site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As most know, there has been a media battle within the Con Inc ecology. I want to go over some of those developments. If you know the lore you can skip the story so far.

Story so far

On October 27 Tucker Carlson did an interview with Nick Fuentes on The Tucker Carlson show. Sitting at a comfortable 6 million views, it’s one of his most viewed videos. Following that interview, jewish ethnonationalists like Ben Shapiro and Jonathan Greenblatt made the rounds condemning and calling for disavowals. But condemning and disavowing Tucker Carlson is easier said than done.

When the Heritage Foundation released their condemnation video, they distinctly claused out Tucker from their criticism. This, for jewish ethnonationalists, was outrageous. Eliciting remarks from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Ted Cruz, and other jewish ethnonationalist stooges. Tucker needed to be firmly disavowed, and Fuentes was not to be talked to or debated, but ostracized and ‘canceled’. Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, went back like a beaten dog and put up a second apology video saying as much. Still, it was not enough and condemnation articles, calls to resign and protest resignations rained in.

Despite all this chaos, Roberts kept his presidency, Tucker remained unfazed, and Fuentes was only emboldened by the attention. releasing an hour long monolog on the alleged overbearing fact of jewish ethnonationalist influence in American politics and his position on the modern JQ. The jewish ethnonationalist front had to hit back somehow.

Enter Chuck Schumer, proposing a senate resolution to condemn Nick Fuentes and the platforming of him by Tucker Carlson.

Whilst Fuentes is only emboldened by such attention, it might be different for Carlson. It is, after all, harder for a man of credibility and standing like him to shrug off an official disavowal like that. Though it could not have come from a better direction as far as a right winger is concerned, it is still bad.

The Carlson Rebellion

Missing from the firestorm of outrage and shock from the Fuentes Carlson interview is the simple question of... What exactly is Tucker Carlson doing here? Unlike Fuentes, who lives for this type of spectacle, Tucker is, one can imagine, an actual person with connections and things to lose. So why?

In a recent episode Tucker laid out his answer to the Fuentes Question. Young mostly white men are flocking to the extremes, both left but mostly right, because America sucks. Everything from the housing market, job market, education, media, domestic and foreign policy. It's all anti-white. It's all anti-male. What exactly does anyone expect young white men to do? What confident identity is even available to young white men?

To that extent one can sense Tuckers ire towards the establishment and those who shill for it. How is it possible to allow things to go on like this? To ignore it? Telling young white men to be individual whilst every other group is forming coalitions to outcompete them is suicidal and stupid. Why can't we tell them something else? Something they actually want to listen to. Well, that might lead to another holocaust in the minds of paranoid jews so, no, we can't. Young white men just have to die alone and abused.

Say what you want about Fuentes, but Tucker, at the very least, has a proposition that is open to compromise with the ethnonationalist jews on the right: This individualist free market zionism stuff isn't working anymore. Things, as they currently are, have to change. And if the only response to that reality is calling everyone an anti-semite or a nazi then what is even the point of this?

If Chuck Schumer's resolution passes it would be the first time in US Senate history of such a condemnation of a private citizen for political views.

Young mostly white men are flocking to the extremes, both left but mostly right, because America sucks. Everything from the housing market, job market, education, media, domestic and foreign policy. It's all anti-white. It's all anti-male. What exactly does anyone expect young white men to do? What confident identity is even available to young white men?

The foremost appeal is the force of truth. If you watch Nick's monologue, his criticisms are true. They are rational arguments, and they are anti-fragile in the sense the backlash they provoke strengthens their currency. It's not just due to the housing market, job market, anti-white Culture. It's due to the very real cultural criticism of Jews that Nick gives which nobody else has been willing to say. Jews themselves incessantly criticize White culture and identity through all mediums and institutions they control. And then they become apoplectic when a White man fires back with truthful criticism of Jewish identity and culture.

One thing I have never seen from any of the Jews weighing in on the Tuckercaust is an acknowledgement of the arguments Fuentes is making. They grasp for some other explanation for Fuentes' popularity, but they never restate the arguments Nick makes in that monologue for example and engage them. They simply pathologize the individuals who are being influenced by these arguments. It's why Shapiro would never debate Fuentes. If Fuentes laid out his argument as clearly as he does in this monologue, what would Shapiro even say?

The only path forward would be for Jews to acknowledge the truth of Fuentes' arguments and make genuine efforts to reconcile. They are incapable of that, which is why cancellation and pathologizing the "anti-semites" is their only reaction to this Cultural Criticism going mainstream and it's not going to work.

