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Notes -
There is a recent poll on DEI[1][2][3]. DEI seems to be viewed more favorably than not.
A majority reject the following:
They agree that:
There are a number of questions about whether people should receive DEI training; a majority is in favor of DEI training in all cases, most strongly in the case of police officers (69% - 31%) and least strongly for private sector employees (64% - 36%).
The document provides some comparable numbers which are claimed to come from October 2024, but that appears to be a mistake; the previous polling on DEI was done in January 2024[4].
A lot of the public doesn’t have strong views on DEI. 92% of respondents have heard the phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (up from 72% in January 2024), but when given the option “neither agree of disagree,” many respondents chose it. For the DEI training questions, “neither agree of disagree” was not an option.
When asked what the top three priorities of the Trump Administration should be, 2% selected ending DEI programs as the top priority, and 10% included it in one of the top three. 19% of Republicans, 6% of independents, and 2% of Democrats included ending DEI in their top three priorities.
The poll didn’t ask about people’s own experience with DEI, but I found a Feb. 2023 poll that did[5], which presumably gets a more knowledgeable pool of respondents. People who worked at a place that had a staff member whose primary job was to promote DEI said that having such a person was:
In the same poll, 56% of respondents said that “focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly a good thing,” 16% said it is mainly a bad thing, and 28% said it is neither good nor bad.
So DEI seems to popular but controversial, with one third of the country and 65% of Republicans saying that DEI discriminates against white people.
Links:
[1] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8
[2] Top line results: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FToplines%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025
[3] Crosstabs: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FCrosstabs%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025
[4] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/january-16-2024
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023/05/ST_2023.05.17_Culture-of-Work-DEI_Topline.pdf
> Be me
> Load entire thread into a text to speech app
> Surely no one would just dump incredibly long naked links into the motte dot org.
> go upstairs to fold laundry
> oh a naked link, that's fine, how long can it be
> literal minutes later go downstairs to make this comment.
By quoting the links in their entirety all you've done is ensure that when you get back to relistening to this thread now you'll be spending twice as long listening to garbage!
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My first impression of this is that the press release was written before the study, with some blanks filled in. And I noticed some of the odd results others noticed in the crosstabs. Hopefully the name of the author Tatishe Nteta isn't itself worthy of a ban. The linked page has his capsule bio as
The word "intersection" seems a bit forced there, honestly; it's like he's trying to write a bio that doesn't actually show his biases while dog-whistling them loud and clear, but dog-whistling doesn't work -- that's a train whistle.
His undergraduate was in African American Studies. His name, though, he comes by non-politically; his father was lefty activist Christopher Nteta a black South African immigrant to the US.
His past work includes papers claiming to demonstrate that "racial resentment" really does measure anti-black prejudice and not just conservative belief, and that Nikki Haley lost because Republicans are sexist.
I would not consider a study authored by him to be reliable. In theory, scientific methods work regardless of who uses them. In practice, there's a lot of ways to put one's thumb on the scale.
My post was about the poll, which was conducted by YouGov. YouGov is a legitimate polling organization; FiveThirtyEigth gave them a B+ rating. It’s unclear who wrote the press release, which quotes Tatishe Nteta and three other professors.
YouGov ran the poll under Nteta's direction:
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hmmm those are pretty surprising results; let’s look at the poll study author
Oh
This is so low effort it's barely even a critique. Normally I'd leave it at that, but you've now been told about eight times to stop the low effort sneer-posting and that you were heading for a permaban. I dislike permabanning someone for a post that would normally be just a warning, even if it is like strike nine, but I think it's appropriate at this point for you to go away for a while. Thirty days, and don't come back unless you're going to stop doing this.
30 days seems harsh considering they did bother to look at the poll closely enough to notice a relevant fact and then bring it to light for further discussion. I think it’s a valuable comment broadly and got the point across without padding the post with extraneous words. I understand you’d want to discourage low effort posting on average but 30 days for this specifically seems unwarranted in my opinion
Is Nteta widely known? I've never heard of them, so highlighting the study's author, alone, doesn't provide me any insight.
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What was the point, in your opinion?
I can't see anything other than bare-faced racism because the name doesn't mean anything to me.
Black people with moderate opinions on race, or even 'when we say "kill all white people" we don't really mean "kill all white people"' opinions on race, do not name their children 'Tatishe'. African immigrants use biblically inspired names, Caribbeans use normal Anglo or Hispanic names, and AADOS use distinctive AADOS names which might be weird but which are recognizably not deriving from the Niger-Congo languages.
I tried finding that name, and it had two hits worldwide (0.001% of "Steven", for reference). The second result in my search was the study author, and the third was a Spanish (or at least Spanish-language) musician. Maybe I have to brush up on my linguistics, but I still don't see any notable connection between that name and any region, let alone any political stance.
