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Come on man, surely you’ve seen leftists presenting a story like this: “Lady and her partner were on the way home from dropping off their kid at school. They make a wrong turn and completely accidentally end up in the middle of an ICE operation. Agents begin shouting confusing orders including “turn around.” Lady is panicked, tries to comply and do a 3 point turn, agent deliberately positions himself in front of her car and murders her.”
This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online and this convincingly debunks every one of those points. This isn’t some “two screens” rationalist bullshit, this is like Nicholas Sandmann, there is a straightforward lie and there is the truth.
You can still accept this video and say the shot was unjustified, but to say this doesn’t clarify anything just isn’t true
This seems like a strong claim to make without evidence. Extraordinarily popular, really? I'm sure you can find a few people posting such things but it feels like a massive weak man. Certainly I haven't seen such a narrative much at all in places like Reddit and other left wing spaces.
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Yeah, in this situation the Leftists remind me of a defense attorney who reviews the evidence and, on behalf of his client, fabricates the most pro-client narrative that the evidence will permit.
You're being overly charitable. They are certainly not limited to what the evidence will permit.
In a sense, they are. I agree that they will spin and twist and lie very aggressively, but there are still limits. So for example, suppose this Good woman turned out to have posted on social media that she really would like to run over an ICE agent in her SUV. Leftists might claim that this was faked somehow. And if a video came out of her saying the same thing, they might claim it was AI-generated. And so on, but eventually they would change tack. Perhaps they would argue that this evidence is irrelevant because the ICE agent was unaware of it.
And of course sometimes evidence comes out which is so overwhelming that the Left does stop doubling down and instead gives up -- not by conceding that they were wrong but instead by just quietly dropping the subject and pretending the whole incident never happened.
Based on literally this thread, I think they would instead just decline to acknowledge that any such social media post existed. If confronted with it, they would ignore the claim, or vanish and reappear elsewhere to continue making the exact same claims without updating on the new evidence to any degree.
This is at least honest, and I don't hold it against anyone for bowing out of discussion of a Happening where their preferred side looks bad.
I tend to disagree with this, at least in some situations. For example, when the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax took place, a lot of Duke professors and students publicly condemned the men who had been falsely accused. A few national newspapers jumped on the bandwagon. In my view a public apology and some soul-searching was in order.
Absolutely. I meant more any faculty who saw the situation, intuited where it truly ended up, and chose to remain silent. If you've already taken a strong stance, then yeah, you need to openly conform to reality if you want to retain any respect.
But if someone chooses not to engage with a situation in the first place, I'm not going to hold it against them. Every position that everyone holds has at least some evidence against it, or example that makes them look bad. You don't have to go to the mats, die with the lie, go all in for every single one. You can just look at your cards and fold the hand. There's a whole lot of poker left.
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Yes, this is what happens when "My outgroup is evil" is straight up not allowed. When you can't just go "Well, they've lied about literally everything the last 15 years of my life... so I'm just going to assume the worst about them this time."
Obviously every narrative about this shooting from the left was going to be a lie. Did we already forget the cloud of bullshit they kicked up attempting to claim the Kirk shooter was MAGA? The weeks people spent here giving time to lies that were obvious immediately, irrefutable days later, and still trying to be "charitable" to obvious liars wondering in here weeks later from new accounts to discuss if Kirk's shooter was actually MAGA.
I'm reminded, ironically, of one of Sam Harris' criticisms of Donald Trump. Which is that, if he tells 1000 lies, just completely thoughtlessly, maybe 10 seconds per lie, and it takes you 2 hours to disprove each one... Donald Trump still wins because he wasted minutes of his life on the effort and you wasted days if not weeks or months.
So this is me weighing in finally. I don't understand why anybody even entertained a leftist narrative when the obvious reality is that this woman chose every step of this encounter, and fucked around and found out. She was not innocent, confused, wrong place wrong time, panicked, any of it. She's a brainwashed lesbian activist who thought she could run down an ICE agent because she's on the right side of history and Democrats have been telling her she can for years now. She doesn't deserve charity, the people creating fog of war do not deserve charity, evil actually exists no matter how much you claim it's against the rules to discuss.
To say nothing of Tim Walz having every appearance of being willing to cross the Rubicon because the Feds are finally going after his fraud kickbacks. Which is rich after having been beat over the head with "Insurrectionist" for 4 years.
There are no offramps or political solutions. It's between you, your God and your conscience your level of involvement in what's coming. I pray that keeping your head in the sand works out for most of you.
