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Notes -
Newsom basically calling for a boycot of Target.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/did-governor-newsom-spark-target-boycott-among-liberals
So he’s not too happy that red tribe has learned how to cancel something. I think we are approaching a day where you have to declare your allegiance. Red or blue.
I usually don’t like Balaji and think he’s a smarter hack who knows how to grift, but I think he’s right in this thread
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659094966671425536?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
And Scott had a thread about how pride is just like every other cities holiday posted recently. I can’t find it.
America seems to be in a religious war between two cultures now. A couple years ago red tribe didn’t know how to wield power. Desantis has done that highlighted by his war on Disney and grassroots red tribe found their first success with Budweiser. Twitter going Musks was an obvious red tribe move. Jan 6 and Trump overall was a movement that hadn’t found their real leaders who could use power.
I don’t think religion is that strong anymore on the right. I say this because there is a lot of tolerance for Trump being not a Christian. He bangs hookers. So red tribe has an internal sub-war between their traditional alpha male and their good Christian Desantis.
I do like Scott’s metaphor of this being a time like when Christianity took over the Roman Empire. No one believed in the old pagan gods anymore. And I think blue tribe would have won this but they made two crucial mistakes:
The movement doesn’t have a great place for males. Who have always dominated every society.
The trans movement has a lot of vibes of backward religions. Getting kids to cut themselves up and change their bodies has a lot of vibes of practices we long since banished.
On Trump:There was a very obvious tip-toeing going on with Trump and Christianity during the 2016 campaign. I wouldn't call the disposition of Christians to him a decline in their religiosity or a change of faith since that would place Christianity and religion in general on a pedestal it doesn't really occupy.
Being a 'good Christian' was always just as much about showing allegiance to the ingroup as it was about actually being a good Christian person. You can be accepted, as an outsider, to the ingroup as long as you demonstrate respect for and allegiance to it. Which is what Trump did. There's no hand of god involved with this. It's just ingroup/outgroup bias.
As for the boycott thing: it's an exciting change. From a broad perspective it seems like, to some extent, the American system has, though from a narrow populist standpoint at best, worked. As an example, white nationalism 2.0 was killed off in its infancy. Banned from all platforms. And to this day any resurgence or reinvention gets a very similar treatment. From an idyllic and naive standpoint, the 'system' was corrupt in that instance. But red tribe conservatism was to some extent left to live. Aside from the massive anti-Trump thing, and in part because of it, red tribe conservatives managed to fumble their way into organizing on Facebook. And from there, luck their way back on Twitter.
You don't need all that much meme power to appeal to a group of disgruntled folks who have been left politically marginalized for a long time. Remember the TEA Party? I mean, most of the chest pounding group affirming rhetoric had been relegated to a loser like Glenn Beck. Every other conservative avenue for proper group formation got strangled dead or acted as controlled opposition, at least in my lifetime. Caring more about 'respectability' than winning. But now there seems to be a soft resurgence of the red tribe conservative movement that is, to some extent, free of the mainstream media right.
Maybe I'm tying too much optimism to this. There have been multiple iterations of this old dog called 'conservatism' growling back at the leg that's kicking it. It's never amounted to much of anything. Assuming this will be different is naive. Especially since the whole 'gay' thing is a red herring for more unfixable issues like mass immigration, which has already 'doomed' the country. But having a common enemy is always a good baseline for organizing. Maybe the rainbow colored flag can act as a unifier for the red tribe as well. I certainly wouldn't mind the dog getting a good bite out of that sadistic leg before it finally gets put down.
The Tea Party Saga is one of the most interesting bits of recent political history. It provided the emotional oomph, revitalized the power of the far right bases while also giving Christian Nationalism social legitimacy among the south.
Considering the 2008-2011 election eras had so much going on, it's almost worth a look to revisit those years and show how bald-faced the democrat party were in the dirty tactics they used in order to establish power. While you see on democrats side, people crying about the right wing being conspiracists or whatever, a close examination of the events of 2008 - including the Democrat takeover, and the resulting fatalism of the conservative party, as the republican fat cats were happy being the performative losers while letting the democrats steamroll over them...
The way the Dems shat on then-Senator Palin for 2007/8, spreading some of the nastiest misogynistic shit about a woman who chose to have kids... And then watching democrat voters justify the shit they said about her after the fact.
As we gear up for a new election year, it's going to get downright dirty.
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