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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Which of BLM’s goals did it achieve? Stuff like the bail/justice reform movement long predates BLM and wasn’t the focus, so that doesn’t count.

Diverted uncounted billions of dollars to leftist activism to give sinecures to hordes of useless college graduates, putting fringe "critical theory" activists in charge of university hiring, science funding, and formerly apolitical NGOs with massive endowments and prestige.

I don't know what goals you think they had other than "all power to us, loot the system for our ingroup"

How can people still pretend the institutional takeovers of 2020 just didn't happen?

That’s just institutional leftism, it isn’t BLM in particular. That was a specific movement with goals like “defund the police”.

BLM was the previous vehicle for institutional leftism to take over everything. "Decolonization" is the new one.

Got some of those in the 'leadership' positions independently wealthy.

They got Starbucks locations to act as a public restroom for a few years. Not even that was able to stick.

Looser sentences was absolutely a key focus of BLM. The fact that those demands predated BLM does not negate the fact. As for achievements? That's another story. But I think the goal for BDS is more tangible since most people don't really care much about Israel one way or another. That's why the Zionist lobby has been successful. It's enough for a small but passionate minority and you can have outsized impact on foreign policy. Domestic policy is trickier.

I agree, Zionism is the default in the US because most people don’t care except (most) Jews and some Evangelicals and this leads to policy by default, unlike issues like abortion and gun control with strong views on both sides. As the Muslim population rises in the West, the constituency strongly ideologically opposed to Israel, who consider opposition to Israel a central religious and moral imperative, grows with it.

That said, the route to BDS’ actual goals (which, most pointedly, include sanctions as a central element) is much harder. Fifty something representatives out of 435 voted against the current Israel aid bill; 20 of those were Republicans protesting the related aid for Ukraine and that some of the money would go to Palestinians (and even the NatCon faction definitely wouldn’t vote to sanction Israel in support of Palestinians, they just wouldn’t vote to send it money). Of the few dozen Dems most just thought Israel went a bit too far in Gaza. The US Muslim population is much smaller than those in major Western European countries per capita, and is highly concentrated in a few house seats. Even countries that have been more skeptical of Israel’s war in Gaza, like China and Russia, don’t sanction Israel. Even many Muslim lands do not.