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Nothing Ever Happens
DOGE is as good as dead. They’ve hit the wall.
Federal judge pauses deadline for federal workers to accept Trump’s resignation offer.
DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts.
The one shining light of hope for true government reform was Elon Musk’s DOGE. They seemed to be making real progress. They may not have been loved, but they were feared, and Machiavelli said that’s enough.
Now they have lost the momentum. Stays and injunctions will start pouring in as district court judges stop fearing that their orders will be simply ignored.
If the
deep statecareer civil service can draw blood with a trick as old as “drag-up old racist internet comments”, then DOGE really are toothless. No one will take them seriously anymore.Maybe Congress can tap in…
In my opinion, that might be a good thing for what I value. I would much prefer for some other arm of Tumpism to be stopped, not DOGE, since I value cutting government bloat... but at least it's something. My politics is based on the idea of keeping the left and the right stuck in a stalemate so that neither becomes dominant.
Now that Trumpism and the new right in general have given the woke a number of brutal punches and the woke is on the ropes in several ways, Trumpism begins to seem to me like the bigger threat, so now I turn my attention to strategies for doing some damage to Trumpism.
This would not have come about, other than that the left turned out to be weaker than I expected. I thought they would put up more of a fight, and that the stalemate I wanted would naturally come about, but I was wrong. The left has turned out to be a bit of a paper tiger and Trump's people have been running wild, which was never my preferred outcome. I just wanted to stop woke authoritarianism. So now I pivot yet again and, since the left turned out to be weaker than I had expected them to be, I now, despite having no love for the left, find myself wanting to at least prevent them from being crushed, since although I am neither left nor right, unfortunately the left is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the right, just like the right is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the left.
Let me tell you it makes me a bit sick to be doing my best @2rafa impression, but my guy it's been 18 days. It probably took you longer than 18 days to turn against the party of Obama, did it not? Can you explain how the woke is on the ropes in several ways? A few federally sponsored organizations have been told to stop doing some types of work.
What exactly been done that can't be undone January 20th, 2029?
I never supported the party of Obama to begin with. I enjoyed seeing the Republicans go down, but Obama's movement creeped me out. I found all that hope and change stuff, and the legions of young people treating Obama like some kind of superhero, to be disturbing in a cult-like way. But I did enjoy seeing the Republicans eat shit.
The woke is on the ropes. First, they have failed to censor discussion. The old meme was "just build your own Internet". The anti-woke did just that, but what's more, they didn't even get driven off most of the existing Internet. Un-woke discussion is completely mainstream on X, Facebook, and YouTube. Second, DEI is being rolled back both in government and business. Third, the Democrats completely embarrassed themselves in the last year. Even a bunch of their supporters are disgusted by their ineffectiveness and elitism and/or are calling for them to become less woke. Fourth, apparently zoomer guys are lurching right.
The woke isn't completely defeated, but they have sustained massive blows. In my opinion, the woke is still a threat but a relatively minor one, at least to my values. The bigger threat to my values, which are largely classical liberal, right now is, I think, for the first time ever, the Trump coalition. I do hope that the Trump coalition deals huge damage to the establishment blob before it goes down, though. That said, I also do not want to live in a country dominated by Trumpism.
Edit: One important thing I should add, which I did not think of when I originally wrote this, is that I still view the woke as being excessively strong when it comes to property crime and violent crime in blue cities. Some progress (as judged according to my values) has been made on this issue lately, as one can see for example from the fact that even on Reddit, which is a solid blue bastion, blue city subreddits have been condemning overly progressive approaches to policing lately. However, the "defund the police" types are still too strong for my tastes.
I know this isn't your main point, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. It was so creepy the way a cult of personality formed around Obama. Even still, to this day, my mother in law basically equates "the Obamas" with "good people". There's a similar thing with Trump but nowhere near to the same extent as it was for Obama. "Cult-like" is a great way to describe it, and I was astonished how many people just fell into the cult.
Obviously I'm not saying that all Obama supporters were in the cult of personality, much as not all Trump supporters are. But it was so pronounced that it really was freaky.
I think a lot of people today would have a hard time believing how intense the Obama personality cult was. This is partially because it won - it seems more reasonable to people today that he was so admired seeing as so many of his scandals have been relegated to the dustbin of history. It's also partially because it's now irrelevant and discarded - Obama, while still powerful in internal DNC politics, is out of office and no longer really needs a personality cult, which would have been difficult to sustain for so long anyway. But between both of these factors, I don't think most people today realize that the Democratic consensus around, say, 2008-2011, was that you needed a Maoist degree of unconditional support for Obama or else you were an evil white supremacist. He also presented himself in a much more extreme light back then - far from the basically-Bill-Clinton-but-black that we now remember, his promise to America was that when elected, he would usher in a totalitarian Soviet-style communist state, radical change beyond the wildest dreams of what DOGE is trying. We don't remember that because it failed, because it hit the blob and got absorbed.
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C'mon, are you kidding me with this?
I haven't seen any actual shrines to trump with candles and offerings at the alter, and I haven't seen any newspaper articles saying "Many spiritually advanced people I know identify Trump as a lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet"
So that's one level of crazy even his colloidal silver quaffing fans haven't reached yet. They just think he executed Hillary Clinton and replaced her with a clone as part of The Plan.
remember this creepy song/chant being taught to children: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qp-ot_vChlU
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I know people (unwillingly; they're in my neighborhood) who honestly think that if they can just manage to get Trump to pray for someone sick, said person will be healed. No shrines and prayer candles that I'm aware of, but I don't hang out at their house, either.
I mean to be fair, judging by all the prayer request chain emails I get from friends, they think this about a lot of people. There's some carcinisation features of folk religions that evolve over and over. In another fifty years I wouldn't be surprised to see Americans burning money at funerals so the deceased can tip St Peter the customary 25%
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There are people who treat the trump family as royal, but few who have the fawning demigod attitude the left still has for Obama.
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No, I'm not. I don't think you remember just how big the Obama cult of personality was if you think Trump is on the same level. Obama's was everywhere. The news, the arts, you basically couldn't get through a day without encountering that stuff.
By comparison, though Trump personality cultists surely exist they don't control mass media (and in fact are shamed by said media, not that that's right either). I've never personally encountered one, whereas I knew several people who were all in on Obama. They simply are not as big nor as much of a cultural force.
Immediately thought of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2fZHou18Cdk
Seeing that '17 years ago' next to the view count was a real 'Holy shit' moment because it does feel like yesterday
Personally I'll always remember the Chris Matthews. He was the 'I felt this thrill going up my leg as he spoke.", who also cried over an Obama speech and compared him to Jesus.
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One of my formative political experiences was going all in on the cult of Obama (as a Brit) and being told by an American friend of many years, “who the fuck do you think you are to tell me who to vote for? You know nothing about American politics, nothing about McCain, and you’re telling me how I should vote?”. I’ve never forgotten it.
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