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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Who else up watching election results? As of the time of this writing Decision Desk has called all of:

  • The Virginia governor race in favor of Abigail Spanberger (D).

  • The Virginia lieutenant governor race in favor of Ghazala Hashmi (D and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office).

  • The Virginia Attorney General race in favor of Jay Jones (D lmao).

  • The New Jersey governor race in favor of Mickie Sherrill (D).

  • The NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani (D, projecting a majority of the vote too lmao).

  • Both statewide Georgia Public Service Commissioner races for the Democratic candidates.

Polls are still open in California so no word yet there on the redistricting ballot measure. In other Jay Jones news the house delegate who leaked his texts is on track to lose her re-election, as part of dems winning a trifecta in the Virginia government.

The county by county level results I've seen show pretty much all of the above running ahead of Harris and Spanberger even running ahead of Biden in 2020. Is this indicative of what we might see going forward? Dems had previously overperformed in special elections this year but this is the closest to a general until next years actual federal elections. If these trends hold up not a good sign for Republicans!

If these trends hold up

That "IF" is doing absurd amounts of work here.

Anyway, literally none of these outcomes was too surprising or even concerning to me. I have managed to studiously avoid caring too much about these elections since my state has mostly just been a beneficiary of other states self-immolating.

The outcome that was ALSO unsurprising but I think has some really noticeable import is the Young Female Vote*:

  • 81% for Mamdani in NYC
  • 80% for Sherrill in NJ
  • 78% for Spanberger in VA

and on the male side:

  • 64% for Mamdani in NYC
  • 54% for Sherrill in NJ
  • 56% for Spanberger in VA

*Exit polling, so the real margins might look different.

Dems can pull a basic majority with young men, but still have 40+% going republican even in a good year. But are pulling huge majorities with the young women.

So there's a sizeable gendered political gap even in blue-leaning states.

If you're a young conservative dude in any of those states, good freaking luck finding a romantic partner. For the <20% of women who might partially agree with your politics, your competition is your 'fellow' conservatives, who overall outnumber the available pool of women.

Oh and then there's the recent research that "Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies"

So in terms of 'trends,' What do you think eventually happens if young women continue voting for Democrats/lefties in droves... and have extreme intolerance for anyone who doesn't, while young men tack further right?

So in terms of 'trends,' What do you think eventually happens if young women continue voting for Democrats/lefties in droves... and have extreme intolerance for anyone who doesn't, while young men tack further right?

Complete Democrat political dominance? 80+% of women consistently voting for Democratic party candidates would be a nigh insurmountable electoral advantage.

Right.

Unless men decide they don't like that.

I've said it before, Women are a potent political force but an incompetent military/policing one.

If 60ish percent of men vote one way, and 80ish percent of women vote the other, and win, seems like a problem if the men who are in that 60% are ALSO the ones who would be tasked with carrying out/enforcing the laws they expressly disagree with.

Oh, and paying for it all too.

So here's the question I really want answered:

If less than half of the young men buy-in to the ideal of gender equality, what happens to a Democracy that tries to enforce gender equality?

WE'RE PROBABLY GONNA FIND OUT.

If 60ish percent of men vote one way, and 80ish percent of women vote the other, and win, seems like a problem if the men who are in that 60% are ALSO the ones who would be tasked with carrying out/enforcing the laws they expressly disagree with.

What are you envisioning here? Are police going to refuse to make arrests for crimes? What crimes? Prosecutors refuse to file charges? Judges going to toss cases? Are you under the impression all parts of the justice system today think every law they enforce is just? I am very skeptical that is the case.

If fewer than half of the young men buy-in to the ideal of gender equality, what happens to a Democracy that tries to enforce gender equality?

What do you think is going to happen?

What are you envisioning here? Are police going to refuse to make arrests for crimes? What crimes? Prosecutors refuse to file charges? Judges going to toss cases? Are you under the impression all parts of the justice system today think every law they enforce is just? I am very skeptical that is the case.

Depends. If the issue is most prevalent on a state-by-state basis, I think we see Police quit and move to more favorable jurisdictions., which worsens the crime issues in the Blue areas, which either 'forces' a political correction, or it spirals into decay a la Detroit.

Likewise, why, do you suppose, did Military recruitment surge in 2025 after literally hitting an all-time-low in 2022 under Biden?

Guys choosing to simply not join military/police forces would be enough to undermine a government's legitimacy in a given territory.

What do you think is going to happen?

I think we see a political figure arise who notices and exploits the disconnect between the political priorities of the government and the actual political grievances expressed by a majority of men.

I think we should be very hopeful that its J.D. Vance or a guy like him. Vance clearly NOTICES the issue, and he's good at credibly establishing himself as "one of the guys."

