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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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In particular, I would argue that outside your odd lizardman, none of the smarter MAGA people believe the narrative. I think it highly unlikely that Charlie Kirk thought, in his heart of hearts, that Biden was committing treason for which his countrymen would sent him to the gallows if they knew about it. But the narrative played really well with the idiots, so he spread it.

...How closely have you been following the revelations about Russiagate/Crossfire Hurricane/Hillary's email server/Biden's Corruption/Hunter's Laptop over the last year? My working understanding of that mess (and it seems to me there's a fair amount of evidence that it is a coherent, single mess) is that we now have solid evidence that Obama, Hillary and Biden worked together to suborn the national security apparatus and turn it into both a partisan weapon against their political enemies, as well as a shield to their own serious malfeasance. As with, say, Watergate, but amusingly never ever with any Democrat scandal, the initial crimes seem vastly overshadowed by the institutional corruption used to cover them, which at this point appear to have run so deep and for so long that they put the viability of our political system itself into question.

More generally, there's this amusing pattern I see, where people are very willing to discuss things under a frame where Trump and MAGA are fascistic white supremacists who must be stopped by any means necessary, as we did here for years, and are also willing to discuss things under a frame where actually there's no difference between the parties, everyone's corrupt so none of the details really matter, but certainly are not willing to discuss under the frame where, no, actually it's the democrats who are uniquely, intolerably bad. Maybe it's just bias speaking, but it seems to me that this excluded third option is going to get harder and harder to exclude the more evidence accumulates. And while within the context of debate and one's own mind denial might be an invincible shield, it's less effective in the real world if sufficient numbers of the public simply stop being willing to cooperate with your tribe in any way ever again.