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Must everything be so over-dramatic? Berlin is not burning. Hirohoto has not announced surrender. Trump is not the last hurrah of the right. Trump is one of the least popular presidents in history, but the Democrats are even less popular. Gen Z is shifting right. The pendulum swung too far, and is now swinging back. It will swing again and again, as it has the entirety of history.
Mass culture is 90% left? Sure, agreed. Right-coded entertainment causes controversy? Eh. Your usual leftists on Reddit and some websites, mostly many small ones, complain about it, but does that really amount to anything?
I work for a woke company you've heard of. What's it like day-to-day? The once a year HR training has some eye-rolling sections. I get some emails about whatever group's day or month it is that I delete. I don't talk politics at work, which is good advice always. That's about it. Completely anecdotal, but I've heard one guy say he reviews applications at a university, and the only attention he pays to the mandatory "what have you done to promote diversity?" question is judging their writing ability. Whether he was lying or all professors do, I can't tell you. I'm making the argument that life is often pretty banal. Supposedly the students are more woke than many of the professors.
With regards to big business, to some degree yes. A decent number of them are scaling it back. Disney is realizing that young men have stopped watching and that's a massive amount of money being left on the table. Billionaires tend towards the woke when it doesn't notably affect their bottom line. They aren't rushing to implement socialism or raise the minimum wage.
I'm not asking the right to lose, or to stop fighting. I'm saying the left lost themselves to BLM and became a parody of themselves because everything was so awful they had to do this and that. I think the right is becoming the party of nothing but political grievances and emotional overreactions in much the same way. Political parties always fight. The fight over slavery would probably make today's fight over "wokeness" a joke even aside from the literal civil war era.
What I am saying is maybe get off the internet and step back a bit. Things aren't great but America isn't collapsing either. "Burn the institutions and salt the Earth!" is cringe and could possibly cost you the normie vote in future elections. A lot of wokeness is nothing more than people being sanctimonious on the internet and then individual actors being blown up on the national stage. In a country of 350 million, you can find no shortage of idiots even if they don't matter at the end of the day. You should fight it, but that doesn't mean you need to shape your personality to "REACT" to it.
Not everything is national. "Fire in a crowded theater" was a government decision and we're mostly talking about private organizations. As for private organizations, welcome to At-Will hiring. It's always been the case that you have no real job safety in America. You can be fired or refused a job because your boss woke up one morning and decided he didn't like you. And there are plenty of times this happens to left leaning people and you don't hear about it. Lots of America is red-coded rural areas.
Free Speech can mean both the willingness to tolerate opposing ideas and the freedom to choose not to deal with other people. The left was cheering for banks cutting off the right from oil pipeline funding, now they're complaining about Valve removing LGBT games because Visa went on a porn crusade. It's the same power in both cases, both sides just cheer when it gets the outcome they want and jeer when it cuts them. But unless you want government czars deciding how individuals relate to each other, what are you going to do about it?
If by Berlin you mean the culture and the fabric of the society ("first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"!), then it's definitely burning at the full blaze. At least for me - a regular middle class guy who wants nothing more than being left alone to grill on my backyard - it certainly feels that way. And I am not alone in this.
No, but Trump is there because of that feeling. He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers. Just watch what people like Biden, Obama, Clinton (either of them), etc. said before the Great Awokening. The difference between them and Trump, if you filter out all the bombastic rhetoric, is minimal. But the right had no choice. It was either Trump, or total destruction.
Nope, nope. Remember the case of Gina Carano? She was booted from highly acclaimed role in a successful franchise because she said something right-coded. Reddit didn't cancel her. Reddit wanted to, but Reddit wants to cancel everybody to the right of AOC. No, people with much more power - people who contol billions of dollars - decided that. And now they are settling with her and talking about "looking forward to future cooperation". Did I vote for that? Hell yeah! One small example, of course, but it's everywhere.
I work for "maybe a tiny bit woke" company you probably never heard of (unless you're kind of professional that has to, then you did) but probably indirectly using something it did, maybe every day. It has DEI department, and some of the HR training had a little cringey tones but overall is pretty bog standard "these are ways in which you're not allowed to be an asshole" which didn't change much since The Great Awokening. No mandatory diversity kowtowing or pressure. Some people are explicitly woke but most keep it in their pants and don't bring it to the workplace. I am happy to be at this level because it's probably the best one possible in the US outside of tiny startup where everybody are buddies and HR does not exist. But I know that's not the situation in all companies.
I've lived in Soviet Union (a long time ago). I know how people in evil empires work, and that not all of the storm troopers even want to shoot the rebels. Most of them don't care, they just want to get the salary and the pension. Some of them would purposedly miss or forget to lock the prison cells if they can get away with it. But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.
