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It is Okay to Think That Charlie Kirk was not Literally Jesus.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to get shot in the jugular for expressing controversial political opinions. I actually agreed with many of Charlie Kirk's controversial political opinions. The thing about controversial political opinions though, is that lots of people don't like them. If you are a person who does not like Charlie Kirk's political opinions, here are some things that would be perfectly understandable for you to think or feel upon hearing the news that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed:
"Charlie Kirk once said gun rights are worth the cost of a few shooting deaths. Kinda funny now huh? I wonder if he's changed his mind."
"Sucks he died like that, but I'm kinda glad I don't have to see his tiny face spouting talking points anymore."
"Charlie Kirk was a massive hack. I think we should care about the kids shot at that school in Colorado more than him."
"Charlie Kirk wanted me kicked out of the country because of my political opinions. It's hard for me to feel bad for him."
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
I was shocked today when I saw a Republican Congressman announce a woke-era pressure campaign againt people who "belittled" the assasination. Apparently I have a much longer memory than many people. I still remember 2020. I still remember George Floyd. It wasn't just the riots, it wasn't just the demonization of physical policing tactics, it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event. Never again. In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
I think a lot of people have just been pushed over the edge by this. It hits all the visceral buttons:
Regardless of whether he was a saint or not, I can think of few plausible ways to make this more inflammatory than it already is. It's perfect rage and hate fuel. If it were Fuentes (who is an outrage-baiting dick) or a politician (who we expect willingly take on this risk to some degree) or even some friendly but unmarried talking head whose whole life was politics, people could rationalize it away. But many (myself included) see a guy who is just like them or their husbands or sons, and combined with seeing in Iryna their wives or daughters, it's just too much.
The time for dialogue has been over for some time now, but we have been able to maintain peace because frankly many grillpilled normies had their heads in the sand because facing the truth (risk of Yugoslavia 2.0) was too horrible to contemplate.
But this is impossible for many of them to ignore. Charlie will be sainted, regardless of who the real Charlie Kirk was, because the truth doesn't matter to them anymore. All that matters is winning.
What does that mean in practice? Start prepping for civil war because all remaining hopes for peace are futile at this point?
In my comment I was describing how I've seen some of my normie friends and family talking. I certainly do not hope for war, I think it's unimaginably destructive to society and the human spirit and would probably result in the end of American society as we know it (through radical transformation, not destruction), no matter who "wins." But given our trajectory, I think you would be foolish to not start making preparations to protect yourself and your family in the event that mass political violence breaks out.
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There are a non-zero number of offramps: sufficiently-decisive political victory that one side or the other capitulates, abrupt prosperity due to AI or robotics sufficient that everyone is too busy being insanely rich to care about politics any more, maybe two or three others. Potentially, Christ might return on a cloud to judge the Quick and the Dead.
The odds of you and those you know and love (and to be crystal clear here, this is a fully-general you, red, blue, grey, every human in the continental US) dying screaming increased significantly this week, and the action most likely to significantly counter that likelihood is to leave the country. What you see happening around you is happening because many millions of people want it to happen, and are willing to work to make it happen. Momentum and a good many other things are on their side.
This is a good time for the regular reminder to consult the chudjak's "things happening" charts. I predict that within two months, this incident will be out of the news and as forgotten as Luigi Mangione is now. Dedicated activist right-wingers will have added it to their long list of grievances against the left, but it will no longer feel fresh and visceral and pale against the volume and weight of other grievances like COVID and BLM.
When you are online and seething among the like-minded, it is easy to imagine that the rest of the people out there have just not caught up yet and once they do (let it sink in and come to share your feeling of outrage) surely the sentiment will boil over. In reality, the normies have already caught up and are actively in the process of getting over it and moving on. If the rage was not enough to cause riots on day 1, there will certainly not be enough on day 2, or 3, or thereafter; it's not like the US right has the wordcel or activist base to nurture mass secondary indignation in excess of the peak of primary indignation in response to the event.
The argument is not that "Billions Must Die" because some brainrotted person shot Charlie Kirk. The argument is that society is a complex machine, and keeping it running requires a degree of base-level values-coherence. Kirk's murder, and the left's extremely public reaction to that murder, are demonstrations that the minimum level of values-coherence no longer exists.
I think you are wrong that this incident will be forgotten; for that matter, I think you are wrong that Luigi has been forgotten. But it scarcely matters. This murder was not a fluke, but rather a stochastically-predictable result of many millions of people trying to live together with many millions of other people whose values and worldview are mutually exclusive. Events like this are going to keep happening, and they are going to keep generating common knowledge, which will in turn drive further action.
