site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26041 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Basically nothing has happened but the commentariat has decided that Vance is a failure and doomed to lose. I don't know why. I think everyone must be bored.

Realistically, Vance is the heir-apparent to MAGA. Vance is popular, well-spoken, and ties together the different factions that make up MAGA. The only alternative at this time is Rubio and there's no indication that Vance and Rubio are even a little at odds.

Vance just has to defeat whoever the Democrats put up. Is the second rise of Kamala that threatening?

The fantasy you lay out is neither a credible path for Vance to take the Presidency, nor even to rank as a great figure of American history, but more likely to lead in him getting jailed or worse. "Sue for peace with Iran"? I think you should stop scrolling the timeline and pick up a book or something.

Vance just has to defeat whoever the Democrats put up. Is the second rise of Kamala that threatening?

I'd be surprised if the Democrats were that dumb. Not extremely surprised, but surprised.

But in general I agree. It's 2026. Election's in 2028. We've got a war to get through, plus midterms. Lots of things can happen, it's way too soon to count Vance out.

I think Kamala will have a lot of power because she presents a fantasy. If a Kamala wins 2028, it’s a mulligan, Trump was just a fluke after all, we’re back to the original timeline. She won after all it just took a while. Anybody else is an explicit acknowledgement that Trump won and we’re living in his shadow.

Kamala was never that popular without a coronation there's no way she gets the nomination.

She lost the popular vote to Trump. The stink of failure is too great this time. I predict an early flame out in the primary for her.

The dem primaries for the midterms have, so far, pushed towards conventional wisdom white male candidates. Not the same thing as moderates, but not diversity hires or people who can't string a sentence together.

Speaking of, what the heck is going on with Jasmine Crockett? First she gets beat by the white guy which clearly has to be down to racist misogynoir, right? and now there's some possible scandal over a former security guy of hers turning out to be a criminal impostor who just got shot by the cops?

I see she's another one touched by the guiding hand of Kamala:

When I became VP, I had a secret project—I called it the Stars Project—that only my senior team knew about. We’d brainstorm about the younger talents in the party and then, on Friday afternoons, I’d invite one or another to visit my office in the West Wing or the residence. As I’d offer a seat on the couch across from me, more than one nervously confessed: “I feel like I’ve been called into the principal’s office.” I would laugh and say, “No, I think you’re very talented. What are you working on, and how can I help you?”

Many of those on my list spoke at the convention: Lauren Underwood, Robert Garcia, Angela Alsobrooks, Lateefah Simon, Maxwell Frost, Joe Neguse, Lina Hidalgo, Jasmine Crockett.

I can’t speak for the others, but Lina Hildalgo is also crashing and burning, although she blames ‘mental health problems’ rather than racism and sexism.

Talarico is not a moderate; but he is a conventional seeming white guy… until you hear him talk(which during the primary, he didn’t do very much of). He won the primary due to black-Hispanic tensions and mismanaged elections in Crockett’s strongest county. This doesn’t make him a particularly strong general election candidate although he seems like it superficially.

Talarico is not a moderate

I don't have much exposure to him. Just some sound bites where he comes off as a decent and likeable Christian with down-to-earth, pragmatic ideas about politics. Though I see there's now a kerfuffle over a deep fake Talarico reading some of his old tweets and there's no hiding the fact he's debased himself at the altar of woke in the past. Is that what makes him immoderate? Or is there more to it?

Who have they got otherwise though? Newsome probably gets cancelled eventually for resembling a white male with initiative

Newsom at the moment looks like the front-runner, but his problem (same as with Kamala) is that the skills that won things in California aren't going to scale up to the national stage. Nate Silver had a run-down of "these are possible Democratic candidates who are doing better than Newsom" but none of those jumped off the page for me.

It can't be Kamala a second time, because she imploded so badly first time round that if they put her in a free primary there's no way she'll win (see her run for 2020 which planted the seeds of a lot of things that tripped her up in 2024, e.g. the infamous trans surgeries bit) and if they try and force her as the nominee as they did for 2024 there are no reasons for it this time round as there were last time, and unless someone has even fewer functioning brain cells than Tim Walz no way they would agree to be her VP (see Shapiro's little hissy-fit over why she rejected him).