88% of students lie about their politics to get better grades: https://x.com/bumbadum14/status/1957743796357329334 Take one guess to which side the lying goes. I clandestinely suspect that non-zero number of the professors aren't even woke, but they are so terrified to be cancelled they are pretending to, and thus their studends have to pretend in turn. A nice academic freedom the left built for itself, eh?
Are you sure? New York's Mamdani is financed by a billionaire heiress. Maybe she doesn't expect him to take all of her billions (and he, alone, now, probably can't) but she certainly contributes to the cause. And it's not unique - for example, a lot of rich Russian magnates supported Russian revolutionaires. We all know what happened next.
That's not true. The right has a lot of the positive agenda. Just to advance this agenda, the right needs the ability to rule, and that requires taking control back from the left. If the right wins an election, but the Left continues to control everything in the country - as it happened in the first Trump term - nothing is getting done. Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition. Note I am not saying destroying the left - the left wants 0% right-wing people in every space. I am fine with certain percent - maybe even 50%, though I personally would prefer less, but I do not prescribe any specific number - of the left in any space they want to be, provided the right is also allowed the same. And yes, for this certain amount of power that the left has now must be destroyed, but while to them it may look as "revenge" and "overreaction", it's just returning to normal.
The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies. I remember the time where politics were about shoudl taxes be 25% or 28% and should minimum wage be $7 or $10. Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce port to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi. Yes, we need some pushback to get back from this to what used to be normal, and if Trump can do at least part of it, then I am happy to let Trump do it. So far I haven't seen any better option, and I don't see how not doing it is an option anymore.
This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them. For the left, at least institutional left, it means destroying them, grinding them into the fine dust and throwing it to the winds. The left has this power - at least had it before 2025 - and they weren't shy to use it. It didn't always work, but they always wanted to. Yes, the right has its history too, with porn in particular, a battle that they lost and will keep losing, and probably in other aspects too. But the left has been much more efficient in this game. Compare what happens if somebody in academia dares to say one of the words proscribed by the left and what happens if they say America must be destroyed and white people must be put in camps.
The problem is those are not some lone idiots bloviating on a sopabox. There people are Congressmen, Senators, mayors, governors, prominent politicians, famous actors, academia managers, they control trillions of dollars and command vast power. And they are not shy to use their powers to achieve their goals. Which are diametrically opposed to mine. So I, as a voter, have no choice but to give my vote to somebody who can push back on them and at least slow down the descent to madness. Maybe, if we are extremely lucky, even reverse some of it. What other choice do I have?
I disagree with your assessment, much as I disagree with your assessment about Fox News. Democrats certainly wouldn't work to get Roe v. Wade overturned. Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good. I don't think working with another government to imprison them without trial is a Democratic position. I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position. I don't think "piss away our international relations to strongarm trade deficits" is a Democratic position, even if Democrats are sometimes protectionist.
Yes, I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available and not as uncommonly used historically as you might think.
In the Soviet Union, the terror originates from the government. They effectively set the background level of terror and the punishment for not complying. Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire. There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough. The dynamics are very different. One is a group with a goal. The other is a culture of social media frying everyone's brains. And how they must be cured is very different. The latter I think can be accomplished by getting everyone to chill the fuck out, which I think will happen when the left cries wolf too many times and people stop caring, and I think the Democrat's unpopularity and Gen Z shifting right is a sign that it may be happening.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government, and in order to fulfill that goal it requires giving the government power it does not and should not have.
Multiple people in this thread are saying almost verbatim what I just said.
There's a mix of things I agree with and things I think are mischaracterizations.
I think the left is going too far with this, but I don't think all sex ed is porn.
Agree with you on this, even though you did frame it in a way to sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
"That alleging someone is a violent gang member and knowingly sending them somewhere they will be imprisoned without trial is bad"
Missing context on this one.
"cities burned down" is more like "some property destroyed during a mass protest." Which is bad but it's like calling the death of 5 people a genocide.
This is the classic "I sanewash my allies and nutpick my enemies" framing. Yes, there are absolutely people for whom this is true. There are people for whom this is not. For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed? I browse /r/legaladvice and you do get threads like "my landlord is trying to make me take down my pride flag" or a woman at a Christian school fired for being pregnant out of wedlock (with a man who works there and is not being punished).
Dems have always (well, if we talk about recent times, not ancient) made the difference between legal, limited and controlled immigration and no holds barred open borders. This was a long time union position too (no need to expand on where the unions political affiliations go). It has all changed recently - now Democrats basically reject any need for immigration law or citizenship pathway. In fact, illegal migrants seem like their preferred category, getting policy preferences not available to regular citizens.
