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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   34924 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:

It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority. Trump’s first action with regards to the civil service was to fire all the DEI staff. But woke attitudes are far more widespread than just the few people who are officially hired to work on DEI, and Trump and Musk are probably united on the need to root out as many as possible.

This is probably why Elon loudly made a big deal out of rehiring a DOGE staffer who was fired for racist tweets, despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets. Federal civil service workers are a lot harder to fire than workers at Twitter; many are on contract, and there’s a limit to how long they can be placed on administrative leave. Musk tried the gambit of offering a buyout to all federal employees, but very few took it. One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.

This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).

This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.

DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.

For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

Yeah. This is the luxury beliefs hypothesis.

One startling stat I saw recently from Rob Henderson: Among Yale graduates in their forties, 90% of men are employed but only 50% of women are.

The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.

I think there are a lot of the true believers in government posts, because the person most likely to take a job in government is the one with the least realistic outlook on most issues mostly for lack of experience. They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.

Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort. Thus those in the government are likely to be uncritical of anything popular that they’ve been told. They went from their communications degree at some middling university to answering emails on behalf of the government because the6 honestly cannot get a middle class position in the private sector.

Put those together, and you end up with isolated mandarins who believe exactly what the cathedral has told them about the world and who know that not toeing the line is dangerous anyway.

They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.

Maybe at the federal level, but some of the most experienced at the local level are certainly civil servants. The police are mostly responding to calls in the bad parts of town, as are the paramedics and fire fighters. Even the health inspectors are boots-on-the-ground visiting all the establishments in the city on a regular basis. Much more so than your corporate desk jockeys or even service workers. Maybe your plumbers and electricians make it out to those areas too, though.

The police are mostly responding to calls in the bad parts of town,

I'm pretty sure that rank-and-file police are more sympathetic to the Republicans than the average person.

I just did a bunch of googling and Google absolutely refused to give me the stats. I smell the stink of filtered search results.

Anyways, duckduckgo.com gave me this interesting 2016 article.

A total of 3,652 working officers responded.

Out of that population of working officers who plan to vote in the November election, 84% say they support Donald Trump. Hillary was supported by 8%, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 5%, and "other" received 3%.

But that's just subscribers to this cop website clicking an option, not a rigorous polling method. On the other hand, geeze that's lopsided. Hillary barely beating out Gary Johnson with single-digit percentage support.

For another datapoint, the NYPD union went hard for Trump.

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