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The Pogroms Will Continue Until We All Get Along
This is some good old fashioned culture warring. Happy New Year, y'all.
This clip has been popping up on twitter recently, most likely because Elon Musk re-tweeted it.
It's a doozy. I'm probably in too deep in AI land, but I thought for a moment it may have been a very well done deepfake. The cliches are just too juicy:
A little Wiki background on the host here turns up the clown world dial even more. This is an atheist progressive white woman who has a podcast with a title that is synonymous with exasperation. She's been wanting to speak to the manager since before it was cool. The Wiki entry concludes with a Hasan Piker endorsement. Hashtag resistance, hashtag StayWoke.
I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism. Yas Queen, Globalize the Intifada.
Turning down my own sarcasm, this appears to be like a kind of resistance-within-the-resistance of severly disaffected former Obama style liberals / progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA. It isn't the weirdo terminally online language of Gen-Z etc, but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad. I didn't think this was, well, real. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies. Mostly, I felt sympathy.
But these folks seem serious! If this is TollBooth losing some of his childlike wonder of the world, so be it.
Ok, we've seen what the institutional left in the US trying to target the right looks like before. It was... the Biden admin. Not Biden personally, he was sundowning for most of it. But figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland are pretty core to the DNC apparatus- if 'democrats take the gloves off' has a face, it's one we've seen. Their attempt at internal repression was largely a fizzle. They lost a domestic hard power confrontation before they were even halfway through!
One thing to remember about democrats vs republicans is that- not for every case of right vs left, but for this one- their failure modes are different. It's optimate vs populare, in the original meaning of the term- how they derive their sense of internal legitimacy, of deserving to win. The democrats are representing the class that should be in charge, simple as. The republicans are representing the thoughts we all have but which the experts won't entertain, simple as. Republicans thus have an internal telotic pressure to move and then take the gloves all the way off. Democrats have an internal telotic pressure to focus group and study the issue until they can issue new regulations.
Now, the process of stasis is well advanced in the American republic, but it's important to remember that optimate choleric lashout to enshrine the mos maiorum virtually never works, and the next attempt at Sulla won't work either. Progressive elites talking out loud are quite open about their views that the mos maiorum of democracy is progressive institutionalism, damn the voters. It's been published all over The Atlantic. The unwritten constitution, in their view, is a set of values. A set I'm sure we've all seen before, which puts self expression- especially over gender and sexuality- above ancient rights. They'll lash out, impotently, it will fizzle, and the backlash will enthrone the caudillo. All this has happened before, and it will happen again. As a matter of fact I wouldn't rule out that Trump is that caudillo and Biden was the Sulla. Stasis can't be stopped at this juncture.
That's a wild take. Biden and Garland were pretty explicit about not targeting the right and slow-walking any legal action and a pretty common sentiment on the left (or maybe just the far-left? certainly not the NYT-wing of the "left" mainstream media) is to be upset at them for that.
Taking them at their word is pretty wild considering we literally have FBI memos noting that there are no non-ideological reasons for targeting the people they've been sicked on. That's what the 'FBI targeting traditional Catholics' memos were about- the agents mostly wondering why they were supposed to be doing this, considering they're infiltrating people who are not white supremacists, dislike white supremacists, and have no affinity for terrorism. Or considering the novel theories like the Doug Mackey prosecution.
Let's flip this- the right wing twitterati is frustrated with Trump for being too moderate with his priorities, slow walking immigration enforcement, etc. Is that, uh, objectively correct?
It's not quite the same, but, yes, I'd consider the claim that Trump was taking immigration enforcement seriously to be only slightly less absurd. The Trump administration is very interested in the theater of immigration enforcement, but has repeatedly avoided or backed down from doing anything actually effective. It's clear they don't actually believe in the goal (likely because it would be bad for the profits of their funders) and merely want theater for their base. That said, this is one, among many, areas where the theater of the Trump administration is itself at least somewhat advancing the long-term goal of destroying the cultural concept of the US being welcoming to immigrants.
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