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If by Berlin you mean the culture and the fabric of the society ("first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"!), then it's definitely burning at the full blaze. At least for me - a regular middle class guy who wants nothing more than being left alone to grill on my backyard - it certainly feels that way. And I am not alone in this.
No, but Trump is there because of that feeling. He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers. Just watch what people like Biden, Obama, Clinton (either of them), etc. said before the Great Awokening. The difference between them and Trump, if you filter out all the bombastic rhetoric, is minimal. But the right had no choice. It was either Trump, or total destruction.
Nope, nope. Remember the case of Gina Carano? She was booted from highly acclaimed role in a successful franchise because she said something right-coded. Reddit didn't cancel her. Reddit wanted to, but Reddit wants to cancel everybody to the right of AOC. No, people with much more power - people who contol billions of dollars - decided that. And now they are settling with her and talking about "looking forward to future cooperation". Did I vote for that? Hell yeah! One small example, of course, but it's everywhere.
I work for "maybe a tiny bit woke" company you probably never heard of (unless you're kind of professional that has to, then you did) but probably indirectly using something it did, maybe every day. It has DEI department, and some of the HR training had a little cringey tones but overall is pretty bog standard "these are ways in which you're not allowed to be an asshole" which didn't change much since The Great Awokening. No mandatory diversity kowtowing or pressure. Some people are explicitly woke but most keep it in their pants and don't bring it to the workplace. I am happy to be at this level because it's probably the best one possible in the US outside of tiny startup where everybody are buddies and HR does not exist. But I know that's not the situation in all companies.
I've lived in Soviet Union (a long time ago). I know how people in evil empires work, and that not all of the storm troopers even want to shoot the rebels. Most of them don't care, they just want to get the salary and the pension. Some of them would purposedly miss or forget to lock the prison cells if they can get away with it. But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.
88% of students lie about their politics to get better grades: https://x.com/bumbadum14/status/1957743796357329334 Take one guess to which side the lying goes. I clandestinely suspect that non-zero number of the professors aren't even woke, but they are so terrified to be cancelled they are pretending to, and thus their studends have to pretend in turn. A nice academic freedom the left built for itself, eh?
Are you sure? New York's Mamdani is financed by a billionaire heiress. Maybe she doesn't expect him to take all of her billions (and he, alone, now, probably can't) but she certainly contributes to the cause. And it's not unique - for example, a lot of rich Russian magnates supported Russian revolutionaires. We all know what happened next.
That's not true. The right has a lot of the positive agenda. Just to advance this agenda, the right needs the ability to rule, and that requires taking control back from the left. If the right wins an election, but the Left continues to control everything in the country - as it happened in the first Trump term - nothing is getting done. Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition. Note I am not saying destroying the left - the left wants 0% right-wing people in every space. I am fine with certain percent - maybe even 50%, though I personally would prefer less, but I do not prescribe any specific number - of the left in any space they want to be, provided the right is also allowed the same. And yes, for this certain amount of power that the left has now must be destroyed, but while to them it may look as "revenge" and "overreaction", it's just returning to normal.
The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies. I remember the time where politics were about shoudl taxes be 25% or 28% and should minimum wage be $7 or $10. Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce port to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi. Yes, we need some pushback to get back from this to what used to be normal, and if Trump can do at least part of it, then I am happy to let Trump do it. So far I haven't seen any better option, and I don't see how not doing it is an option anymore.
This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them. For the left, at least institutional left, it means destroying them, grinding them into the fine dust and throwing it to the winds. The left has this power - at least had it before 2025 - and they weren't shy to use it. It didn't always work, but they always wanted to. Yes, the right has its history too, with porn in particular, a battle that they lost and will keep losing, and probably in other aspects too. But the left has been much more efficient in this game. Compare what happens if somebody in academia dares to say one of the words proscribed by the left and what happens if they say America must be destroyed and white people must be put in camps.