Your multi-sentence specific explanation wasn't enough to convince me, so I stand behind my criticism of their brief dismissal.
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It flags a very obvious conflict of interest.
"Discriminating in favor of black people is good and popular, says study by black man" naturally invokes suspicion.
Yes, it's an ad-hominem argument and not a replacement for drilling carefully down into the details of the study (assuming it's not one of those surveys where they just make up the results, which are rare but do exist). But the prior for this study's rigor and truthfulness should be set lower than would otherwise be the case.
When it comes to categories like race/sex/age/nationality, some level of presumptive conflict of interest is inevitable. Would a White researcher come off as unbiased in race research in your opinion?
In the social climate of the past 30 or so years? Quite possibly, though if the researcher themselves capitalized white that would be a signal that increases the prediction of bias. That's part of how we ended up with Biden.
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No, of course not. That’s why everyone likes a convert - somebody who benefits from or was attached to position A telling you that B is true instead.
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It’s not concise, it’s not valuable. Is everyone supposed to know who this is? If so, the comment is straightforwardly disallowed; if not, I think as part of the compact of making non-sneering comments you are obligated to at least gesture at saying something informative and you know, make an actual point.
I agree that the commenter should not have darkly hinted, but I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse here...
To make the point explicit - the name "Tatishe Nteta" strongly suggests that the author's race is sub-Saharan African (and we can look at his faculty page to clear up any doubt), so the fact that he carried out a poll that supposedly shows public support for DEI (i.e. state-backed anti-White discrimination) gives another example on a long list of non-White (but especially Black) intellectuals for whom almost all of their published works are attempts to critique and undermine White people/identity.
I'm guessing, beyond the poor forum ettiquette, you also take issue with what is actually being darkly hinted at here. Perhaps you just don't believe in HBD (in which case there isn't much to say, since I would agree with academics like Ntete under ~HBD) - but if you do believe in HBD, then what do you think is wrong with what Magus implied?
My honest first reaction was simply what I said: “is this guy supposed to be famous or is there some in-group reference I’m missing?” Even linking his faculty page like you did would have been a more effective point and IMO a valid comment. In fact, pointing him out as someone with an obvious career stake and bias towards finding bias IS a good point. I just strongly believe (and the rules are aimed at) putting a little extra effort into being explicit about things is healthier for discussion. It’s not good to habitually rely on people guessing at meaning, and deliberately underbaked comments allow the worst kind of motte and bailey because it necessarily involves some degree of projection.
You're saying that you didn't think to yourself - "that sounds like a Black man" (even given that the topic of the OP was DEI in the US, a practice that heavily rewards Black people)?
Sure, but that is an additional point, going beyond the original comment. The point of the original comment is just to point out that the author is Black - we can infer he has a particular bias towards finding bias because he is a Black intellectual (so the alternatives to systemic racism would be especially unflattering to him) - Magus' point still makes sense even if we couldn't see any of his works/publications.
You might believe that judging him on his race is morally or factually wrong. But I don't think that expressing such beliefs should count as a rules violation if done plainly and in a calm tone, so while this comment is rule-breaking, the implied point should still be expressible on the forum (e.g. if Magus had explicitly said "the author is Black"), without having to add further justifications and context about his career choices, publications, etc
I had the same reaction as @EverythingIsFine - the name, alone, isn't clearly indicative of anything (unless you're attuned to what seems to be tacitly acknowledged to be a genuine racial dog-whistle). See, also, the comment by @ulyssessword about the name:
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It also strongly suggests he was raised to be an activist. Normie Africans name their kids things like ‘John’ or ‘Mary’ and normie AADOS use names which are, yes, dumb, but recognizably Anglo.
Not uniformly. African-origin names are common in many Commonwealth Southern and West African nations.
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For reference, from the link, the questions were
Who are these 53% of people who think that their mandatory DEI trainings through their employer are helpful? That result makes me pretty doubtful of the results of this survey as a whole.
In case it isn’t clear to anyone following along, we are talking about the 2023 poll of workers. About 10% of the workers were self employed or owned their own business. Another 8% worked for organizations with fewer than ten employees. 52% of the remainder, or about 43% of the total sample, said their company or organization had DEI training or meetings.
My impression is that DEI training is very common in the corporate world and pretty close to universal in government, so the numbers don’t seem implausible to me.
Specifically, what I was referring to with "53%" was
15% + 38% is 53%, and this is the 53% I was referring to. I was not referring to what fraction of the sample of workers who worked for certain organizations had DEI training or meetings.
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Thanks for posting the questions. Note that 11 doesn't specify mandatory trainings or training content, beyond the DEI buzzwords, so 12 may be influenced by self-selection or normal "workplace orientation" having been given DEI window-dressing.
