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Yes, Democrats Really Do Want You Dead
Some people have already put the Charlie Kirk assassination into the memory box. For others it still feel terrifyingly relavent. The initial shock at the cheers and jubulant celebration at his gruesome public execution has faded slightly. The public square dominated by Democratic figures and Never Trumpers invoking some fraudulent both sidesism has, like it or not, dulled some of the public backlash. And honestly, the compulsive conspiracy theorist on the right hasn't helped maintain moral clarity in the wake of his murder either.
You may remember, I've talked before about the casual genocidal bloodlust the average Northern VA Democrat has based on the time I lived there. And while Democrats, for now, seem to have enough message discipline to not get on CNN and openly say "Yes, Republicans deserve to be murdered", their line is just shy of that incredibly low bar. Enter Jay Jones.
He's been caught essentially laying out the case that Republicans should be shot and killed, and their children murdered in front of them, so that they change their politics. A DM conversation "leaked" where in he has this conversation with a Republican colleage in the Virginia House I believe. So this wasn't even exactly an "in house" conversation. Just straight up telling the opposition, "Hey, I think you deserve to die" like it would never or could never come back to haunt him.
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican. His brazen assertion that you should kill even the children too, because "they are breeding little fascist" is probably a huge hit in Northern VA. Finally someone who openly talks and thinks like they do. I've seen those exact words on the NOVA subreddit every day. He's very likely to have top legal authority over me and my children, whom he believes deserve to die.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work. In the famed Jewish Pogroms of 1881, 40 Jews were killed leading to a mass emigration from Russia. I wonder if we'll hit that number in Virginia the next 4 years. I fully expect my deep red rural county that's been electorally attached through gerrymandering to Fairfax will be aggressively "enriched" as punishment for voting wrong.
My God, you're right. Look at these comments. What the fuck? We've really been living in a country like this for this long? There's nothing that can't be sanewashed, can't be whatabout'd? There is no evil so bad that you can't blame it on Trump? I just can't believe what I'm seeing this year. I swear, the culture war is gonna go hot in a way we have never seen before.
I skimmed this and it's really boring. Literally the lamest thread on /pol/ is 300x as unhinged and you're not freaking out about that.
Even the whole thing is such a meltdown over a guy saying
Which is inappropriate as a public figure, but an incredibly common joke.
Comparing Reddit to some 4chan offshoot is played out at this point. I am bothered that toxicity from the Left gets a nice mainstream pasture to jerk themselves off day and night with tacit mainstream approval while milquetoast Right wingers get left with condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust.
We've seen how the Left reacts to 'bad speak' where no slurs or threats are even deployed. And the entire neurotic hammer-dropping process has been completely absent here as it was with Kirk.
You want to compare this to a chan schizoid going off on gassing the Jews? Okay. I'll grant that an apples to apples comparison leaves the virulent antisemite looking worse. But this phenomenon where Reddit discourse gets pass after pass? Yeah, I think thats more concerning and even dangerous.
Is Reddit representative of the Left? Not entirely, but it represents a mindset that is quite alive and well over there. And its one I've detected enough IRL that I no longer consider this 'a random internet opinion'. Meanwhile, I know zero people that express chan bile unless they have the good sense to leave that on the net.
/pol/ isn't a self hosted 4chan offshoot, it's just 4chan. And the correct comparator to reddit isn't even 4chan, it's twitter, where people are happy to issue calls for the death of whoever you'd like, unabated.
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Right-wingers from milquetoast to genocidal currently have Twitter to jerk themselves off day and night.
So do left wingers. There’s still progressive Twitter, the lolcows just left for blue sky.
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Along with eveybody else from any political corner. And that is solely due the intervention of one eccentric manchild billionaire. I guess I'm fortunate that things progressed that way given the way the stars were aligning.
I don't really care if toxic sentiment is spilling out in some free-for-all arena - or at least don't care as much. I do care when spaces (often de facto Left-ruled) make a big song and dance about rules and decorum, deploy them maliciously against their opponents, and spare themselves. This is sanewashing what got many other subs monitored and eventually banned, and allows users to acclimate to a norm.
Find me the mainstream right-wing Reddit easily downloadable and accessible from the IOS store and I'll take these comparisons seriously.
Sure, it's open for everyone (though I suspect that right-wing content gets boosted by the algorithm), it's just bit rich at this point to say that right-wingers (let alone milquetoast right-wingers) have to do with "condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust".
IIRC at least Parler and Gab were kicked out of both the Apple and Google app stores for what is demonstrably less "violent rhetoric" than is frequently seen posted on Bluesky (by public figures, no less) about Jesse Singal, plus whatever you can find about Charlie Kirk.
