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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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all shades of low-agency

This is the truest blackpill IMO: collective agency has been eradicated from Westerners, and it will take at least a century to rebuild the necessary infrastructure to produce it again. A shared sense of tribal origin and identity, shared heroes, shared ritual celebrations, shared sacred affinities, shared (invented) memories, allegiance to a promised land, a shared enemy, and shared tragedies are the evolved ways to collaborate as humans. Even more important is the sense of catastrophic danger to the tribe which activates threat detection. While the Westerner has all of these instincts manually turned off through years of cultural conditioning, the religiously and/or nationalistically Jewish collective does the opposite, and tries their hardest to place every member through a rigorous process of in-group allegiance to enable collective collaboration. It is a kind of asymmetrical cultural strategy and it will win every single time, because the conditioned member of the group will choose what’s best for the group for free, and more robustly.

This plays out practically as follows: the President has not been conditioned to hyper-value his own tribe, but Kushner has, so Kushner persuades Trump toward a certain path which benefits the tribe. Trump’s cabinet make-up was significantly informed by people from the tribe, and they got rid of Gaetz through what looked like a kompromat op. Trump’s favorite news guy, Mark Levin, has allegiance to the tribe, and caters his message to persuade Trump. There’s a cadre of lobbyists who will all work passionately to benefit the tribe and they are motivated by deep biological triggers and not just money, and they can wield an enormous amount of influence as we saw with Les Wexner. In fact, while the Wexner Foundation would host talks about the dangers of White nationalism, they developed a meticulous decades-long strategy to increase loyalty to Israel among American Jews and decrease the intermarriage rate (which they catastrophized as a second holocaust), employing billions of dollars toward this aim. Why would Rubio or Hegseth risk their careers and livelihood to stand up against Trump when they have no deep reflexive in-group favor? And then you have billionaires like Miriam Adelson who don’t waste their money on a random African charity but have been trained to employ it toward Israel, and she admits to this. What we see are only the branched-off actions (Miriam has a lot of money) and not the root (Miriam was conditioned at a young age, her husband was given a job by a tribe member, tribe members sought to influence her support by activating her biological instincts).

In politics, “agency” isn’t an individual thing, but a product of social network and reflexive habits and values. If a tribe member wanted to “do something positive” for his group, he can call hundreds of organizations which will paternalistically guide him and even train him toward the most effective path to benefit the group using decades of experience (“volunteer here…” “join this…” “I know a guy in this industry…”). There is no organization which does this for Westerners. You can’t just cold email someone who will hype up your feelings of collective pride, remind you of your ancestral enemy Amalek, and then tell you to do x and y and then work in z because “it’s good for the Jewish people”. Westerners are woefully behind the winning strategy of power as it is actually acquired according to EvPsych.

This is the truest blackpill IMO: collective agency has been eradicated from Westerners, and it will take at least a century to rebuild the necessary infrastructure to produce it again.

The blackpills don't end there! Demographics is destiny, and the West does no longer have "at least a century" to rebuild anything. A century from now, Westerners will no longer be in charge of what is currently thought of as the West. The world may at that point be African, or Muslim, or Chinese, or some new atomized globalized urbanized uniform brand of cultureless human mass, but it won't be recognizably Western.

This is the truest blackpill IMO: collective agency has been eradicated from Westerners, and it will take at least a century to rebuild the necessary infrastructure to produce it again

Overly pessimistic, I hope. I think it could/would be rebuild much quicker through a collective crisis. I'm watching China with a lot of interest partly because of that. I think a descend into a Cold War era international order, followed by a defeat of the West at the hands of China - could be a relative minor thing like Sputnik - would jump start the entire thing right quick. Probably requires media alignment and effective political leadership, but I assume that would emerge more or less naturally.