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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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If the collar was an "air tag" as Hasan is claiming, his response is still pretty bad - his dog got up, he began yelling at her, she injured herself and yelped, and instead of checking on her/making sure she was okay, he continued to yell/complain about her. The response to a dog yelping in pain is not to yell at it, especially if the pain was not anticipated to occur.

From a culture war perspective, the defense of "I didn't do X bad thing, I only did Y bad thing! Take that!!!" is wild to parse as a strategy in real time - a shock collar is horrible, but so is what Hasan is claiming he actually did in the moment, and no one seems willing to comment on the behavior of the latter just because that type of abusive behavior is less bad than the shock collar.

The response to a dog yelping in pain is not to yell at it, especially if the pain was not anticipated to occur.

Agreed. Presuming that my 50%+ guess is incorrect and it is either a vibration collar or just a regular collar, his response to what appears to be a moment of distress by his dog is still absolutely horrid behavior. However, I wouldn't condemn him for just one clip of him losing his cool like that; even someone with stupid and vile opinions who has actively harmed US society like him deserves grace for one momentary lapse of that sort. Given how he likely has hundreds (thousands?) of hours of video of him and his dog, finding a single instance of something like this shouldn't be enough to condemn him as a piece of shit.

a shock collar is horrible, but so is what Hasan is claiming he actually did in the moment, and no one seems willing to comment on the behavior of the latter just because that type of abusive behavior is less bad than the shock collar.

I think you're mistaken. No one seems willing to comment on the behavior of the latter because the people who want to remain skeptical given the lack of damning evidence are mostly people who are motivated not to condemn Hasan for anything in the first place, no matter what he does; he could film himself ordering a shock collar from Amazon, unwrapping it, putting it on his dog, and zapping it indiscriminately, and a significant number of these people would figure out why the dog deserved it. And the people who would condemn him for the lesser type of abusive behavior are mostly people who are motivated to jump to conclusions to condemn Hasan with the flimsiest of evidence, so they've already decided that he's guilty of shocking his dog. The exceptions in either group are likely vanishingly small.