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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.
The woke are not on the rope. They have not even begun being dislodged. What has happened is the start of some setbacks for them. It is fine to admit you don't want them to be dislodged, which is what will happen if victory is declared already.
Non anti woke liberals support censorship and woke agendas. They support doing it on progressive grounds and zionists on zionist grounds.
There isn't this movement of moderate, centrist liberals out there, because mainstream liberalism shares the pathologies of anti white racism, virtue signalling authoritarinsm, hatred of dissent, distorting things in favor ,progressive political corectness over what is true, obviously it is part of patronage networks and corruption where money is directed to them and their client groups. Are definetly nationalists for their favorite demographics and are definetly motivated by hostility towards the continued existence of homogeneous ethnicities of their etnhic outgroups and want to replace and end them both for ideological and ethnic hatred and to gain an electoral advantage. They see fascism in the existence of european ethnicities which is very extreme, and also treat with fanatical hostility those dissenting with them on such issues.
And so, I don't think from the depths of such hostility that you can have people who respect freedom of others. Nor are all freedoms equal, the freedom of totalitarian tyrants to impose their struggle sessions on their ethnic and ideological outgroup is not equal to the freedom of not having this imposed against you and suppressing political commissars who demand that you hate your group. The liberal war on all sorts of isms leads them to support cancel culture constantly and with intensity.
National freedom necessitates keeping out extreme foreign nationalists or Communists for example, that favor your nation destruction and subjucation out of ethnic hostility or ideological hostility to your nation, or both. That liberals blacklist those who don't share their extreme ideology, in addition to discriminating against white males, is something that can't be forgotten, since we can't have institutions be controlled by people who abuse their position.
This isn't to say that those who claim to be anti woke can't be for censorship either on progressive, which is most common, zionist, or even right wing grounds.
There is also the question of what measures are necessary for a good public morality. I doubt the Trumpian right which is authoritarian on criticism of Jews and Israel, is going to ban porn. Authoritarianism in line with the same old establishment ends seems more of a threat than genuinelly right wing cultural authoritarianism.
Personally, I would rather people who tell the truth and care about what works well, are promoted, while those who lie, censor, are suppressed. And the first get rewards and praise while the later get scathing criticism and lose opportunities. And there are some general ethical priorities too. People who care about their own nation's well being, and therefore can't be for maximizing individualistic hedonism, but are honorable in their dealings with rest of the world. I don't believe you can have every institution this idea of "everything goes". Discernment inevitably will exist, and it should weight against the Walter Duranty characters but in favor of the Gareth Jones type of characters. Instead of letting the Walter Duranty types of the world as it happens today, to cancel the Gareth Jones types of the world. https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/news/a-tale-of-two-journalists-walter-duranty-and-gareth-jones/
Now, as far as liberalism goes, it falls in the Walter Duranty side rather than the Gareth Jones side. Cancelling their patronage network hasn't even started happening and would be welcome news.
To the extend one can identifie a pervasive liberalism that differs from a pervasive "woke", it will still share most its pathologies, with the woke are just even further extreme on the same direction.
My view of the matter is that it does not make sense to pretend of a center left that doesn't exist, because far left policies is the behavior of the mainstream left, and of mainstream liberals. Extremism is what the supposed center left is about. This pretension just ends with the far left doing far left things while those who aren't them, we let them and are asleep. It is just a big myth to justify their anti right wing extremism and their far left politics.
That liberals who think the right which hasn't even started doing things, should stop, is part and parcel of the extreme ideology against the right wing doing things which has lead to things being so far left to begin with. It is obligatory for right wingers who have started changing things to not listen to liberals who oppose them from doing so, and see them as part of the entrenched far left. The far left has become such a big problem while there has been countless rhetoric of liberals downplaying the problem of far left extremism and exaggerating the problem of right wing extremism during that time. In response the right wing has started to evolve, and these tactics no longer work anymore.
I might be misreading you, but while I think you nailed most of this post chum, here you are wrong - there is, it's called the maga movement. Also I think actual moderate centrist liberals are definitely nationalist, it's the natural cultural foundation.
MAGA is an archetypal national-liberal political movement. Down to even the McKinleyite foreign policy. It's made up of a lot of people who don't like or care about liberalism, but there's the irony of our current situation for ya.
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