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Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.
Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.
This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.
The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.
One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.
I've been ignoring this for one huge reason: This video was posted on December 26th. If anyone approached my children's preschool today, they would find 0 children there. Not 0 people, because it's also a Lutheran church and there's always some kind of social happening somewhere. But 0 preschool-aged children. They're all home for winter break.
If a stranger tried to go to my child's preschool during a business day, they would not be let into any classroom. They can call the office or send an email to schedule a walkthough. But if you don't have the phone app for parents or an appointment, you're not getting through the double doors.
The fact that it's a 23 year old doing this "investigative journalism" makes my eyes roll so hard. He has no idea what "normal" would look like in the first place. I'm very tired of this genre of "Watch me make unreasonable demands of people and watch as they're weirdly defensive for no reason."
I'll admit the misspelled "learing center" was a nice touch . I'm not going to make the positive claim that these institutions are all above board and the victim of selective editing. There's enough journalism indicating that this kind of fraud is rampant. I'm just perpetually annoyed that this is what makes people pay attention and become outraged, when this sort of thing has been reported on for a while now across America:
https://journalistsresource.org/home/how-they-did-it-minneapolis-kare-11-team-uncovers-medicaid-fraud-in-peer-recovery-services/
https://kstp.com/tracking-your-tax-dollars/whistleblower-minnesotas-child-care-assistance-program-has-fraud-cases-dating-back-12-years/
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/09/17/a-former-autism-center-employee-tried-to-report-fraud-to-the-state-nobody-responded/
Were you aware that this youtuber has been going around anywhere & everywhere relevant for at least a year now? He went to greenland, panama, LA, portland, DC, utah, etc., and posted his man-on-the-street interviews & footage from it all (often livestreamed before editing down to the relevant punchy parts). This wasn't like a james o'keefe style designed hit out of nowhere. Most of your comments seem to make more sense if you're missing the context of this guy's stuff.
Didn't he go to the Ukraine and say there wasn't a war?
No, I'm not familiar with this guy. I don't know why you're negatively comparing James O'Keefe, who actually bothers to do stings that would prove something.
O'Keefe's thing:
Disguised guy: "Hey, will you do crazy illegal thing with me?"
Mark: "Sure!"
Disguised guy: "Sooo, do you ever do crazy illegal thing with anyone else?"
Mark; "Yeah, all the time! No one ever catches us, don't worry!"
Admittedly, after getting kicked out of Project Veritas there's a lot more hearsay instead of actual stings. But the original Project Veritas stuff was good quality.
This man on the street thing doesn't prove anything. It relies on priming you ahead of time to expect that anything short of seeing a kid on camera outside this facility in this 2 minutes he's there is evidence that no kids are there at all. When really that's a crazy leap in logic.
Well the point is that I don't think O'Keefe ever posted anything if it didn't further his political aims. If he didn't successfully get anyone to drunkenly try to brag about doing something politically untoward, we just wouldn't hear about it. Nick Shirley apparently just goes everywhere following whatever is in the recent news, and adds some ground-level footage of it, regardless of what anyone had to say, rather than creating the story itself. I watched his greenland, panama, LA/portland ICE, and no kings protests videos, which were fairly boring but seemed to give a pretty real perspective.
I just think there's a huge difference between "fbi to investigate further after viral video by nick shirley" vs "fbi to investigate further after viral video by james o'keefe". Which is that the former is like "duh, that's what you could have known the whole time", while the latter is more like a laura loomer style politically-targeted push.
But I would forgive anyone for not knowing the context of any of these people. As for you being a fan of O'Keefe's style and actually knowing more about Shirley than me (didn't know of him going to ukraine over a year ago), I guess I just totally misread your angle here.
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I think the real story is that many dozens of less flashy whistleblowers, like the older man in the video, have been investigating this stuff for years. Many of the people involved have already been charged with crimes since months ago, and the fraud centers shut down. Nick Shirley didn't really uncover anything, he just made a fun video demonstrating it to the general public. I agree that some of his presentation is a bit deceptive, but it's directionally correct in that it shows how blatant and widespread the fraud was, in a short punchy format that regular people can watch.
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I believe the video was shot a week or two before the post which whilst late in the year also isn't a public holiday. Plus I'd expect the Somali diaspora to not all be big people of Yule
If so, that's good. A lot of the people responding to the video are saying, "I'm going to go out right now and investigate my nearby publicly-subsidzied daycare today!" Which is just dumb.
