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Notes -
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.
"Lock her up!" was a big part of Trump's platform in 2016. I'm not sure why some random podcaster saying this is particularly interesting, You can find thousands of podcasters saying every politician you can think of should be locked up for one reason or another. I think there is a sentiment among liberals that democrats need to start playing dirtier, because the republicans continually reap the benefits of defecting from norms. Merrick Garland being a prime example of that, and why there is talk of packing the courts as revenge.
There's a very large difference between "lock her up" and "lock them all up and be grateful we aren't having them all industrially executed". Particularly when the "her" in question is someone who has been accused of criminal offenses for decades at that point - note that Trump didn't call to lock up Harris. The irony is that Hilary and Bill Clinton might be closer to jail now after being held in contempt over their refusal to testify regarding Jeffrey Epstein.
"lock her up" was a presidential candidate. I am not sure who is saying "lock them all up and be grateful we aren't having them all industrially executed" (the SJ left is generally not too fond of gas chambers, I think). If it is Newsom, I will grant you that it is worse.
I am sure that some politician somewhere is saying that a Democrat administration will be going over the conduct of Trump's ICE with a very fine toothed comb, and prosecute any agents who violated any departmental regulations which were on the books at the time.
I do not see this as particularly bad. Trump is running the DoJ as a weapon against his enemies, so turnabout would be fair. Sadly, I am also convinced that it won't be happening. Having federal agents who enforce your ideas with impunity is useful to any administration, and establishing a precedent of them getting persecuted by subsequent administrations would end this. This is also why we will not see a court martial over the bombing of shipwrecked sailors.
With the same creative and novel legal theories they used against Trump, I'm sure. Going to be amazing watching the gerontocratic Dems "discover" that enforcing laws they themselves wrote and passed decades ago is domestic terrorism or something.
The most prominent example I'm aware of is Hakeem Jeffries calling ICE a lawless organization engaged in state violence, and vaguely threatening to prosecute them in what very much looks like an attempt to intimidate federal agents.
I haven't seen anything that extreme from real '28 Democrat contenders, but let me ask you this. Remember the clip about giving free healthcare to illegal aliens, where every single Dem candidate raised their hand? Imagine the following question: "If you win the 2028 election, will you commit to prosecuting the fascist Trump administration and it's supporters to a level comparable to the Nuremburg trials?"
Which 2028 Dem candidates do you think would say "no"?
Which is exactly why I would expect the Dems to throw anything at the wall to force out, if not jail, every fed and ICE agents who supported Trump.
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