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Can anyone explain to me this chain of Trump primary victories? Normally I find myself pretty in the loop and things make sense, but I'm having trouble here. Trump as we all know has approval ratings in the doldrums and that extends even to a decent amount of historical loyalist, electorally - recent surveys show his endorsement is a drag in general elections in battlefield states. He also has a mixed at best record of picking primary winners. Yet he's scored several notable wins recently.
He has endorsed former Texas AG Paxton (and dogged by significant simmering corruption allegations), endangering the Texas Senate seat and going against sitting incumbent Sen. Cornyn. His pick for Kentucky Senate seat won the primary despite opposition from both Rep. Massie and retiring incumbent Sen. McConnell (notably, opposite wings of the party despite being somewhat anti-Trump). Rep Massie himself, they are reporting, has lost a primary as well (the most expensive House primary in history, in fact, drawing both Trump and AIPAC opposition) despite drawing support from other somewhat Trump-skeptic but influential right-wingers such as Tucker Carlson, MTG, and Boebert. Trump-opposed incumbent Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy finished third and didn't even make the runoff. In Georgia, perennial enemy (of 2020 election fame) Brad Raffensperger lost the primary for governor. Trump even took out five state senators in Indiana merely over their refusal to jump in the redistricting fight!
So why amid generalized disaster is Trump scoring so many primary victories?
Recent events have peeled off some of Trump's Republican support, but generally speaking Republicans still love him. He bestrides the Republican party like a colossus.
But why now, when during Trump I and even the Biden Interregnum he was dealt quite a few defeats? I mean I'm well aware of what Trump means to the GOP and how he's exerted sustained pressure over the last decade but typically you'd at least expect recent events to provide more of a counterbalance, right?
Take Massie. His most notable stances are anti-Israel and holding administration feet to the fire about budgets and Epstein stuff. These are all issues where Republicans are, theoretically, quintessentially sympathetic (small government, anti-secret liberal cabals, non-interventionism). All of which are basically more popular now than any time in the past 10 years, right? Well, maybe not small-government spending priorities, but you get the idea.
Massie was against funding ICE in the BBB. Immigration is still the most important issue to the conservative and Republican base. You can make some show of opposing the party on certain issues but Massie opposed the party on the issue it cared about most.
And ultimately the base cares more about deportations and immigration than Israel and Epstein. Those issues are still extremely online. Posters getting their ideas about MAGA from such ideas should probably recalibrate.
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For many, perhaps most Republicans, Woke demonstrated that the present crisis is existential. It is common to see arguments that "woke is over"; rarely do people making such arguments explain their understanding of exactly how "woke" "ended". The only remotely plausible answer I can see is that Trump was re-elected.
Arguments that Woke is over and therefore it's time to move on from Trump are self-defeating if Trump is the only coordination point powerful enough to actually deliver meaningful setbacks to the woke coalition. If we had compromised and not pushed Trump in this last election, even a non-Trump Republican victory would likely have resulted in unbroken Woke advances, simply because very few of the plausible Republican candidates are willing to do what is necessary to contest the culture war, and none to the degree Trump brings to the table.
And it should be emphasized that the sauce here isn't, for the most part, Trump himself or the choices he personally makes. It's Trump as a Schelling point for war rather than surrender. Sell him out, and the people coordinating our end of the sale will absolutely, obviously sell us next. Republicans like myself stick with Trump because we see no viable alternative.
[EDIT] - an amusing note for Massie in particular is that his campaign apparently sent out an advert today, using an old endorsement given by Trump in 2022 to try to fool voters into thinking that Trump was endorsing him now, rather than his opponent. One plays the cards one has, I suppose.
I don't think that woke is over. However, I do think that woke has been dealt serious body blows in the last few years and is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point.
It's not just that Trump won despite being widely considered both by wokes and non-wokes to represent a repudiation of wokism.
It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet. Non-wokes successfully created myriads of their own websites. Woke didn't even manage to destroy 4chan. Non-woke took over X. Race realism, actual racism, anti-immigration stances, and open misogyny are now common on mainstream social media. Even on Reddit a few non-woke positions can be seen: for example, being against mass immigration is common on /r/europe, even while the sub sticks to woke positions on all other major issues.
In addition to this, woke overreached on policing and affirmative action. It is now common to see Trump-hating Democratic Party voters on city subreddits support strong policing against street crime and vagrancy. City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.
Even back in 2020, California Proposition 16, which would have made certain banned kinds of affirmative action legal, failed to pass. In San Francisco in 2021 a public backlash caused the school board to scrap a plan to rename a bunch of schools for woke reasons.
Woke also overreached on trans issues. Peak trans activism is over. Woke pronouns are starting to seem like a brief, now-dated fad. Still in use, but much less talked about these days, and they seem to be of a certain time period.
None of this is to say that woke has been defeated. It will probably rise again in some form, and relatively softer versions of woke continue to have strong influence in institutions. But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.