Newsom is the obvious choice; it's possible the Democrats can keep their wokies under control long enough to elect him. There's also Shapiro, though with the anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) turn in both parties, I find him unlikely. And AOC, who is probably more electable than Kamala (though not by much).

The wokies can't win a straight vote. They universally hated Biden but it didn't matter.

Yeah, but I think his problem is the same as Kamala's (and indeed, Pete Buttigieg's problem): great, you did fantastic in your home state, now what?

He was governor of California, what does that mean for the rest of the country? Is he going to try and turn the entire USA into California? Some might love that idea, some might not. I can see why he's trying to rewrite his personal history ("I had to take a job as a paper delivery boy because my single mom had to work multiple jobs! I'm dyslexic!") in order to get away from the billionaire connections, but that's not really going to work. The French Laundry incident, the Getty wedding where he and a rake of other Californian pols were all too happy to bow and scrape for their very good close friends - it's not everybody can have City Hall closed down to preside over their single wedding. That's not helping with "I can relate to you, ordinary people, because I too had a hard life" presentation:

It seems we finally know what California Gov. Gavin Newsom was up to for at least part of his prolonged public absence for the last week and a half.

Vogue reports that the governor — who has not held a public event since Oct. 26 and abruptly canceled a trip to a climate change conference in Scotland — attended the wedding of billionaire oil heiress Ivy Getty in San Francisco over the weekend. A photo from the event appears to show the masked governor watching Gordon Getty kiss his veiled granddaughter. The Getty family are longtime San Francisco residents.

...Newsom has always had close ties to the Getty family, though the wedding does not entirely explain why he canceled his trip to the climate conference. The Sacramento Bee's Hannah Wiley noted that Newsom was supposed to be in Scotland from Nov. 1-3, and seemingly could have made it back in time for the weekend wedding.

My impression of this forum is that it leans overwhelmingly anti-populist and technocratic. Some of the posters here may have supported Trump and Vance briefly as spoilers within their own intra-factional pissing matches, but they remained 'capital D' Democrats at their core. Now that they know that they may have handed 8 - 12 years of consecutive rule to the populist wing of the GOP the knives are coming out.

I expect many more posts here about Newsom's "inevitability" and how Vance, Rubio, Et Al. are dead in the water before November of 2028.

As an actual Democrat, I can tell you right now that Newsom is not inevitable; in fact, I'd be rather surprised if he wins the nomination. He does not have the support of any component of the Democratic base that I can think of. Black people don't like him. Older people don't like him. Progressive young people don't like him. Moderates don't care for him. Conservatives who dislike Trump don't like him. Try finding a forum online where people keep talking him up. You won't. Maybe people from California like him. He offers absolutely nothing. Okay, he's willing to stoop to Trump's level, and seeing a Democrat do that was entertaining for a while, but the schtick has grown tiresome. He's not going to turn out the base, or any subset of the base, and his crossover appeal is nonexistent. The only reason his name keeps coming up is because he's the governor of a large state and everyone knows who he is. The nominee is probably going to be someone like Shapiro or Beshear who has shown he can appeal to moderates and hasn't accumulated much political baggage.

I want to see Pritzker run on a left-leaning populist platform. It's possible he could pull it off because, as a billionaire, he doesn't need to kiss the feet of the democratic donor class.

Wasn't that part of Trump's argument, i.e. "I'm already rich so you can trust that I won't be corrupt"?

He does not have the support of any component of the Democratic base that I can think of.

What about unmarried middle-class white women? What about Hispanics?

Black people don't like him. Older people don't like him. Progressive young people don't like him. Moderates don't care for him.

How did Harris fair in that kind of estimation? I get the impression she also lacked a natural constituency, but she ended up a presidential candidate anyway.

She lost her primary. She was then appointed VP because she was nonthreatening and stumbled into a big girl presidential run.

Even she admits that:

Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him. The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory. The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate.

