Part 3 - The End of the Culture War Era
Woke Goes to Sleep, The New Normal, Election Day 2024
Woke Goes to Sleep
The radicalization of US politics actually began on the Left, not the Right. This came in the form of the “Great Awokening” and “Occupy Wall Street” (covered in “A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right Part 2”). While the Right might have been responsible for Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric in 2016 and the J6 Capitol riot in 2020, the Left was responsible for the Black Lives Matter protests/riots of 2020 and left wing violence via groups such as Antifa were a fixture of American politics throughout the Culture War Era.
The radical Left and radical Right both had their own set of grievances against the establishment, but they hated each other just as much. This created a tit-for-tat situation in which each side would further radicalize the other side in an endless feedback loop. In order for American politics to be de-radicalized, it was not enough to simply neuter Trump. The Left would have to be brought to heel as well.
After the 2020 election, the Democrats were in charge again, and Trump had hit a low point in his political career. He was out of office, being investigated for insurrection, and condemned by many in his own party for his actions on January 6. He was also banned from social media, thus limited in his ability to communicate with the public. For a moment, it seemed like the GOP might even move past Trump and choose another nominee, such as Ron DeSantis.
This removed the sense of urgency on the Left to “resist” Trump, which had been the main direction in which their radicalism had been oriented since 2016. The Covid pandemic also winded down during the end of the Biden administration, removing another source of tension between the Left and Right. As the pandemic slowly faded, Leftists slowly began to abandon masking and social distancing, as the propaganda surrounding the Covid regime—such as the lies about the efficacy of the vaccines and masking—was brought more and more into question, even on the Left. Disagreements over issues such as Palestine began to make the Left less united, and more critical of Biden. Runaway inflation, and a lowering of the quality of life made Biden less popular for all Americans and made culture war issues seem less important than economic ones. Thus, a general sentiment known as “The Great Vibe Shift” began to permeate Leftist strongholds, especially in New York City.
“The Great Vibe Shift” described a Leftist landscape that had burned itself out on “resisting Trump” and “cancel culture.” Joe Biden, who at one time had invited drag queens to go topless on the White House lawn, painted himself as a moderate. “We’re not as crazy as those far right extreme MAGA folks who want to ban abortion” was more or less the rallying cry. Leftist streamers such as Hasan Piker, or even normie libtard streamers such as Moist Critikal, cultivated a smug, “above it all” attitude, and applied social pressure to their fans to “just be normal”—a Left Wing version of “appeal to normie.”
During the 2024 election, the Left’s foremost attack against Republicans—especially Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance—was calling them “weird.” By the 2020s, the Left had already achieved cultural hegemony for some time. They had already redefined “normal” as abortion, OnlyFans, and puberty blockers. The demographic transformation of America was assured, in spite of Trump’s toothless and vague threats of “mass deportations” which would probably never occur. There were hardly any new leftist frontiers that could conceivably even be conquered that had not already been.
Thus, the Democrat establishment pivoted to a less aggressive version of the Left, apart from trying to regain some small victories that the Right had made on issues such as abortion. The Left shifted from progressive to liberal in its rhetoric—rhetoric similar to that of the 2000s Left before “The Great Awokening” of the early 2010s. Leftism reverted back to an earlier, more effective strategy of “boiling the frog”—presenting themselves as reasonable and liberal moderates, even while Biden mostly continued to govern like a progressive on social issues.
That is not to say that the Left intended to abandon any ground to the Right. The seeds of progressivism, such as transgenderism, that had already been planted continued to grow. Leftists would allow for a certain amount of pruning from time to time by the GOP, in order for their ideas to be more seamlessly embedded in normie culture. For example, the GOP complained about issues such as “biological men in women’s sports,” which highlighted problems in terms of the practical implementation of Leftist ideology, but by now the GOP establishment had abandoned resisting the ideology of transgenderism as a whole. In fact, they offered up their own cadre of “anti-woke” Republican transgenders such as Caitlyn Jenner. Thus, the establishment Right posed no existential threat to the Leftist. So long as the argument was over how best to implement their agenda, the discussion was framed in such a way as to make it impossible for their ideology to lose, and they could simply adopt a more passive approach and let these details be sorted out in the background.