Colleges are, as we already discussed, fully captured by the Left. Places like Harvard or Columbia are the major engines in propagating and supporting leftist causes. So, obviously, they would come under attack from Trump. My point is not that everything Trump is doing now is part of Democratic agenda - of course not, he's on the opposite side of the war so he'd do stuff to wrestle control from them. My point is that Trump's political positions before he became the leader of the MAGA had been very close to Democrats' positions before the Great Awokening. Including, btw, abortions - Trump never cared too much about it and had been vaccilating here and there for years on the question, he had not been a passionate pro-lifer. Of course, when he became the head of MAGA movement, that came with some necessary policy adjustments, but RvW had always been a major target for the Right - especially due to the Left's complete unwillingness to reach any European-style compromise and the insistance that only full unrestricted abortion until - or even after - the birth is going to work. That question has been way beyond Trump and for it Trump was the one who had to fall in line, not drive it. In general, if you look at Trump's historical positions, there are preciously little of them that could not come from a pre-Awokening Dem politician. Again, I am not talking about Trump's actions now, when he's the head of MAGA and second-term Republican president, but his positions when he was starting up with his journey.
It wasn't "any reason", it was very specifically and clearly a particular reason - the reason of doing right-coded things. It's not impossible to survive in Hollywood while being right-coded, but it is very, very, very, very hard. There's no problem being a Communist in Hollywood though. That's the point - there's a huge difference in risk profile of being open leftie and open rightie in a huge number of institutional settings, and the former's life is overwhelmingly much easier than the latter's. I already quoted the numbers how massive the difference is in places like academia - it's nowhere near neurtal or symmetrical.
True, there's no single hierarchical structure - at least, not yet. Instead, there is a distributed network of semi-independent agents, which semi-autonomously work towards the common goal. Some of the nodes of this network - like teachers unions and academia - ensure there's always new people coming into the network, some - like journalists and entertainment - ensure ideological synchronization and agenda pushing, some - like judicial and politicians - ensure the agenda is enforced on the groud. Etc. etc. One could probably write a lot of books and make a dozen of sociology PhDs just studying these networks. I hope one day somebody will.
Those mobs are surprisingly well financed, supplied and coordinated. Often, if you bother to dig, with taxpayer money. And covered for and protected by government officials. It's not random, it's a system which is distributed enough that people fail to make connection between different aspects of it, but there's one. Woke professors, woke AGs, woke NGOs, woke antifa soldiers, woke CEOs, woke actors, woke judges, woke journalists, woke bureaucrats - they all part of the network. It's not as comprehensive as the totalitarian state, but it's powerful enough now to exercise a lot of control over the society. It's not social media's fault. The social media just makes it easier to coordinate and to find foot soldiers, but it's a tool, not the reason.
That's not correct, the right has the ground game too, and finally is pushing back on the culture war. But given the amount of capture of the governmental and government adjacent institutions, some governmental action is required. If the left's NGO network is financed by taxpayer's money, cutting of or reducing this stream requires government action. If DEI has been pushed for years by government action, undoing this would require government action too. Some things could probably return to its natural state without any intervention, just by removal of external coercion, but that would take a lot of time. And a lot of time is not something the right really has - if the left wins the next election and continues with its strategy of eliminating the right from every institutional space, flooding the country with infinite amount of migrants, setting up leftist NGO networks to feed from the budgets forever and making the elections unverifiable - the right does not have much chance for survival without pushing back fast. Which, unfortunately, means also using governmental action where it may not strictly be necessary.
The problem is not what you think. The problem is the left thinks what the parents think does not matter, and they - the left - own the kids and are free to feed them porn whether you like it or not, and if you disagree, you are a domestic terrorist. If the question was "I don't think book X is porn so I would like to show it to my kid" and the other person would say "no, I think this is porn so I won't show it to my kid" then this would be a normal difference of opinion. But that's not where we are. Where we are is "we will show your kids what we want - and make no mistake, what we want is porn, gay porn, trans porn, whatever we can think of porn, and we are not ashamed of it! - and if you think it's porn then fuck you fascist, we'll take your kids away from you". This is not normal.
"Some people did something" makes a comeback! Some property is billions dollars of loss, multiple businesses and governmental buildings destroyed, full city blocks made unlivable, etc. The problem is not even that per se - though it is extremely bad - but the complete acceptance and normalization of it from the leftist elite. The worst problem is not even that a mob torched a disctrivt court - but that everybody on the left are taking it as a normal, and sometimes encourageable event, and working very hard to ensure nobody is going to be prosecuted for it. And it's continuing now - the left is consistently rejecting the obvious reality of crime and decay in Democrat megapolises (even though the normies, even the leftist ones, are well aware of it on their own day to day experience) and are consistently opposing any effort to make any improvement in it, declaring enforcement of the laws "racist" and "fascist". This is not normal.