The press knew I was on the short list, so they had our DC apartment building staked out. When Doug and I stepped out to go somewhere, they’d follow. Occasionally I’d save them the trouble. I’d wander over to their van and say, “Doug and I are just going for coffee, can I bring you something?”

Honestly, I didn't expect much from this memoir when I bought it, but it's solid gold for an inside look at why it all crashed.

The prose here is extremely clunky and betrays a cringe personality but this anecdote betrays charm and an ounce of charisma. (That’s why it was chosen for the book, which is what makes it cringe.)

Wait till you get to the "charming" anecdote about how her staff threw her an impromptu birthday party but some misfortunate made the mistake of getting one of those balloons with the age on it.

Kamala does not like reminders of her age.

So she crushed the balloon saying "60" beneath her heel while looking at her staff. To me, that reads more like "this could be your head and will be if you fail me again":

That afternoon, when I climbed the steps to the plane, I discovered it had been decorated in streamers. My team on board were wearing gold party hats and presented me with a deliciously rich German chocolate cake, my favorite birthday cake. They had red velvet cupcakes for the press. There was also a big helium balloon with fat numerals: 60. My team knew that I stopped counting birthdays a long time ago. So I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon. Then I went to find my Uggs.

And then she regales us all how she laid into her hubby dearest for not making special enough effort to celebrate her birthday. Oh yeah, "charming" is not the word I'd use. Imagine working for her. After reading this book, I now believe all the stories about how she was a terrible boss and the turnover in the VP staff was rapid and high:

He hadn’t put any thought into where we’d stay that night, so staff had picked a place for us that they thought would be a bit more special than the usual campaign hotel. It turned out to be a bland establishment whose red-and-black decor looked like it hadn’t been redone since the ’70s. The only distinguishing feature of the room was its larger size, but the curtains were broken.

Storm, knowing how much I love good food, had picked two possible restaurants from which to order dinner. She thought it would be nice if the meal was a bit of a surprise for me. So, on the plane, she knocked on Doug’s door to ask him to choose the menu. He’d shrugged and told her to ask me. So she picked the menu herself. Ordered a cake. Dressed the table with candles. My girlfriends had sent flowers.

Doug at least had thought to get a gift for me. It was a necklace by a designer I admired from Ojai, California, Jes MaHarry, the same designer who’d made the piece he’d chosen for my anniversary gift. This one featured a set of baroque pearls nestled in a gold setting. When I turned it over, I saw that the pearls’ backing had been engraved with the date. How thoughtful, to commemorate the milestone of my big birthday. But then I looked closer.

The date was not my birthday. It was the date of our wedding anniversary. He’d obviously intended to give me both pieces on our anniversary, until it occurred to him that by repurposing one piece, he could kill two birds with one stone. He could practice thrift and also save himself the bother of shopping for a birthday gift.

...I noted earlier that Storm speaks bluntly but always with correct protocol. The next day she told Doug, “Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.” She handed him a set of note cards. She’d numbered them one through five, for the nights we’d be apart through the end of the campaign. She instructed him to write a note on each one.

From then till the election, no matter what city each of us had landed in, at the end of the day I would find a note on my pillow, in Doug’s chicken scratch, telling me how much he loved me.

Yeah, I bet he remembered to leave her a card telling her how much he loved her. God Almighty, that's dog training, not how you treat a spouse.

At the risk of sounding sexist, just sounds like normal Boomer/early Gen-X, upper middle class, educated woman behavior to me. There are plenty of other reasons to dislike her as a political leader.

More comments

I think it goes without saying that she didn't take the traditional path. Her own candidacy in 2020 is an object lesson in this. Reasonably well-known, sort of hyped by the media, candidacy goes over like a lead balloon before any votes are cast.

With the reputation as Copmala, she over-corrected by swinging too hard to the progressive side, wasn't able to pull off the course correction subtly enough and so gave a lot of hostages to fortune, and to top it off was running in a primary that everyone pretty much knew would be Biden's version of "It's my turn now" after his previous failed attempts at a run, and the desperate hope that the aura of Obama would cling to him and bring success in the election.

