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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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To which I would say, would your model predict:

(1) Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?

"Trump" isn't a unitary figure - the people who would have had to prosecute Hilary were the DOJ, which Trump was embroiled in a...contentious relationship with, given his termination of his first AG (who, incidentally, had a long history with Hilary as colleagues in the Senate), and the role of senior officials at DOJ in promulgating and sustaining the Russian Collusion hoax. Any order Trump gave to try and prosecute her would not have been obeyed.

(2) The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?

How quickly we forget. There was at least one significant attempt at actual terrorism in the lead up to the Dobbs decision, coupled with strategic DOJ non-enforcement of (and thus tacit condoning of) the laws against harassment of judicial officers. There then followed a propaganda smear campaign designed to gin up impeachment efforts against conservative justices, notwithstanding similar conduct from liberal justices.

There was quite a bit of ‘4 am property damage’ attacks directed against Catholic Churches in the aftermath of dobbs as well, the stuff that could have been prosecuted as a hate crime if the perpetrators weren’t politically sympathetic. A very small number of far left activists attempted to interrupt masses and were physically prevented from doing so, which I suspect had a deterrent effect on confrontational behavior.