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Some losers posting on an anonymous thread from their mother’s basement is a very different thing from elected officials telling each other they’d commit murder if they had more balls.
I suppose this is a reason I feel so… uneasy with gun control. I know for a fact that theres lots of people who shouldn’t have guns. Lots of them my cotribals. I know that, factually, I don’t really need all my guns. But golly this attitude- I mean I don’t see it up close and personal, I suppose this is the first really solid evidence I have that it isn’t just unhinged screeching online, but we all knew it was there- just makes me go, yeah, F you, I need them.
"Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head" this is literally a common joke used to humorously compare people to Hitler et al. It was incredibly inappropriate for someone running for public office to say, but otherwise is profoundly meaningless as far as calls for violence go.
I go back and forth on this a lot myself. I strongly believe gun control is needed to keep governments/institutions scared of the masses, but at the same time the masses end up rather dangerous to one another in the interim.
First, we usually expect our elected officials to be above such things. Usually. Second, he didn’t just call for the murder of his opponent. That’s not good, but it isn’t terribly unprecedented. He called for killing his toddlers.
It's implied, but never explicitly proven he did. The people who leaked this were deliberate with what they showed us. If he said that explicitly, wouldn't they have leaked that too?
Isn't the reporting that he said it in a phone call, and not by text?
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Keep. Reading.
You don't get to read the first thing he says, go "Sounds benign to me", and then ignore the rest of the truly horrific and sober thoughts he put down.
In an effort to be a good mottizen, I gave it a re-read because I had skimmed just his side of the conversation when I first looked.
It does seem like he agrees with the other person saying "you were talking about hoping Jennifer Gilbert's children would die" but I would imagine if he said that in text, it would have been part of the leak? That would be so much more damning and would totally fuck him (because fuck him for saying that), but it's absence from these screenshots is weird if he did in fact say that.
I don't know who this guy is but I really don't like him. And given I hold elected officials to high standards, I would never vote for him, but I also can't take the "3 people 2 bullets" joke all that seriously given its historical precedent as a common joke.
If he was actually wishing harm on his political enemy's kids though, that's extremely concerning.
Why do you think that would fuck him?
If there is a threshold that causes a party to lose political interest over words then the words have different targets-- or, the act of withdrawal has lesser consequences. I can only speculate where the threshold is, but it requires certain political conditions to be lowered. All else being equal, if this was a three year old text of the candidate writing, 'March the whole family against a wall and shoot them all, yes including the evil fascist breeding babies,' then this receives roughly the same response. This is not so different as to what was was provided. Obviously he's not serious, context, Trump and whatabout, says NarwhalRedditor along with the state party apparatchik having a bad day.
There's little this guy could have written of his enemy that would disqualify him via October Surprise. If we found a much older text from 10 years ago where he referred to his constituents/neighbors as 'greedy kikes' and 'dumb niggers' that might not be recoverable. He becomes a much greater liability then, but a text the opposition sat on about them? Fat chance. If evidence arose he was soliciting prostitutes and severely beat one of them this past Summer that might disqualify him, but then we're beyond the realm of words. If there were other opportunities or further damage to party interests these could be considered. Here, where withdrawal is simply losing, much can be justified.*
I forget who, but in one of the past couple threads someone wrote about war footing language. Groups of people speaking themselves into a position where they should and must prepare for war. Politics found this neat little hack with most important election ever, End of Democracy, and many internalized it. I don't know why we should be surprised that people would be willing to forgive their allies who merely say they want to to punish their enemy with their fascist bred babies.
Everyone in this thread is acting like that is indeed what he said.
You, personally, have an assuredly principled line in the sand -- or a consideration of factors -- that allows you to move abacus beads on the appropriate exchange-pogrom language scale. I agree that this is not pogrom language. I don't think the gap is as wide on this reportedly accidental, unprompted exchanged, but my point was the accurate placement on the pogrom scale is not so important to the politics.
We The People transcended opprobrium. The Motte is not supposed to partake in the enlightenment, so in that regard you deserve kudos for working on the details. There is a lot of grievance bleeding in. Voters, not party, will get the chance to decide how much such things matter anyway. That's probably for the best or worst.
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To 'steelman', it's 'just' wishing that his opponent would feel the pain of a horrific loss to change their political positions, rather than an explicit threat.
I don't think that's any better, but I'm also aware that it's been a thing for over a decade now.
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"Coyner’s alarm at her former colleague’s violent rhetoric toward Gilbert prompted Jones to call her and explain his reasoning over the phone, a source familiar with the exchange told NR.
According to the source, the Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.
Then at one point, the source said, he suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust."
