This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Sir, there's been four new Nazi/Hitler/antisemitic issues in the conservative community in just the past day
Following the recent Politico expose on the Young Republicans groupchat leak among mid 20s-30s leaders of the organization containing comments about gas chambering their political opponents and antisemitic remarks like this
In the followup to this, yes you heard it right, at least four new antisemitic and/or Nazi controversies in the past day or so.
A flag with a swatiska embedded in it was spotted in the office of Representative Dave Taylor. Rep. Taylor has called it out and condemned it, and it's quite possible he never noticed it before himself but it does seem to be another sign of the embedded antisemitic and pro nazi rhetoric in lower level staffers if one of them put it up.
Additionally, the Border Patrol posted a video on an Instagram containing an antisemitic slur. While the higher ups of the border patrol likely don't have much to do with what gets posted on the social media, it's again another bad sign that the lower levels who coordinate posts and approve them are antisemitic. Someone had to specifically pick that particular verse of that particular version of that particular song, they knew what they were posting and whatever approval process they use, the others would have heard the lyrics and yet signed on.
The third controversy is the most explicit of them all. Myron Gaines, host of the Fresh and Fit podcast (1.58 million subscribers on YouTube alone) posted
Now, I never would have imagine that the word woke includes "thinking the Holocaust is real and Hitler is bad", but that seems to be where we are at now. Gaines is also a former employee of the DHS, which is just another point of evidence of low level gop aligned staffers having pro Nazi/antisemitic views.
But in fact, all of this seems to be par for the course, according to Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab. who also wades into the ring of antisemitic Holocaust denialism with comments like
That's right, at least two major conservative names have directly engaged in unashamed pro Nazi/Holocaust denialism/etc rhetoric in response to the group chat leak and both of them strongly believe that many other high level conservatives agree with them (Myron's use of "We like Hitler and Torba saying it's normal).
As Richard Hanania (Writer of "The Origins of Woke" who has been in many conservative spaces before) explained months before the leak, this is actually pretty common. As he's said before, the two types of comments he tends to get "it can't be that bad" and "lol that's exactly what it's like" such as this agreement from National Review reporter James Lynch
What's interesting is that the one thing both the Nazi denouncers (Hanania/Lynch/etc) and Nazi defenders (Myron/Torba/etc) here both seem to agree on, is that this is common among the young right. There seems to be a broad consensus that this gropyer antisemitic Nazism is growing among conservatives, especially young ones. We've seen this with Kanye and his descent into Nazism, we've seen this with John Reid and Mike Robinson both exposed over their Nazi fetish. We've seen this with Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper. The rapid growth of figures like Nick "six million cookies" Fuentes, Ian Carroll and Theo Von. In fact a neo Nazi inspired kid was even behind a recent school shooting in Colorado a few months ago
EW Erickson says https://x.com/EWErickson/status/1978812093773041964
Ben Shapiro says that unity with radicals will destroy the right wing as it pushes moderate Americans away.
Right wing conservative libertarian speaker Phil Magness says
So with all this recent controversy, how big of a Nazi problem is actually festering, and why do the Nazis seem to feel so comfortable in modern conservativism? They even seem to be dropping hints at the highest levels if the border patrol video was intended as a dog whistle to be dropped before deleting. Is this growing widespread agreement (from Hanania to Torba) that this is just the tip of the iceberg among young conservatives accurate? Will this growing trend of Nazi radicalism destroy the Republicans chances among moderates in the future like embracing left wing radicalism hurt Biden? And how do the non Nazi conservatives and moderates balance fighting off Nazi accusations from the left also working to stem this apparant rise of unashamed nazism and Holocaust denialism?
What else does the mainstream left have then the nazi-scare? Free medical care, cheap housing and no more forever wars are popular policies with the base but the elite veto these policies. Trans ideology is losing steam and winning 50+% of votes on trans issues and BLM isn't going to work. What are they going to run on? Free trade fundamentalism, open borders migration and increased deficit spending? The only other issue that they really could run on is a repeat of the inflation reduction act. However, this would require massive deficit spending.