So let me ask you two genuine questions (and to forestall any objections or claims that I am trying to "bait" you-which I have never done, contrary to your repeated assertions- I swear that even if you take this opportunity to insult me in whatever fashion you wish, I grant you immunity):
Is it your genuine sincere belief that every single person identified as being "on the left" is an evil liar? That it's literally impossible for anyone to be a Democrat or a liberal and sincere and well-intentioned?
If we allowed some of those anti-MAGA posters who wander in to post like you do, would you be okay with that, or are you explicitly advocating we make the Motte a "leftists fuck-off" space?
Because the point of not allowing people to just post "My outgroup is evil" is not that no evil people exist or that you cannot believe your enemies are evil. The point is that if people just post how much they hate their enemies with no nuance, context, or argument, we will just have people screaming at each other and competing for who can sneer most dramatically - unless we are just all circle-jerking each other about who our enemies are.
As an actual literal statement the political left is committed to violating black letter constitutional civil rights protections that they justify by inventing human rights, yes, that's a very defensible statement. The adults in the room in the Biden admin(and there were some- not Biden and Kamala, but figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland were powerful enough on their own to count) were mostly moderate, establishment, center-left types and not crazy radicals and they... just let the country fall apart while they pursued failed attempts at political vengeance and power consolidation. The war on domestic terror was just full of oversteps that make no sense except as retribution against dissidents against state ideology, the novel legal theories, etc. Meanwhile actual competent governance was... not a priority. The null hypothesis for both a Biden admin and a vegetable in the white house is that technocrats from his own party run the country in a not-cartoonish manner with some featherbedding.
Trump talks about some of this stuff. But he doesn't actually do it.
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I think they do evil. I think at this point to be a Democrat is to be deeply committed to doing evil. The hills Democrats have chosen to die on (castrating children, giving billions in fraud to immigrants of questionable legality, forcing people to take experimental medications, mass censorship) are virtually unrecognizable from the Democrats of 30 years ago. All the good ones left the party and joined the Republican ticket. Which is probably why so many high ranking positions in Trump's administration got filled with former Democrats (RFK Jr, Tulsi).
I have in laws who are deeply committed Democrats, deeply committed to destroying the country. They don't think of it that way. They are hopelessly, and willfully, ignorant of the consequences of their policies. If "Evil" had a version of "without intent" like manslaughter, they'd be that. All the same...
If they were honest. I only care about honesty. They may view me as evil, for caring about my heritage, and wanting it to continue to exist. For not wanting billions of 3rd worlders enshittifying my homeland. For the very fact that my ancestors conquered this nation in the first place. And these are the exact reasons these differences can only be sorted out finally. I cannot exist in their world, and they cannot exist in mine. We are mutually evil to one another. I find their morality an abhorrent inversion of proper morals, and they feel the same. I can recognize this however, and accept that it's all over now but the violence. We cannot coexist.
But only if they are honest. If they stroll in here like Darwin of yore, playing Arguments as Soldiers, refusing to be pinned down, refusing to ever admit what the negative space around their rhetoric is gesturing towards, fuck em.
Which goes straight to it, and you see this over and over and over again. The leftist always calibrates their speech towards maximum fog of war. Among their own it's "Yes, I want to destroy the white race." but then in public it's "Oh why can't we have sympathy for the 65 IQ serial rapist an NGO imported from Africa? He just needs more restorative justice. That 3 year old probably won't even remember what happened to it." Which also goes straight to why LibsOfTiktok went so viral. These people just put all that nonsense out there, under their real ass names, employment in bio, and thought they were the victims when people outside their bubble saw it. Because, like Hillary Clinton famously said, sometimes you have two sets of opinions, a public set and a private set. It was an invasion of privacy to see their private opinions... even when they posted them publicly.
Do you believe your in-laws literally want you dead and your daughter transed?
I suspect not. (If you do- well, I don't know what to say except that must make things tense at Christmas.) This is the problem with such absolute statements.
Wrong question. People love to abstract evil away into mustache-twirling schemes to deliberately do harm, so they never have to face the evil in their own hearts. Evil isn't doing a "paperclip optimizer" routine, but for double mastectomies, it's convincing yourself your cause is so good, that you can, say, lie to promote / defend it because the chuds would """weaponize""" the truth.