Yes, of course, people are harassed on both sides sometimes. But there's a difference between getting a bunch of hateful tweets and being declared domestic terrorist by the FBI. Between having some online talking head talk shit about you and having US banking system refuse to do business with you. Between getting on some bloggers "bad people" list and getting on TSA's no fly list. Between somebody in your club shunning you and IRS stomping on your organization. Between being criticized on social media and having the government shut down any mention of you on social media. Between somebody not going to your talk and a violent mob setting a building on fire to not let you talk. Yes, people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok sometimes get harassed (even though they always had published the content they get harassed for on their own volition on social media) - but that harassment if very different from the harassment one who has crossed the institutional Left is subjected to. One is annoying, the other can seriously ruin your life.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Agree but with a quibble. Dems do very clearly favor a path to citizenship because, whether you believe anything else or not, it would be a much different story if Trump were kicking out people who had completed becoming American citizens. That said, I was contrasting with Trump who seems to be going after people on student visas, people with green cards, people who claimed asylum. They are people whom the government is essentially already tracking, and putting aside the current crazy progressive Dems, the 90's Dems probably aren't too concerned with them being here. I extrapolate from that that Trump is acting on vibes of "there are too many non-Americans staying in America, get them out."
My point is that I don't actually care about the distinction here. I know he does a lot of things for the votes, but the only thing that's relevant to me at the end of the day is "Did he do X? Yes or No." And a moderate Democrat from the 90's would not have done these things.
They are financed and supplied, but they are not that coordinated. The woke professor has no control over or in with the woke CEO or vice versa. All they do is see on the news that the other did something and approve (sometimes monetarily) or turn around and shame him. You mention the banks, but right now there's a protest over Visa/Mastercard cutting off porn video games. That notably includes LGBT games. Currently the leftist network is accomplishing jack shit. And I point out social media for a different reason. Social media thrives on forming echo chambers and showing you the opposing side's outrage. That helps form personalities that think the world is nothing but people who agree with them and crazy people/people who willingly align with the crazy.
Non-state colleges are not government-adjacent institutions. And even then, K-12 and state colleges are managed mostly at the state level. NGOs are also private organizations. I did not claim the right is not fighting back culturally. I am claiming that the federal government is what they expect the use to achieve their biggest aims. And I think they're taking a lot of creative liberties to get around the question of "Can the federal government even do this, particularly by Presidential fiat?" And Trump is treating every interaction point with the government as a stick (such as cutting off international students from a university), as if the government could one day decide that your tax return is based on your political beliefs and this would be totally acceptable if the correct side was behind it.
That's a more precise definition of the damage. I was objecting to "cities destroyed" which is quite obviously false. I did see that damage estimates from BLM are estimated at $1-2 billion. For some context, a quick search suggests somewhere between 15 and 26 million participated in BLM nationwide protests. Brave AI thinks that a basic grocery store would cost $1-2 million to build, stock, and staff. A relatively small number of idiots out of a huge pool can make numbers add up fast on that scale. If 15 million people really want to cause destruction, they can easily make $2 billion look like chump change. I'm not trying to excuse away $2 billion. I'm trying to show you the scale of fuckery that even a subset of 15 million people can get up to.
As for the minimizing it, nobody likes to admit the bad. I see the same thing when the right says Jan 6th was just some people walking around and Babbitt was a victim. Though yes I know you are going to claim the scale of these are way different and I agree. It's just an example.
Hold on, this is a different argument. The argument was not over which side is worse, the argument was over "wanting to be left alone." Harassment is definitionally not about wanting to be left alone. Here you are doing similar minimizing the bad.
Even getting to this new argument, it's a bit of a gish-gallop. I don't even remember most of the things you're referring to except the one where organizations were accused of engaging in political activities despite claiming to be a nonprofit that does not engage in politics.
A, the distinction still matters because the way you stop a tyrant and a zealot differs. B, what I am talking about is the tendency of the right to turn around and say they are righteous in whatever they do to oppose the left.
You seem to be doing this thing repeatedly, where you take a specific case, throw out what makes it specific and declare the hollow husk support for your argument. Trump is not just going after "people", Trump specifically is going after people who are involved in criminal mischief, and not just any mischief, but in violent support of foreign terrorist organizations and publicly calling for a violent uprising on US soil. Student visa is not a "get out of jail free" card, and revoking such visas for individuals that commit violence and call for insurrection in the US is a legitimate measure. If they hate US so much, they should be in some other place they'd hate less. Trump never made any move against people who are not involved in such criminal acts, and never objected to the concept of student visas in general.
That's a completely false and libelous statement, and you should be ashamed of proclaiming it, contrary to all known facts, but I don't expect you to be.
Congratulations, you found the coordinating node! What you generously called "the news" is the propaganda organization whose sole purpose is to instruct the woke CEO and the woke professor what they are supposed to be outraged about now. And those organizations have been witnessed many times to push literally identical message all over the networks.