The democrats have Trump = Putin and Trump = Hitler. Other than that they have few policies of their own that they could actually win on.
One argument many moderate conservatives are making is exactly this, the rise of Nazism is literally feeding left wing discourse a valuable weapon. When figures like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Myron Gaines, etc openly deny the holocaust and spread hateful neonazi conspiracy theories, they push away the normies and validate calling the right Nazis.
In politics you don't outrun the bear, you outrun the other party. The Dems made themselves too caustic, the pendelum swung too far. While they seek to moderate their image now, the growth of unashamed open air nazism by high level conservative figures is a great way to make the exact same mistake.
To give the other side of the coin it’s due, Nick Fuentes and Myron Gaines are not super influential outside of far far right politics. Tucker is still sorta mainstream, though he’s not really on public airwaves or mainstream cable. And as I keep pointing out, as far as I can tell, a vanishingly small near lizard man constant levels of conservatives have any serious support for Nazi/Neonazi ideas. It’s simply not mainstream in conservative circles in any real sense, and only helps the left to constantly denounce Nazis as if they’re a major faction in conservative politics. Constant denunciations of nazism are a win for liberals because it feeds the impression that the left wants to create that the right is crawling with Nazis and therefore dangerous.
If a guy is constantly starting every conversation saying “I hate child molesters”, it doesn’t actually create the impression that he’s actually against child molesters. Instead, it causes normies to ask “why is it that this guy is always talking about child molesters?” And a good portion of the people noticing that will come away thinking that he must either be a child molester or be protecting one because most people do not go around denouncing things everyone else hates. I don’t want anything to do with child molesters. But im not bringing it up because I have nothing to do with child molesters.
It's not so much about whether Nazi ideas are held by a significant number of Republicans/conservatives, but whether there is a popular perception that they are. A lot of people on here seem to think that the Democratic Party is hostile to men, or white men, or whatever. It's a reasonable conclusion to come to if you listen to certain voices that are amplified by people looking to influence your opinion, but if you take an objective look at the party itself, it's absurd. The party chairman is a white guy. The most recent president was a white guy. All across the country, at all levels of government, there are white guys in elected positions as Democrats, and there are plenty more who were nominated by the party and lost.
In 2022, when Pat Toomey's seat opened up, there were four options for the Democrats. Val Arkoosh was a doctor who showed some early promise but withdrew before the primaries. Malcolm Kenyatta was a black, gay, state legislator from Philadelphia who was able to wrangle some early endorsements and seemed like the favorite son of the party. But when Conor Lamb entered the race, practically everyone who mattered in the party threw their support behind him, aside from the state party and Governor Wolf, both of whom declined to endorse any candidate. Lamb is about as sterotypical upper middle class white guy as it gets. Hell, just being an attorney from Mt. Lebanon signals as much to anyone from Pittsburgh. Lamb eventually lost the nomination, though, to a non-stereotypical white guy with a higher public profile.
These do not come off as the actions of a party that is hostile to white men. But there's a perception nonetheless that it is, and there's certainly a brand of lefty that is hostile to white men, and, as I've been saying for years, the influence of this kind of person among normie Democrats is wildly overstated by people trying to portray the party as a caricature for political purposes. And it's a problem for Democrats, and while I won't go as far as saying that it has cost them elections, it is certainly plausible to think so. If people get the impression that the Republican Party is insufficiently condemnatory of white nationalists, or Nazi sympathizers, or people who make racist jokes in private, or whoever, then it could come back to bite them in the ass regardless of whether these people make up a significant number of registered voters or elected officials.
