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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?

Maybe? I could absolutely see this joining the stolen 2020 election, measles parties, and pedo rings as an accepted part of the conspiracist worldview. And maybe you can even get a few silicon valley billionaires doing the "just asking questions" routine. And ... what then? That coalition is, on average, poorer, less educated, and less skilled at exercising power, and plus they can be really annoying, IMO. Many of the original far-right leaders have become disenchanted at all the low-quality people populism attracts, just look what Jason Kessler (who organized the Charlottesville goon march) said today:

https://x.com/TheMadDimension/status/1898878914199441800

Holocaust revisionism is unlikely to go mainstream among intellectually serious people until "revisionists" can answer some very basic questions like where did all these trainloads of Jews go? Why did 100,000 Dutch Jews seemingly vanish off the face of the Earth? Etc.

And ... what then?

The what then, as I have been shouting in vain for the past few months, is that you have to actually deal with them. You can't just smugly dismiss them and point at your experts, that's how Harris lost the election - they have too much power and don't trust your experts. You could smuckle to yourself about how dumb they are and then go about your day all you liked in the past, but now the dreaded 'conspiracists' (which as far as I can tell is anyone who doesn't fall in immediate lockstep behind any authority figure) run the world's biggest economy and make policy decisions that affect the whole planet, not just trailer parks and tenements. Now you have two choices - work with them to explain your arguments and defeat theirs, or sulk quietly to yourself and then passive aggressively side talk about all these low quality populists.

Now you have two choices - work with them to explain your arguments and defeat theirs

What do you think I'm doing here? I'm trying to influence the DOGE guys who I suspect are here (or are on ACX or DSL) and the guys who might wind up as GOP state legislators in fifteen years time.