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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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The Pogroms Will Continue Until We All Get Along

This is some good old fashioned culture warring. Happy New Year, y'all.

This clip has been popping up on twitter recently, most likely because Elon Musk re-tweeted it.

It's a doozy. I'm probably in too deep in AI land, but I thought for a moment it may have been a very well done deepfake. The cliches are just too juicy:

  • Calling for a focused investigation to various Republican personalities ex post facto after an (assumed) 2026-2028 Democratic sweep of house, senate, and white house. This is the pogrom vibe.
  • Over use of the term "accountability" which is not only grating, but an open code word for punishment / retribution.
  • Packing the Supreme Court.

A little Wiki background on the host here turns up the clown world dial even more. This is an atheist progressive white woman who has a podcast with a title that is synonymous with exasperation. She's been wanting to speak to the manager since before it was cool. The Wiki entry concludes with a Hasan Piker endorsement. Hashtag resistance, hashtag StayWoke.


I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism. Yas Queen, Globalize the Intifada.

Turning down my own sarcasm, this appears to be like a kind of resistance-within-the-resistance of severly disaffected former Obama style liberals / progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA. It isn't the weirdo terminally online language of Gen-Z etc, but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad. I didn't think this was, well, real. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies. Mostly, I felt sympathy.

But these folks seem serious! If this is TollBooth losing some of his childlike wonder of the world, so be it.

There is something very interesting going on with middle-aged White women, you see it with the hosts of this podcast and with all the recent ICE protests too. Obviously, I get middle-aged women being the moralizing demographic of Christian moms protesting video games, but recently White women seem to be radicalized with a degree of violence that is unfamiliar and shocking to me. Now, they aren't going out and committing mass shootings but they seem to have an open bloodthirst that seems very uncharacteristic. Anyone have any theories what is happening here?

Edit: The fact that Jennifer Welch is a divorced divorce attorney probably puts her in the 99th percentile for hatred towards men.

Are the more radical or less afraid of the consequences? Historically this demographic would have been meeker than they wish to be because they would be afraid of the consequences. Starting a fight as a 45 year old mom is a bad idea. Violence is rarely worth it as a high risk high reward strategy for fit young men. Women would have been too afraid of getting hurt.

These demonstrators learned especially through BLM that their behaviour has no consequences. They are not used to being in an environment where actions have physical consequences. They are used to screeching and the world babying them.

The fact that Jennifer Welch is a divorced divorce attorney probably puts her in the 99th percentile for hatred towards men.

I'm willing to give divorce attorneys a pass on pretty much anything. Back in April I was having a really bad day at work. I was appearing for a Zoom deposition and instead of doing it at a hotel Plaintiff's counsel thought it was a good idea for an old guy with limited technical ability to do it from his home without assistance. He lived in the middle of nowhere. And there had just been major storms in the area. The whole thing was delayed due to technical difficulties beginning about 15 minutes in, and every time we tried to continue with questioning some other issue would occur. After several hours of this the court reporter had a "technical expert" call in and try to walk the guy through some process. This woman had a high, whiny voice and talked to the guy like he was in kindergarten. I was about at the end of my rope, it was 1 pm, and the guy had answered about ten questions so far.

I went into the kitchen to get coffee and the wisened old of-counsel in my office asked me how I was doing. I told him that I probably died in a car wreck on the way to work and was actually in hell, and proceeded to tell him about my shitty morning. He said "Just look on the bright side: You could be practicing family law. And you'd have to carry a gun." That pretty much stopped me cold and I vowed that I wouldn't get too annoyed by minor professional inconveniences anymore.

I would add that I interned for a family law judge in law school, which judge handled child custody, and it's nothing I have any desire to get within a mile of.

I heard horror stories from my own divorce attorney (who I came to know socially as well). She never said anything about fearing harm from an aggrieved party, but the job does seem to involve having to deal with people who are going through the worst thing in their lives, which brings out the absolute worst in themselves as human beings. Things like a divorcing couple burning through $30k in billable hours fighting over a $1500 table that neither of them actually wants - they just want to hurt the other person.

It sounded like a ringside seat for the lowest tier of reality TV, except you're responsible for one of the malevolent idiots on the show.

Jennifer Welch is a divorced divorce attorney

That seems to be her co-host, Angie Sullivan. Welch is (was?) an interior designer. Both are divorced, though.

"By 2025, Welch scaled down her job as an interior designer and Sullivan had left her job as a divorce attorney in order to focus on the podcast."

Anyone have any theories what is happening here?

Internet outrage is inherently futile. You can doomscroll through endless provocation, but no short form video is ever going to give your ape brain the catharsis it wants. That's why these same women go on Scream Retreats and post videos of themselves having unhinged meltdowns. And that's why they spiral into more and more extreme rhetoric (and eventually, action) - because no amount of performative fury spewed into a screen ever actually scratches that itch. Combine that with a total lack of experience with real violence, and the end result is this nonsense.

One of the notable things about the MN shooting was how hard people went giving Good the benefit of the doubt. Even most people who think it was a justifiable shooting presume she couldn't have really had a murderous intent. I doubt that's a valid presumption. We don't have info about her media habits, but given who she was associated with and what she was doing, it seems very plausible that she was mainlining deranged homicidal ideation towards ICE agents, in the form of videos and posts from women and soyboys who think of the situation as something between a Marvel movie and a 7 year old daydreaming about fighting off bandits.