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Look, /pol/ is /pol/. Unhinged stuff gets posted there, too. But seeing something normie coded like reddit erupt into whataboutism over something as grisly as saying that little kids need to die along with their parents? Yeah, that's bad. And again, just like with Charlie Kirk, I already see a couple people in this thread downplaying it right in front of me and telling me I'm worrying over nothing. Why? What do you get out of it? Like, this is the kind of behavior I expect from revisionists when there's a thread on anything that took place in the 1940s. Did you click on WhiningCoil's Twitter link and read what Jay Jones actually said? If you did, and you are still insisting it's just over a The Office joke edit, why?
People who comment on Reddit are not a representative sample of normies. The vast majority of internet users lurk.
I'm pretty upset he was murdered. I really don't want political violence in the USA to escalatee. I like pax Americana just the way it was, thank you.
Yes, he said "Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head"
I don't think he should have said this as someone who wants public office, and I also don't find it very concerning given it's a common joke template. I have made that joke many times and I have no wish for anyone to actually die. Those texts would make me not want to vote for him, and also don't remind me of Jewish pogroms lol.
reddit's tagline is literally the front page of the internet.
It's as normie as you can get, while still being on the internet.
Reddit =/= Reddit commentators amusingly, given the stats on commenting vs lurking
The commentators are the result of consuming the kinds of content that the admins and moderators allow.
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Without directly encouraging it here, a concerted campaign by the right could probably severely undermine the (left) cultural cachet of Reddit and Bluesky purely by constantly juxtaposing the brand names with things the users endorse in words or (in)actions on such content from the moderators.
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I'm still not sure if you're actually being genuine here or not. Did you just click the first thing you saw and said "well, that's all there was to the exchange"? I asked you if you read them, and you said yes just now, and you wrote the least offensive thing in a collection of texts. I guess I have to post plaintext of what he said to verify that you are comprehending what I am trying to convey.
In response to "You were talking about hopping that jennifer Gilbert's children would die":
And yes, then The Office joke, which has a bit of a different context if you've just established you actually want to do it.
That last quote especially tells you that he hates Gilbert.
Sorry I was looking for / focusing on calls for violence specifically, I got rather anchored on the "Yes, Democrats Really Do Want You Dead" and "This is how Pogroms work."
I think the rest of his comments are in extremely poor taste, but I don't think saying gross things is comparable to inciting basically genocide. I wouldn't vote for someone who says these things, but saying "I'd piss on someone's grave" =/= "we should organize mob attacks on Republican communities".
The fact he mentioned their kids is heinous though, it's weird that if he was wishing harm/death on those children it wasn't included in the screenshots as that would be a much more salacious leak. If he was threatening children I hope he is sued, potentially disbarred(??) etc.
The claim is not that he was inciting genocide, but that a genuine desire to harm people merely for having a different political opinion is not compatible with a position of power. Especially being an Attorney General, where he would be required to serve the legal interests of all Virginians, not just those that agree with him politically.
Aside from that, there is also the issue that these statements make him a risk to the safety of government employees and politicians that he would encounter in his job. If he sees lethal violence as a solution to conflicts, then a workplace conflict could logically lead to a workplace shooting.
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You really are committed to just ignoring all the rest that he said, huh? Just constantly repeating for the people who won't read for themselves this lie by omission that all he said was a joke.
Responded to you in a different comment but fair enough. In my first read I was just looking for direct calls to violence in his texts, so gross quips about "pissing on their graves" didn't really meet the bar for "inciting violence" in my opinion.
I am concerned about his references to their children though. That is too far. Although weird that it's not included in the leak if he did say thing about them, because that would be way better leak than this is currently.
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/pol/ is not a representative sample, they are exiled and are as marginalized as can be. I am honestly tired of the attitude that internet posters are not real people. This stuff being normal to them is not meaningless. Tyler Robinson was a product of reddit mind rot after all
The internet comments you see are also not a representative sample.
Anyone who comments on the internet at all is by definition an outlier, as the vast majority of people are lurkers.
Much of what you see on Twitter is algorithmically selected to cause you to engage more, and unfortunately shit you hate and makes you upset makes you engage, so that is what you'll see.
Redditors are.... Redditors. Every single geographic (city, country, whatever) subreddit is a wildly mis-representative sample of the people in whatever geography it is nominally about.
What on earth could possibly convince you that there is a problem? An attorney general nominee (merely implicitly, I suppose) says we should kill children, to which thousands of real people shrug and say well what about the letter next to his name. That's pretty crazy. We should not frame it as if internet commenters are not real people. They may not be the most well-balanced individuals but they contribute to a prevailing narrative. Your insistence that this is not something to worry about only makes me more skeptical.