My guy, can you tell me what it is about the Jews?

I've never been able to figure this out. Take the mask off a bit and tell me why them.

You had me nodding along and then it is abruptly about Jews and I check out.

Yes Jews are in the pile that is causing these problems but they are a rounding error in comparison with say, HR dog moms, or X actual ethnic/racial demographic that supports the spoils system instead.

Did a Jew bully you in school, get your dad fired, close your favorite restaurant?

I don't know where this stuff comes from and I earnestly want to.

White anti-black racism has a straight line from perceived degradation of communities to the feeling, accurate or not.

I don't know where anti-semitism comes from.

Besides religion? Besides nationalism?

A lot of the things people say about the Jews are said about other groups. Ilhan Omar gets the same charge of dual loyalty, with the same basis.

Complaints about white overrepresentation and privilege? Certain applicable to Jews. In hindsight it was sort of hubristic to expect that the young, especially Third Worlders who have ethnic and religious reasons to resent Jews, were going to just buy into the doublethink that "muh culture of education" would allow an exemption from the usual critiques of wypipo.

The difference is that Jews are disproportionately successful and the antisemitism taboo is great at shutting these complaints down, which apparently makes it worse.

I'm not the guy you responded to, but the most enlightening explanation I've heard given of right-wing antisemitism is given in this substack article (sorry for the long text-dump, but I think it's very informative)

Anyway, perhaps we should get on with it. The first characteristic of the Far-Right mind is the desire for anthropomorphic theories of socioeconomic reality. What I mean by that is the need to fit the data of reality into a shape that makes sense in terms of a consciously conceived plan to move that reality in a particular direction.

This mindset is commonly given the term ‘conspiracy theorist’, but, on the whole, I think that is usually too generous. A conspiracy theory involves an attempt to tell a story in which the various pieces of data fit into place. Doing so inevitably leads to spiralling layers of complication in which anomalous information can only be accommodated at the cost of creating yet more anomalous data points that can’t be made to fit. Hence this meme:

The typical Rightoid doesn’t bother with any of that. What he does instead is notice some apparently contradictory information, then use innuendo and rhetorical questions to assert that this can only be explained by they planning it. He believes not in conspiracy ‘theories’, but conspiracy deities, shapelessly malleable and borderline omnipotent entities whose mere existence is enough, by their own terms of definition, to explain any kink in the matrix you might observe (and, Heaven knows, the matrix is kinky enough you can do this all day).

To this day, a good portion of my friends are Rightoids. Most of them are good people, and none of them are wholly devoid of positive qualities. The need to anthropomorphise complex social structures exists in them to various degrees of extremity, a product of how frequently they indulge it, but, in all cases, is central to their entire engagement with politics. What I learned after many years is that it’s an act of pure self-harm to try and argue them out of this. You can sit with them, as patiently as you can, for literally hours on end, forcing them to stop changing the subject and actually explain how the different parts of their ‘theory’ fit together, to verbalise each step and watch as it dissolves into undeniable incoherence, and then later the same week they’ll be back with the exact same thing. This is how they want to be. Some people like crackers, and some people like crack. No point in getting aggravated about it (another thing I wish I could go back 10 years and point out to myself).

To recap, the essential quality of the Far Right mind is the desire to explain the world around him in terms of the plan of a conscious intelligence. You therefore need a they; this is the whole point. Once we understand this, it’s pretty obvious why antisemitism exerts this queer magnetic attraction to all who enter the walls of the Far-Right asylum. If you have already decided that someone is behind the curtain driving everything going wrong around you, then who else it is supposed to be? The Yoruba? Inuits? The Jews are an obvious candidate not just because they are genuinely a big deal, but also because there is 150 years of antisemitic literature that you can read explaining how Jews do it and a small army of salesman eager to initiate you into their pyramid scheme. For years, I couldn’t understand why almost any dissident Right article on practically any subject would have at least one comment beneath with a fresh insight like ‘why do they call it the Cathedral, more like the SYNAGOGUE if you ask me!!!!’, but, when you think about it, it’s just good marketing. There’s always someone new who took a fistful of red pills and is looking for the next dose.

You can sit with them, as patiently as you can, for literally hours on end, forcing them to stop changing the subject and actually explain how the different parts of their ‘theory’ fit together, to verbalise each step and watch as it dissolves into undeniable incoherence, and then later the same week they’ll be back with the exact same thing.