This is why people like Stefniak are quick to condemn these people and call for their resignations. If you recall Stefniak was gunning for a UN Ambassadorship, only to have her nomination pulled by Trump. She's in a nominally safe seat, but Trump had recently had to travel to Florida to after the seat vacated by Mike Walz was in danger of being lost to a Democrat, a seat Walz had carried by 30 points. the GOP underperforms when Trump isn't on the ballot, and if Trump's popularity declines it could spell trouble in 2026. Probably not enough trouble for Stefniak to lose her seat, but an opponent being able to roast her for ignoring people from her district in party-affiliated offices making these kinds of remarks in a semi-official forum then it could be enough to tip things over the edge. It's at least enough of a concern that Trump was unwilling to risk a special election.
People called Mitt Romney fascist. When Mitt Romney attempted the beloved progressive policy of affirmative action, he was called sexist instead. The game is rigged and the principles don't matter.
Broad hostility is not actually contradictory to the affected group continuing to have high-level positions, especially when those positions go to people that have been, ha ha, grandfathered in. I think the hostility was actually quite useful to Biden's win, since he became the only candidate with name recognition that wasn't an Official Group, and as such he becomes the default since he is entirely forbidden from campaigning for and on his identity.
There's also the slim and fractured line between malice and indifference. The Democratic Party, and liberal-progressives writ generally, are not necessarily hostile to white men, though they have a lot of constituents who are, and they do not disabuse those constituents like they do for hostility towards other groups- remember that Biden was forced to apologize to a murderer. It is, in my opinion, utterly undeniable that the Democratic Party and liberal-progressives have a deep unconscious indifference to white men, that can often be taken for hostility in comparison to the endless praise and generosity to every other demographic.
This laundry list from the Green New Deal has long stuck with me for its thoroughness of such callouts:
Some of those groups do, indeed, include white men. But 'white men' is virtually the only group not outright named!
Who called Romney a fascist? The only example I can find is a comment made around the time of the Democratic convention by a delegate from Kansas, but I'd bet you couldn't name him without looking. Maybe you can find something I can't, but I've done a bit of looking and I can't find any contemporaneous sources describing him as such. The "binders full of women" comment is a different kettle of fish entirely, largely because he embellished the story. He didn't go out and look for female appointees and compile a binder; it was handed to him by MassGAP, a bipartisan advocacy group. The further criticism was that he spent 25 years in business and evidently didn't know any qualified women.
As for the rest of your comment, the glib thing to say would be that Democrats are indifferent to white men while Republicans are indifferent to everyone else, but that would be overly reductive. In another post I made today about jury instructions I say that:
The rest of the post gives some additional context, but the upshot is that lawyers need to put themselves in the shoes of the people who will actually be acting on the jury instructions rather than automatically assume that since they make sense to them they'll make sense to anyone. And this is true for most of the legal system; if you have a system created and run by lawyers and judges you have a system that works great for lawyers and judges, even though when the system fails it ultimately isn't lawyers and judges who have to deal with the consequences. Any number of legal reforms over the years were met with stiff resistance from within the legal community along the lines of "that won't work because this is the way we've always done it and it simply can't be done any other way. This is true even for things that seem blindingly obvious in retrospect. In 1843 there was a murder at Yale University. A young man was charged with the crime, posted bond, then returned home to Pennsylvania, at which point the Connecticut prosecutors closed the case. In the view of the lawyers involved in the case, this was an appropriate resolution. That’s the way things were done. A bond is posted to ensure that the defendant appears at trial. If the defendant doesn’t appear for trial, he forfeits the bond, and the books are closed. It has to be done that way, the lawyers argued. Otherwise, what is the point of posting bond? The press had a different take. As the press saw it, the failure to prosecute the murderer because the murderer was wealthy enough to forfeit the bond was an outrage. The lawyers thought that the reaction of the press was ignorant. These people just didn’t understand the process. The press brought to it a different perspective—and the press was right, and the press won. The practice of abandoning warrants when a defendant posted bond and fled the jurisdiction was gradually curtailed.