What you want to ask in the case of his in-laws is, if his daughter said she's trans and he opposed it, would they hear him out, or write him off as a transphobe? Or for the "want him dead" part: if the cancel mob came after him, would they defend his character, or throw him under the bus (or for a borderline case: squirm like Alec Holowka's sister, hinting at the truth, but refusing to state it outright for fear of the mob going after her as well)?
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No, but they literally keep voting for local politicians who have that as their party platform. They just... I donno, refuse to grapple with that part of things.
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Declaring someone a mortal irreconcilable enemy provides them with the best possible reason to stop being honest with you, or trying. There is no honor to be won being honest with moral aliens.
Well yes. Thats another reason i hate my enemies. They don't even have the descency to admit it and have a fair fight. Its just gas lighting about their naked aggression 24/7.
What did you think being mortal enemies was? Essays? Vibes?
According to you, someone who you declared should literally be wiped out as the only reconciliation is supposed to be decent to you?
You can conduct yourself in war the way Russians do in Ukraine, or the way Israelis did in Gaza (not to mention, heavens forbid, Americans in WWII). Existential war is no excuse for savagery.
There is plenty of room for deception, stratagems, collateral damage and psychological warfare even in non-existential wars.
N.B. I don't believe either of the examples you listed are examples of existential wars. Russia overplays the existentiality as part of its official excuse to swing the nuke threat around (it would be bad optics to admit that it went to war for the sake of mere "sphere of influence"), America was on the other side of the ocean from the Axis (now USSR would be a much more salient example). Israel is closest to existential but it still has a buffer of overwhelming power over Gaza. If that buffer is threatened I would expect them to glass Gaza into the precambrian age faster than you can say "Zionism" because any political fallout is better than being overrun.
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I realize these questions are directed at someone else, but I feel like answering them:
Pretty much yes. It's become an evil ideology. People who adhere to evil ideologies are -- to a greater or lesser extent -- evil themselves.
I think that's a slightly different question, since, generally speaking, people are very good at self-deception. I think there are plenty of (evil) Leftists who genuinely and sincerely believe in the lies they spread and genuinely and sincerely believe that they are trying to make the world a better place.
Personally, I'm fine with Leftists posting here since (at least for now) they cannot engage in their usual tactics of shouting down their opposition; ideologically capturing the moderation team and abusing those powers to silence their adversaries; etc.
How are you defining "left"? By the standards of the Motte, I am on the left. (I'm more likely to vote Democrat than not, I don't like Trump, I think *-isms are bad, etc.) So does this make me "evil" or do I not count because I'm sufficiently gray? (Go ahead and call me evil if you insist, I am genuinely trying to figure out how you are modeling other minds.)
Okay, but that necessarily means we don't let you shout them down either.
Hey now, that moved to the right over the last 10 years. Official left position has long been that -isms are good, as long as they target the right groups.
No, the "official left position" has long been that behavior that would be classified as a *-ism when targeting groups they support isn't a *-ism when targeting groups they don't, allowing them to continue claiming *-isms are bad without having to give up discriminatory behavior against groups they don't favor.
Fair, better nuance there.
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That's a complicated question, because in many ways Leftism is not a specific set of beliefs but rather a process by which people compete for social status and power by pretending to be morally superior by making use of what Larry Auster called the "liberal script." But here's a rough and ready definition for you: If you could unironically put one of those signs in your front yard which says "In this house we believe," then it is highly likely you are a Leftist. I haven't paid specific attention to your posts so I don't know if I would call you a Leftist.
That's fine with me. For the most part, the positions espoused by Leftism can't really stand up to fair scrutiny. In the absence of underhanded tactics, Leftism will lose.
I definitely would not put one of those signs in my yard. But I know who people who would and do, and while they make me cringe, they are not evil.
I would have to disagree with that. At the very best, they are minor minions of evil.
If you look at ideologies in history which, with the benefit of hindsight, are not disputed to be evil, they are no different from people who voluntarily adhered to and promoted those ideologies.
Just my humble opinion.
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that you know. The meme of the left eating their own originated for a reason.
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Yes, I have seen that narrative. "Good was there accidentally" I guess is arguably included in option (f) but I considered it unlikely. Even taking it as a given that she was there intentionally, my point stands.
People here considered it, and I'm pretty sure that poster even did so in good faith. Of your own proposals, the video seems to at least significantly reduce the possibility of b and c.
I'm not going to say anything with confidence yet -- we don't even have confirmation this is real video! -- but there's a long distance between 'absolute 100% proof' and not 'particularly clarifying'.
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