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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet.

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.

City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.

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 also overreached on trans issues.

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.

But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.

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.