That's really weak. Banks have been scared of porn for decades, and it's not some kind of political anti-gay move you are trying to present it. If that's all you got, you are really scrapping the bottom. The processors are scared of any kind of porn, gay, hetero, Christian, Muslim, whatever it be - they won't touch it. That has been like that since forever. On the contrary, there was recent push to debank any outlets to do with guns (I personally closed all my accounts with Citi because of it, something that is being rolled back now btw), which is clearly politically coded, even more precisely - woke coded. And even more recently they started to debank people personally, for political activities. I hope it will now stop, but it happened. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if Visa/MC stop being dumb prudes (and invest in some proper fraud prevention) and embrace the lucrative world of porn. But this example - and especially trying to link it with gay stuff - is super weak sauce.
Most of them are very dependant of govenrment funds and government loans, even those who are formally private. The amount of woke pushed by the governemnt through the colleges, either directly, or by just dangling money in front of their noses, is gigantic.
Formally, yes. Huge amount of leftist NGOs, however, are financed by taxpayer money and often created with that explicit purposes. A lot of local money allocated to various programs - homeless, drugs, migrants, poor, etc. - are allocated to NGOs. Have you ever heard of "GONGO"? That's what most of those leftist networks are, either officially or factually.
Universities that insist on violating the law and discriminate on race, for example, deserve a lot of stick. In fact, I am unhappy how little stick Trump is giving them for being such a bunch of unrepentant racists.
Are you new to this whole thing? We had whole huge scandal where IRS was doing this - it was deciding which organizations to allow tax-exempt status and which not, by political beliefs, and then somehow all the evidence for this turned out to be on some hard disk, that had misteriously failed... Your "can't even happen, it's ridiculous" scenarios are my "already happened and everybody on the left cheered it" scenarios.
I said "burned down", not "destroyed", but yes, it was somewhat exaggerated - never the whole city was burned, just parts of some. But for me, presonally, a lot of cities were effectively destroyed - there are a number of cities to which I previously gladly went - and even considered living there - and now have to avoid, because they turned into shitholes. San Francisco, Portland, parts of LA, etc. That's my problem, of course - and thousands of other people who feel the same.
When the whole movement endorses the outbreak of violence, and fuels it, and incites it, and says absolutely wild things like "in the middle of raging pandemic, we must lock people up in their homes and arrest people for surfing on the beach alone, but mass protests are completely fine because that's what the science says" - then it's way beyond just "nobody likes to admit mistakes". It's somebody likes to make the mistakes way, way worse abd double - no, throusand-fold - down on them. And keeps insisting those weren't mistakes but the righteous deeds.
You know, willful ignorance is not as strong argument as you may believe it to be. Maybe watching "the news" does not make you as informed as you may think? Maybe "the news" are not telling you something that they don't want you to know, and you should lookup up beyond them if you want to be informed? Provided that you indeed want to be informed, and not just reassured your side is good and all is good, of course.
Babbit was definitely a victim, especially if you apply the same criteria as the left had been applying to other cases. But even by any sane criteria, there was absolutely no need to kill her. As for other Jan 6 participants, there definitely were some violent ones - at the same level we see at any leftist protest where they regularly and routinely clash with the police. Since this was pretty much the only case where the right did what the left by then has been doing for several years (including occupying government buildings, and not for minutes, but for days, and sometimes burning them down) - they blew it up absolutely out of proportion - including falsely claiming the protestors killed policemen - in an explicit effort to diminish the mayhem their side has caused and deligitimize any claims from the right. They had a lot of success in that - the treatment that Jan 6 protestors got - even those who did not do anything violent - has been horrendous and ruined any semblance of respect that FBI by then had. That is one more illustration of how awfully skewed the political life in the US has become - the left does something hundreds of times, no consequences, the right does it once - it's an historical event and Congress enacts a live TV drama, orchestrated by Hollywood producers, to make sure nobody ever forgets that, and everybody who is even minimally connected gets the book thrown at them. There's a huge difference.
THe right never did even a tenth of what the left has been doing recently. However, when the right did have the power, when they did bad things - like censorship - they were wrong. They don't hold that power anymore, and haven't been holding it for a couple of generations at least. If they ever hold it again, and try to use it again for evil - like, I don't know, ban porn or something - then it would be righteous to oppose them. It's not the problem that is currently has any real importance.
The tiny, tiny flaw in this argument is that it's not true. Protesting is not criminal in and of itself no matter the reason they are protesting, and Trump has not signaled in any way that he's only going after those who commit crimes during the protest. "To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests," he said, "we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.". Even putting aside the "Is having sympathy for Palestinian citizens the same as supporting Hamas," I see two possibilities here: either they are being punished for a crime or they're being punished for their speech. And I don't see the bar being met for the first. There are legal definitions of what counts as "supporting" a terrorist organization to a criminal degree.
