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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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It might work for the ICE attacks, where we have a clear policy, perpetrators in custody, and alignment with other groups. I’ll say that Democrats could and probably should do that.

I think Democrats should do that. I don't think they can, and I'm pretty willing to bet that they won't.

Trivially, there's not been an outpouring of support for ICE being attacked by a literal roving mob. Bringing in the national guard to fix the problem resulted in a minor constitutional standoff rather than an embarassed looking-the-other-way. Newsom, widely suspected as the frontrunner for the next Dem presidential primary season, is in the middle of fighting ICE on several fronts, a good number of them ranging from mildly to hilariously unlawful, nearly all of them bad ideas, along with his more general accelerationist behaviors. A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it. The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.

There's been no willingness to budge on sanctuary cities, even in the most egregious cases that everyone with the slightest clue knows is going to blow up in pro-immigration faces. There's no triangulation, no Sister Souljah from a Dem going onto ABC and smacking someone for saying gestapo. On this very forum, we have dishonest partisans who can't go further than promoting the Lankford bill, even this week, without ever confronting the serious flaws in their claims.

Not so much for the assassins. No surviving perpetrators.

Of the 'successful' ones, we have Kirk's killer sitting in a jail today. Utah's asking for the death penalty; tell me if you can find a Dem partisan who wants the murderer to fry and doesn't call the shooter a groyper.

One attempted assassin was on trial literally yesterday, tried (poorly) to kill himself with a pen after being found guilty. Another went trans and has sentencing coming up soon. Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?

And, yes, if we include Luigi fandom, he just got murder one dropped down to murder two for his trial, and even if you think that's a necessary conclusion from NY's esoteric statutes, we have wide evidence of what happens in other legal cases where prosecutors or the Democratic party don't agree with a specific statutory interpretation, and this ain't it.

No comparable groups to discredit,

Several anti-immigration and anti-abortion groups were discredited for merely having similar-sounding names.. I don't think that's healthy, but we have Options, here. People in the 80s and 90s who were too happy to bring down the hammer on organizations that merely echoed the language or defended killers or violent protesters on the right, and we now have a surfeit of test cases. We'll see how it looks in a week!

no social networks to ban,

Funny to mention that!. ARFCOM had its registrar boot them based on rhetoric that merely looked like that of violent protesters; YouTube booted gun owners for things that they merely thought might ever look illegal. We'll see how this looks in a week.

no pet issues to excise from the party planks.

I mean, 90s Republicans didn't abandon anti-abortion or anti-immigration or pro-guns positions entirely. They just made massive and often-painful compromises until they could rebuild political capital. Do you think that's going to happen, here?

And widening them enough to punish all of antifa, the Democratic Party, or “the left”…that’s going too far. I understand that it feels natural for an average Republican to make that equivalence, but I believe it’s wrong.

I'd love to agree with you. The trouble is that I can absolutely agree with you, and also have nothing incompatible with :

It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable.

A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it.

He said that the judge was innocent until found guilty and that he respects law enforcement's efforts to hold criminals accountable. He just also took potshots at Trump over unrelated matters.

The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.

That's not true - not in that video, at least (I have no idea what else he said that day). Let me quote:

And I wanna emphasise too, that nothing, nothing justifies this homicidal attitude towards ICE; nothing justifies pulling a trigger. But I, I do think that we have a problem when we take our law enforcement, and dehumanise them, and turn them into, um, instruments of fear, because law enforcement must have a positive relationship with the community in order to be effective. And when, when we have ICE being directed to behave as they are, I think we undermine public safety.

He was saying that ICE would be less effective by turning up the fear, because it would make people less likely to inform and co-operate with ICE. Factually accurate? Maybe not. Distasteful to divert onto his talking point at this time? Absolutely. But no, he didn't talk "about how ICE invited this attack".

The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.

Uh, you know Texas democrats are ridiculous progressive fanatics in a contest to see how expensive losing elections can be, right? Just off priors this guy is too far to the left for his own base and an electoral irrelevancy.

He's already a State Senator, but fair. On the other hand, we also know exactly what sort of demands get thrown out -- and sometimes half-hearted apologies still offered -- when random no-name chucklefucks that are too far to the right for their own base and electorally irrelevant get.

he just got murder one dropped down to murder two for his trial

I suspect this is a result of overcharging, since they tried to charge him with terrorism, while in his case he was aiming at exacting revenge for his beef against health insurance industry, not as a general political statement. So the terrorism part was kinda iffy, and at least from casual reading of the statute, murder two is your regular murder, while murder one is super-super-bad murder where the specific reasons for super-badness are enumerated, so if it doesn't match any of them, it can't me murder one. So it's not necessarily a reflection of any opinion about the case itself.

It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem

The Left doesn't have a violence problem. The Right has the problem of the Left being violent, but it's not a problem for the Left - for them, it's a desirable feature. They do not "realize" it because it's not a problem for them, so there's nothing for them to realize. Of course, they would condemn violence from both sides any time it's convenient, but having violent storm troops that would attack their enemies on cue - while being completely free from any legal consequences for it - is not a problem in the least for them. Expecting them to do something about it out of kindness of their hearts and compassion for people who they have been calling Nazis for decades now is plain stupid, and if the Right wants it to stop, it needs to realize the only way to do it is to use all the force they can bring in to handle it. The Left did not hesitate for a second to do it in Covid times, and when suppressing people who investigated 2020 elections, and when stomping Jan 6 protesters into the ground. What would be the Right's answer to much more violent and massive attacks from the Left? So far it's prosecuting immediate perpetrators in a handful of high-profile cases and short raids into the enemy territory. One can't hope to win a campaign this way.