The problem is those are not some lone idiots bloviating on a sopabox. There people are Congressmen, Senators, mayors, governors, prominent politicians, famous actors, academia managers, they control trillions of dollars and command vast power. And they are not shy to use their powers to achieve their goals. Which are diametrically opposed to mine. So I, as a voter, have no choice but to give my vote to somebody who can push back on them and at least slow down the descent to madness. Maybe, if we are extremely lucky, even reverse some of it. What other choice do I have?
I disagree with your assessment, much as I disagree with your assessment about Fox News. Democrats certainly wouldn't work to get Roe v. Wade overturned. Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good. I don't think working with another government to imprison them without trial is a Democratic position. I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position. I don't think "piss away our international relations to strongarm trade deficits" is a Democratic position, even if Democrats are sometimes protectionist.
Yes, I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available and not as uncommonly used historically as you might think.
In the Soviet Union, the terror originates from the government. They effectively set the background level of terror and the punishment for not complying. Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire. There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough. The dynamics are very different. One is a group with a goal. The other is a culture of social media frying everyone's brains. And how they must be cured is very different. The latter I think can be accomplished by getting everyone to chill the fuck out, which I think will happen when the left cries wolf too many times and people stop caring, and I think the Democrat's unpopularity and Gen Z shifting right is a sign that it may be happening.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government, and in order to fulfill that goal it requires giving the government power it does not and should not have.
Multiple people in this thread are saying almost verbatim what I just said.
There's a mix of things I agree with and things I think are mischaracterizations.
I think the left is going too far with this, but I don't think all sex ed is porn.
Agree with you on this, even though you did frame it in a way to sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
"That alleging someone is a violent gang member and knowingly sending them somewhere they will be imprisoned without trial is bad"
Missing context on this one.
"cities burned down" is more like "some property destroyed during a mass protest." Which is bad but it's like calling the death of 5 people a genocide.
This is the classic "I sanewash my allies and nutpick my enemies" framing. Yes, there are absolutely people for whom this is true. There are people for whom this is not. For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed? I browse /r/legaladvice and you do get threads like "my landlord is trying to make me take down my pride flag" or a woman at a Christian school fired for being pregnant out of wedlock (with a man who works there and is not being punished).
Dems have always (well, if we talk about recent times, not ancient) made the difference between legal, limited and controlled immigration and no holds barred open borders. This was a long time union position too (no need to expand on where the unions political affiliations go). It has all changed recently - now Democrats basically reject any need for immigration law or citizenship pathway. In fact, illegal migrants seem like their preferred category, getting policy preferences not available to regular citizens.
Colleges are, as we already discussed, fully captured by the Left. Places like Harvard or Columbia are the major engines in propagating and supporting leftist causes. So, obviously, they would come under attack from Trump. My point is not that everything Trump is doing now is part of Democratic agenda - of course not, he's on the opposite side of the war so he'd do stuff to wrestle control from them. My point is that Trump's political positions before he became the leader of the MAGA had been very close to Democrats' positions before the Great Awokening. Including, btw, abortions - Trump never cared too much about it and had been vaccilating here and there for years on the question, he had not been a passionate pro-lifer. Of course, when he became the head of MAGA movement, that came with some necessary policy adjustments, but RvW had always been a major target for the Right - especially due to the Left's complete unwillingness to reach any European-style compromise and the insistance that only full unrestricted abortion until - or even after - the birth is going to work. That question has been way beyond Trump and for it Trump was the one who had to fall in line, not drive it. In general, if you look at Trump's historical positions, there are preciously little of them that could not come from a pre-Awokening Dem politician. Again, I am not talking about Trump's actions now, when he's the head of MAGA and second-term Republican president, but his positions when he was starting up with his journey.
It wasn't "any reason", it was very specifically and clearly a particular reason - the reason of doing right-coded things. It's not impossible to survive in Hollywood while being right-coded, but it is very, very, very, very hard. There's no problem being a Communist in Hollywood though. That's the point - there's a huge difference in risk profile of being open leftie and open rightie in a huge number of institutional settings, and the former's life is overwhelmingly much easier than the latter's. I already quoted the numbers how massive the difference is in places like academia - it's nowhere near neurtal or symmetrical.