I didn't say Trump hates literally every immigrant. I think that Trump sees the number of people deported as a high score list, and doesn't actually give a shit what the details are. Stopped for marijuana in the 90's? Leave the country. DUI in 2009 that you already served? You guessed it, leave. I will be fair and say that events like these happen under other presidents and maybe the media is less apt to report them, but based on Garcia I don't think Trump is capable of much besides doubling down.
That's it? It's all controlled by big CNN? Most news outlets can barely make a fucking profit nowadays, and you're telling me they're the head of the Illuminati? Sure, the news can spin a story to some extent before being able to be sued, but reporting on things is not control, else I'd argue LibsOfTikTok is in fact organized harassment. Either you control how people react or you don't. Even if it's not editorialized, it's still selected to show only the arguments that invite ridicule.
I didn't claim they were doing it to target the left. My argument is you claim they are part of the leftist network, and the predominantly left media is criticizing them for it. They are obviously not in lockstep with the left on this and the left has absolutely no power to make Visa/Mastercard change course.
If you want another example, how many groups have actually divested from Israel? I decided to take a look. Many universities have refused, or given vague promises to consider. This link shows 56, most I haven't really heard of. Oh, and the city of Portland, of course.
Well yes, welcome to America where barely anyone can afford to go to college without going into debt. But now we get to the leftist argument that giving money to someone is endorsing their beliefs. To say that "I won't give you money if you espouse X beliefs" is to say that government can control speech if there's money changing hands, and I very much don't like that. Whatever happened to small government anyway?
You mean the one where they also doing it to progressive groups?
They don't endorse it, from what I've seen. They excuse it or deflect from it. That's where you get the "93% of BLM protests were peaceful" or "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" from. Which is still bad, but different from "Hell yeah we did it!" The part about scientists weighing in to excuse breaking covid was completely dumb, I agree.
Done with the little rant? I may or may not have even read some of these at some point, but I don't keep a folder on my computer labeled "Things that pissed off other people that happened 10+ years ago." You don't actually have a clue what I read and what I don't, thank you very much.
She was in the front of a mob of people trying to get past a barricade leading to multiple VIPs, and people with guns were telling everyone to stop. Sometimes it'd be nice to live in a world where teens do stupid things and live to realize how dumb they were too, but, well, oftentimes the predictable happens. And as for the rest of the group, well it turns out if your protest happens to involve going into a large restricted area and there are lots of cameras, it makes it easy to prosecute.
It's easy to say that when the right hasn't targeted you. The gay kid who grew up in a conservative town would say otherwise. I like how your example of them hypothetically abusing the left is porn. Porn is not the right's battlefield anymore. This is Trump's party now, and everything is about owning the libs.
Here we go again. Going to generalities and completely omitting the specifics. Yes, protesting in general is not criminal. "Protesting" like the Hamas mobs did definitely is - property destruction, attacking other students, shutting down campus, preventing other students from learning, etc. It should have been criminally prosecuted, if the campus management did their jobs - but they do not intend to, because of their ideology. That does not make criminal actions less criminal.
I want to notice here also how the left has suddenly rediscovered freedom of speech - in one single case. If you show on campus in KKK uniform or in blackface - you bet your sweet behind you're going to be kicked out. If you burn a rainbow flag or say something against Muslims or transgenders or immigrants - there would be grave consequences. Professors have been fired for much less than that. But if you call for murder of Jews and islamist insurrection in America - oh, here we must tread lightly! Here we must take all measures to not sudenly over-react and give any impression that this kind of speech is somehow unwelcome and that we may not want to see people who speak like that around! That treatment is reserved for somebody who says there are two genders or that maybe equal test scores should give people equal chances for admission, regardless of their genetics. That speech is horrible, but the one about the Jews - that's precious, we must keep that one. Fascinating, how it works. And that's another thing that is way out of normal with the modern Left. They don't believe in freedom of speech, but they select some of it to pretend they do. And the kinds they select is raising a lot of eyebrows for sure.
Seriously, you are choosing a MS-13 member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser and an illegal migrant who has an active removal order from a judge, to be your best example of how Trump is deporting people just because he's racist and no other reason but thinking there's too many foreign people in America. I guess that does close the case, just not the way you think it does.
Not controlled, but coordinated. And not by CNN alone, of course, as I explained numerous times, it's a network. Propagandist outlets like CNN serve the coordination function in it, disseminating the Currently Correct THinking, so that the faithful would know what they must think. I'm not sure what this has to do with "profit" - their point is not to make a profit, and they are doing piss-poor job as a business, but they are not traditional businesses anymore. They don't need to be, it's not their function.
It's practically impossible to win a case against a news outlet on bias. If they straight out lie - which they do often, because, see above, they are piss poor at their job - they can be successfully sued, but that rarely interferes with the primary function.