Whether Vance will exploit this to the hilt remains to be seen.

But someone will.

I also think that an economic contraction will re-assert some 'reality' to the discourse, should it occur. We had a long era of economic growth post the 2008 crash and the Zero-Interest-Rate era. Plus the Covid Hiring boom.

lotta people getting laid off from cushy jobs, in many cases maybe the only real career-type jobs they've ever held. Women might finally, F-I-N-A-L-L-Y be required to either suffer from economic destitution or make some concessions to men to obtain the support of a good one.

If they can't marry a corporation who will take care of all their needs, and the Federal Government, for once, isn't bending over backwards to accommodate their complaints, well, the default fallback is probably either prostitution or marriage. And there's already a lot of prostitutes.

I do personally expect things to get worse before they get better.

Without @HereAndGone's snarkiness: why do so many of you salivate at the thought of women being forced to sexually service someone they don't want in order to eat? Yes, this was the norm in earlier ages. Those ages sucked a lot for almost everyone, given that the average person lived a precarious existence at best.

To desire a return to the sort of civilization in which you can get a woman because her survival literally depends on you does not seem to me like a normal, healthy thing to desire in a society with abundance enough that most people shouldn't have to consider starvation or enslavement a realistic possibility.

Even if this worked, would you not always be living with that gnawing awareness that she's only with you out of necessity? That you're literally just the next best thing to starvation?

It seems to me to not only be a spiteful and misogynistic attitude, but one utterly lacking in self respect.

Consider it this way: when the Chinese government banned cram schools, one might think they were attacking a deeply beloved institution. People paid huge amounts of money to the cram schools, kids spent huge amounts of their time there. Surely they would be really upset at having them taken away?

But no, of course not. Everyone hated and resented the cram schools. They existed because of a specific set of incentives that were unchangeable from the inside, and that could only be changed by a large-scale coercion.

I can’t speak for the Dread Jim etc. because I don’t follow them, but IMO the point is that men and women more naturally form loving bonds when a) they are paired together, and b) their interests are broadly aligned.

Modern society has broken both of these conditions, in an attempt to solve the problems that arose in cases when the previous system went wrong. By allowing women to work in the same paying jobs as men, and by providing unconditional support, it deliberately ensured that women didn’t require a man to take care of herself. A noble goal to be sure, but the result is that the natural fear of opportunity costs, generalised fear and distrust of men, (and, yes, a certain hypergamous tendency) combine to ensure lots of women don’t end up paired. (The same dynamics apply on the male side to but I think to a lesser degree).

Likewise, we have worked hard to ensure that even when married, a woman’s interests are kept separate from her husband’s, in order to avoid genuinely nasty abuses that occurred under the previous system. Women now retain their property when married, they usually retain their jobs, and they can decouple with minimal difficulty. This means that even during marriage, a woman often has one eye on being ready for an exit and her own private interests often conflict with the interests of her husband and family.

IMO the goal is lots of loving, happy relationships. (With, yes, an inevitable long tail of grudging-but-functional relationships and some pretty nasty ones). This benefits a big fraction men very clearly, because the current system is straightforwardly inimical to them; it’s hard to say whether it benefits women because they will gain certain things and lose certain things and probably different groups of women will benefit. I would like to think that the averaged outcome for women would be better, but even if it is mildly negative, ultimately the end effect will be positive when averaged across the sexes.

The mistake is thinking that modern society broke men and women on a simple whim that could be reversed just as simply with a lil' bit of political will. In reality, we have had techno-economical changes that first uplifted many men and women from farming/peasantry to urban work, offshored a lot of labor that required raw physical strength to machinery, and interlinked industry in such a way that people no longer rely mostly on themselves and a few local craftsmen to produce all they need in life.

Meaning, the attempts to blindly RETVRN are not aligning the interests of men and women because regressing to the farmer economy is not really in most people's interest. Also, the men that are most interested in upending the status quo are, it seems, not really the kind of men who were capable of forming "grudging-but-functional relationships" before, let alone loving ones.

The way for west-of-Hajnal societies, I think, is nowhere but forward. Or, we can break down our factories, go back to villages and sit there waiting for the ever-dreaded Muslims, who have got a lot more experience in that kind of life, to overrun us.

Contra ergw and the rest, I do not believe most true incels are so productive that they must be appeased with government-issued wives or society collapses. It should be sufficient to let the incels have their AIfus, the femcels their serial killer LLMen, erect some basic fucking standards so that the eligible men don't poach the femcels too much and use technology to connect pair-bondable men to pair-bondable women for once. Instead of whatever it is the dating apps are doing.

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