True, there's no single hierarchical structure - at least, not yet. Instead, there is a distributed network of semi-independent agents, which semi-autonomously work towards the common goal. Some of the nodes of this network - like teachers unions and academia - ensure there's always new people coming into the network, some - like journalists and entertainment - ensure ideological synchronization and agenda pushing, some - like judicial and politicians - ensure the agenda is enforced on the groud. Etc. etc. One could probably write a lot of books and make a dozen of sociology PhDs just studying these networks. I hope one day somebody will.
Those mobs are surprisingly well financed, supplied and coordinated. Often, if you bother to dig, with taxpayer money. And covered for and protected by government officials. It's not random, it's a system which is distributed enough that people fail to make connection between different aspects of it, but there's one. Woke professors, woke AGs, woke NGOs, woke antifa soldiers, woke CEOs, woke actors, woke judges, woke journalists, woke bureaucrats - they all part of the network. It's not as comprehensive as the totalitarian state, but it's powerful enough now to exercise a lot of control over the society. It's not social media's fault. The social media just makes it easier to coordinate and to find foot soldiers, but it's a tool, not the reason.
That's not correct, the right has the ground game too, and finally is pushing back on the culture war. But given the amount of capture of the governmental and government adjacent institutions, some governmental action is required. If the left's NGO network is financed by taxpayer's money, cutting of or reducing this stream requires government action. If DEI has been pushed for years by government action, undoing this would require government action too. Some things could probably return to its natural state without any intervention, just by removal of external coercion, but that would take a lot of time. And a lot of time is not something the right really has - if the left wins the next election and continues with its strategy of eliminating the right from every institutional space, flooding the country with infinite amount of migrants, setting up leftist NGO networks to feed from the budgets forever and making the elections unverifiable - the right does not have much chance for survival without pushing back fast. Which, unfortunately, means also using governmental action where it may not strictly be necessary.
The problem is not what you think. The problem is the left thinks what the parents think does not matter, and they - the left - own the kids and are free to feed them porn whether you like it or not, and if you disagree, you are a domestic terrorist. If the question was "I don't think book X is porn so I would like to show it to my kid" and the other person would say "no, I think this is porn so I won't show it to my kid" then this would be a normal difference of opinion. But that's not where we are. Where we are is "we will show your kids what we want - and make no mistake, what we want is porn, gay porn, trans porn, whatever we can think of porn, and we are not ashamed of it! - and if you think it's porn then fuck you fascist, we'll take your kids away from you". This is not normal.
"Some people did something" makes a comeback! Some property is billions dollars of loss, multiple businesses and governmental buildings destroyed, full city blocks made unlivable, etc. The problem is not even that per se - though it is extremely bad - but the complete acceptance and normalization of it from the leftist elite. The worst problem is not even that a mob torched a disctrivt court - but that everybody on the left are taking it as a normal, and sometimes encourageable event, and working very hard to ensure nobody is going to be prosecuted for it. And it's continuing now - the left is consistently rejecting the obvious reality of crime and decay in Democrat megapolises (even though the normies, even the leftist ones, are well aware of it on their own day to day experience) and are consistently opposing any effort to make any improvement in it, declaring enforcement of the laws "racist" and "fascist". This is not normal.
Yes, of course, people are harassed on both sides sometimes. But there's a difference between getting a bunch of hateful tweets and being declared domestic terrorist by the FBI. Between having some online talking head talk shit about you and having US banking system refuse to do business with you. Between getting on some bloggers "bad people" list and getting on TSA's no fly list. Between somebody in your club shunning you and IRS stomping on your organization. Between being criticized on social media and having the government shut down any mention of you on social media. Between somebody not going to your talk and a violent mob setting a building on fire to not let you talk. Yes, people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok sometimes get harassed (even though they always had published the content they get harassed for on their own volition on social media) - but that harassment if very different from the harassment one who has crossed the institutional Left is subjected to. One is annoying, the other can seriously ruin your life.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
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