Kamala, if she won, would have been the first black female president, and she was much more progressive than her old, white, male predecessor. But she did not campaign as a radical. The Democrats chose a normal looking midwestern white guy as her companion on the ticket—Tim Walz. Walz campaigned with camo-print campaign merch, and identified himself as a gun owner who loved to hunt. Far from shilling Robin DiAngelo books urging white people to feel guilty about their “whiteness”—as Leftists were wont to do during the Culture War Era—the Harris campaign reached out to white people with their “White Dudes for Harris” campaign, hoping to draw back in the white working class voters in the Rust Belt that had flipped from the Democrats to Trump. The DNC included patriotic country music, and even waving the American flag. And of course, like the RNC, it stressed “unity” and an end to “political polarization.”
Our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past. A chance to chart a new way forward—not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.
I know there are people of various political views watching tonight, and I want you to know: I promise to be a president for all Americans.
— Kamala Harris’s 2024 DNC speech (https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-08-23/5-takeaways-kamala-harris-closes-out-dnc-with-message-of-unity)
If one compares this speech to Trump’s 2024 RNC speech, the similarities between the two are glaring.
When Trump was elected in 2016, Antifa rioted. Thus began intermittent Leftist violence throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s, reaching a climax during the 2020 BLM riots, the most violent in US history (covered in “A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right Part 5”). In 2024, no such riots occurred. Some Leftists did complain about the results of course. Some, still activated against Trump, posted the now-familiar rhetoric about Trump and his “threat to democracy,” racism, and so forth. But violence seemed to have become a thing of the past.
The only political violence that occurred was against Nick Fuentes. After tweeting “Your body, my choice. Forever.” on election night, his address was doxxed on Twitter. Subsequently, Leftists began showing up to his address. This led to several incidents, the first in which Fuentes pepper sprayed a Leftist woman who knocked on his door, and another in which a man came to his door armed with a crossbow and pistol. This man, who had already murdered several others before arriving at Fuentes’s residence, was killed in a gunfight with the police.
Aside from this minor episode, election day was more peaceful and uneventful than it had been since 2012. Not only had the establishment Right flipped to Trump, but it appeared that many on the establishment Left had changed their minds about him. It was not that they necessarily began to endorse Trump, but they no longer resisted him as an urgent threat to democracy.
This was especially true of Big Tech, which had shifted significantly to Trump. Not only had centrist conservatives like Elon Musk become Trump supporters, but even Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2020 had actively helped the Democrats defeat Trump, made no attempt to help the Kamala campaign, and eventually would become a Trump donor (https://www.wsj.com/tech/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-donates-1-million-to-trumps-inaugural-fund-32a999c1).
Billionaires changing political allegiances is one thing. But to see that Trump’s biggest nemesis—the mainstream media—had changed their tune about Trump was far more unexpected and shocking. In 2016, The Washington Post had rebranded themselves as the paper of “resistance,” holding the would-be tyrant Trump accountable, complete with their tagline “democracy dies in darkness.” But in 2024, they completely capitulated. First, they chose to neither endorse Trump nor Harris. Then, Jeff Bezos, the publication’s owner, released an op-ed admitting that their politically biased reporting—not Trump’s supposed dictatorial ambitions—had contributed to American’s distrust of the mainsteam media.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, released an op-ed in that paper Monday announcing a change in the publication’s strategy. Bezos argued that the decline of public trust in journalism demonstrated that the current news model was fundamentally inadequate, saying,
“In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”
This failure, Bezos asserted, is a threat to the fabric of society.
…
These moves are all consistent with a desire to push the paper more towards a position in the political center and reduce perceptions of bias in the publication’s reporting.