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5 and 7 are about building accessibility. If they conflate 'wanting your building to have wheelchair access' with 'I support DEI', they are being willfully dishonest.
I have come across some interesting "The ADA is one (of several) well-meaning laws that keep us from building cool stuff" takes that, while I still endorse the broad principle, have made me question some of its aspects.
Can you give some examples?
Sure! The universal requirement for ramp and elevator accessibility in most places is probably the biggest culprit. It sounds great on paper, but in practice makes it really hard build new things outside of greenfield construction.
That's what I was looking for - challenges of updating pre-ADA designs are one thing, but "keep us from building cool stuff" is another.
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The interaction between historical preservation and disabled accessibility is particularly problematic. There are a lot of buildings where the options boil down to "stay in the lane that allows you to be grandfathered out of disabled accessibility" and "abandon the building and the lot it stands on because it is too historical to refit or demolish".
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ADA is pretty closely aligned with the literal meaning of the words "equity" and "inclusion".
Right. That makes it completely different from DEI.
This is funny to me.
I mean, my interpretation of your comment is that DEI is everything indefensible (from your perspective), and everything that's defensible is not DEI.
I mean ADA can't be DEI, it's one of the most successful programs in the history of the world in terms of creating real outcomes for people who do not have the same abilities that the median individual has.
So I guess we just have to wait for that gentle slide of the Overton window for it to turn into DEI?
Wouldn't it make more sense and be more charitable to distinguish that the ADA predates DEI as an acronym by 20 years?
I see. So any policy that predates "DEI" as a boogeyman is safe from being labeled DEI? Bummer that affirmative action was collateral damage.
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Its more the 'You aren't against wheelchair access are you? Then approve our racial quotas!' that gets me riled up.
They bundle these things together to get 'inclusion' to do the heavy lifting for 'diversity' and 'equity'.
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The literal meaning is kind of useless. Is a truck with duallies "four wheel drive" just because its drivetrain is connected to four wheels?
Yes. I will die on this hill.
Upvoted for boldness and your flair. Do you call also "all wheel drive" cars with four wheels "four wheel drive?"
Yes, and I call onewheels all wheel drive.
If a four wheel vehicle with all open differentials loses traction on one wheel and spins it, while the remaining three stop receiving torque, is it four wheel drive, one wheel drive, or zero wheel drive (or something else)?
How should the ability to link wheel speeds be denoted, in your opinion?
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I hope that hill isn't too poorly graded or sandy, then. :)
I'll be fine, my truck is 4 wheel drive.
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what kind of sample has a majority its participants go through a formal DEI training? That excludes almost the entirety of the blue-collar and tradesman, as well as a plurality of the service industry. I hate to go diving into crosstabs to discredit a survey, but this sounds very suspicious.
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It remains interesting that people are simply misinformed about the facts. DEI policies, factually, are discrimination against white people (and Asian people). They literally cannot accomplish their stated goals without doing so, they are definitionally policies that implement discrimination. That's not an ironclad argument for or against them from where I sit, it's just the starting point that we all need to be aware of in order to have these conversations.
I would guess that when a person says that DEI policies don't discriminate against White People (and others depending on context), what they understand the question to be is something like "Are white people, on net, discriminated against as a result of DEI policies?" Which is a tougher question, and one that one can interpret in a lot of different ways once one starts slicing and dicing what counts as White and what counts as Discriminated Against.
This was the form of cope I most frequently ran into at selective law schools regarding DEI policies of the time: that they didn't really matter. Sure, as a result of diversity initiatives black kids might get a +1 while white kids get a -1, but for a whole host of other reasons black kids were already functioning with a -5 and white kids were carrying a +3, so on net it doesn't matter, there's no real discrimination against white people.
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The point of the linguistic judo has always precisely been not to have the discussion and indeed to make the discussion impossible to have or think about. And specifically stated as such by the people who coined all these terms.
Even the terms that make the acronym themselves are subversive language tricks to an Orwellian degree.
Have you ever heard people call initiatives or departments "100% diverse"? And what to say of "Equity", a term so transparently designed in a lab to supplant "Equality" because it sounds too absurd to normal people when you're justifying discrimination in the name of equality.
DEI is just Applied Cultural Marxism. And I'm allowed to say this because I learned about it in university in those terms before its activists started to pretend that correctly identifying their ideology is a conspiracy theory.
Can we have a survey on how that is perceived by the public mayhaps?
I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it. Can you explain what on earth it means?
Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:
Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.
So I’m left not understanding what people mean by it precisely. It seems to me at this point the phrase is meant to just tar by association, but I’d really like to hear if there’s something more meaningful to it.
This was my resource on Critical Race Theory, and seems relatively even-handed. It covers some of the inspiration from Marx and Critical Theory.
Link
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Because people were using it back in the 80's and maybe late 70's, and when the term started attracting too much negative attention, they promptly started pretending it's a conspiracy theory.
