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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Watching the press briefing Trump gave... something in me finally broke.

I don't think it matters what you call Trumpism. I think that we've spent all of this time propping up a broken system with a broken man. I recoiled from the accelerationists who said they were using Trump to break the system because that just seems so destructive and vile, no better than the people who break Starbucks windows.

I thought: maybe he's a good man. Maybe we should give him a chance. And the Democrats are so vile in their baseless slander.

But the Dermocrats didn't make him give that speech on January 6th.

Hillary Clinton should have been jailed and she should still be in jail. There is nothing to be gained however from holding on to a tool that has run out of use.

I mean is there anyone out there who didn't understand why Democrats were in shrill hysterics about fascism? The man like to scare them, and I don't know if I believe that he had so much fun terrorizing the libs (it's so easy and someone has to do it) that he fell into it, or if... well, I just can't go down that road yet.

This criminal wasn't worth all of this divisiveness in our politics. Maybe the divisiveness was already there.

I regret my support for former president Trump and I want him to withdraw from public life. Nixon had the decency to step down when his time was up.

  • -28

Meh. I've never been a Trump partisan, but this changes little for me. I still view Trump as the prole's middle finger, and his decline into persecuted irrelevance is part of the cyclical tragedy of class politics.

I called this right at the start. Trump is not Caesar, Trump is not Hitler. Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. He was, is, and will always be the failed aspirations of the working class projected onto an incredibly flawed cartoon of a human being.

We're not to revolution yet, but if and when we get there, the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.

The working class has been defeated, their champion will now be buried under every over-charging liberal prosecutor in every state and city where they have authority. The PMC cannot allow the threat that Trump poses to their hegemony to go without absolutely humiliating and destroying him (in their own minds, anyway).

So, when a competent successor appears, promises all the same things Trump did, and manages to get his hands on the military, he might well decide there's no point in comfortable retirement, because that won't be an option. If you want to lead the Populare faction, you must win or die in prison, poverty or both. The proles will not be allowed an equal voice in the operation of the country except by force.

The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate. And yet he could not bring himself to kill them all, so they killed him.

Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy. The people will support an emperor because the oligarchy is uncontrollable otherwise.

the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.

It is only because those norms have held that Trump's justice will be certain.

To the extent that norms have been violated, it is Trump who has violated them. There is no law saying we must commit suicide by holding to norms.

If your argument is that we cannot hold one person accountable, let me tell you: this is how you hold the system accountable. There is no universe in which the sane response to a part of the system being held accountable, no matter the story it has told about its persecution, is to complain about how the system is never held accountable.

Campaign finance law has been broken. The full facts of this case have already been read into the congressional record. Only terminally confused. Yes.

Welcome back!

Your arguments haven't improved, but welcome all the same.