— The American Conservative, Oct 29 2024, “ Bezos Declares New Era at Washington Post” (https://www.theamericanconservative.com/bezos-declares-new-era-at-washington-post/)
Bezos also promised to hire more conservatives.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has reportedly given the newspaper a mandate to add more conservative voices to its opinion section — even as he remains silent over the broadsheet’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
Bezos — the world’s second richest person with a fortune that Bloomberg Billionaires Index valued at $211 billion as of Monday — is keen on gaining a more ideologically diverse readership by expanding his newspaper’s reach among right-leaning audiences, according to a report in The New York Times.
—The New York Post, Oct 28 2024, “Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wants more conservative opinion writers at paper: report” (https://nypost.com/2024/10/28/media/washington-post-owner-jeff-bezos-wants-conservative-writers/)
All but the most leftist of media backed off of Trump considerably, instead attacking Project 2025 rather than the man himself.
Like the Democrat Party, the liberal media was also making a play for the center in order to protect “the fabric of society.” In other words, de-radicalization.
The New Normal
Another factor in the de-radicalization of American politics and the end of the Culture War Era was simply a lowering of American standards. For some time, Americans had grown increasingly pessimistic about the future. Almost every event after the 1990s—9/11 and the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crash, the 2016 election, the events of 2020, and the runaway inflation and worsening economy of the Biden years—had served to exacerbate this pessimism.
At first, as Americans felt that the country was going in the wrong direction, they were willing to take increasingly drastic measures to correct it. Somewhere in the back of their minds was the idea that this was just a temporary downturn, and that eventually America would be saved by some sort of spontaneous “waking up” of the population—either through Trump (on the Right) or some sort of socialist reform (on the Left)—and then things would return to the “normalcy” of the 1990s.
However, after three decades, this return to normalcy had failed to materialize. Instead there was a “new normal”—that of post-Covid America. An America that was dirtier, poorer for the average middle class person, less unified, less free, less safe, less socially mobile, less stable, more anti-social, and altogether more dreadful. It seemed that at this point, Americans had simply accepted defeat. The system simply would not change, and this could not be helped. There would simply always be an erosion of constitutional rights, forever wars abroad, a worsening quality of life, exploitation by globalist economic policies that favored the elites at the expense of the people, and so forth. Things that used to shock the American public were now simply accepted as part of this new normal.
Americans were concerned with simply making ends meet, and terrified of any threat to whatever small amount of hard-fought financial stability they may have managed to wrestle out of life. In short, they had become too desperate to care.
Disillusioned with the potential for political change, their focus turned to a desperate striving for material comfort. “Get rich quick schemes” such as crypto scams, “side hustles,” “redpill” dating advice in which young men were trained to compete in the “sexual marketplace,” and so forth enticed men by offering them an individualistic escape from the crumbling American social fabric. Maybe if they “hustled” hard enough, they could manage to eke out a family and some semblance of financial stability in spite of the ruthless American meatgrinder.
As America becomes more foreign-born, this attitude will only accelerate. Americans once believed in the “American Dream”—a dream in which a man could graduate from school, have a steady job, get and stay married, buy a house, and provide for his family on a single income. This was depicted in 90s sitcoms like “The Simpsons” and was what most Americans of the time considered normalcy.
The “Immigrant Dream” is far different. It is to work in America, and in doing so live in better conditions than you would have had in India, East Asia, Africa, or wherever you came from.
The American compares the status quo to the 1990s, when the American Dream was the norm, and feels that something is seriously wrong.
The immigrant has never known the American Dream of the 1990s and does not feel that they ever were a part of it. The Immigrant Dream is still possible. Compared to where they came from, America is doing just fine. Thus, they inherently support the status quo and resist any threats to it.
It is also possible to speculate that an element of the Immigrant Dream is the desire to become accepted by a historically white, Western state which may or may not have previously colonized their ancestors. This serves as further motivation to work hard, make lots of money, and procure a high social status for themselves and their family. If this requires working well over the 40 hour work week that Americans have become accustomed to, having both parents in the household work, accepting lower wages, and in general becoming a desperate, workaholic, social striver, then that may be an acceptable cost in order to procure this objective. If this is the case, it is not difficult to see how this plays right into the hand of the American employers who benefit from this immigrant labor.