Yes. This is why I go so hard on our Joo-posters. Because they do this every damn time. Doesn't matter how calmly and politely you ask them to explain why it's always Da Joos. They'll give you an eliiptical theory of Jewness that doesn't hold together, cobbled together bits of Holocaust apocrypha, and when someone bothers to patiently disassemble it, they curl their upper lip, go silent, and then come back in a couple of weeks repeating the same thing.

It's worth noting that 'not being an antisemite' is a historical anomaly. I'm not saying anything for or against the Jews here, just that there's clearly a lot of people they rub the wrong way.

This is a good point, but the things pointed out right now (like overrepresentation in Hollywood and Journalism) ...those are new? What the fuck were they doing other than not being Christian before? Or is it just that they survived when the Druids got wiped out or whatever.

Medieval antisemitism included a number of tropes, some of them straight up falsehood('blood libel' literally was invented to describe the claim that the Jewish religion runs on the human sacrifice of Christian children) and some of them more or less true(Jews really did lend money at high interest rates, really were the main conduit for the trade in slaves out of the Christian world and into the Muslim one, etc).

Islamic antisemitism stems from, among other things, their end times prophecy.

really were the main conduit for the trade in slaves out of the Christian world and into the Muslim one, etc)

Wait, really? I've never heard that one. Kind of awkward if so.

What the fuck were they doing other than not being Christian before? Or is it just that they survived when the Druids got wiped out or whatever.

They're not just any tribe that refused to convert. They're the tribe(s). They had the books first. Both Christians and Muslims appeal to the antiquity of Jewish religion to justify theirs (Muslims claim that Allah sends a prophet to all people and yet most all of the "canon" examples cited in the Qur'an are Jewish or draw from Jewish myth)

If you truly are God's chosen prophet/Messiah and you were spoken of in past Scriptures, why do the people who've held those scriptures for centuries reject you? The gentiles will ask.

It's simply a theological and political problem that requires an answer and the easiest answer is to discredit and attack the Jews themselves. As they themselves did to their less monotheistic/faithful brethren.

It's actually "not being a religious bigot" that's a historical anomaly. Europeans were not historically more tolerant of Muslims or pagans or Hindus, etc. The reason antisemitism happened more is because there were more Jews around, not because Jews "did" something to make themselves more unlikeable.

Not to mention all the wars between Catholics and Protestants.

Which remember, only really ended in 1999.

When Jeremy Corbyn (previous head of the UK Labour party and genuinely very antisemitic) was elected as head of the party, I was slightly taken aback to see literally 1/3 to 1/2 of my usual columnists writing articles starting with some variant of "As a Jew, I am horrified to see Jeremy Corbyn...". That's a literal 'literally'. In a country with <1% Jewish people. Later I discovered that it's the same in publishing, and also in finance.

There is also the famous 'white people rule the world' left-wing meme complaining how almost all top CEOs, media people, politicians etc. are white, and then the far-Right got hold of it and pointed out that almost all of those are Jewish and if anything gentile whites are underrepresented.

TLDR: The combination of 'huge Jewish over-representation at the top of most key areas' and 'you will be destroyed if you notice or discuss that over-representation' makes people distrustful. The fact that white people are hounded for far smaller discrepancies makes people resentful.

I don't think Corbyn is antisemitic. I think he's just simple-minded enough to believe the narrative "Hamas are freedom fighters, therefore they are good" and isn't capable of reasoning about it more deeply (not that I think this is a good reason to support Hamas, but that's another topic). It's the same way he was probably exposed to the idea that capitalism is bad because of inequality or something when he was a teenager and therefore decided the USSR is good, and hasn't been able to update his thinking since then.

There is also the famous 'white people rule the world' left-wing meme complaining how almost all top CEOs, media people, politicians etc. are white, and then the far-Right got hold of it and pointed out that almost all of those are Jewish and if anything gentile whites are underrepresented.

As an aside, while it's entirely fair to point out such disparities much if not most of the online right really tell on themselves by being unable to stomach that the reason whites outperform blacks - average IQ differences - is most likely behind their own underperformance relative to Ashkenazis. Watching these people tie themselves in knots trying to avoid this conclusion looks a lot like a progressive journalist reaching for esoteric theories of structural racism to explain why there aren't more black professors at MIT.

that the reason whites outperform blacks - average IQ differences - is most likely behind their own underperformance relative to Ashkenazis

I'm happy to bite that bullet, personally - the evidence is that Orientals and Ashkenazim have higher IQs than average gentile whites, and this explains much of their over-performance.

