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While I find the argument "you have to let the democrats win in order to fight wokeness" to be wishcasting at best (and disingenuous depending on the source), there is something that is undeniably true: The Trump years were a bonanza to the NGO industrial complex, news media companies and other related grifters.
Will this resume again in Trump pt II? There have been claims that the mood is different now, more deflated and tired. But things are often different until they aren't, specially if Trump ends up being more effective this term.
It's probably the other way around -- just like only Nixon could go to China, only an anti-woke hawk could reach detente with the NGO complex.
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Radicalism can take multiple forms and follow different incentives. Political factions of different temperament and composition will have different reactions; that much is self-evident. The attitude may be ‘the enemy is winning, we have nothing to lose and will not yield, it’s us or them’ or, in the opposite case, ‘now they’ve shown weakness and lost their spirit, it’s now or never, hammer the iron while it’s hot’. But to outsiders, it all probably just looks the same in most cases. (‘Why the fuck are these insane twats going crazy?’ etc.) A Kamala victory would’ve probably resulted in the de-radicalization of leftists on average, but it’s foolish to assume that it was not going to drive the radicalization of any leftist groups anywhere.
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I only hope that this time around there's much less of the "not quite lying, but fudging the truth to such a degree that it makes me feel like I'm going crazy". Examples of this include the media acting like Trump installing his own staff into the white house was unprecedented and all ran shock stories about how Trump just fired everyone (even though that happens every presidency), and also when they said that Trump made rape a preexisting condition. The media whipped everyone into a frenzy about everything Trump did, even the most anodyne stuff, and spun it all in the worst possible light. Even if Trump isn't more effective this time, I just hope that people are sick of the media BS and that they do not start doing this sort of dishonest tactic again.
if this cycle has demonstrated anything, I think it's that the process of the media no longer mattering that began in 2016 is reaching a conclusion or at least a tipping point where these organizations find themselves forced to course correct
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Oh they will definitely do all of that again. The legacy media is dying and the Trump years briefly resuscitated them. They’ll try the same stuff again. Will it work as well? Probably not
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I definitely think it'll experience something of a modest second-wind, but that it won't be nearly as prominent as during peak woke of the 2017-2020 era. Thermostatic equilibrium is one of the most enduring phenomena in politics that's survived even the extremely polarized environment of the US. Trump will try to crack down on immigration in a hamfisted way, somebody will take a picture of a migrant child in a cage or dead in the desert or whatever, and public opinion will swing back towards being somewhat pro-immigration.
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I hope Trump is more shameless about shit canning people in the executive working against him. Everyone was ready to pop off if he fired people at the DOJ investigating him just like Nixon did. This time around, he'd be a chump not to do it given he was ultimately totally vindicated last time around, and there is zero pretense of things being anything other than a fishing expedition this time around. The MSM will bleat about it, but the massive rightward shift of every demographic I think finally shows their power is broken. Maybe they'll recover, but while Trump has mastery he needs to use it to the fullest extent possible.
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This is in large measure a legal question. An aggressive, competent, and creative Trump DOJ could throw many monkey-wrenches in the works, to say nothing of tax legislation changing the rules around philanthropic foundations and non-profit status.
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It's a very difficult problem for anyone who is anti-establishment.
The default is that being president is really being elected to be the scapegoat. The president does not actually have that much power to change the big trends that make people happy or unhappy with their situation.
So if you have a woke/establishment president, they end up cementing woke rule with their court picks, administrative rulings, funding decisions, DoJ prosecution decisions, EEOC appointments, etc. And then when you elect a fire-breathing ant-establishment politician they spend all their energy thrashing and on petty beefs, get nothing done, and then end up the scapegoat for all the problems that have accumulated over the past ten years.
Trump court picks have actually done a lot against the DEI/woke crowd
I will never forgive Gorsuch for Bostock.
The conservative court picks, definitely slow down woke, that's the advantage of not having a woke/establishment president. But they don't actually reverse previous woke and fix the country. They don't even stop woke movement entirely, again, Bostock.
Richard hanania laid out how a lot of woke stuff sits on executive orders that Trump could easily cancel. Hopefully he actually does it this time
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For one, injunctions in half the states against Biden's new title IX "misgendering is an expellable offense" rules. Which at least gave it a slim chance of being overturned by courts before it became a fait accompli.
Out of curiosity, have the election results changed your view on the general political situation in the US? Would you be less inclined to push the button, after a demonstration of the limits of Blue power?
No, it just delays the inevitable by a few years, until they get in again and finish the plan of giving their imported migrants the vote in every swing state.
Go look at Ken White doing the "literally murder heritage foundation members" thing and tell me there's any option other than getting the necessary violence over with as fast and effectively as possible. Bluesky is already talking about a final solution to the white man problem, why should we give them any more time to prepare for it, when they will only grow stronger and their brainwashing more effective?
If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today. If you say ok sure, I say why not 40 years ago when this could have been stopped by a targeted excision instead of civilization-destroying war?
Can I just ask, for the record, exactly how big the pile of skulls you want to build is?
Are we talking thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Tens of millions? Presumably not billions since, uh, not that many Westerners.
(Disclaimer: I am definitely in a glass house here.)
As late as the 70s it probably would have been a few 10s of thousands, although that's with the benefit of hindsight knowing which obscure academics to target. Now... Being realistic it would spiral out of control unless you were very lucky or had enough top-down organization (which would make violence redundant in the first place, and is obviously what the NRX crew is aiming for. Good luck to them.)
Like Hannah Arendt said about nuclear war, it can only be a rational response against a future worse than human extinction.
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Fun fact: it used to be a sand castle.
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Are we talking randos saying edgy things, or some kind of coordinated thought push?
‘The death of the white American male’ or ‘the end of white manhood’ has been a grievance studies DEI goal for a while. It’s hard to tell how actual literal this goal is.
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I think wokeness was on the ascent prior to Trump descending the escalator. While it did get turbo-charged under Trump, it also clearly revealed itself and was increasingly unable to sanewash its prescriptions through anodyne description (ie. "Do you seriously take issue with an academic approach to female representation in media? Seriously, a problem with academics?"). Without Trump, I think the poison pills could have gone unnoticed for longer.
And 2024 is not 2016. There was a period where culture makers could more freely indulge their fantasies of a mythical Modern Audience that would monetarily reward their tainted output. In the time since, we have had major, recurring flops across multiple industries, and some clear indicators that audiences aren't chomping on this hook. There will be some token displays of staying in the fight, but this experiment has mostly failed. Important money men will want to pivot away.
I distinctly remember that one criticism from dissident right-wingers directed at Trump in the early years of his presidency was that his bellicose behavior will galvanize rabid and destructive leftist groups into action, and not only will he lack the willingness to confront them but he’ll also not give any support, direct or indirect, to those who do, leaving them out in the cold. Off all things Trump was ever criticized for, this is what I as a dissident rightist always found to be the most (and pretty much the only one) damning.
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I agree with this. What Trump did was more bring the issue into the open. Woke itself is fairly weak outside of whatever got snuck into HR. That’s why it got so loud when Trump started challenges to it. Once the stuff was open, people rejected it and the Woke couldn’t really stop it. They could only make a lot of noise in an attempt to appear powerful.
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