It's fairly probable that at some point in the next few years, Blues are going to gain significant political power. When they do, they are going to exercise that power in predictable ways: they will escalate. Reds will react to that exercise in predictable ways: they will escalate back. This murder will shape the backlash to the backlash to the backlash, and it will shape it for the worse. Reds are by no means prepared to be ruled the way Trump is currently ruling Blues. Blues are not prepared to have murder of their champions treated the way they are treating Kirk's murder. Both are very likely to be forced to react to such treatment in the relatively-near future, and neither is likely to do so in a way that we might, from a detached and nonpartisan perspective, consider "pro-social".
How do you figure you are not just hearing a Shepard tone of things escalating all the time? It seems to me that your argument is essentially that things have to get worse because the set of grievances can only monotonically grow, but culture war material also has a certain half-life. People are still alive in the US nowadays that experienced far worse political violence than Charlie Kirk getting shot, but events from the '70s and '80s hardly count for anything because their political valence becomes more and more inscrutable as the past grows foreign. Did the Unabomber attack Red consumerism on behalf of Blue degrowth, or Blue academia on behalf of Red RETVRNerism? Was Waco Red police brutality or Blue oppression of religious conservatives? Some fringe groups of course still have categorical answers to these, but even two fringe groups that everyone agrees belong on the same side of the spectrum now will not necessarily agree on the answers.
(Coming up soon: were anti-Vietnam college students Blue commie sympathisers, or the forerunners to Red Putinbots sabotaging our heroic defense of Ukraine?)
(This is also a sort-of response to @Amadan below.)
With difficulty and a considerable degree of imprecision.
There is pretty obviously no way to prove it, beyond comparing the predictions I've made and the reasoning underlying them with events as they unfold. @Chrisprattalpharaptr is confident I'm wrong, and has called out what he considers my predictive failures in two previous posts, one immediately preceding Luigi killing the CEO and the other immediately preceding Kirk's murder. And it's fair game; I predicted that the violence would get worse during the rioting, and I predicted that the rioting, compromise of policing, and attendant spike in crime would be lasting. Instead, the rioting finally wound down, "abolish the police" was largely sidelined, and the crime spike declined back to around the previous trend after only four years and a few dozen-thousand additional deaths rather than continuing on for the rest of the decade. I was too pessimistic; in hindsight, I think the "Blue Tribe ran out of mana" explanation is clearly more accurate.
And yet, we have had hundreds of attacks on churches, yearly, for multiple years now; mostly vandalism and harassment, but a notable number of arsons and shootings; my church has a permanent armed security team now, which is novel. We had a nation-wide vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla, with Tim Waltz among others winking and nodding along to in public appearances. We've had a worrying spate of trans school shooters which seem to me to be directly motivated by the tenants of trans ideology. We've had the attempted assassination of Trump missing by the slimmest of chances amid, charitably, criminal incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and then the very obvious and quite public disappointment in that failure through Blue Tribe, top to bottom. Since then we've seen the rise of assassination culture in Blue Tribe, "who will kill Elon", national polling showing large portions of Blue Tribe endorsing the murder of Trump and Musk. We saw what that looked like in practice with Luigi: widespread, open support for lawless murder throughout blue tribe, again top-to-bottom, with unrestrained glazing from major media organizations and blue-state legislation being named after him. We've seen it again with Kirk: appalling murder met with undeniable, widespread, population-representative-scale gleeful support.
Multi-city riots against ICE have been limited because Trump established punishing escalation dominance from the very start, removing much of their political cover and aggressively prosecuted as many rioters as possible. And even with that federal hammer pounding away, we've seen facilities mobbed and destroyed by rioters, we've seen numerous serious attacks on federal agents, murder of federal agents, and at least one coordinated paramilitary ambush. In the background we're still seeing what appears to me to be clear support from democrat officials to assist all of the above by doxxing ICE agents and releasing the information to the public.
And to CPAR's point, this is a better outcome than I expected; in 2018-2020, I did not expect Trump to escape jail, much less win the 2020 election. The above is what it looks like after the Democratic party imploded itself in one of the most humiliating and catastrophic electoral defeats in modern political history, when their voters have fled and their donors have shut their wallets. This the mayhem Blue Tribe can inflict when at the weakest it's ever been in my entire life. Barring unprecedented measures or outcomes, it will most likely recover and will once again find itself wielding federal power. It almost certainly will exercise that power with a furious vengeance, unconstrained by the norms and structures that are currently being trampled by Trump in the meantime; Blue politicians are already running on a policy of "drive it like you stole it", and their base does not seem inclined to moderation. And why would they be? They're as desperate and policy-starved as my side is.