Why not run the ICE agent over? They're basically Nazi Death Eaters. None of the videos in which some septum-pierced crazy person loomed at the camera while calling for the deaths of federal agents ever raised the possibility that they were people, or might leave a real corpse. They're basically CGI robot aliens that don't even bleed.

I presume she fantasized about using lethal violence and ICE agents, and that she would realize those fantasies if given sufficient permission structure by society. She surely held a general malice towards ICE, as presumably most ICE agents do towards these types of protesters. I still think it unlikely that she meant to drive into him at that moment. I doubt she was capable of the 3d spatial awareness necessary to clip him just enough to hurt but not seriously injure. Mostly I think it was woman driver not correctly perceiving how big her vehicle was and how it would accelerate on a slippery road.

and that she would realize those fantasies if given sufficient permission structure by society.

The permission structure is here. She went to an openly advertised training session to learn about how to ram ICE agents with her car. Approximately zero people on her side condemn her for hitting an ICE agent, and approximately 100% of them would have openly feted her if she killed him. The only Democrat I am aware of who is calling this behavior/mentality a bad thing is John Fetterman, who is so unpopular with his party that he ought to flip teams if he wants a shot at being reelected.

as presumably most ICE agents do towards these types of protesters.

No, massive difference in "type" of malice. In video after video, the attitude I see from ICE towards these protestors is the same attitude a retail worker has towards Karens. They are annoying fucking bitches, and sometimes they escalate things into genuinely stressful situations, but you mostly just want them to go the fuck away. And if they did go away, they would transmute from "target of malice" to "amusing work anecdote" about an hour later.

And the ICE attitude is actually even less extreme than that. Part of what makes the retail worker so molten furious is how powerless they feel. Conversely, the ICE agents are allowed to sass back and if things escalate enough, forcibly arrest the entitled assholes.

I still think it unlikely that she meant to drive into him at that moment. I doubt she was capable of the 3d spatial awareness necessary to clip him just enough to hurt but not seriously injure. Mostly I think it was woman driver not correctly perceiving how big her vehicle was and how it would accelerate on a slippery road.

Sounds like women drivers who put themselves in stressful situations are inherently a threat to the public.

She went to an openly advertised training session to learn about how to ram ICE agents with her car.

Do you have a source for this? It's the first I've heard of it.

link

I didn't see anything in this article to corroborate your specific claim. Per the article:

ICE Watch and adjacent groups can also turn confrontational — with numerous instances of activists ramming agents with their cars in the past.

“[Renee Good] was trained against these ICE agents — what to do, what not to do, it’s a very thorough training,” Leesa said.

“To listen to commands, to know your rights, to whistle when you see an ICE agent,” she added.

The article does not say that Renee Good received training in 'how to ram ICE agents with her car', merely that she had received training from ICE Watch. The article does seem to imply that Good's training involved ramming, but recall how "The Media Very Rarely Lies" -- the NY Post isn't stating it as fact, but merely pushing that interpretation by how it arranges true facts, in the same way that left-leaning outfits did their best to slander Rittenhouse without directly lying about the facts of the case.

She went to an openly advertised training session to learn about how to ram ICE agents with her car.

Presumably it was advertised as less escalatory than that, as a fig leaf if nothing else?

Now, they aren't going out and committing mass shootings but they seem to have an open bloodthirst that seems very uncharacteristic. Anyone have any theories what is happening here?

Retvrn to ancient tradition of Germanic Screeching Women.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ullteTvPiw

I’ve never actually read a kulak post before, rather I only vaguely recall his posting and people sneering at him here.

That was actually a pretty good read though. A little long, but a decent bit of humor and some novel ideas.

I suspect it's a sign that an era is coming to a close. Usually, women have other men who would do the dirty work for them. If they feel that they have to do it themselves, something is probably collapsing.

I don't think it's a sign of collapse, feminism has had its share of radical rhetoric for decades now and that hasn't slowed it down. The more worrying explanation is that it's just a sign of a more general radicalisation, and if even seemingly normal women are willing to get locked up or shot for their cause that's all the more moral sanction for the men in that group to take it further.

It's not a rigorous historical point but I would think an exhausted radical movement looks something more like nationalism in Northern Ireland just before the fighting stopped, where the women are marching for an end to the violence and only a few stubborn men remain committed to it.

I am not sure this is really very surprising, to be honest. I'm not sure I can put it better than Kipling:

Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise. Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

but

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.

One could go a bit further and speculate that the arrangement Kipling describes:

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her

Has broken down and been washed away, particularly as the older Christian gender norms Kipling was familiar with have increasingly been forgotten, and commensurate with this breakdown we might expect to see ever stronger evidence that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

Now that one of their own has been killed they want others to commit bloodshed on their behalf?

But the "one of their own" in question was acting in an absolutely unhinged, uncharacteristic of women with children, manner, which got her killed in the first place.

Who cares? She was of the tribe and was killed by one not of the tribe. Thus, in fact, she was not unhinged. She was stunning and brave. If she acted uncharacteristic, no doubt she was forced to by the barbarity other tribe. Truly the other tribe's perfidy knows no bounds, but needs must.

There's something to this. Death was meant to be suffered by the others. The Karen class as never meant to endure the ultimate consequences of their actions. No wonder so the post-shooting protests were so virulent. The group that makes up the majority of progressive organisers has finally been attacked.