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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Trump only started leading by huge margins this primary after getting indicted. Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson seeded a retarded narrative that americans should rally around Trump to somehow teach democrats a lesson.

That's not a retarded narrative. The second-best way to prevent the Democrats from engaging in dirty tricks is to demonstrate that those dirty tricks backfire.

Nominating Trump isn't a backfire. He's a divisive candidate and he wasn't a great president (better than Biden, but that's not saying much).

That isn’t a retarted narrative. Politics in America are coalition politics. You need to protect your flanks and even at times protect idiots in your flanks because if you they don’t vote you lose elections 49-51 instead of winning 51-49. Of course Trump isn’t exactly the flanks.

Further, everyone on the right believes pick your candidate Vivek, Desantis, even Liz Cheney would suddenly face the same treatment if they were the nominee. The only way to protect your movement is to rally around the flag.

Sure these are warfare arguments but politics has the same dynamics. In battle you either work as a team or our slaughtered as individuals.

I'd have preferred if they'd showed some spine instead, but Carlson in particular is a weathervane, not a keel.

What is the appropriate reaction to the leader of the party you prefer being politically persecuted? Set Trump aside for the moment, just imagine a country that you have no knowledge of or material stake in. If you heard that the former President had been indicted in a fashion that most members of that party thought was illegitimate, would you be at all surprised to hear that this created a backlash and hardened support for that candidate?

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