I do also suspect that there is quite a lot of conscious and unconscious discrimination going on - reading people like Scott and Zvi and the various Jewish columnists I read makes me realise that their Jewishness is sotto voce very very important to them, and my experience in real life backs that up. Humans tend to show ingroup bias unless there is lots and lots of explicit structure / ideology to prevent it, and given that Jewish people often tend also to be highly competent as you say, I wouldn't be surprised if non-Jews had to climb a higher bar to be meritorious in the eyes of Jewish bosses. I don't have any proof for that, of course, but that's why I don't like the taboo around Jewish over-representation. It prevents us from having conversations that we need to have.

TLDR: Ingroup preference can only get you so far if you don't have the raw merit to back it up, but I'd be surprised if some ingroup preference wasn't also in play.

That's a very fair position.

I don't care about religion (it's all kind of silly) or ethnicity but I've been scolded a few times for holding that idea. Told to check my privilege and so on... Why is it wrong to turn that back around?

It's more about those progressive journalists being consistent. Apply that same lense to yourself.

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not on the side of people telling you to check your privilege.

My guy, can you tell me what it is about the Jews?

My vague understanding is that a bogeyman is needed to explain European failure at ethnocentrism. If we're being replaced and taken advantage of by hostile third-worlders, then saying 'we chose this because we are pathologically altruistic' isn't very satisfying to the highly race-conscious. In step the Jews, who 'made us do it'.

The explanation only works in America because the Jewish minority there genuinely is very influential through AIPAC. It completely fails to explain similar levels of outgroup preference in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the countries of Europe. Most countries in Europe have Jewish populations of roughly zero, because a certain 1930s dictator killed what Jews they had, and yet you still see even based conservative Belarus importing hundreds of thousands of cousin-marrying 'specialists' from Pakistan.

My pet conspiracy theory regarding Europe was always that our own continental elite - the ilk of Merkels and Merzes and von der Leyens, and their true power base of dynasties owning supermarket chains, publishing houses and car manufacturers - was shocked into action by the left-based attacks on their core interests in the '90s and early '00s. This was when waves of popular protests empowered by the ascendant internet demanded increasingly cushy labour conditions, tanked transatlantic trade treaties that were meant to secure information-economy revenue streams against the internet gift economy, and often even produced geopolitical embarrassment such as when Germany was forced to keep its involvement in the Iraq war a minimum.

Their political intuitions correctly told them that introducing a large culturally incompatible immigrant underclass would amplify existing contradictions in the "uppity left" to the point that it would tear itself apart and stop functioning as a coherent political force (as indeed it did, with all the anti-elite energy having been successfully redirected into a war between those who are horrified at immigrants and those who are horrified at the preceding group), and they probably bargained that no comparable threat to them could emerge from the right (which anyhow they had good experience and infrastructure to manage).

There was a similar phenomenon in Burgerland even before the immigration started. The only reason the elite like the left so much now is that they had the FBI spend 70 years beating the shit out of the left until it was free of all the parts they didn’t like.

My vague understanding is that a bogeyman is needed to explain European failure at ethnocentrism.

I agree, but I would go further. A bogeyman is need for blame for all problems of white people, just as feminists blame essentially all their problems on "patriarchy."

feminism:patriarchy::white nationalism:Jews

Now mods, I don't know what's going to happen here, but in pre-emptive defense of my boy @SecureSignals here I just really want to stress the fact that this dude asked.

Oh, I'd be happy to see @SecureSignals actually answer the question, and he wouldn't be banned for answering honestly. But he's too strategic for that and he's never going to spell out here on the Motte why he hates Jews so much and what he wants done with them. I'm pretty sure he uses places like this to quietly draw in fellow travelers, and saves the ho- scaring shit for more private venues.

To clarify: actually calling for violence (eg "We should kill the Jews") or making statements that are just boo outgroup (eg "I hate Jews because they're sneaky cunning vermin who hate me") would be against the rules. But going into detail about what you believe Jews have supposedly done, or even genetic theories about their natural animosity for gentiles, would be allowed even if the reasoning is specious.

Yes please. This is not meant to be bait and I am happy to take the discussion into DM if it helps me improve my mental model of those with these priorities.

I don't know where anti-semitism comes from.

It's lindy.