It worked, in fact it worked too well as he was only supposed to be a one-term placeholder to keep Trump out while the Democrats worked on their real pick for the next election, but he (and his inner circle of the family) convinced himself that he could run for the second term. And by the time it became painfully obvious that this was the wrong decision, there wasn't any real alternative but to run Kamala instead. And because of all those hostages to fortune from 2020 plus the indebtedness to Biden, her campaign swung wildly all over the place on the basis of "I'm not Trump!" plus "Time for the First Female Ever!" and not much else. Policy positions? Oh no no no, look I'm a black woman, vote for me or you're a racist sexist!

Jesus. I had forgotten that she even ran

But... but... but did you not listen to the "Call Her Daddy" podcast? Everyone listens to that instead of Joe Rogan! 🤣

It's okay, I think she forgot about that too.

Biden definitely forgot.

I get the impression she also lacked a natural constituency, but she ended up a presidential candidate anyway.

She didn't go through a primary in 2024 to get there. Her 2020 results speak for themselves.

Try finding a forum online where people keep talking him up. You won't.

You best start believing in ghost stories forums Ms @Rov_Scam, you're in one.

PotC memes aside, I actually agree with your assessment.

I must have missed all the Newsom fanposting on here.

If you want to shell out the ten bucks to Scott you can read his case for Gavin.

You'd have to pay me rather more than ten bucks to read more than a summary of any remotely modern Scott article. He's a prime example of a writer who spends 95% of the words on completely pointless waffling and even the remaining 5% only very occasionally contains something of value.

Someone would have to pay me $10 to have me read them making a case for Newsom.

Compared to other Democrats. Any candidate is hated by 70% of Democrats and loved by 30%. Even as a GOP I don’t see how you hate Newsome. He’s just mid. So maybe his route is no one loves him but only 50% of Democrats hate him.

Josh Shaprio is 5'8", which does matter I think. No US president since Carter has been under 5'11". He is also Jewish with a little bit of personal history in Israel, which could bad for him in the current political climate.

I know almost nothing about Andy Beshear, but at least he does seem to be within a typical height range for a US president in the modern era. He is also a gentile straight semi-Southern white man, which matters. Democrats have done well with that kind of combination in modern history and would almost certainly be served well electorally by trying to continue something like it rather than risking a black and/or gay and/or female candidate (Obama is commonly thought of as black and did great electorally, but he is also one of the most charismatic political figures in recent history, and people with that sort of charisma seem to be rare in both the Democratic and Republican parties).

Shapiro may be short and have a lot of baggage, but he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that. I wouldn't count him out.

I think the only thing that could legitimately knock him out of the running is if the Ellen Greenberg case actually gains some traction outside the Fox news info sphere.

he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that

Which seems to be the problem if the Atlantic story is any way accurate. Lot of enemies inside the party who will be all too happy to knife him in the back should he formally run:

The worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania politics is that the governor is disliked—in certain cases, loathed—by some of his fellow Democrats. The causes vary: policy disputes, personality clashes, accusations of meddling and sabotaging and ceaseless self-promoting. When Shapiro was being vetted for vice president in the summer of 2024, Erin McClelland, whom Democrats had recently nominated for Pennsylvania treasurer, stunned the state party by suggesting on social media that Shapiro would “undermine” Harris—adding other insults for good measure.

...The private commentary from Democrats is worse. In 30 years spent climbing the party ladder, Shapiro has acquired a long list of enemies. If he wasn’t already aware, the governor found out the hard way in 2024, when a not-small and not-subtle chorus of Democrats made their misgivings about him known to Harris and her team. (A Pennsylvania lawmaker told me that, at one point, a member of Harris’s vetting operation called him to say that in their decades working in party politics, they had never witnessed so many Democrats turning on one of their own.) If Shapiro chooses to run for president in 2028, Democrats in the state told me, the backlash will be far more visible.

Shapiro seems like their best candidate right now. But this isn’t the Supreme Court where you can place the Jew and nobody cares. What percent of Dems right now would never vote for a Jew?

Probably no higher than the percentage of Republicans who won't.

