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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.

A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Edit: typo

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

I ended up going into technology, because it was the only sufficiently merit-based thing I could find in which I could sort of force open the door. Even there, I think I got a senior role just in time, as I hear the entry level is very very bad these days. I've had conversations with my wife about what we might advise our future children to do with their lives, and I've mentally prepared to tell them that certain dreams are just impossible, and some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them. Maybe it's been a good thing, in that I was forced to keep some things I love as just a hobby, and so I never got burnt out on them by trying to make them a career.

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

Yeah I had a similar path, wanted to go for a history PhD but all my professors told me it was hopeless as a white man. I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.

I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry. I have to say. I wish there was a more constructive movement to end this shit, very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.

If it helps, I do think that there's a lot of angry underemployed highly skilled men floating around right now, just waiting for a chance to do something. Trump is old and there's no clear successor, so there's a big power vacuum right now. X is a great organizational space. It feels like we've got the chance to do something now. I just don't know what.

Some form of DOGE would be a good thing to do. Given how fast it was crushed, there are a lot of money (tens of billions at least, maybe more) that basically are stolen from the budget, and it enables huge number of people to do damaging activism full time, without any resource constraints, while the opposing side has to balance having day job and family and mortgage and all the normal dependencies and vulnerabilities. That's like fighting a professional boxer while trying to cook a meal and care for an infant at the same time. No way you wouldn't lose badly. Disrupting this process would make a huge impact. Even just revealing the details of this - and consistently making it the focus of the discussion - would make an impact, most normies have absolutely no idea how much of the crap they are paying for from their own pockets. A lot of this information is out there, just buried in terabytes of forms and reports. Some of it is non-public, but can be revealed if there's sufficient energy dedicated to it. But except for a handful of people, not a lot of politicians, even from the conservative side, take any interest in that. Partially because they have their own, smaller, grifts, which could be disrupted by revealing and stopping all the massive grifts.

My impression is that the federal government is actually reasonably efficient, at least in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for, which is why DOGE failed. What we really need is 50+ DOGEs for every state and local government, that's where the real waste is. See for example: the latest scandal with food benefits in Minnesota.

in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for,

Only in a very broad sense, e.g. if the money is labeled "covid subsidies", it is going to somebody who claimed they need a subsidy because of COVID. But whether they actually need that subsidy, whether they should be in the front of the line for that subsidy, and whether their claim has any relation to reality, and whether they are actually going to spent the money to the cause they promised to spend - all this is controlled very weakly. And the leech networks have long adapted to the weak controls and learned to extract money by saying the correct "open Sesame" phrases, after which they get access to streams of money.

That said, I absolutely agree that state and local money need the same treatment.

It's what Paul Krugman called "An insurance company with an army". So outside medicare, medicaid, social security, defense, and interest payments, there's just not much left to cut. All those individual fed programs that sound suspicious like "covid subsidies" just don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

Medicare, medicaid and SS also give some opportunity for grift, and so does defense budget (I mean, if climate change is a threat to national security, we can finance climate change projects through defense budget, right? And if racism is a public health issue, we can finance DEI programs via healthcare budgets as well) we still have almost a trillion dollars in discretionary non-defense spending. It is true that solving the budget balance without addressing mandatory spending is not possible. But I am not talking about solving the budget yet, I am just talking about cutting off the most aggressive leeches, and thus forcing them to at least play on equal footing. My point is not about solving the budget - that can come later - but about denying the enemy the resources which should be either deployed to more worthy causes or returned to (or not taken from) the taxpayers. If the Left wants to donate to their favorite causes, they are welcome to, but without the help of the IRS.

And even Krugman (who one can usually rely on distorting the reality as much as possible to benefit The Party) admits this:

Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers.

The schoolteachers part is most likely a lie (I didn't check but I know who Krugman is) but the preceding part is true - significant chunk of federal money goes as "aid" to local budgets, where it is rerouted - either directly, or through a basic fungibility trick - to various pet causes. Establishing transparency and control over this would do the conservative cause a lot of good - but they are doing virtually nothing about it.

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My personal push would be to form a unified group that pledges simply to withhold tax payments while this particular discrimination regime is allowed to continue.

Needs to be enough buy-in that "they can't prosecute all of us" is a legitimate factor. And ideally pool funds to pay for attorneys for those who do get tried.

Yes, there's like a dozen ways the state can crack down on this, but that would actually force them to cross those lines OR negotiate.

It's harder to disrupt or de-legitimize such a group compared to one that threatens violent martial resistance. Hence why this approach would probably beat forming an informal militia.

This is nuts! Law fare is the tried and true way of damaging US institutions to effect change.

Who is going to pay for the lawfare?

Peter Thiel of course! There is always some rich white guy with an axe to grind in practice.

I think you'll find that it's quite easy for the IRS to take your tax money. They don't even need to win a trial, they can just take it directly from your bank with a tax lien and force you to contest it. Unless you're talking about money laundering, but then that's a lot more complicated and a serious felony.

Not more serious than armed insurrection, of course.

What does this look like? W2 income is already automatically taxed for e.g. FICA and to some extent income tax. And the government has plenty of well-exercised sticks to get compliance from both employers and employees.

The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.

The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.

Yeah this is the "lying flat" movement in China, which is spiritually corrupt imo.

Personally I prefer a strategy of working a low-effort job, enduring relative material poverty, and putting more effort/energy into building social capital, virtue, and an awareness of the problems.

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