As immigration increases and natural births decrease, immigration may soon account for most of the population growth in the United States.
Over the next decade, immigration accounts for about 70 percent of the overall increase in the size of the population, and the greater number of births than deaths accounts for the remaining 30 percent. After 2034, net immigration increasingly drives population growth, accounting for all population growth beginning in 2040.
— Congressional Budget Office, Jan 2024, “The Demographic Outlook: 2024 to 2054” (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899)
The inevitable result of this is a perpetual lowering of standards. As more and more time passes, the American Dream will become a distant memory, and the Immigrant Dream will become the new status quo.
It is a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition.
-- Aristotle
The “Most Important Election Ever”
By the 2024 election, I had basically grown disillusioned with politics. Trump was no longer a revolutionary figure hated by the establishment—or even all that funny for that matter. Instead, he was just another Republican. His fans were no longer Internet autists from 4chan with Pepe the Frog and anime profile pictures, instead they were Fox News Boomers ranting about “socialism” and Straussian bodybuilders promoted by Claremont posting lazer eye memes from 2012.
Politics was not particularly interesting to me anymore. Anything that I had to say about it I had said in my book which I had written the year before. If anyone was going to be making America great again, it was not going to be Trump and I would probably be too old to really benefit from it.
Going down the “right wing rabbit hole” had eventually led me to understanding the importance of tradition, especially traditional religion. If anything was going to solve our problems, it would be the Church, not the White House.
In 2016, I supported Trump but was skeptical about whether or not it was all rhetoric, so I did not vote. In 2020, I was an enthusiastic Trump supporter. In 2024, I once again was convinced that voting did not matter.
On Election Day, I decided I might as well go to the polls and vote for local positions. But when I got there, the line was out the door. I had never seen crowds this large in my life. One of the poll workers informed us that it was a 90 minute wait. No way was I waiting that long in the cold November air for Trump and Kamala. So I got back in the car and went to vespers instead.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t ignore the suspense that permeated the air. The polls were pretty much tied 50/50 and had been for the last few weeks. But beyond the simple question of who would win was the question of how the election would unfold. Would it take days to count the votes, as it had in 2020? Would there be another “red mirage”? What would happen if there was? Would it lead to another event like J6? What if Trump lost—would he end up in jail?
As the votes trickled in, it seemed like things were shaping up to be another Trump landslide. Then, just as in 2020, the election map froze as the key swing states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada—had yet to be counted. Would this be another repeat of 2020? Would the Democrats try to steal it again?
No. On the contrary, for the first time since 2012, there were no surprises. By the end of the night, the votes had been counted, Trump had declared victory, and Kamala had conceded. There was no backlash or violence from the Left, and neither side accused the other of cheating.
The only notable aspect of the election results was the decisiveness of Trump’s victory. He had won every single swing state. He had won the popular vote—the first time a Republican had done so since 2004. More than 89 percent of counties in the United States shifted in favor of Trump in the 2024 presidential election, according to the New York Times.
Another interesting aspect of the election was that it provided further evidence that (unlike the 2024 election) the 2020 election had been stolen. In 2020, prominent former senior government and campaign leaders, academics, journalists, and other members of the American Elite, such as Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, former Democratic National Committee Acting Chair Donna Brazile, neocon establishment heavyweight Bill Kristol, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager John Podesta, and Mark Zuckerberg created the “Transition Integrity Project,” a series of “political scenario exercises” meant to “fortify” the 2020 election (covered in “A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right Part 5”).
In 2024, no such “political scenario exercises” occurred. Many of the elites, especially those in the GOP establishment and Silicon Valley, had flipped to Trump. Coincidentally, the statistical anomalies from the 2020 election disappeared, and the 2024 election was once again decided on election night, just as it always had been prior to 2020.