Again, they don't "control" how people react, they serve as a conduit to inform the faithful how they need to react. Nobody forces the wokes to be wokes - not by threats or anything like that. But once they become woke - they'd listen to CNN, or read the NYT, or whatever flavor they'd prefer, there are many - that's how they would get their marching orders.
So what? Stalin murdered Trotsky, and they both were Communists (and Stalin murdered many, many more communists too). Of course inside the left there would be some tensions and clashes. I am not saying the leftists always and in everything are in lockstep. I am saying in the question of suppressing the political opposition they are able to deploy vast number of resources, and the banking system is one of those resources that they were successfully able to use for that. Of course it doesn't mean some on the left never had any conflicts with any banks (ignoring now Visa/MC aren't even banks) for any reasons.
Why? Because if was set up this way. Why it was setup this way? Because this way it's much easier to control and manage. Who controls and manages all this system? Deep state bureaucracy. Which side of political spectrum the deep state bureacracy leans to? Bingo! The dependency on the government is a feature that was carefully implemented and entrenched. That's why the left is so infuriated that the right is trying to use it against them - how dare they to use the weapon that was designed and implemented by the Left to fight back against the Left?! It's not fair!
That's what the govenrment had been saying for many years, only the X beliefs were the correct beliefs, that the Left and the deep state condoned, so everything was well. Now that the right is trying to use same tools, the left is screaming "what happened to the small government?!" You killed it, you bastards, that's what happened to it.
Yes they did. BLM riots were widely endorsed and supported - including absolutely mind-blowing declaration in the middle of pandemic that mass gatherings against racism are exempt from any medical concerns - and the premise of US being deeply racist country, solely based on oppression of non-whites by whites, and various race hate hoaxes, from "hands up don't shoot" to finding various nooses in random places etc. has been very actively propagandized. If you haven't seen it, that means your information sources are lacking. That's just explicit endorsement, with second line had been by refusal to address and prosecute any lawbreaking that accompanied those events, and in rarest cases where somebody was arrested they usually were either let go immediately or given slaps on the wrists.
I do. Well, the label is different, but recording things that pissed me off about US politics had been a little hobby of mine for over a decade. Call me crazy but that helps me being less pissed off about them, kind of therapy if you will. I don't often re-read them but sometimes I do.
No I don't, but you do. And when you repeatedly say that you haven't seen or noticed things that I witnessed to happen - either in person or by reading contemporary reports about them as they were happening, and I know that they happened, then I know whatever you read it's not enough to keep you informed. That's how I know.
People with guns tell protestors to stop all the time, and protestors ignore them all the time. If that led to killings each time, all Portland antifa would be dead already, and most of other leftist militants were too. It's not how it works though - except in one single case. In the case where this person posed absolutely no immediate danger to the people with guns or anybody else - and was actually surrounded by people with guns, and people much stronger than her (5'2" woman) who were able to subdue her in seconds without any danger to themselves. Heck, there aren't many 5'2" women that even myself, who isn't a trained police officer at all, would have a problem to handle - unless she had, say, a gun, which Babbit didn't have. This was a clear case of "shoot first, ask questions later" - which poorly trained police, unfortunately, did many times before - but in this case, the victim was a deplorable, so it was deemed ok.
It was easy to prosecute, especially because all the FBI and all the surveillance network (including financial companies, cell companies, etc.) have been mobilized to hunt those horrible criminals - old women that walked in "restricted area". But it wasn't the right thing to prosecute, and it was absolutely horrible injustice in the way it was done. And it was done on purpose - they were prosecuted with maximal effort and maximal cruelty specifically because this was to send the message - the left can do such things any time they want, but the right is not allowed it. There is no symmetry, there is no equality, and the right must be put in their place.
You know btw who FBI didn't find easy to prosecute, despite lots of cameras? Somebody who placed the pipe bombs at DNC and RNC HQs. Somehow nobody cares about that, and the FBI is absolutely content to let it slide while zealously prosecuting every last grandma and grandpa who walked anywhere near the Capitol. Is this normal?
He would say the bank refused to open his account because he was gay? Or the college kicked him out? Or he was attacked by a mob in a restaurant? Or blacklisted by all employers? Which town is that?
It is Trump's party because of the abonrmalities that happened in the previous two decades. His sucess is the direct consequence of the woke abuses. There's a limit to what people could take, and when that limit is reached, you get Trump. Or somebody worse, if you're unlucky. If there was another way of somehow restoring at least some measure of normalcy, then Trump weren't necessary. But the Left is not going to correct itself and roll back the woke insanity. They are too invested in it to stop now. So, an equal and opposing force is needed if we don't want to go deeper and deeper into insanity. That's Trump.
You are the one omitting the specifics. If Trump wants to cancel the visa of John Smith, then the argument should be that "John Smith committed property destruction" and bring the evidence, not "the mob committed property destruction and John Smith shares ideological views with the mob." Sorry, when it comes to government, guilt is not communal.