What we've had in America, historically, is a system that works well for white men and varying degrees of less well for everyone else. And while it hasn't worked well for all white men, as a group white men have been in the best position. You can mock the Green New Deal statement, and I'm generally not a fan of this kind of posturing but it at least makes sense. It doesn't name white men, but every group named has a counterpart, and alleging indifference to the counterparts ranges from cringe-inducing to ridiculous:
The whole point is that some people in the US are in a worse position than the should be as a result of policies that were designed with indifference to them but which worked well for certain majorities, and that it is more just to change those policies so that we have a system that works equally well for everybody. One of the more recent frontiers in legal reform is getting rid of the plea bargain system. There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I'm not necessarily in favor of the idea, but one of the worst arguments against it is that it isn't feasible because there's no way we could have that many trials. Complaining about alleged Democratic indifference to white men is like arguing that the plea bargaining system is necessary because it's easier for the lawyers and judges.
Are you pretending to not know what sort of channels in the Democratic coalition would, or are you pretending that the Democratic party and their allies have not been leveraging fascist / nazi themes into political attacks on Republicans for over half a century?
A two-word search of 'Romney fascist' can find this NPR story from the 2011 election cycle whose opening paragraph is-
Is this a direct accusation of fascist? No. However, a deflection to that would be willfully ignoring that raising the subject of the fascist preacher in this format is a indirect accusation via presenting the association in the first place, with the purpose of the insinuation being to encourage the perception and linkage of Romney and fascism. In a public media format where irrelevant information is excluded for reasons of space format, the fascism is a critically relevant
That Romeny was also running at the time in part on the merit of his religious morals, and the fascist raised by the NPR article is identified as preacher when [fascist] would have worked just as well as the noun as opposed to the adjective, is an additional form of the accusation-by-insinuation. The not-subtle subtext- but not direct accusation- to the audience is that the preacher's religious nature is relevant and provides another parallel to Romney, i.e. like to like that, which serves to reinforces the fascist linkage.
This and the Maher article were not the only format in which Nazi themes was raised against the Romney campaign, as media covered at the time. 'I didn't directly call them Nazis, I just referenced Nazis while condemning them, and I'm sorry if they take offense to that' is, again, a form of calling someone a Nazi. So is the earlier accusation-by-analogizing of Romeny aides or supporters- 'I wasn't accusing Romney of being a Nazi, I was just comparing the people Romney chooses to surround himself with the fascists who were Nazis.'
What a presenter choose to raise in the context of a denunciation is the context of the denunciation. Democratic politicians, partisans, and partners in the media were calling Romney a fascist, even if they were doing it indirectly and passive-aggressively. An indirect accusation is still an accusation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, this fits exactly with my beliefs on the matter. It was Darwin (who is likely OP) who clarified the matter for me. It was a post long ago, and he was being grilled about why his extremely progressive beliefs didn't compel him to offer his own well-paying job to an equally deserving woman or minority. And his response was annoyed bewilderment that these autistic nerds kept trying to actually apply the ideology consistently. Didn't they understand that it was just a manipulation? You're not supposed to actually suffer for it, you're supposed to make rivals suffer for it. Joe Biden doesn't give a fuck about black people, he's just shameless enough to use them as a weapon against Mitt Romney.
White Democrat men are like the pick-mes of the Democrat Party. They talk the talk specifically to sabotage other white guys and surround themselves with less competent identity people who are less of a threat to their striving and status.
No, it totally does. They are very open about
projectingbelieving that everyone else is super, super racist, and will never vote for or support non-whites. Kamala Harris literally just said that this exact logic was why she passed over her preferred VP pick!Nah, we've had this argument and it isn't plausible. 90%+ of Democrat politicians and leaders are openly misandrist (even if they are male themselves). There's a tiny handful of influencers trying to triangulate their way around that, timidly suggesting that maybe more Gen Z men would support Dems if the Dems spent less time actively shitting on them, and those influencers were themselves mean girls ganged into submission.
More options
Context Copy link
I can’t imagine massive denunciations of far left woke ideology is going to fix that either tbh. The wings have sucked the oxygen out of real politics and has nothing to do with political power. They also generally don’t drive policy. They’re not important except in managing the banding of the party.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link