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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Vibe shift?

I've thought, several times, certainly this will be the vibe shift. And every time, somehow, normies go back to sleep. Some comforting narrative Xanax get's cooked up and shipped out.

I thought surely, the naked insanity on college campuses, that may have peeked with Evergreen and Bret Weinstein, will cause a vibe shift. And maybe a few people on the edges woke up, but most people went back to sleep with tales that it wasn't so bad, and also they deserved it.

I thought the nightly footage of BLM/Antifa burning down cities, sieging a federal courthouse, and occupying and then murdering people in CHAZ/CHOP would wake people up. And once again, a few did. Then Jan 6th happened and most people went back to sleep. They were told that was worse than all of the above combined, and they slept soundly.

I thought the government taking away people's children, sterilizing and mutilating them would surely wake people up. But if my in-laws are any indicator, it's a crime against humanity so horrifying to contemplate, and so mired in euphemisms like "trans health care for children", that they literally think it's impossible that doctors could be operating on children as young as 13, or prescribing permanently altering drugs to prepubescents. They think my wife and I are making it all up.

The iconic scene from the Unite the Right rally of "Jews will not replace us" is being repeated by diverse crowds in every major city in America in support of Hamas. If the handful of losers in Charlottesville, dwarfed by the counterprotest, were hung around Trump's neck for 4 years and considered the most significant threat to America, what do we make of the current explicit shows of support for Hamas' terrorism and antisemitism from the radical left that dwarf Unite the Right by several orders of magnitude?

I'd like to think people will wake up. But I've thought that before. It's impossible. They'll just tune into MSNBC, fiending for more narrative Xanax. They'll be told to stay off Twitter, everything you see there is misinformation. It's not so bad. Also the Republicans are still worse. The ADL says so, and they'd know. They're the authority on antisemitism after all. Just goto sleep.

the naked insanity on college campuses, that may have peeked with Evergreen and Bret Weinstein

Peeking and naked insanity? Sounds more like Harvey Weinstein.

Anyway, I don't think that this is a huge disastrous moment for wokery or anything like that, but things like perceptions of antisemitism on the left can make a difference. It was one of the things that hurt UK Labour in the latter Jeremy Corbyn years, culminating in Corbyn being successfully persecuted by the centre left and UK Labour in general doing a massive turnaround in many ways within several years, with a lot of Blairism and Blairites being rehabilitated.

In the US, where Islam and pro-Palestinian sentiment are less important on the left, I don't see the Hamas attacks having as much significance. At most, elements of the far left will acquire a lower reputation among everyday Obama-loving Democrats.