I can't remember the post but I saw somebody on Twitter posting screenshots suggesting it was 16/12 that atleast some of the visits took place on.
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I've seen some of the online right try to dunk on the Somali immigrants for that, but the irony of it is that the daycare owners are making an obvious Shakespeare reference the online right is just too bigoted and uneducated to get. King Lear illustrates the importance of empathy and social justice (values that the right lacks), which children can learn—errr, acquire understanding of—at that childcare center.
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Do you think it was filmed the day it was released?
Yeah, misspelling your school's name on it's front door is a 'nice touch'.
So what are you claiming? You seem to just be swatting lazily enough to not have to think any harder about it. Come on out with a prediction here. Of course Nick Shirly, a 23 year old youtuber isn't going to be a button up investigator, which makes it all the more damning if he's the one to whistle blow massive fraud.
So massive fraud or not?
There's probably massive fraud involved, but a twenty three year old man knocking on the door of a daycare asking to see the children will have the police called on him, and not see any kids(they will be locked down). This video doesn't show anything at all.
The kids of course are being stored in a bunker far below sea level, handled by elite security personel.
I've done a lot of childcare tours/pickups if one is even somewhat active you'll be able to hear it. Even if these are all a unique form of windowless secure child storage the lack of even stroller parking is pretty indicative.
I don't know what stroller parking is, but in this video you can clearly see kids get dropped off at one of the locations: https://x.com/i/status/2005779133947650471
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They will be kept in their classrooms with the doors locked and the windowshades drawn.
They don't lock down the entire place, with the kids huddling in such utter silence that no one can tell they exist, every time a car pulls up. What emotional need are people fulfilling by posting this kind of thing?
It does feel like Occam’s Butterknife.
To me the best explanation as to why no children were seen or heard is because there were no children present.
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Perhaps its true; it would certainly partially explain falling fertility rates. Who would want to have kids when it's necessary to expose them to that?
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At all times? Have you ever been near a child?
I'd agree if it were an active shooter drill but you're saying the random childcare workers are immediately going on DEFCON7 every time somebody pulls up in the driveway?
At bare minimum a functional childcare would have some sort of outdoor play area as is literally state-mandated, generally I'd expect to see stroller parking and the building being noisy and active.
The higher the defcon, the less the concern (or defcon 1 is the highest risk; defcon 5 the least).
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And the red tribe/blue tribe split shows itself again.
When I lived among the blues... honestly some childcare institutions were this paranoid, deranged as it seems. Loudoun County Schools called the police on a father who showed up to collect his raped daughter because he was a little too upset that his daughter was raped. I believe they didn't even allow him in the building, locked down classrooms, and sent out an email that a parent had caused a disturbance.
I don't live among the blues anymore. That level of neuroticism and inverted priorities is just too cruel for me to live under. But though you may scoff and think he's exaggerating, depressingly he may be describing how childcare institutions actually behave around him.
They really are completely different from us.
I live in a low population red-tribe town surrounded by farms and our elementary school and preschool are locked and no unauthorized adults are allowed in. If one tried to force their way in it would be treated seriously.
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I'm not saying people can't lockdown a childcare center, my point is more that an active childcare center tends to be quite obvious on account of the accoutrements and noise of children. Unless the presupposition is that they immediately shuffled everybody into the bunker as soon as these guys got out of the car.
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Yes, massive fraud. No, this video isn't proof of it. This video is just outrage bait.
Was this filmed the day it was released? No, could have been filmed... December 25th? December 24th? It clearly wasn't filmed in the Summer. It's not like this was a culmination of years of investigation.
There's enough CONFIRMED fraud going on in the Somali community that your priors that this sort of business is fraudulent, at least to some large degree, should be high enough to make an educated guess rather than outright dismissal.
Plus, the Boomer guy straight up says he's been paying attention to this for years.
So in a sense, yes, yes it is a culmination of years of investigation.
See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3430/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/395401?context=8#context
There's a pretty simple argument to suggest that fraud, if it can be proven to exist at all, is probably pretty rampant in Somali communities.
Premises:
The Somali community in Minnesota is probably tight-knit and interconnected, moreso than most other groups in the state. Lots of communication channels amongst them and between different circles of them.
The Somali community would thus likely be aware that there's a bunch of sketchy daycare business operated in their area, and these receive federal/state funds.