No, I think the combination of Trump's views on travel bans from Muslim countries, birthright citizenship, asylum claims, ICE tactics, student visas, etc. and the way he goes about doing them almost exclusively through poorly thought out executive orders, combined with his belligerence to any pushback from the judicial branch on virtually every issue, represent an attitude of "I am going to take every nativist stance (I don't care whether this is genuine or political), and I don't give an actual fuck about the people this will affect or how this policy will actually work."
Big CNN was a joke by the way, not that I thought you meant CNN alone. If CNN is simply "disseminating" information, who is the shadowy figure giving CNN and MSNBC and so on their next propaganda to deliver? Because if it's just "people share information when they agree with it" that's just how society works. They need to make a profit because they can't disseminate propaganda if they close. More money means more propaganda.
I am saying that you act as if they are coordinated when it's convenient. I am asking you to elaborate on where the actual coercive power lies. What group fills the Stalin role of the current left, and can make everyone bend the knee? Sure, maybe the Visa example was too small potatoes. But progressives really want to put pressure on Israel right now. How much actual coercion are they deploying, and how much effect is it having? How much coercion power are they using on the left to coerce them to put more pressure on Israel?
In other words, did they put pressure on the banks to stop gun sales or did the bank do it themselves? If they put pressure, why are they not successfully doing it in other leftist causes?
LOL no. Business wants people who are already trained. You can learn programming on your own, but when it comes to job hunting that paper makes it so much easier. Government wants to be more prosperous, so funding college increases the net wealth of America. Colleges know their value and price accordingly. It's not "deep state," it's three portions of society interacting with other to fulfill their own goals.
The left was never really crying for small government, the right was. Now they are not, but what they stand for now I genuinely only have vague ideas. You want to say I wasn't paying attention to all the left's transgressions, you are probably to some degree right. And by the same token you aren't really paying attention to the right's transgressions. That's how information bubbles work, and the right is not immune to it either.
You are missing the nuance of what I am saying. I am not saying BLM wasn't supported. It absolutely was. I am saying that the elements of the left that specifically call for violence are not endorsed, they are denied. Denied in the sense that most of the left doesn't even want to think about the fact that some of their members commit violence. That's not a good thing, but it's a thing you wouldn't really do if you were on board with the violence.
But do you keep a record of everything that pissed off other people? And second of all, you're missing a big thing here. I did not say I had never read those stories. I said that I do not know which stories you are referencing, which can also mean that I have read those stories but I am not remembering or not making the connection of what you are referring to.
During your average protest, the police's goal is to prevent violence towards other people, and if they can arrest someone causing property damage without triggering the mob or leaving a formation that needs to hold, do so. During this particular protest, the goal was to protect a specific group of people that the mob was moving towards. The police had to back off before, and now the mob is getting close. They don't know what Babbitt will do, and they don't know what the group of people behind her will do. But if she goes through, more will follow.
Even if a prosecutor wanted to, it's very difficult to make a case out of someone being on the street in Kenosha when a protest happened. It's easy to prove that they didn't have the right to be in the Capitol building. It absolutely was the right thing to prosecute. First of all you argue that the left should be punished. Sorry, but the government does not operate on "you can't prosecute a murderer unless you prosecute all murderers equally." Either you did it or you didn't. Unsurprisingly the government looks down on actions taken directly aimed at the heads of government.
Don't know enough about that case, but a politically motivated prosecutor certainly would try to find someone who tried to bomb their own HQ, even if said person also attempted to bomb the opposition.
Debanked, no. Christian colleges absolutely have kicked out gay people. Attacked by a mob, no, but absolutely hazed at times, sometimes physically, and without facing any consequences. Blacklisted? Can't say but fired, absolutely.
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Yes, but your definition of 'right' is outdated compared to the actual definition of 'right'. I assert that, after 2016 and especially after 2020, the Blues repositioned themselves firmly on the Right and the Reds (the people who will be paying for that gross conservative decadence that was the uncommon cold for the rest of their lives) have inherited the Left.
This is why I believe that [by that definition] the Right's current strategy of "mimic Trump on Twitter" is going to fail. It isn't the left that can't meme: the left is where memes come from, 4chan was just confused as to who left and right actually were at that time, as were [and are] we all.
Well, that and the human trafficking (sorry, "illegal immigration"), and the "ban all business for 2 years" thing, and Burn Loot Murder, and encouraging your children to castrate themselves (and arresting those who voice opposition thereto), and...
I could go on. Those have real sociofinancial costs, and the Left would like the Right to pay for them.
We already have that: it's called the Civil Rights Act. It was a weapon used by one side for the last 60 years, and it's understandable that that faction using it in that way is apoplectic about it being used for its stated purpose (not the one they used it for).
Care to expand on this? I've read it multiple times and still can't follow it.
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