Yes, the problem isn't that the Left is violent, it's that we on the Right aren't.

and if the Right wants it to stop, it needs to realize the only way to do it is to use all the force they can bring in to handle it.

Yes. And by "all the force," I, for one, mean all the force.

It would have been murder one in a lot of states, just not NY which has an unusual definition of murder 1 under which "premeditated intentional killing" is not necessarily murder one.

I imagine different states have different definitions of what kinds of murder they prosecute. The point is nobody is (so far) arguing it's not a murder or shouldn't be prosecuted, the question is just some technical points which aren't hard defined one way or another.

Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?

The Zizian attacks are weirder than "left wing" - Ziz did some bad theorizing about decision theory and came to the conclusion that it was always correct to retaliate with maximal intensity against all threats, with a very broad definition of the word "threat", under the worldview that nobody would "threaten" you if you so precommitted. Moderating the general left wing wouldn't have helped with that particular flavor of insanity.

"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position. Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+, and I've seen no indication in Ziz's writings that they were an exception in any way; their moral model seemed to be founded on Blue Tribe Progressive morals, only diverging where it came to how and when to take action, where they were a more extreme variant of Rationalist ideas. Who the Zizians consider to be threatening to them pretty clearly followed a leftist model.

More generally, what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"? Red Tribe actually went to quite considerable lengths to purge racism and even the resemblance of racism; to the extent that it is more of an issue than it used to be, it's coming from internet culture, which was a Blue Tribe phenomenon, and from aggressive redefinition of racism to cover the purged behavior set.

...It seems to me that the above is a non-trivial problem. I don't have a solution for it, and I don't expect you to have a solution for it, but I'm certainly not going to pretend that there's some system in place to handle this. Roof and Tarrant and Breivek were absolutely treated as Red problems, and still are. This latest shooter used an app Blues wrote explicitly to make finding and tracking federal agents easier, and left a note that "Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror," while the left is still playing "what even is leftism" games. The John Brown Gun Club, a group that I myself have argued in favor of in the past, is posting up flyers explicitly celebrating Kirk's murder on the campus of Georgetown university. Antifa has been beating Reds for showing their faces in public in Blue strongholds for a decade, and the police let them do it, and they are still doing it to this day.

We had a full decade of Blue Tribe crusading against "right wing" radicalization with everything from ceaseless propaganda to explicit government censorship to organized lawless violence. Jordan Peterson was treated as a dangerous radical*. We have examples beyond counting of what it looks like when Blue Tribe takes a problem seriously. They evidently and undeniably do not consider murder committed by their partisans to be a problem worth taking seriously. Maybe you think that's a reasonable response, given the givens. I do not think it is going to work out well for Blue Tribe generally.

Do you have a list of the Zizian murders and the motives?

Killing the landlord: seems to have been a mix of Marxist-adjacent "seize the means of production" and normal criminal "didn't want to pay for things"/"didn't want to be testified against".

Killing the cop: normal criminal "I don't want to go to jail today".

Killing one of the members' parents: is this the one you're accusing of being anti-anti-trans?

There were others, right?

I do not think it is going to work out well for Blue Tribe generally.

Why not? It's not like Red Tribe is going to do much more than whine about it, "vote harder," and hope that somehow, this time Left-captured enforcement agencies will start obeying orders from elected Republicans.

what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"

They... are? I don't expect general pushback against right wing ideas would have particularly helped in those cases.

"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position.

Within the Blue Tribe enclave in which I reside, it doesn't appear that way to me. I'd say that it's a mainstream opinion, but certainly a minority one, and not a big minority. That said, a supermajority would support the statement "People who disagree with trans ideology are being unjust or oppressive towards trans people," certainly publicly and likely privately as well.

Now, I could see a way in which your apparent observation makes sense; a supermajority of Blue Tribers, when surrounded by other Blue Tribers and interrogated in a leading way, would eventually be pressured to appearing as if they genuinely support (which, let's be clear, makes one exactly as responsible for genuinely supporting it as actually genuinely supporting it) "People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people," where "dangerous threat" implies literal physical violence. To be completely fair, from the outside, this would appear almost indistinguishable from a supermajority of Blue Tribers supporting the statement.

There are a lot of Blue Tribers who equate "oppression" with "dangerous threat," but because of how loose the definition of "oppression" has become (in 2025, arguably, it means nothing more than "something that is currently being applied to a [person that I like or that is an opponent to someone that I dislike]"), most Blue Tribers tend to grok that it's just not a big deal. The notion that "We're all racists/misogynists/White Supremacists/homophobes - and that's OK" (of course, just because we're all equal doesn't mean some of us aren't more equal than others) has become close to the water that we swim in in the Blue Tribe.

Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+

I'd suggest this is a selection effect in terms of which trans people are most likely to make lots of noise or be otherwise noticeable. I'd guess a majority is Blue Tribe/leftist, certainly, but 99%? I'd want to see the actual stats and methodology.

Red tribe trans people- especially FtM's- aren't even that uncommon. They're just low status enough that no one cares about them, like literal trailer trash level. Not so for blue transgenders, who seem to come from higher class backgrounds more often and be a bit more likely to be MtF.