And even knowing that, I still think this is probably the best possible path forward; maybe Trump can deliver enough obvious improvement in living conditions that we win the midterms and maybe 2028 as well, and maybe enough political defeats in succession can force capitulation from Progressive ideologues and the demolition of their centers of economic, social and political power, and we can actually wind the culture war down. Maybe. Otherwise, it will be the Blue turn to prosecute culture war escalations through federal law, and my side's turn to prosecute escalations outside it. And there's still hope there too! There's a possibility that the struggle over federal power will have done enough damage to federal institutions that those institutions will simply lack the capacity to prosecute the culture war further, and both sides sag back in exhaustion to simply running their own states and communities as best they can. Society pillarizes, sorts, segregates, and good fences make good neighbors. It could happen!
Maybe.
I still remember that Blue Tribe terrorists and murderers got institutional protection and tenure. But sure, last time it died down, it might die down again. This is true.
Last time it died down because, on the balance, the Blues of the time capitulated.
Let's take a concrete example. I do not think the views this person expresses are fringe within Blue Tribe. I think that, prior to the ongoing backlash sparked by Kirk's murder, I would have been fired from most jobs in my industry for disagreeing with this person about Kirk or objecting to their statements. In order for the Culture War to de-escalate, this person's views have to become fringe, or Kirks views, and mine, have to become fringe. This person is pretty clearly willing to endorse extralegal killing to stave off capitulation. So, as it happens, am I, even if my choice of acceptable targets is considerably stricter. One of us has to lose, and neither of us is willing to accept that loss, and until that changes it seems obvious that the escalations will proceed on their current trajectory. Ozy described the core drive and Zunger did the math more than a decade ago, and everything since then has been fractal iteration.
...Having deleted answers to both questions, I will accept that I may be fringe (Ted was much closer to Red, Waco was very, very definitely blue and I would be very surprised to see an existence proof of arguments to the contrary, I can't help myself), but it seems to me that better examples might have been Prohibition and Eugenics. Even there, the answer does not seem like some deep enigma lost to the sands of time; I think most answers from people here would be fairly uniform. It seems to me that the Culture War and the split we currently label red vs blue has been a coherent force for well over a century, and possibly three centuries. In this country, it is easy to see how that split has, over the last hundred years or so, steadily eroded our social and political structures and norms, and how the present unpleasantness is simply the long, slow trend going exponential as the last of our social cohesion burns away.
In any case, it is indeed possible for time to unwind the Culture War. But it is also possible to escalate faster than time alone can unwind, and it seems pretty clear to me that we are now doing that.
Again, the person linked above. Is that person crazy? Is their ideology meaningfully fringe? It's certainly not fringe enough that many millions of people felt uncomfortable expressing similar sentiments privately or publicly over the last two days. It's certainly not fringe enough that I'm confident I could disagree with it publicly and keep my job, even now. I'd give roughly 50% odds that the views they presented, together with views of similar extremity on a variety of other issues, are going to secure federal power in 2028. What do you expect to happen then?
....And all of this is based on the consensus understanding of what we might call the "math" of irreconcilable cultural conflict, which seems to me to give a high probability of things getting very bad. But I think it's actually much worse than that, because the consensus model is badly mistaken in ways that dramatically underestimate how bad things are likely to get, in a similar way and for similar reasons that people underestimated the impact of the iPhone on human interaction before its release.
You may disagree, and if so I'd be interested in hearing where I'm wrong.
To clarify, Ted was a Red attack on Blue academia, Waco was Blue oppression of religious conservatives? That's more or less my understanding of the two incidents.
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Thanks for your lengthy response. I'm not sure if I'll have time to answer in a way that does it justice today, but I'll at least drop a few bullet points addressing some aspects now while I can:
Here's an article giving a feds-were-being-Red interpretation of Waco. I'm fairly sure I saw at least one other version of this argument during BLM.
There's a big asymmetry between the Right and the Left in that the Left has overwhelming control of the media, and I don't mean to call this asymmetry cosmetic or unimportant to questions that ultimately pertain to the Left's capability for coordinating escalation at all, but we should also try to decouple this from the sentiment of the actual masses if we are to get a handle on whether things are actually getting escalated. Take away the top-down approval, and a lot more symmetry can be seen: for example, the widespread approval among the Right for lawless killings such as the Zimmerman/Martin case (whatever you think about whether it was justified, there is little to dispute about it being lawless).
...and either way, the "Shepard tone" model does not even depend on it being "both sides", nor does it even require any particular metric to give comparable readings now and in the past! After all, a Shepard tone is made up of many separate frequency peaks that all fade in, drift in the same direction, and then eventually fade out. You may be right that, in all the ways you have described, the Left's misdeeds have only been getting worse in volume; but what about the ways you didn't touch upon? Is anything happening right now as bad as the assorted actual race riots of the past, or Weather Underground, or a coalition of blue college kids providing what should be a true Dolchstoßlegende for America's first and most iconic foreign military defeat if it didn't have so many dollar bills to wipe its tears with, or Blue spies delivering the actual crown jewels of American military secrets to the communists?
