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That does not compute. Protesting is by definition controversial - if it weren't, it's not a protest, it's at most solidarity march. The whole point though is that the left has been actively in search of culture war since the civil rights movement largely achieved its initial goals (legal equality and high legal barriers to deter any attempt to discriminate). Gay rights, trans rights, BLM, immigrants, vaccines, abortions, whatever it takes. And to crown that, in modern US culture you don't call your opponent a Nazi if you want to hash out policy differences. Everybody knows what you do with the Nazis - you destroy them. So there's no doubt what this framing means.
Gee, maybe that's because the Left has been calling them Nazis and promising to crush them for a couple of decades now? May that be where they got the suspicion? I'm seeing the "Nazi bar" metaphor repeated daily on virtually every corner in the left discourse, and they never even explain it - everybody in their audience already knows what it means, they are just confirming, yes, we can't tolerate even the slightest sign of anybody on the right being allowed in the spaces we control. And we can't tolerate any spaces we don't control because all those are "Nazi bars". The right is in this mode because they are aiming to crush the right. Only now, finally, the right starts to wake up and wonder "oh, they are trying to crush us, maybe we should push back?" And then we hear the complaints "how undignified, you are fighting back, people would think you are the same! They will reject you for stooping so low as to fight back! You should just roll over and take it, then you'd have all our sympathies - everybody loves losers!"
Oh, I know. I was deliberately stating it in a way to show the absurdity. My impression of progressives is that if you asked them what the median person believes on X, Y, and Z issues, they would describe a progressive. They think their belief system is so normal that they see themselves less as attempting to move the needle and more trying to keep the needle from moving away from them. Or at least they think that the culture is aligned with them and they only need to get the government to recognize it. That doesn't mean it's true. It's just an observation about many members of a group that I believe I'm seeing.
From there I am saying that there's a sort of discrepancy - the right frames the last 20 years as if the left sat in a war room and planned out a list of slow, coordinated encroachments meant to erode the status of any right-leaning beliefs. The left acts as if they were going about their normal daily routine, dealing with the occasional asshole as one does, and then the assholes came back with a mob.
My model is that the left is an uncoordinated mob that isn't even really paying attention to all those other encroachments because journalism, left or right, mostly focuses on whatever bad thing the other side did. Everyone has a point where they will try to completely shun someone else. Finding out that someone supports pedophilia is an easy example. The progressive left has calibrated their "cut all contact with someone" threshold to be extremely low.
That's one way to frame it.
The left and the right have fought for public support since the beginning of democracy. I might disagree with the rules of war the left plays by, but the right, collectively speaking, were not passive bystanders minding their own business either. "We didn't start the fire" after all. The problem is, in real life there are laws that allow anyone to use the public square. When it comes to both businesses and the internet, every part of it belongs to somebody, and with that comes the ability to remove someone for any reason. They're nowhere near as culturally dominant, but there are certainly places that ban left-leaning opinions. If you'd like to change that, well that's certainly an opinion but it's one at odds with the libertarian beliefs many on this forum claim to possess.
Let me ask you this - how can an outside observer tell the difference between someone "pushed to their limit" and someone who never had principles in the first place? Surely the left would tell a similar story about how they were all for free expression until the mean old right wouldn't leave them alone. I'm obviously biased, but many on the right seem positively giddy about all the things they want to accomplish. And they only clues I have on what they would consider "too far" are the things they've already done and now tell me are completely reasonable.
Oh no, "encroachments" stage was decades before. The last 20 years was "the walls are breached, time to burn and pillage!" stage. Unlike many preceding stages of the campaign, this one doesn't really require careful coordination - just letting your foot soldiers do their worst works fine. Does each foot soldier realize they what they are collectively doing? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it doesn't matter because it is happening anyway.
Like what? Let's take the inventory. The mass culture is about 90%, it's not that right-coded entertainment doesn't come out, but it comes out maybe once a year or less, and is always a huge controversy. Woke is the default and considered normal setting. The academia is thoroughly cleansed - lone celebrity professors that can't be cancelled are profoundly isolated and kept around to demonstrate "here, we have all kinds!" but on non-genius level, if you're not woke or at least pretend to be, you don't have a chance. Teaching the teachers? Thoroughly woke. Teaching the lawyers? Mostly woke too. I'm not talking about history, sociology and pol-sci - there's probably no right-wing professor left there in the nation, and the "moderates" there see Sanders as a dangerous right-winger. The press is absolutely woke on the "official" side of it - even the dreaded Fox News is at best "center-left company which tolerates some of the right hosts" (for a time). Of course, there are independent bloggers and radio, but as far as institutional press goes, it's very heavily left leaning. I'm not talking about such powerful institutions as government bureaucracy or the unions - their leftist sympathies are predictable and expected. Other cultural institutions? I can't go to a museum now without encountering at least several woke exhibit - and sometimes the whole exposition is subsumed by the woke and it's no longer about art but about social justice or climate change or some other woke cause like that.
What we have left - big business? More and more major companies come out as woke, and very rarely the reverse - that is mostly small to mid-size independent businesses. Banks are glad to debank right-wing figures - but did any of them debank prominent leftists? Not that I heard of. Billionaires tend to the woke side (understandably, they can buy power there) - for one Musk, there's three Cubans, Soroses, Simonses and so on. The army now has pride parades and features soldiers in furry costumes. I'm pretty sure the officers who authorized that are not inclined to listen to any contrary opinions.
Now, which prominent places ban leftist opinions? Internet forums? Local gun enthusiast meetups? Which cultural institute, comparable to what I described above, is excluding the left-leaning opinions to a measure comparable to exclusion and persecution of the right-wing ones? If we can't find any, or can't find a list as comprehensive and powerful, then demanding the right stops fighting back - without any history of prior consistent and prolonged demand to do the same from the left, at least - can not be read as anything but telling the right "why can't you just lose quietly so we all can stop this unpleasantness?". It is not hard to see why the right wouldn't look favorably on such approach.
And that's true. They were, when the right had institutional power and tried to shut down all kinds of leftist speech. And lost (mostly). The famous "fire in crowded theater" maxim was pronounced specifically against the leftist anti-war speech, and was overturned as a grave mistake later (99% of leftists aren't aware of either of these facts). Now, when the leftists have the power, they have no need in free speech anymore, and it's the right's turn to fight for it. But that turnaround wasn't caused by the right going "too far" - on the contrary, it was caused by the left seizing the institutional power and no longer needing the feeble "free speech" soapbox when they can use the powerful platforms provided by the institutions they captured.
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.
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