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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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There is no actual population mass willing to engage in active actions that exists to delegitimize external authority beyond their local sphere. There are cheerleaders for violence like Black Lives Matter, pro-palestinians, Jan 6 (though the motive was seizing power rather than juvenile chaos) that will celebrate violence that reaches escape velocity but are largely unwilling to travel outside the start point of violence to continue it. There are local resistances like CHAZ, Black Hammer, Koresh, technically the various Mormons, that carve out a local territory for themselves and attempt resistance against state authority, but they seem content to self implode rather than actually wage violence against society. And of course you have all criminal gang wars that exist in the space between state capacity and extractable resources, where violence is waged against each other in lowsec but never attempting to attack the state.

In none of these circumstances do we see, at least in the USA, any appetite for mass movement of violence that would see either armed revolution or enforcer defections. The Days Of Rage of the SDS in the 70s was perhaps the last time the intelligensia thought they had the mass of society on their side that simply was waiting for the chosen ones to lead the way, and they got smacked down by reality when not a single normie joined their revolutionary uprising. Even the Black Panther Party failed to significantly mobilize the Black Middle Class who were still extant (this Black Middle Class now has turned into normie whites, living entirely seperately from their co-ethnics).

The above impression of equivalence between leftist and rightist violence is due to categorization of intent, not scale or capability. Should rightist violence truly emerge, it will utterly dominate and show the hollowness of leftist rhetoric. Leftist agitators are keyboard warriors happy to cheerlead the violence spilled against their enemies, taking credit for the violence being proof of their ideologies salience when convenient and staying silent when not. The vanguard of revolution is happy to proclaim their inevitability and act as such, despite their subreddit members not being able to leave the house to get a sandwich let alone lead a charge.

But at the same time, is it not true that the fighters of the Syrian Civil War were an utter minority compared to the total population of the country? And yet now the old government is gone and the country may well be in utter chaos that dwarfs the civil war.

What I'm saying is, don't discount the potential of the left in inciting a civil war, the critical mass needed for a social breakdown may be smaller than you assume.

Thats a really good point, but if anything the Syrian civil war shows how quickly realizing the fragility of the state is the observation that collapses the schroedingers unreality of state capacity. The SAA collapsed and retreated, and more importantly the citizens in the overtaken cities saw fit to allow, if not actively aid, the various advancing rebels. Counterexamples are how Russians reached the end of their logistical trains and could not advance further in Ukraine (or hell even Chechnya), the USA found willing collaborators in every town in Iraq, the Tigrayans go only as far as their kin exist etc etc etc.

Does the left want chaos? Their behavior is consistent with wanting to seize the levers of power for themselves so that they can create a better world in their preference, with their only active step being stepping out of their high towers to lead the huddled masses that will mill around aimlessly wondering what to do next after the hated patriarchy is cast down. Cheerleaders for violence are never on the field, and the rare times they're there its just to get gangbanged by whatever players still playing for keeps.

The difference is that, historically, left wing revolutions have tended to eat their suit wearing Allies while rightist movements often accepted obviously half-hearted conversions. The institutional left now knows this. They also know how a civil war would go.