Also, "never met someone who uses the term directly" is an argument that's applied extremely selectively.
Critical Theory proudly takes inspiration from both Marx and postmodernism.
Those are fairly decent nutshell descriptions, and there's no reason to reject them.
Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s? That is the most compelling argument I think—that they described themselves this way until it became a liability.
I didn’t mean it as an argument, my point was I haven’t had to chance to ask someone what they mean so I’m eager to seize the opportunity.
If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically? Is the claim that he invented or pioneered it in the form of his class war analysis? It just seems incredibly vague making the tie to Marx specifically tenuous to me.
Emily Hicks, Richard R. Weiner, Douglas Kellner.
That Cultural Marxists themselves thought that they are taking inspiration from Marx:
This is extremely helpful and exactly what I’ve been looking for—thanks!
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Mind if I ask your source? I'm certainly well aware of SJ's extraordinary capacity for deliberate meme warfare; I would just appreciate receipts on this particular one.
The best way to convince yourself of this is to read Herbert Marcuse and see how his ideas inspired the scholarship around what is now called DEI.
I think much of One Dimensional Man is applicable, but a seminal work that is now of obvious significance is Repressive Tolerance which I encourage you to read in its entirety as well as his Essay on Liberation. You'll come back with I think the same conviction I do that SJ ideas and tactics have this New Left lineage and that they are indeed deliberate tactics rather than any emergent production.
I could go into more detail but I think it's a bit pointless to do it in extenso when the one thing that James Lindsay can be commended for is that he fairly accurately mapped out all the philosophical underpinning of this political movement. His video on Marcuse's influence I find to be broadly accurate to what I've been taught and seen for myself.
Now of course Marcuse isn't the whole of the school of Critical Theory and kritik isn't the sole influence on this movement, but it is the main source of their political tactics, hence their focus on language and control of the frame rather than more traditional Marxist struggles.
If you want to trace this influence closer to DEI itself, you can look for yourself throughout the scholarship of the 80s and 90s. For Equity's origin as a linguistic weapon, you'll be able to find its genesis in all the papers that discuss the "dilemma of difference".
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It's hard to interpret survey answers like this, presumably the 41% are expressing support by picking the more positive-sounding answer but how durable is that support? How they would respond to additional information or a different context? How much of this is pure partisan affiliation that doesn't translate into supporting specific policies at all?
Lets say they were working as recruiters and their managers said "The DEI report indicates our numbers aren't good enough, please trash all applications in the hiring pipeline from candidates that aren't female, black or Hispanic." What percent would respond with "Sure! Some bigots would call it discrimination to throw out the white/asian male candidates, but DEI isn't discrimination against white people."? What percentage would say "I thought DEI didn't entail discrimination! This is wrong and I won't do it."? What percentage would be somewhere in between? And of course most aren't going to be personally involved in implementing DEI policies, so how would they respond to more distant narratives, like a political debate about a discriminatory policy that has more specifics than just the DEI label?
53% of the people in this survey said that their employer-mandated DEI trainings were "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful". That's the baseline against which all numbers in this survey should be judged.
I talked about two different surveys. The “DEI discriminated against white people” question was from a poll of the general public. The one on about whether workplace DEI trainings and/or meeting were helpful comes from a survey of workers. If you didn’t find DEI training/meetings helpful, that would place you in a minority. That could be a reflection of the DEI training you received; perhaps most people would rate that particular training as unhelpful.
If you wouldn’t have guessed that large numbers of people find DEI training/meetings helpful, that’s the point of conducting surveys: to learn what people are actually thinking, rather than generalizing from you own experience or the experience of a few people who happen to be in the same bubble as you.
The report that a majority of people report that they find DEI training helpful is surprising to me, yes.
Everywhere that I have worked, from retail to food service to white-collar knowledge work, such "training" is "watch this endless slideshow of videos in which corporate HR types give banal examples, and then take a trivially easy quiz at the end (which you could have passed using common sense immediately without watching the videos, except that the course is mandated by law to be at least 2 hours, and then print out a certificate for HR to file away in a drawer forever".
Given that, some hypotheses that would explain the 53% number:
I personally expect it's mostly (5), with maybe some (3) thrown in there.
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I mean, yes? Duh?
DEI is racial spoils politics for non-whites. And, to some degree, depending on context, spoils for white women as well. People like it when you give them free stuff. The majority of people alive are not white men. So, most people by default will be predisposed to viewing DEI pretty favorably. And a lot of white men have been convinced that it’s a good thing too, even though it actively and explicitly harms them. So that tilts the scales even more.
It takes a rather strong principled ideological commitment to arrive at the position that DEI is a bad thing, so it’s unsurprising that it’s a minority view.
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Thanks. I'll keep these in mind for the next time I post.
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