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Notes -
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
You may or may not remember that back in January of this year President Trump, in his personal capacity, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in damages related to leaks of his tax returns by a contractor back in 2018-2020. I don't want to dig into the merits of the case as such, except I'll note the legal discussion I've read seems to have a consensus that the case is very weak. It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of. There are obvious conflicts of interest involved. So much so the judge in that case issued an order for the parties to explain how they are actually adverse to each other, how they disagree, so that the cases and controversies requirement of the constitution is satisfied.
As of today, it seems we may never find out how good the claims are or aren't, how adverse the parties are or aren't. Trump filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit, pursuant to the establishment of a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". It's not even clear to me the fund is going to be administered by the United States government, as paragraph C provides:
Is this going to be the new normal? If you're President and Congress won't give you the money you want to pay your friends and allies you can get however much you want with this one weird trick!
ETA:
ABC reports that the fund will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, but the members will all be removable at-will by the President.
We know we're living in the late republic, it's not culture war anymore. Oh, sure, the TDS crowd will get very conspicuously upset about Trump corruption again. But no one else cares.
What was the “late republic” turning point in your view?
I would say gay marriage in the USA. That is when crybulling really really picked up and people started seeing the USA as just a set of ill gotten spoils that needed to be redistributed.
Probably 9/11 is the previous point, but I think up to 2010 things were pretty normal.
Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes (arguably deliberately selected to be that way) and it's much younger than the drive for racial or class based redistribution.
I think this may be precisely why it was a turning point. The tactics used to win this battle - "born this way," "how does two loving men/women getting married and getting [marriage rights] affect you?" - were so successful in large part because it was so close to zero-sum. But once that battle was won, the same activists applied the same tactics to other things which were not nearly so close to zero-sum (insisting that MTF transwomen be treated exactly the same as women in every context is the most obvious example, but smaller scale examples in things like representation in fiction also count), which resulted in significant push back, which resulted in the activists take the "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach.
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Yes but afterwards the activist industrial complex spilled into all the other causes. And they managed to instill their monoculture in the tech giants for almost a decade. Now of course the workers there are scared because of the layoffs and are less politically active - as the obedient drones should be, but do you remember the first Trump admin?
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