Nobody notable in the Somali community has raised an alarm as to this practice, and I've not heard a single word of condemnation from any of them. Quite the opposite.
What might we conclude about the Somali community?
Do we conclude that they are harsh and intolerant of fraudulent behavior in their midst? That they are quite honest and rule-following on average?
Or is the obvious implication the precise opposite, that the majority of them are probably cool with fraud going on (maybe they don't even see it as immoral) even if they're not participating, and good many of them are participating?
Or which premise do you take issue with?
Are Somalis NOT tight knit in this area? Do they somehow NOT know that their family and neighbors run these sketchy daycares? Or are they actually coming forward and reporting on fraud all the time, but they're ignored?
Which premise fails?
Your analogy falls apart the second you notice that Christians are constantly calling each other out and even condemning each other for preaching falsehoods (as they see it) and are not prone to covering for each other merely because of shared theological beliefs.
Famously, individual denominations take massive issue of tiny disagreements in interpretation and are quite happy to make their disagreements known, and distance themselves from 'heretical' street preachers and the like.
What exactly do you think I am saying here. I take issue with 0 of the premises. I also hate this video. What is being misunderstood?
My analogy to a Christian street preacher does not fall apart because the whole point is that it's not all that weird to call out arguments you hate that are on your side! I am against fraud and against Somalis that don't assimilate remaining in America. I also hate that the video is what got people interested in the problem. Just like I would be alarmed if a video of a street preacher acting crazy was getting attention as the one true proof of Christ's divinity.
This is complete "Who gives a shit?" territory and the only reason people are responding is because they think you're making a larger point than you are. Nobody thinks there isn't fraud, including you apparently, and nobody is going to stop noticing because some youtuber didn't follow your preferred protocols.
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Guess I misunderstood the thrust of your point.
Me, I have accepted that you don't get to choose how certain issues make it to mainstream prominence.
(I've been aware of the Epstein situation for like twenty years, and I'm just happy that people at least notice it now)
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Of course it’s not proof. It’s a spotlight, and a question begger about what’s going on and why it took him to highlight it
“well of course there’s fraud, a this guy is pointing to it, but see he’s pointing wrong, so can be dismissed or agreed with where convenient”
It’s just cake-eat-having commentary.
It's like being a Christian and suddenly a street preacher video is blowing up online. The preacher's argumentation isn't sound and he's weirdly confrontational towards a handful of people just going about their day (and yeah, those people are sinners, but it's still confrontational.)
Wouldn't it be kind of frustrating for this to be the thing that takes off as proof of Christianity, and not all the actual scholarship? If I were to say I wasn't a fan, but I still was a Christian, would that be having and eating cake?
The video's author could personally come to my dwelling and fart loudly in my face, cheeks spread wide open and splattering me with the fecal remnants of his last shit and his observation would still be valid: the daycares that don't admit new children and conspiciously don't have any sounds of children (they are not quiet, let me tell you) are frauds and you should be ashamed that you are even defending this position.
Anyone who goes 'he's right, but he didn't say it in GOOD FAITH' should be shot by a firing squad.
I don't know where you get the idea that a daycare center can't sound quiet from the outside? If the kids aren't out in the playground I don't hear them. Our preschool is actually insulated on account of the very cold winters here.
My argument is not, "he's right, but he didn't say it in Good Faith." My argument is the evidence in the video is not sufficient to support his claims. He didn't systematically eliminate other possibilities. It's going to backfire, because it's easy to just show children getting dropped off in these places and Voila! debunked.
Dropping children off in these places after a major expose doesn't debunk. The lack of children despite parents being in on it was the easily visible indicator of fraud that- having been explicitly identified- is easily rectified afterwards to obfuscate follow-on attention and allow motivated individuals to claim that children were always there.
The sort of motivated people who believe this sort of video 'debunks' are also the sort of people who wouldn't be persuaded by 'systematically eliminating other possibilities,' since motivated reason is under no obligation to conceed that other possibilities were properly eliminated based on whatever trivial grounds they have. They could even invent their own grounds of dismissal, like claiming that the videos were made on holidays or weekends where there would be no children.
It's not like such motivated reasoning against anti-progressive activist exposes are unknown. I'm sure you remember when the planned parenthood videos were dismissed as bad faith and misleading for editing techniques that many of the media organizations critiquing it were using, even as the activists posted the full videos which the media organizations rarely do and went out of their way to ignore in order to insinuate deception without, you know, showing the deception.
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