site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   23414 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It’s official. Hitler had a micropenis. Furthermore, Nick Fuentes is either a closeted homosexual or a 30 year old virgin.

I’m wondering to what extent far right political worldviews are influenced by the denial of sexual malformations or shortcomings. I decided that this forum would be a good place to explore the extent of this and perhaps collect more data on the phenomenon.

If any posters here at the motte would like to participate in an anonymous questionnaire, please DM me.

  • -51

It's about as official as any of those "tomb of Jesus discovered" documentaries that were all the rage on the Discovery Channel years back. Possible blood sample taken from "I cut off this piece of material from the sofa in Hitler's bunker" eighty years ago, not stored in any way you could consider preservative of DNA samples, for clickbait documentary hosted by TV pop-sci host who apparently will appear for the opening of an envelope.

Yes, I'm convinced!

The tomb of Jesus has been known for well over a thousand years.

Not relevant to your broader point, but you can literally go visit the tomb of Jesus. There's a church there; the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox are forced to split it by the civil authorities in Israel(and before that were forced to split it by the Ottoman authorities). Ditto for the manger; Catholics get the midnight service on Christmas(in Latin).

The tomb of Jesus has been known for well over a thousand years.

Yes, both of them in fact.

Is this a reference to the tomb of Jesus in northern Japan?

I was thinking about the Garden Tomb.

The Garden Tomb was only identified a couple hundred years ago; there's no ancient tradition there.

Or possibly the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, depending on which one you were thinking of.

Ah, but that's the fake tomb, you know? Not the real family tomb with the bones and His wife and kids and third cousins and aunts by marriage all with the names graven on the ossuary! The one good thing about the Avatar movies is that they distracted James Cameron from making more of these "really true truly real" documentaries.

Fuentes likely has a girlfriend (if not multiple) but hides this to prevent their doxxing. He has a loyal female fanbase that calls themselves groypettes and they pay to have their superchat messages read on his livestream, where he unceremoniously declines their advances.

On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work. Vance and the couch for instance. Humans really are that base. I recall reading that the 12th century Peter Abelard couldn’t be promoted at his monastery because he was castrated and thus deemed unmanly. That’s a monastery, in the Middle Ages. And the recent insult that Trump fellated Bill Clinton is no different than when they called Caesar “Queen of Bithynia” per the accusation that he slept with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia in his youth. Something that annoyed me with Kamala Harris is that he have actual evidence that she behaved in such a prostitutional way, as she was the girlfriend of Willy Brown at 29 while he was 60 and he proceeded to hand her a comfy no-show political job. This was so ripe for insults — the guy’s name is literally Brown Willy — but no one was willing to stoop low for it, though they were all on board with the Russia prostitute stuff. I think the reason for this is man’s innate philogyny, and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men.

Dude is also a devout Roman Catholic. Trying to shame him for being a virgin is probably not the best avenue of attack.

On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work.

I'm reminded of the suffragettes who would purposely wear white to their protests in order to emphasise their chastity, because their critics (evidently somewhat successfully) been calling them a bunch of sluts.

Between him being Catholic, being pals with homosexuals like Ali Alexander, it seems likely he is a homosexual too.

There's even video of him performing fellatio, isn't there?

There's even video of him performing fellatio, isn't there?

Can't believe how many times I've seen this question litigated given that I don't care about the guy at all and don't seek out information related to him.

There's even video of him performing fellatio, isn't there?

No, that's fake and wrong. First of all the video you are thinking about would be of Destiny sucking dick and the theory that would be that the dick belonged to Fuentes, i.e. a video of him receiving fellation (from a man). But even so, it's all made up.

However.

There's the date with catboy kamikaze. There's that one time in 2024 when he was flirting with some zoomer kick livestreamers outside an in-n-out late at night in early 2024. Or that his favorite evangelion character is Kaworu Nagisa and his favorite show is Euphoria. Or how two prominent members of AF were homosexuals named Ali (Jamal and Alexander). Or that one time he accidentally tweeted a video that showed he was watching tranny porno. Or how AF members look like a "type". Or when Jaden (ex treasurer) left and he was heartbroken. And the Jaden said about living in Nick's basement. Or that time he said he thinks sex is disgusting (the other time, not the famous one when he said sex with women is gay).

But it's all gossip, the proof is all buried in kino casino and metokur streams, all stuff without any credibility, from years ago and it's all plausibly deniable anyway. So he isn't officially gay until he goes on the coming out podcast tour. For all we know he might have an harem. A super secret harem of women who don't mind being in a harem, don't regret it afterwards and don't use the fact of having been in one to cloutchase.