I would never vote for him after these comments. They are gross and inappropriate, but in my opinion do not meet the standard of "inciting genocide (what a pogrom is)" or "wanting all republicans dead".
If he did in fact say those children should die, he should be punished by either legal ethics standards boards, the Democratic party, the law, or all of the above.
I am suspicious about what exactly he said regarding children, given that if he said something spicy, you'd think it would have been leaked like these other texts? I am assuming whoever leaked this selected only the snippets that made him look the worst. So I am weary of conjecture here.
I respect you for conceding some points here. I am a little dissatisfied with your implication that he probably didn't say anything bad about her kids, but I understand that sometimes it takes some time to come to a conclusion.
We don't know what he didn't say, only what he did say, and since he agreed with her when she said what she did about kids, that's a pretty good indication that he said something pretty bad. The pretty bad something could have been farther in the text history and couldn't be found easily. The pretty bad something could have been something spoken vocally and not recorded. Regardless, I think there is enough to say this person should be canceled out of the political system entirely, but the condemnations I'm seeing are not particularly strong, and the comments sections are justifying him, saying that he's far better than the opposing side.
My assumption is that if he did, it would have leaked. As whoever leaked obviously wanted to damage his reputation, and that would me maximally reputation damaging. Therefore, if it existed, we'd be seeing it right now. The photos in that tweet are cropped and presented without timestamps, which is a deliberate choice. So if they're narrative shaping, why wouldn't they include it?
Fair points that it may be a follow up from a verbal conversation, but given the limited context presented to us I don't think I can jump to "he wants to hurt their kids".
Yes
This is bad and embarrassing for Dems
I've said my piece on the usefulness of internet comments. That said, republican politicians do have a shitty track record about saying fucked up shit about their out-groups, so to borrow a reddit phrase, "everyone here is the asshole".
As a concerned onlooker, I wish your country would stop flicking each other's nipples and wake the fuck up to the real issues, which are China, the coming wave of climate refuges, and the existing tidal wave of unstainable old people pensions.
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Perhaps you should read the previous comment of mine I posted about how pogroms are not the same as genocide. Not ever, not once, not in any historical context. Pogroms have very low fatality counts compared to genocide. They are not organized. They are a roiling low level amount of violence against an ethnic group that the state alternates between turning a blind eye to, giving slaps on the wrist over, and occasionally inflaming with their rhetoric and permissiveness. The goal is to get the ethnic group to be demoralized, be too fearful to participate in public life, and at best straight up leave.
Democrats are absolutely capable of that. Arguably you see it already in many Democrat run cities.
I guess I should have said "ethnic cleansing" instead of "genocide". Although frankly I kind of find the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to be a cop-out term governments use when they don't want to put boots on the ground somewhere that's looking real genocidal.
It kind of feels similar to the stupid word games of "its not racism against white people, it's just racial prejudice". Like congratulations, you (not you Whining Coil) made up a new word, you're still a massive asshole for being racially prejudiced/not intervening in the ethnic cleansing where children are being murdered.
Anyway, on pogroms, if my government was tacitly allowing low level violence against me and my people I'd feel rather genocided and would be absolutely attempting to leave immediately far away lest it get worse. Which then kind of makes it ethnic cleansing if I get the hell out of the area.
What?
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You know very well that reddit is not some vacuum where the opinions are totally meaningless. It's within the top 10 visited sites in the world. The lurkers upvote things. The lurkers don't care enough to comment, but they silently agree or disagree with things. If they really disagreed, they might post a comment themselves, like what I'm doing right now.
Are politicians representative samples? Very few people run for office, so they're outliers, right? Surely that means they don't represent anyone's real attitudes?
I'm not saying it's meaningless, I am just saying that internet commentators are not a representative sample.
In my experience as a Canadian living in Toronto, the Toronto/Ontario/Canada subreddits are all wildly out of touch with the median citizen who lives in any of those three areas. This is most evident in the sentiment towards elected officials versus their electoral results.
By some quick math I did a few years ago, /r/Toronto actually has one of the highest "# of subreddit subscribers"/"city population" ratios in the Western world, and yet literally any comment section in /r/Toronto is laughably out of touch with the views held by the median human who lives in Toronto.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I have a friend that complains that /r/AirForce is incredibly unrepresentative of the Air Force as a whole, and yet, everyone looking at reddit sees it and thinks that's what the Air Force is like. But those people coalesce from somewhere. The progressives have a pretty astounding stranglehold on the culture in a lot of places, and it's pretty scary if the sites where they're dominant start to turn violent.
I hate it, that's why I am here!
I am worried about this, just not "they're going to start rounding up red-tribers any day now" worried.
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