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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Enthusiasm for Trump isn't what it was, but he's been in the sphere for close to 10 years, lessened excitement is to be expected. There was the euphoria among Obama supporters in 2008 that felt entirely gone by 2012. Disillusionment is some of it, but a rounding error is people flipping, a lot of it is going to be people who have become apathetic about politics or who have more immediate concerns in their life, but most in the right are the people who became disillusioned with the government. They hoped Trump was redress, everything got worse, now they want an open radical. A Tucker with Vivek's platform amped to 11: Garrote by XO the major alphabet agencies, fire everyone employed at the pleasure of the Executive including most of the military officership and start over. A tidier candidate with Trump's charisma--so easy--with that platform would do extremely well, especially in 2028.

That platform is the key, it's why I say Trump will win in a landslide. It's not him drawing a second wind in voter enthusiasm but the Michael Moore factor, the "Molotov at the establishment." A million if not millions will vote in November for Trump even as they dislike him or even hate him because they hate the establishment more. Trump's a lot of things, but for politics, the thing that matters more than all else is that he embodies being the anti-establishment, and it doesn't even have to be anything he's done, it's everybody who's against him. His haters are the cred.

On real issues, the price of milk and eggs should have the DNC in an endless waking panic, nothing should matter more. I'm a conscientious shopper with a damn near eidetic memory for grocery prices, I cook a lot, and I'm good with my money, but that's me. The people making less, worse with their money, less interested and capable in cooking, who now have to spend another $50 every trip, every week or every other week, what are they not buying? What are they delaying that they need or not paying off? There's a torrent of negative effects from decreased purchasing power and nothing causes regime change like economic instability. A lot of people experience this most viscerally in the checkout line gut punch, then they look at what the left is championing. I know there might be a million women who vote this fall for the sole reason of keeping abortion lines open, that's a "valid" insofar as it's an effective political platform, it's also grotesque. They can say it's not that, it is, its presence at all necessarily means it is, but also they should, because couching it? Yeah, in what? Doomsday climate change while opposing nuclear power? Increasing welfare? Not prosecuting violent criminals? Keeping the borders wide open? Classroom proselytizing of the queer religion? These people get the same say as me, I say keep it to abortion. Better insouciant than imbecilic.

But for all this, for an election scenario the DNC should be existentially incapable of winning because of the nature of the average voter's day-to-day experience with buying anything, the discussion here is the presidential prospects of the governor of the state most representative of the failures of establishment doctrine. Newsom is actually incapable of winning a national election unless he breaks his ankles pivoting so hard from the reasoning and politics of the decisions that ruined California, and that's 2028. Trump would slaughter him on the topic of the state, the state would become the topic of the election, and I bet Trump would, he certainly could do it while praising everything the state once was. It's wonderful even still, I'd love to live in California if I had a way to dodge the Big One, but it's so far from its past glory because of people who are selectively blind about what is and tragically govern on what ought to be.