There is a way to test this, though I'm not sure he would submit to it: https://reactionaryblog.substack.com/p/using-fmri-to-remove-gays-and-paedophiles

A positive hit on an fMRI would a) not indicate whether practicing or non-practicing, and more seriously b) have an 8% error rate, and thus remain less powerful a predictive tool than Kaworu fandom.

The video is of Destiny performing fellatio on an unknown man, which was claimed to be Fuentes when the video leaked.

and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men

I am always amused at the creative ways obsessives wedge their weird obsessions into every thread.

As for Fuentes- if there is ever someone about whom accusations of being a closet case were believable, it's him. But there is a certain category of straight dude who really, truly hates women and resents that he's sexually attracted to them (and really resents that he needs their permission to stick his dick in them).

Fuentes obviously possesses a seething hatred of women, not just a tradcon belief that they should stay in their assigned roles (and not vote), but he seems to be viscerally disgusted by females. That's either a guy frantically trying to compensate for his sublimated lust for dick, or a guy who has a pathological level of misogyny--either way, someone whose own desires repulse him.

The notion that Fuentes is actually keeping a secret harem is some serious copium.

On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work

Something that annoyed me with Kamala Harris is that he have actual evidence that she behaved in such a prostitutional way, as she was the girlfriend of Willy Brown at 29 while he was 60 and he proceeded to hand her a comfy no-show political job. This was so ripe for insults — the guy’s name is literally Brown Willy — but no one was willing to stoop low for it, though they were all on board with the Russia prostitute stuff. I think the reason for this is man’s innate philogyny, and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men.

Sex-based insults work when directed at men, that is.

Both sides of the aisle agree on women’s Wonderfulness and the usual Who? Whom?

Sex or gender-related insults—or negative observations in general—directed at men are far more acceptable than they are directed at women, especially by a man.

Calling a man gay, small-dick, a couchfucker, a pedophile, a John, a rapist, a virgin, or an incel, regardless of its veracity :drake_yes:

Calling out a woman for riding the casting couch :drake_no:

In the former, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether a specific accusation is true, what’s important is that it’s all in good fun and good faith to hold shitty men accountable for the vibes they project.

The latter is bad faith misogynistic slut-shaming and victim blaming.

Fat/body-shaming by the Left when applied to somebody who's an 'acceptable target' has always struck me as kinda hilarious.

Absolutely sacrosanct taboo to go for random obese women/'healthy at every size' then lowest common denominator fat jokes about ideological enemies.

Yeah, even normies have Noticed the “body positivity for me but not for thee” double standards. Although perhaps not specifically about ideological enemies, an example meme would be “Empowering” vs. “Put on a shirt nigga.”

One predictable perpetrator of this was Jimmy Kimmel during the manufactured outrage around the death of Cecil the Lion.

Abelard was castrated because he fucked around (literally, he got her pregnant) with the niece of a Very Important Guy who didn't appreciate that kind of hands-on approach to tutoring (today Abelard would be criticised for power imbalance, grooming, age gap - he was 36, she was 15-17 years of age, of his pupil). They engaged in a secret marriage in order to satisfy her uncle but kept it secret because if Abelard wanted to become a priest (to have a career in the church) clerical celibacy was becoming necessary.

Uncle was not happy about all this and took action:

Fulbert, infuriated that Heloise had been taken from his house and possibly believing that Abelard had disposed of her at Argenteuil in order to be rid of her, arranged for a band of men to break into Abelard's room one night and castrate him. In legal retribution for this vigilante attack, members of the band were punished, and Fulbert, scorned by the public, took temporary leave of his canon duties (he does not appear again in the Paris cartularies for several years).

End result is that Héloïse ends up in a convent and Abelard remains a monk, but cannot be ordained to the priesthood if he is castrated (there are rubrics around bastardy etc. and what disqualifies someone from the priesthood, including being a eunuch). This doesn't mean he can't continue to be wellknown, he already had a reputation as a theologian and was famous and continued to be, but since he couldn't be a priest this disbarred him from advancement to such offices as bishop, etc. but he did become abbot of a monastery, though his career continued to be controversial due to his alleged heretical teachings.

Truly a case of "fuck around and find out".

As for Kamala, certainly stories about her past were floating around for a long time (e.g. I saw it mentioned online that her nickname had been "Heels Up Harris") and it came to the point that Willie Brown had to issue a denial that he promoted her only because she was his girlfriend (and indeed, later she allegedly warned him off*). Being fair to Willy, yeah he pretty much did promote her because she was his girlfriend and that got her the start in political career, but he also promoted guys as well for being loyal to him. Old-school politician who rewarded his allies and loyalists when the fat spoils were to be divided upon gaining power.

I think the reason it didn't get play this time was (1) it was old news (2) the media and online media were working hard to squash any such distasteful racist and sexist attacks upon the Democratic Saviour From Evil Trump (remember all the havering over "how very dare you say she was border czar, she was no such thing, the Republicans are lying when they call her that"?)