From 2004 to 2016, the popular vote for the Democratic candidate was, on average, about 65 million voters. But in 2020, 81 million Democrats apparently voted. In 2024, 67 million voters voted, bringing it back in line with historical trends. What happened to the 20 million voters who voted for Biden four years ago, but apparently would not vote for his successor four years later?
Likewise, analysts have long used the “Bellwether Counties” to forecast election results. These are regions whose voting patterns have historically mirrored the national election outcomes, particularly in presidential races. Between 1984 and 2024, between 88-100% of these Bellwether Counties have voted in line with the winner of the presidential race—with one exception. This one exception was in 2020, when only 6% voted for Biden. In every year for the last 40 years, no less than 15 out of 17 of these counties have voted in line with the winner—except in 2020, when only one did. In 2024, the statistics of these Bellwether Counties inexplicably returned to normal, and 88% of the Bellwether Counties voted for Trump, in line with the pattern found in all other years.
In 2016, Trump ran on the system being “rigged” against the American people by special interests and lobbyists who funded both sides, and sowed distrust of the mainstream media. He managed to convince many conservatives that he was right. After the 2016 election, Democrats accused the election of being “rigged” by Vladimir Putin (covered in “A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right Part 3). Meanwhile, the “woke” Left saw the entire American project as essentially being illegitimate. After all, its constitution had been written by racist white slave owners who had colonized and genocided the native population. So, during the Culture War Era, essentially both sides felt that the American system was in some way illegitimate.
The legitimacy crisis of the Culture War Era peaked during the 2020 election. The censorship regime surrounding Covid—in which Americans were banned and silenced for questioning the efficacy of vaccines or whether Covid had leaked from a Wuhan lab—caused conservatives to distrust the mainstream media even more. Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter rioters justified their actions using the narrative that America’s institutions—such as the police—were inherently racist, so much so that violent action became an appropriate response. Finally, the 2020 election was contested by conservatives and seen as illegitimate (the second in a row to be considered as such) resulting in a riot in the capitol.
But after the 2024 election, this legitimacy crisis seemed to be put to bed. The election went smoothly and was accepted by both parties. The Left toned down their racial, anti-American rhetoric. Even The Washington Post claimed that it had been too politically biased in the past and promised to hire more conservative writers in the future. All was good again. The elections must be fair because Trump won, so the election could not have been rigged by the Democrats. Or, on the other side, the elections must be fair because Putin was unable to interfere this time, apparently. The Right could be reassured that their savior Trump would solve all of their problems and make America great again. And the Left could be reassured that Trump was no longer a threat to democracy.
Had things returned to normal? Had America finally escaped from Clown World?
2024 in Clown World
Imagine if the opposite outcome had occurred. Imagine if Kamala Harris had won instead of Trump. The results would have been far more destabilizing. Although I do not believe there is any evidence that the elites were planning on rigging the 2024 election against Trump, Boomer conspiracy theorists have started to accuse any election in which the Republicans do not win as having been “stolen.” It is safe to assume they would have done so this time if Kamala had won. The overwhelming enthusiasm for Trump’s victory would have instead been transformed into another four years of rage against the system.
This would have been the third election in a row in which the results of the election were not accepted by the other side, a contiguous 12 years of election skepticism. To add insult to injury, the winner of this supposedly “stolen” election would have been Kamala Harris—a candidate who had never won a primary and who had been switched out at the last minute by her party. It would have also occurred in the context of Trump being indicted in what conservatives considered politically-motivated prosecution, and then having almost been assassinated under mysterious circumstances. Thus, the election of Harris would have accelerated, rather than dampened, the last decade of increasing dissident energy in America. What would an escalation mean this time, when four years ago an angry mob had rioted at the capitol?
Looking beyond the immediate consequences of a Kamala victory on election night, things could have continued to escalate over the next four years. What would happen if Trump had to serve time due to one of these indictments—no longer able to pardon himself, and with Kamala now in the White House?
If the elites were seeking a return to normalcy and a de-radicalization of politics after the J6 riot, it seems likely that a neutered second term for Trump was far preferable to a Kamala victory.