a band like Green Day on the radio, young Americans simply have no reason to not support President Trump’s war with Iran
It seems that going to war in 2025 is even easier than it was in 2003 – despite the fact that almost every presidential candidate has campaigned on ‘no more wars’ ever since America’s disastrous decade-long conflict in Iraq.
While the Americans that oppose the military action may feel like they are contributing to an anti-war protest by constantly flooding online echo chambers with political messages, it is clear that the war hawks of the US government are far less accountable than they were before the invention of social media.
Meanwhile, the music charts are dominated by romantic pop songs and palatable country music, leaving very little space for the protest anthems that were once delivered to young Americans by the likes of Dylan, Springsteen or the Dixie Chicks.
In what looks like America entering yet another ‘forever war’ – there isn’t even a lukewarm mainstream voice of opposition to the government’s drastic escalation in the Middle East.
The idea of bands like Rage Against The Machine or Public Enemy selling out stadiums is inconceivable in the current cultural landscape, in fact, America doesn’t even have any pop-punk scallywags like Green Day to make fun of the contemporary US War Machine like they did during the Bush Administration.
With the 56-year-old former Fox News anchor turned podcaster, Tucker Carlson, now the closest thing that America has to a counter-cultural icon – Americans are starting to realise that all of their young people are pre-occupied with skincare TikToks and K-dramas.
Never before has a nation been in such dire need of the radical middle class anti-war revolutionaries like Billie Joe Armstrong, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