*"Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the mid-1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work". Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president. Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians. Brown noted that the difference between Harris and other politicians he had helped was that "Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I 'so much as jaywalked' while she was D.A. That's politics for ya."

Rich hot straight guys with big dicks think world's perfectly fine as is, news at 11

I laughed out loud on the train, thanks.

Far right guy here: I get whiskey dick real bad. For instance, 2am on Halloween night I was fingering a happy blonde mermaid in the alley behind a bar, but when the time came to push her up against the dumpster, I was a gummy worm. Shriveled and timid as a leftist's soul. The cold, too. I kept turning her around and shoving her on her knees just so I could feel some, any warmth on those sensitive bits of the inner thigh. She might have choked a little but I needed thermal energy more than she needed air. In the morning I was smashed into bed by my hangover and my chest hair was full of mermaid glitter, but my dick remained a proud incel. Hitler would never have let this happen to me; Donald Trump will make sure it never happens again. Donald Trump will deport whiskey dick.

This is trolling and it's not even funny trolling.

Now you know what women have to put up with. For all you guys complaining about women not responding on dating apps, imagine our friend above times a hundred.

  • -16

Now you know what women have to put up with.

Apparently not much, if things like this mild troll post elicit a comment like this.

For all you guys complaining about women not responding on dating apps, imagine our friend above times a hundred.

Who cares? You can still scroll past the dongs and go on a date. Or, if you really think "no responses" is a preferable state of affairs compared to having see random dicks, you can always just... not use it.

Sorry guys, I do have to laugh at all the complaints about how easy women have it and how unfair it is that you (singular or plural) can't get your dicks wet.

It's not women's fault male sexuality is so easy (boobs! ass! young!), blame evolution or whatever is the current favourite punching bag.

I don't have to imagine, I see the mod queue. And I would never want to be a woman on modern dating apps. (For that matter, neither would I want to be a man on modern dating apps.)

Please post real examples of the above type of posting directed at women on dating apps (or elsewhere).

Or he's trying to get some dick pics.

I propose a Peocracy: rule by whomever has the biggest penis. Mandatory physicals every 4 years replace elections.

Ron Jeremy, winner of the 2028 erection.

This could have been an interesting post with more effort.

Fuentes is almost certainly a closeted homosexual, who like many closeted homosexuals strongly disliked women. This likely somewhat informs his misogyny.

You go to war with the generals you have, not with the generals you wish you had.

Yes, Nick Fuentes is most likely gay, practicing or otherwise. But he is also one of the most promising young leaders the alt-right has. As long as he keeps it on the down low, we can look the other way.

From "On Homosexuality And Uranus" by AntiDem:

Anime homosexuals are carefully portrayed as not representing a threat to the prevailing cisheteronormist order. Let us take consider an early example, Sailors Uranus and Neptune from Sailor Moon. Though obviously (and yet never quite explicitly) a lesbian couple, one of whom has some prominent transgender (or at least highly androgynous) qualities, they never really make any demands for accommodation on the world that surrounds them. Sailor Uranus does not wish to upend the society around her in order to gain the validation involved in having her lifestyle redefined as normal; she only desires to be left in peace to discreetly live as she wishes. She doesn’t want to change marriage laws, get you fired for saying that you don’t like her, or tear down the faith of the polis.

And it is because of this that she can safely be left alone by the larger society around her. She is not a threat, so she can be treated as a curiosity – liked by some, disliked by others, but simply not worth bothering with on a societal level. The implicit, unspoken bargain that she makes with the larger society is both reasonable and humane – she gains a strong measure of security through obscurity, and the mores of the society around her remain secure. That is largely how it is in Japan, and how it largely used to be in the West as well. Laws against homosexuality in the West existed, but were essentially a hedge against precisely what has happened now that they have been removed – open, politicized homosexuality becoming a serious threat to the existing order. As for the discreet, private practice of homosexuality, laws against it are and always were virtually unenforceable (for many reasons, including the general disinterest of Westerners in taking any great pains to enforce them against those who kept their proclivities private), and when they were on the books they remained virtually unenforced.

To mix fictional metaphors a bit, I am reminded of the Borg from the Star Trek franchise. In one episode of, I believe, The Next Generation, several members of the crew find that they can, if they are discreet and quiet, move unmolested through a Borg ship, though they are in plain view of numerous Borg drones. The Borg, it turns out, are interested in assimilation at a civilizational level, not an individual level. Thus, if an individual, or even a very small group, moves through their ship and seems to present no threat, they are ignored. Below a certain level of prominence, they are simply not worth doing anything about.

The ironic thing is that Western man requires misogyny, because women lack constructive political instincts and need to be sidelined from politics if the polity is to survive.

