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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36241 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is. I you aren't yet convinced of this you can look at all the people who will suddenly become fine with Trump and his administration when they are the ones distributing treasure.

The Marine Le Pen strategy of becoming more "normal" can be useful so as to avoid being pinned down in the margins of weirdness, but it's intrumental at best. Successful political movement are both pragmatic and uncompromising on their terminal goals. Lose either and you fail.

Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is. I you aren't yet convinced of this you can look at all the people who will suddenly become fine with Trump and his administration when they are the ones distributing treasure.

I think an even better example of this is Covid. A highly cautious view of Covid and of what measures were appropriate are highly correlated with class status and were particularly unpopular with less affluent, less white and overall less 'priestly' people both in the US and Europe. But at the end of the day, the priestly class still got its will for 1 to almost 3 years, depending on location, and hugely shifted norms of hygiene, social activity and economic behaviors like remote work among the rest of society. I still regularly see people here in Germany, mostly elderly and often of MENA heritage (confusing given that at group level they certainly had the least respect for any of the Covid theater), wearing a mask without covering their nose, and given the medical absurdity of this I struggle to think of this as anything other than an illustration of memetic elite dominance.

Uh, less affluent whites were the main group that hated the covid response, but minorities were big into it.

My impression is that in terms of organized political resistance middle and lower class whites were certainly the drivers of that, but in terms of simply not giving a shit and going on with life regardless of what the state says that's definitely more of a minority thing, at least here in Germany. For the US I'm less sure, but it also depends more on the group. Using vaccine uptake as a vague proxy, Asians were all-aboard, but they're also more affluent on average, Hispanics were more likely than red whites but less likely than blue whites to take the vaccine, blacks were least likely overall. Another example are the riots after George Floyd's death which, while featuring plenty of white people as well, were disproportionately minority, and they were AFAIK the first large scale breakdown of public Covid discipline.

Blacks in the US didn’t get vaccinated because they don’t trust anything and that led to elaborate conspiracy theories about it making your testicles swell up so people would stop masking. Red whites didn’t get vaccinated because we hate the people telling us to. Hispanics were middle of the pack because that’s kind of their thing.

IME blacks held extremely covid conscious views, they just didn’t think that the vaccine was real or contact tracing would work- usually for Alex Jones type reasons. There were lots of demands for ‘everyone stays home for two weeks, even the grocery stores be shut down’. They were big on NPIs.

I suspect vaccine uptake and masking would give you two entirely different answers. In the US, blacks had lower vaccine uptake, but at least anecdotally (and in some surveys), were more into masks.

Also, when covid started to spread you officially were a weirdo for being concerned. Pelosi told people to go to Chinatown and hug an asian.

Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is.

This statement is false.

If it were true, the 45th president of the United States would have been either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, not Donald Trump.

Hillary and Jeb were both pretty universally hated by the normie class. The reasons likely to do with decades of the priestly class hating on them, sure, but it's the truth.

Hillary and Jeb were both pretty universally hated by the normie class...

...and universally beloved by those in power. If normies only adapt to what people with power tell them to, one of them would have become president.

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