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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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To play devils advocate here, if the system is completely broken and unable to produce a good result on anything that matters, maybe a defect bot is exactly what you need.

There's no way to even tell if Trump is a "defect bot", because the defection against him started early. The New York Times declared they'd only cover his candidacy in the entertainment section (a declaration they did not follow). Democrats rioted on election day. They proclaimed him #NotMyPresident and declared #Resistance. They rioted again on Inauguration Day. They started trying to impeach him in 2017. They did impeach him in 2019. There's no way you could distinguish between defectbot and tit-for-tat under these circumstances.

A third of Americans can’t read.

Are these yokels from Trump Country, or products of our Democratically-controlled urban school systems?

We can’t handle disaster recovery

Ron DeSantis can.

build aircraft

I doubt either party could fix Boeing.

Large portions of most cities are no go zones, often featuring open air drug markets. Is Trump or any other “defect bot” going to actually be able to fix that?

Most of the things you've mentioned are locally controlled, and Trump can't fix them. But on the other hand, most of those cities are Democratically controlled and the Democrats are the party of "defund the police".

Democrats rioted on election day.

Democratic politicians and Clinton didn't, and I believe almost all of the protests on 2016 election day were peaceful and didn't involve any rioting. Look at what Republican politicians and Trump did on and after election day. Not to mention general Trump voters.

They proclaimed him #NotMyPresident and declared #Resistance.

Look at what Republicans did when Obama or particularly Biden won.

There's no way you could distinguish between defectbot and tit-for-tat under these circumstances.

Compare the top-down leaders and the rabble. Hillary Clinton, although publicly claiming Russia helped increase Trump's odds (which is plausibly true, even if it seems more likely than not he still would've won without the DNC hacking and social media influence schemes from Russia), publicly and privately accepted the election results within hours. No high-level Democratic leaders advocated any tricks to try to keep Trump from being inaugurated. A few very left-leaning journalists suggested such things, and some Democratic voters did, but it was fringe. I'm not going to even bother to contrast with what happened from the other side.

Red MAGA is much less tethered to reality than Blue MAGA is, Red MAGA is a much greater proportion of Red Team than Blue MAGA is of Blue Team, and Red MAGA includes most of the current Republican leadership while Blue MAGA contains little of the Democratic leadership.

This is an inaccurate history. The democratic controlled government launched project crossfire hurricane based on known Clinton oppo research that the FBI had determined was bogus and the Obama admin took steps to ensure it would continue after the admin changed. They did this to cripple the incoming Trump admin.

They then used the investigation to paint his regime as-if controlled by Russia to the point many dem voters are totally unaware of the fabricated source of the story. These media stories were then used to say “where there is smoke there is fire” which led to more investigations.

The Dems played very dirty. They prima facie accepted the results of the election but through dirty IC related shenanigans substantively did not accept the election results.