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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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They don't feel like they seek out American influences.

But they won't deny or be bewildered by someone pointing out they are influenced by American culture. They'll nod along and probably say we should invest into local stuff so we're not relying on Americans so much. I've had exactly this conversation countless times.

You can't simply forcefully spread just anything. It has to fit into the framework of what the current generation was taught as children and young adults

You'd be surprised how much you can get away with. Whatever you're pushing through, most people won't hear about. Of the ones that do, the majority won't care. Of the ones that care, the majority will be afraid to say anything, because saying something will make them sound like AfD/Orban/Farage/Trump, and the ones that do say something can simply be fired and ostracized to serve as a warning for others.

Wokeness was laundered / whitewashed as just being a decent human being, and basically just 90s race blindness as the foot in the door, and once you pluck all the DEI/representation fruits from that

Even if we go with "race blindness was a pre-requisite for DEI", that just shows that these things have to be spread gradually, not that they can't be spread top-down.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a distributed system

This the part I'm denying. It's not. It's all spread top-down by governments, corporations, and NGOs, who regularly get together and discuss hiw to get around local popular pushback.

Like I said, European leftists believe wokeness will never became a thing in Europe, precisely because they were applying the kind of analysis you're doing here. They assumed spread is organic, and so no organic resonance anywhere around them, so they concluded it will not arrive in Europe anytime soon.