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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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The Dread Jim weighs in on the "moderate right".

Basically, to him the right isn't progressing at anywhere near the rate it needs to in order to enact radical change. He uses Asmongold, the popular live streamer, as an example. Asmongold is perceived to be anti-woke, but in reality all of his positions (in Dread Jim's opinion) are moderate/centrist.

For Dread Jim, the only way to save civilization is through the following:

  • Eliminating voting rights for the vast majority of "normies", and all women
  • Executing gay people ("poofs off roofs")
  • "Conscripting wombs"

He seems to view this last solution as the most important. Fathers should once again be responsible for marrying off their daughters, and if that's not possible, the state should step in. Similarly, adultery should be punishable by death.

Barring these radical changes "failure to murder everyone who is insufficiently left is likely to also be 'extreme far radical right'".

  • -15

I am a right-wing extremist. I am aware of "The Dread Jim" from many previous discussions through the various iterations of this forum.

His proposed solutions are not feasible, nor are they necessary, nor does he appear to possess insight or a track record that makes him worth listening to or discussing in any significant way. He, like many similar "right-wing extremists", appears to be possessed of a combination of panicked fearfulness and abstracted zealotry aimed at a sort of imaginary, narrative-based glorious final battle. He, like many others, lacks the necessary coldness of heart to effectively prosecute the culture war.

His suggestions are similarly foolish.

  • eliminating voting rights is unnecessary if federal power can be annulled and Blue cultural and political power centers neutralized and demolished, which by all evidence appears to be much easier to accomplish.
  • Rolling back LGBT's influence on our society does not require exterminating LGBT people, only creating general awareness of the concrete harms their movement has caused and an understanding that their social control can and must be resisted. This, again, appears to be working.
  • It is a very good idea to roll back feminism and "women's rights" generally. As with LGBT, what this looks like is establishing common knowledge of how these movements have catastrophically overstepped, the concrete harms they've caused, and the ways we were better off before them. Women having the vote is irrelevant if we neutralize the unaccountable power that vote is meant to enable. Relationships between men and women, whether spousal or familial, are not advanced by the sort of iron fist Jim advocates. Loving relationships can exert a level of stabilization, security, and sound life decision-making that Jim's preferred forms of tyranny can never achieve.

This is a more generous assessment of Jim and his ilk than I'd be inclined to give. I think there's less foolishness there and more evil; the pursuit of a good end by bad means has long since given way to a pursuit of a bad end by bad means. I don't think that Jim merely disbelieves that stabilization, security, and sound life decision-making can be achieved by loving relationships; I think he deplores loving relationships in a vacuum. There's some kind of tipping point you often see people running over where reasonable paternalism gives way to an all-consuming hatred.

I think there's less foolishness there and more evil; the pursuit of a good end by bad means has long since given way to a pursuit of a bad end by bad means.

"Evil" and "bad" are meaningless unless one shares values-coherence with the people with one communicates, which is not true for Jim or people who think he's correct, and cannot in general be assumed here. I certainly do consider him evil and agree with the rest of your analysis as to why, but I try not to assume that others share my moral values.

"Evil" and "bad" are meaningless unless one shares values-coherence with the people with one communicates

One of the most poetic things to ever happen is that the great fascist powers were met in their own framework by their enemies and crushed through strength of arms, thus in addition to destroying there power and killing many of them, also defeating them ideologically in the only way that really mattered as far as they were concerned.

I think ISIS went a bit similarly: the promise of a new caliphate brought out a big chunk of violent fanatics that otherwise would have been terrorists hiding from view, gave faith that they would win battles in a traditional type war with God on their side, and pitted them against a number of local powers backed up by Western air and ground forces. They lost.

I'm not conspiracy minded, but it would at least be an interesting one that this was done deliberately as a honey pot, but I have zero evidence of this. I also can't speak to it's long-term effects on the region --- how many of those dead IS fighters would have fought with the Houthis, Hezbollah, or Hamas in recent conflicts?

Very few for all those. The Houthis and Hezbollah are Shia who ISIS thinks are heretics that deserve to be brutally murdered and most recruits from Gaza just join Hamas and Hamas has few foreign fighters.

I agree with the general thrust though ISIS probably sucked a lot of people in who would have committed terrorist attacks in Europe.