To be fair, one of the reasons why woke is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point is precisely because many people all over the place who thought that it would become overwhelmingly powerful took action to try to stop it.
Woke did fantastic at censoring the internet. They silenced loads of people, they broke up organizations, they debanked people, the works. Elon bought X, and they went out of their way to try and ensure the purchase did as much damage to him as possible. And if Trump had lost the election, I'm quite confident they would be well into the process of destroying his businesses and personal fortune at this very moment, and the censorship would have returned at full strength. Likewise the other tech companies; they hedged when it looked like Trump had momentum, and when he won they bent the knee. Had he lost, the censorship would have simply continued to ratchet up.
None of this is guesswork. Europe is not shy about announcing their intentions for censorship of the internet, nor of providing practical demonstrations of how their system works. Democrats publicly announced their intention to create a similar regime in America, and were well on their way to doing so when Trump won.
This is true, and the massive violence spike that killed ~8,000 black Americans slacked off. And yet, the officials they voted for are largely still in place, and still executing as much of the decarceration agenda as they think they can get away with.
Woke owns the schools, and a large plurality, possibly an outright majority of those staffing the schools are either true believers in trans ideology or unwilling to impede the true believers in any way. Ditto the medical field, from what I've seen. The activists are somewhat quieter because they don't at this moment have the Federal Government as a megaphone. Nothing I have seen indicates to me that they or their coalition have moderated in any way, nor that Blue Tribe is any closer to cutting them loose. Instead, Blue Tribe will do what it did under Biden: claim woke is over and nothing's happening, while providing their movement limitless resources and the full backing of every major social instutition.
The problem is not woke overwhelming the country. The problem is whether, in the process of preventing such overwhelm, the country survives in any meaningful way.
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Woke via the UK Foreign Office and the JIDF have managed to enshittify /pol/ into an almost unusable state. Thankfully somewhat too late because the culture that spawned there and on 4chan in general has spread enough through the internet for this not to matter too much.
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That was a bit of a fluke though. It wouldn't have happened if a mentally unstable billionaire didn't start musing about buying it, and porgressives haven't committed unforced error of actually compelling him through court to buy it, because they thought that will own him somehow.
I'm also anxious about how long it will last. The EU is constantly seething over it. Right now Musk is safe because he's in the US, but if the administration changes, they'll likely go after him, and could easily cause twitter to fall back to friendly hands again.
Sure, but "peak trans activism" was an absolute blitzkrieg, were they could roll into any institution unopposed. Now they're finally getting pushback, but that doesn't mean they lost.
This is something that drives me crazy about the discourse about wokeness. In thr blitzkrieg era we were met with denials that anything is happening to begin with, "Woke/SJW is just a boogeyman", etc. They took over essentially every major institution during that time, and now that they stumbled ad had to slow down somewhat, the same people who were denying their existence are now declaring the fight to be over.
Seen this thread, out of curiosity?
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Woke ended in 2019 after the presidential campaigns of Beto O'Rourke and Kirsten Gillebrand fizzled out before the primary season even started. The final nail was put in the coffin when the Democrats nominated Joe Biden, possibly the least woke candidate in the race apart from possibly Michael Bennett. After that, woke was no longer an identifiable phenomenon and a boogeyman that stood for whatever conservatives were opposing at the moment.
...I understand that this place is corrosive to the angels of our better nature, and I freely admit to significant corrosion myself. Is this your genuine viewpoint, or are you trolling me?
It's my genuine viewpoint. I get the impression that most Republicans are stuck in a bubble where they don't pay attention to what rank and file Democrats actually do, or who they actually vote for. There were a few woke reps who managed to get elected in 2020, and a couple more from earlier, but a lot of them were primaried out before the Biden administration ended. The 2020 primary showed that beyond certain limited areas, there was no national appetite for woke politics. Black church ladies aren't woke. Neither are Hispanics, by and large. Suburban Democrats aren't. Rural granola types aren't. Wokeism only ever appealed to a certain segment of urban voter, who Republicans try to paint as being representative of the party, precisely because they're an easy target.
BLM2 was in 2020 and there wasn't a single rank-and-file Democrat that opposed it. Every single Dem-sympathizing poster here expressed no objection to it, and the majority were outright sympathetic. Biden had age limits on gender reassignment procedures abolished. Then there's the question of if it even makes sense to judge thia by which politician gets elected. You can claim it was no specific politicians's fault that CRT got shoved into school curricula and mandatory corporate workshops, but that just shows your entire approach to this is flawed.
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More popular than before, but still not that popular among Republicans. I think that the average Republican is at least not anti-Israel (and even some of the ones who dislike Israel hate Muslims even more), does not actually care about the size of government at all but just occasionally mouths words about wanting small government, and believes that Trump was not involved with anything bad having to do with Epstein.
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