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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I agree, though with the caveat that this only describes today's conservatives. Salami tactics aren't the sole purview of the Left; in a world where 1, 3, 4 and 10 become hitching points of the Overton window, hardliners will find it easier to drum up support for the rest of the list. For example, if you had 3, 4 and 8, 12 might not be codified into law overnight but would run a high risk of quickly becoming the unspoken norm, in exactly the same way that DEI-style measures became endemic even in institutions with no hard legal mandate to apply them.

I also think you phrased 4 as a needlessly weak version of that particular fear. With things like the withheld Disney cartoon, it goes beyond drag shows qua drag shows: the concern is that conservatives want to legally equate "being publicly trans" with "drag", and qualify any media depicting transition as adult-only media, not just live drag shows. I couldn't care less whether minors can go to drag shows, but I would consider it very damaging and illiberal to restrict their access to non-sexual books, comics and cartoons with trans characters in them. And I'm pretty sure you could get majority support for that among today's conservatives, albeit perhaps by not that wide of a margin.