(edited in) I think you may be underestimating the degree to which "smart money"/the forces that actually steer society have taken as a lesson from WWII that maintaining normality and proving chudjak right over and over again is the winning strategy for all conflicts, and how good they have gotten at it. Russia and Ukraine are currently locked into an actual hot existential war that reduces cities to rubble and then mans cavities in the rubble with men who would rather take a few more enemies with them than surrender, and yet 50 kilometres from the front they are, with reasonable degrees of success, taking pains to keep the cute cafés and nightclubs open and running. This, if nothing else, convinces me that there are really, in some sense, still "adults at the wheel". They may be psychopathic adults with a worrying lack of concern for the well-being of their charges, but the extent of their power to delay their own gratification, control impulses and keep the machine running under the most adverse of circumstances has been proven.
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I have long been in disagreement with @FCfromSSC about this, and I tend to agree with your rebuttal in general. However, we really do seem to be moving apart in ways that at least could eventually end in the sort of worst-case scenario he is predicting. Your argument that "This will be forgotten in a few months, this incident is not actually going to set anything off" is the sort of thing that's true until it's not. This incident probably won't be the one that triggers a civil war. The next one probably won't be. The US is stable enough that we can have many, many such incidents accumulate and fade into the news cycle. But no one can predict the exact confluence of circumstances that will make that one time be the one that does it. How confident are you, really, that the Next Big Thing has a zero percent chance of being the torch that lights everything on fire?
I still don't think we're going to see a violent Red/Blue civil war in my lifetime. Or more accurately, I hope we don't, but I actually don't think it's likely. But I admit my priors have updated to it being less unlikely than I once thought.
Seeing you of all people say this is a real indicator of what time it is.
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I dunno, man. It's not that you're even wrong here, per se, it's just that there's a certain "we're done here" quality about it. But who knows, maybe we'll just loop right back to the same old, same old.
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No, it isn't. If civil war breaks out Blue vs. Red in the US, it's going to be an excuse for every other [Blue-aligned] province of the American empire to descend into the despotism whose agenda they are even today ahead of the US in implementing.
The US is, and due to demographics is likely to remain, the least authoritarian Western nation (and any assertions to the contrary are made by Blues, who intentionally mislabel authoritarianism as freedom).
There are people who would say that living under Red* despotism is better than dying due to civil war.
*In the West other than the USA, red = left as a holdover from Communist red.
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Looking at how things are going across the water, I'm not sure that will work any better for them than it will for local blues. The scenario I can see where we actually get durable blue totalitarianism is one where AI goes FOOM, it's alignable and they align it. Short of that, I do not think that future is going to go the way you are thinking it will go, for reasons that boil down to society being a lot more fragile than people appreciate.
All that said, the advice is not "go to Europe". Australia or new zealand, possibly japan, maybe some of the quieter parts of Asia would be my uneducated guess.
Unlike every other part of the Empire you actually managed to put reformers in office (and the reaction to that has resulted in at least one hard-Blue government being elected in another nation- one whose Blue-aligned voters have also been cheering this murder). Across the water, increasingly blue (as in, establishment/conservative) candidates are elected and potential reformers are jailed.
They have other things they need to deal with, too; I think it will be worse for European countries in particular due to their having imported a ton of foreign fighting-age males over the last 10 years. Not that these are the most violent specimens (those ones stayed home), but the capability is likely there for more mayhem.
Those places are under more Blue control than the US is (concentration camps for the uncommon cold, etc.). Singapore's probably the best option mostly due to their monarchy and being outside of the traditional first-world orbit while still being vital to its operations in Asia.
Ok, I'm a bit lost here. Which country successfully put reformers in office, and which other country elected a hard-Blue government as a result?
US. (Rs are Reform, Ds are Conservative, since about 2020.)
Canada. Technically across the water too, though nobody generally thinks about that.
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Something that is constantly invoked in heated political signalling competitions, but who actually does it? How many people have actually emigrated from the US following the elections of President Trump, for both of which I remember widespread threats of emigration? Yes, to be sure, a few high-profile media personnages have gone to Britain for a spell and given interviews about it, but that's hardly the exodus.
I know one family quite well that has just done so (at significant cost), explicitly for the reason of trans stuff vis a vis Trump. (sad story around the son/daughter)
I question their judgement in that regard, but it might turn out to be a good decision for other reasons.
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I think nowadays people who would claim to move to Canada just get off Twitter and onto Bluesky. It's a lot less commitment, but at least they actually DO it.
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I did it, once upon a time, and somewhat foolishly. Maybe I'm wrong this time too, but I don't think I am. If our society ruptures, it is going to get bad beyond the wildest imagination of even the people who've actually gone out of their way to imagine it.
Emigrate, or publicly announce intention to emigrate?
I actually moved to Canada for a couple years under Bush, and seriously considered renouncing my US citizenship.
Oh my, talk about dodging bullets.
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