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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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If you can find a clip of Charlie Kirk spitting on a woke snowflake and then roundhouse kicking her car causing enough damage that it is no longer street legal, then I will agree with this take.

The urge to create this in Sora is strong...

This is what I am talking about. In the OPs metaphor, Kirk is analogous those middle-school mean girls who go spread rumors, sick the teachers on you, maliciously turn people against you. All without actually personally inflicting violence on you. Their motives are to get fame, popularity, social cred, friends, all very banal human things. Are you the sort of person that when someone fights back violently, for being bullied, you punish them because those mean girls weren't physically violent? Or are you the adult that "plays dumb" because those mean girls need to face the consequences of their social violence?

If you are the former, then a lot of people on the right complain about this zero-tolerance fighting problem and how it punishes people for standing up for themselves. If you are the later then the Kirk situations is just that scaled up with far deadlier consequences.

Kirk peacefully went and spoke with people in order to change their minds and promote his message.

You're equating that to someone interfering with federal officers while armed, multiple times, while shouting, "assault me."

It would be laughable if there were any humor in it.

There's humor in everything, you just need to look for it.

I am not claiming Kirk violently assaulted people, and I never have. There might be some sort of masculine honor in that at least. Instead, he advocated for the state to go inflict violence on people, he advocated for a return to laws and norms that would physically hurt his out group, he engaged in running political campaigns to do that. He knowingly kept the temperature of political discourse high and cultivated a following out of these efforts that provided him with a very very lavish lifestyle/worth. And he was effective in doing so. Apparently his out-group can predict the future better than you can, they felt this future violence, real or imagined. And they decided to act, to do something about it.

Act like a mean-girl, and maybe someone is going to violently attack you for it. Profit off of stirring tribal hate and division and maybe society should "Turn a blind eye" when some of that hate and violence finds you.

Isn’t this a generalized argument against any civil discourse? If that guy wins, my team loses, therefore pew pew. Should we all just go gangs of New York style and hit the streets with shillelaghs and cleavers instead?

It seems like it a generalized argument against civil discourse only if all politics can be interpreted as advocating for state violence against or in favor of X... which seems like quite a stretch.

That's not a stretch at all.

Sure, the logical conclusion of any government policy is that they ultimately would enforce taxation, etc, through the police or military, but this is, in my opinion, taking the logical conclusion to a somewhat ridiculous end that renders the idea of the "state inflicting violence" basically meaningless.

This is what government is. This is why, e.g., for all the moralistic talk about recycling, you can be jailed for putting your trash in the wrong bin.