And we're only getting it from Fuentes, a person so untrustworthy as to be practically utterly useless.

edit after I got the 30 day ban, I thought everyone knew that women weren't selected for being able to cooperate effectively in large groups?

Politics in mankind's very, very long pre-civilized past was typically war or war-related organisation like alliances and as war has always been and still is an exclusive domain of men(e.g. consider which sex has a shoulder adapted for throwing or what's the sex breakdown of war corpses in Ukraine ), from that it follows that men were way more selected for being able to cooperate constructively and effectively for survival purposes and selected for the ability to put away all of their petty feuds and differences in the face of greater threats.

Because in case of military defeat, they were basically dead re: posterity (dead and slaves don't procreate - American black slaves were an exception) and women were generally -outside of nomad cultures- still valuable as slaves or second wives so whatever happened, they were not doomed.

Ugh.

I could imagine a well-argued version of this, but I’m no longer expecting to see it from you. This comment looks like a strict downgrade from last week, perhaps a return to form.

Thirty days this time.

Men on the far right are disproportionately gay and men on the far left are disproportionately (heterosexual) sexual predators. This has always been true. The Nazis and Italian fascists were pretty gay, the 1968ers rioted at the Sorbonne over getting access to the girls’ dorms overnight. Why? Because straight pervs go where the women are (the left), and gay ones fetishize masculinity, maleness, and in particular often sexually fixate on male ‘brotherhood’ in the army, navy, male organizations, which fascist groups usually are.

Hold up. Both the girls and the rioters in question were college students. How is that a case of sexual predation? I doubt rape was their intent.

Also, early Nazi and fascist groups usually formed among veterans of the world war; in other words, all of them were men and most of them were young. To state that they were disproportionately gay isn’t exactly saying much.

Hold up. Both the girls and the rioters in question were college students. How is that a case of sexual predation?

Also, early nazi and fascist groups usually formed among veterans of the world war; in other words, all of them were men and most of them were young. To state that they were disproportionately gay isn’t exactly saying much.

Not disputing far left males being disproportionately likely to be sexual predators, but weren't women actually underrepresented on the political left until the eighties at the earliest?

Favorite example of this is Jack Donovan. To his credit, he doesn't call himself "gay" because he hates the modern Gay/LGBTQ culture. He calls himself "androphyllic."

That Wiki photo. God bless.

Nazis weren't disproportionately gay.

Apart from Roehm, who else was a homosexual?

The SA which was by far the most classically fascist ideologically was pretty gay. Once a totalitarian party cements itself fully in the governance of the nation anyone ambitious joins, so the fact that few leading German political figures in terms of power in that era were actually gay is true but irrelevant.

The SA was rightly sidelined by a party that wanted to run a country, which requires more than streetfighters and the vastly more selective SS which replaced it wasn't noticeably gay. So calling the regime itself to have been disproportionately homosexual on the basis of one of its precursors, that got sidelined, is pretty odd and not valid.

The SA wasn't so much sidelined as buried.

Roehm's boyfriends.

I'm still giggling from William Shearer describing the early SA as subject to the kind of dramatic internecine squabbles only possible between homosexuals.

Specifically,

Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can. (Page 120)

Shirer was one of the earlier and more vocal authors to claim that the Nazis were disproportionately gay, but my understanding is that that claim has been considered discredited since the 1960s. Obviously some were, but there’s no evidence the percentage was higher than that of the general population.

By the mid 1930s it had transitioned into a party of government and so serious people of all sexual persuasions wanted to climb to the top. It’s like if you suddenly put the Catholic Church or Church of England in charge of all politics the proportion of gay priests would fall quite rapidly.

It seems you're right.

Funny how that makes the far-right look actually better, as men who fetishize masculinity and brotherhood(but not homosexuality itself) due to a developmental quirk are somewhat more sympathetic than psychopaths and sexual predators into politics to gain power by exploiting man's egalitarian impulses.

My new theory is that self-accepting gays and sexually malformed people become the far left whereas self-denying members of those categories become the far right.

Since Biblical times, true engine of history has been and will remain the queers.

  • -11

The engine of history is that Adams [right/trad] follow Eves [left/prog] follow Snakes [classic/liberal].

It's popular to pretend Eve/prog and Snake/liberal are the same thing, especially if you're Adam/trad trying desperately to react to something Eve is doing. But if you equate them, you will fail just like everyone else in the past 50 years that tried.

Are radical centrists then those who accept but still hate themselves?

Yawn

I understand that these may be uncomfortable thoughts to consider.

However, I would just like to reiterate that if anyone is suffering in this way, please come forward privately.

With better data on this phenomenon, we might be able to improve outcomes for a generation of sufferers through evidence based practice.

  • -25

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats