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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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How much ammo does one need to summon to crush a wounded, pathetic little duckling?

I respect the possibility that she may WOW me with a pivot to a smart, competent, and incisive campaign. If only these were qualities she had ever managed to exhibit or sustain beyond a 30-second edit. This meme you're pushing that "Repubs are scrambling to figure out an attack on Kamala" is one of the most fanciful things I've read in this last week, as if she hasn't been repeatedly trotted out as a pinata to playfully hit with a stick in between more serious concerns regarding Joe Biden and the Blob. She is known to her opponents, and they make hay out of her every day.

The Trump campaign should give her a cursory acknowledgment as the Dem nominee, and then go back to hammering the Biden admin while pretending she's not even in the room.

How much ammo does one need to summon to crush a wounded, pathetic little duckling?

On the one hand, I see this sort of thing in some quarters. Like Neema Parvini declaring that Kamala is a "sacrificial lamb" intended to lose to Trump, and that this whole election proves his thesis about how our elites are "putting the woke away" and actively pursuing Trump's return as "right-wing containment" and a pivot to rebuilding America's force-projection capacity to maintain the global American empire.

On the other hand, I encounter others arguing that this guarantees Trump's defeat, because the only candidate he could even possibly defeat was Biden, and he's utterly doomed against literally anyone else. Further, many of these argue that this is Good, Actually — not because they support Dem policies (far from it), but because they "want to see Trump supporters cry" and think that the sooner "this MAGA shit dies" the better, to make way for their preferred alternative.

And then you have the Dreaded Jim predicting that "Kamala gets one hundred and twenty million votes at three in the morning after all voting centres have been locked down and Republican scrutineers expelled."

(And don't get me started on the opinions about Vance — he's a based neoreactionary, he's an "anti-MAGA" Republican establishment type, he's a race traitor, he's a CIA/Palantir plant intended to bring about digital passports and a central bank digital currency, he's secretly gay…)

I'm really not sure who — if anyone — has the right of it.

Has the present tumult weakened your confidence that Blues have already won and Reds should despair?

No, not really. The only question is whether they win by using Trump as "containment" — giving Reds another meaningless "win", to defuse tension and slow the proverbial frog-boiling, that translates to no actual rightward movement due to the permanent bureaucracy being fully insulated from election outcomes (Project 2025 is utterly doomed); by using deep-cover CIA Vance to get the GOP back on script as the Washington Generals outer party jobbers; or by announcing Kamala as the winner with over 100 million votes in the most-safester-and-securester election ever, and these absolutely-not-fake official results are unquestionable — literally unquestionable because anyone engaged in "election denial" is officially a domestic terrorist and will be arrested by the FBI forthwith; or some other horror scenario.

Every battleground but one, every mode of conflict between the tribes but one, inherently favors the left. There is only one field of battle where the right has a relative, comparative advantage, and that's the actual field of battle. Any other method, we're guaranteed to lose. And as I've said to you before, I still think that — thanks to the nature of modern military technology and to our inability to organize (because anyone who so much as mentions "organizing" is a Fed) — we almost-certainly lose that one too.

So yes, we're still doomed. Come back to me after you've won a civil war, and then I'll have likely changed my mind.