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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Republican boomers don't march next to atomwaffenfront or "put their white bodies on the line to protect brave young people doing Direct Action." The right doesn't have the organization or ideological discipline to use confused and wishy washy boomers as pawns.

When they con the elderly into sending them a bunch of money, it gets funneled to merch scammers rather than paying professional activists. You don't see leftist boomers buying AI generated commemorative trump collectible NFT digital-colloidal-silver coins like all the old Republicans are. They write checks to the ActBlue Progress Fund For Doing Progress that sends the money on to "Unicorn Riot", and it gets matched by a billionaire.

And you'll notice that old right wingers objectively haven't suddenly had their minds changed for them, so politics is obviously working rather differently on the two sides. There is no Republican activist group getting piles of cash to teach other activists how to "diagram systems of power for strategies of intervention"

Because Israel on the right ranges from ‘go Israel!’ To ‘I don’t care’. It’s kinda difficult to convert people to ‘I don’t care’.

Republican boomers don't march next to atomwaffenfront or "put their white bodies on the line to protect brave young people doing Direct Action." The right doesn't have the organization or ideological discipline to use confused and wishy washy boomers as pawns.

That is mostly because the Republicans don't normally use marches and demos as a political tactic. (They work much better for movements with an urban base.) The last time they did was on Jan 6th 2021, and there were absolutely Republican boomers protesting peacefully on the Ellipse and Capitol lawn while Proud Boys and groypers were ransacking Nancy Pelosi's office.

Odd to talk about Republicans having consistent ideological positions during Tariff Week.

I don't know when any atomwaffenfront have marched in the US, but we've certainly had brownshirts, Klansmen, groypers, and whoever else is the rightist equivalent of "Globalize the Intifada" keffiya-wearers and tankies in Mao t-shirts, and Democratic boomers don't really march with them either.

You're just describing a difference in medium and frequency of the message. Republican activist groups with piles of money certainly exist, albeit not so much in academia. That you think LibsOfTikTok, TPUSA, and Project Veritas style "owning" is more credible and genuine just means they are on your side and leftist activists are not. Why is writing checks for ActBlue more unserious than buying TrumpCoins? Why is George Soros an archvillain but the Koch brothers were a cringeworthy leftist bogeyman and Elon Musk is just a buddy of the President? (If George Soros was handing out checks to people who showed up to vote in a state election, I cannot imagine your reaction being anything other than apoplectic.)

I don't see many people suddenly having their minds changed for them- I see a lot of leftists taking seriously trendy new ideas like men becoming women, but as I said, this seems no different than MAGAs who are all-in on Trump doing things they'd have considered abhorrent and un-American a few years ago (and some of whom were even Never Trumpers!).

They are the same picture.

What the right might lack in organization or ideological discipline they make up for in ideological consistency. The reason you dont see republican boomers marching with Nazis is that republican boomers tend to be the sort of boomer that would rather bayonet a Nazi than march with them.

What you see as a weakness (a disinclination towards doublethink) I see as a strength.