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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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It would seem that this weekend, there was a fire at the house of one Diane Goodstein, a judge who Trump does not like. Reddit being Reddit, they immediately assumed the fire was arson and accused the right wing of violence; the linked story made the front page of Reddit. However, the investigation so far shows no evidence of arson: “At this time, there is no evidence to indicate the fire was intentionally set. SLED agents have preliminarily found there is no evidence to support a pre-fire explosion.

Point being, the radical left (i.e. Reddit) will say lie after lie after lie how how Charlie Kirk’s killer couldn’t have possibly done it because of his left-wing beliefs, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points that way, then they will turn around and accuse the right of right wing violence without any real evidence to back up their claims.

The truth matters. Objective fact matters. I have decried it when the radical right was telling lies, and will decry it as long as the radical left tells themselves lies.

I'd be hard pressed to think that any people who regularly post in dedicated political spaces aren't engaged in pure conflict theory especially when its a place like Reddit which is naturally and unnaturally designed to hide all pushback (mods controlling topics, downvotes hiding the wrong opinions). This is a culture war, and they believe their way of life is at stake at the very least. Of course they lie, that would be my default assumption given the low-quality and high incentives of most places that discuss politics. To me this is just a day that ends in y comment.

I mean Reddit is going to be more politically slanted than anything on /pol/ just because what they want the narrative to be is controlled by upvotes, downvotes, bots, and mods. And on 4chan mods or janitors might fuck with things or try to but pretty much half the posts in /pol/ at any given time are people trolling because its designed to be unpreventable and when they do try to prevent discussion of a topic it goes poorly (gamergate). Reddit just chugs along, lets get every single subreddit to ban twitter - done. No problem even if the majority of users didn't care or want that, just chugs along.

At this point continuing to concern yourself with that is just outrage masturbation. You linked to politics, politics, unfiltered news, and bluesky skeets. Politics I know is the most left leaning place I can possibly imagine and the others are probably worse. Pointing out moments when /r/politics lies for their own narrative is like shooting fish in a barrel overfilled with fish. Even the most reddit-pilled reddit user will shrug off the denizens of /r/politics with being arguments-as-soldiers liars as par for the course. And I'm sure those other subreddits hold about as much political water for being balanced as the_donald or kotakuinaction does.

I do think there's something to be said about Reddit only holding stigma with enemies of it. A "normie" will not really care if you said you read something on Reddit, but if you said the same thing and gave the same information and said you got it from 4chan or Twitter you'd be a racist, even if only slightly, and if you said it was from Facebook you'd be doling out misinformation or at the least boomer-tier out-of-touchness. Reddit might be, at a glance, easily seen as dominated and controlled by the left but it doesn't carry a stigma which I imagine is exceedingly useful in wagging the dog which I expect is the intention with conflict theory throwing-shit-at-the-wall-and-hoping-it-sticks way tallying of evil to preemptively win or bury an argument.

I do think this is why Elon is more hated than Trump in my opinion because he stole Twitter from the left which was used in the exact same way that Reddit is used. Stigma-free narrative control. Bluesky doesn't have that, even if Twitter/X is now racist, Bluesky is not just what normal people think about a subject in the way that twitter was presented before the buyout or Reddit is bundled and sold as now. (Reddit does have to be bundled but the bundling does work).

Anyways. Ever since I stopped going to Reddit because I was tired with the political discussions filling every single subreddit, regardless of what the content was supposed to be, I've been much better off and I think you should probably try to ignore it, too.