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Remember "creeping Sharia Law" that far-right hysterics were warning about 10-15 years ago? Of course it was always ridiculous, but now something pretty amusing has happened.
‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags
What stood out to me was the support of right-wing activists from nearby towns. So this isn't just a moslem issue, even white Republicans are joined up. Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.
For liberals it also creates a bizarre spectacle. They've been obsessed with white Christian "fascists" and often turned a blind eye towards immigrants. Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.
Another ironic twist is that the supposed "Great Replacement myth" is largely what facilitated this change. Moslems are now a clear supermajority in the city and the change happened relatively quickly. Liberals were demographically replaced by the people they brought in and now feel like they've been hosed. Can't feel much sympathy for those who use immigration as a political weapon against their domestic political enemies.
The topic of Muslim conservatism has been talked about to death for years now, and I keep posing the same query: am I to be elated that this intersectionality grift keeps collapsing like a house of sand? Should I care if, amidst a home invasion, one burglar beats down another? Both men wish to fleece me of my belongings, any "shared interests" I might have with the former is a fleeting one, if anything. Not a 1:1 comparison, of course, (and no, I'm not calling migrants "robbers") but this "gotcha" stuff is only good enough as a meme generator for "cringe lib gets owned compilation #314". Reactionary politics cannot tilt the vogue in my favour.
Again, what is the American right's playbook? I see this brouhaha about how "The Right is now the counterculture" but virtually all hardcore leftists believe they're still the counterculture and do all the countercultural work in the media, entertainment, etc. Sadly, I think rightists are taking the wrong conclusion, that like some law of historical thermodynamics, these views and policies will change.
The North American right's material position is vastly different from the European... All the Muslims in north America made it through a traditional immigration system and largely are middle class with a few nere-do-well sons that occassionally join gangs... nothing like what Europe faces with its massive underclass of islamic disfunction.
Likewise the Anglosphere has a large meaningful right wing counter culture whereas europe doesn't.
Insitutional left wing media is monstrosity with a skinsuit of legacy brand drawn over it... No Canadians give a damn about the CBC, Disney and hollywood aren't driving culture or building new brands, etc. Basically all the new culture is being developed by individual creators or being imported from various international sources like anime, or Eastern European video games... etc. In addition to the already thriving Country cultureand the paralell red tribe culture that already existed.
As far as I can tell NONE of that has a parallels in Europe or even Quebec. I was in Quebec recently and it was like being time warped back to 2012... none of the big cultural shifts have penetrated.
Every ethnic group in Europe is still in the Thralls of their regional state backed media becuase they'll actually produce shows in their language or mutual not understandable dialect, in the Case of the UK...
North American anglo-culture is just vastly more online, nebulous hard to tact down, and its legacy media has aged and died far faster.
A career in Media or Entertainment in North America right now is akin to being an Auto-worker in the 80s waiting for your plant to shut... and everyone knows it. Basically every Hollywood movie over the past several months has bombed, and most of the studios are looking at layoffs...Everyone under 50 knows working for a magazine or a newspaper is basically a Career kiss of death at this point, and everyone's desperately trying to make the jump to the post insitutional influencer economy.
And as far as I can tell basically everywhere outside North America is 5-10 years atleast behind it on the trend.
...
What should Europeans take from the North American right's Handbook? Probably very little.
Even you internet is heavily regulated and institutionally controlled and gate-kept in a way ours isn't
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Let me put less abstractly.
Two groups break into your house and want to steal your daughter. One wants to mutilate and sterilize her, the other wants convert her and marry her off so she has lots of grandbabies.
In a perfect world, I'd love to not be forced into those options. To leave the abstract, I'd love if a conservative moral authority had it in them to say loudly, and proudly, and with their hands on the levers of power (and the monopoly on violence) "Nobody is going to mutilate and sterilize your kids, or convert them to a foreign religion and forcefully breed them".
Alas, I don't live in that world.
In this extreme example, I choose grandchildren. Even if they may wind up believing funny things.
Edit: On a side note, while at one point I used to be horrified as Islam's perspective on women and "western decadence", my native culture seems to have done everything in it's power over the last 8 years to prove Islam right. So I guess there is that too. I'm not rushing to convert. But San Francisco has proven there are worse things than an Islamic Theocracy.
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