Never? Very few. There may be some Muslims or conspiracy-minded blacks that wouldn't vote for one, but they're at the fringes of the party. If you had garden-variety Free Palestine lefties in mind, these are the same people who probably already voted for a Jew twice.

I agree that the percent of registered Dems who would never hold their nose and vote for a Jew is well within Lizardman territory, but regarding which potential candidates receive the party’s blessing, I think you underestimate both how pervasive low-level antisemitism is among Blacks (perhaps it’s the lingering effects of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam?), as well as how much Democrats think the Black vote is worth, both for reasons of woke-progressive virtue signaling and, to be fair, political reality in the Deep South.

I could easily imagine, in a smokevape-filled room at DNC headquarters, the progressive vanguard of the party putting their heads (such as they are) together and deciding, for reasons ideological as well as practical, that the most electable coalition they can realistically hope to assemble must rally around the tentpole of anti-Zionism.

As for

If you had garden-variety Free Palestine lefties in mind, these are the same people who probably already voted for a Jew twice.

I assume you are referring to Bernie Sanders, who has done a decent job—for a man of his advanced age—of navigating between the Scylla of his old-school, class-first leftist ideology and the Charybdis of the woke-progressive party line since 2016. In particular he has never, to my knowledge, given any public indication that he is a committed Zionist, or even a practicing Jew at all, or that his Jewish heritage endears him to the State of Israel.

The same cannot be said of Shapiro, who has repeatedly commented on his Jewish faith in ways that, at the very least, reverse-dog-whistle “Zionist bootlicker” to the watermelon-emoji Free Palestine types. Say what you will about their ilk (and believe me, I have an earful of my own criticism), but in my experience they are perfectly willing to accept that an ethnic Jew is not secretly doing Israel’s bidding, provided that the Jew in question makes the right mouth-noises, and avoids making the wrong ones. Sanders has pretty well passed that litmus test; Shapiro, regrettably, has not.

I think the allegations of black antisemitism are overplayed. Yeah, it may exist on the fringes, but one only has to look at the 2020 Georgia Senate Democratic primary to see that it isn't a huge factor. Jon Ossoff, a Jew who made his heritage part of his campaign, won overwhelmingly. I can't find exit poll numbers, but he got near unanimous support from black politicians in the state, most notably from John Lewis. Josh Stein, a practicing Jew, got nearly 70% of the vote in the North Carolina Democratic primary, running against a black guy in a state where the black vote is more important in the Democratic primary than it is in a lot of other places. It's hard to do a similar analysis for Shapiro since he never ran in a competitive gubernatorial primary, but by my calculations he got about 223,000 black votes in the general election. When Wolf ran for the first time in 2014, he got about 177,000 black votes. While the latter election had higher turnout, there's nothing in the data to suggest that blacks were especially put off by Shapiro, since he performed about as well as one would expect him to. It should be noted that blacks made up about 10% of the electorate in 2014 compared with 8% in 2022, but more blacks total came to the polls, and 92% of them voted Democrat in both elections. I don't know that any conclusions can be drawn from this, but I wanted to bring it up.

You're right that Shapiro's specific political positions may come into play when it comes to certain demographics, but that's different then saying that they'll never vote for a Jew, because they probably wouldn't vote for a Gentile who said the same things, either. And with Shapiro, you'd have to be really far to the Free Palestine side of the aisle for his comments to matter. His stance on Israel is similar to that of most Democrats: He accused Israel's military of overreaching, denounced Netanyahu, called for humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza, and called for an end to the war. What he refused to do was call for a unilateral cease fire without the hostages being returned, and refused to denounce Israel or Zionism altogether. The former position is now a moot point, and the latter position is likely to be held by whoever the nominee is. I agree that he's riskier on that front than a guy like Beshear, but he doesn't talk about it much and the perception of him could change when and if he's in a position where he has to talk about it more.

Vance is not popular, though. He's certainly well spoken and has a good shot at being a conservative intellectual or vizier. But it's difficult to say who he appeals to; the Romneycrats that like his speaking ability prefer Rubio(and have since it became apparent they weren't going to get their first choice, ever).

You wot, mate?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats