site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 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.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I made those links to previous conversations because I am content with the arguments made in the past. There were millions of European Jews who vanished during WWII - that part is indisputable. This occurred alongside the conquests of a violently anti-semitic government that openly stated its loathing of Jews - that is also indisputable. It's not exactly hard to connect the dots here, and I'm not going to engage you on nitpicking details.

The more important point is that those details are in themselves a red herring, because it seems to me that, as Amadan says, even though you say that the Holocaust didn't happen, your openly-stated positions on Jewish people imply that it would have been a good thing if it had. And you can just say that! This is the Motte - you won't get banned. It's the way you pivot and dissemble that's so frustrating. You can just say what you believe.

It's this:

But "the Holocaust" - a concerted effort to exterminate Jews - happened, and the strategy of the Holocaust denier is to try to convince people that actually the whole thing was fake because record books at Dachau don't match what someone said in an interview, or what have you. The reality of course is that they know the effort was made to exterminate Jews and they think it was a good thing, but they also know that the public is extremely unsympathetic to this and that Jews benefit from the widespread guilt generated by the Holocaust. So it's a political strategy to try to erode belief that the Holocaust happened, not a historical investigation.

But this forum isn't the public, and there is no need to strategically lie here. Thus my regularly asking you, "Do you hate Jews?" You know the answer to that question, and I know the answer to that question, but you're bizarrely unwilling to say it, even here, on an internet forum for contrarian edgelords, under the cloak of anonymity, even though everybody already knows it. What is this cowardice?

There were millions of European Jews who vanished during WWII - that part is indisputable.

It is absolutely disputable given the argument relies on subtracting a sequence of highly unreliable population estimates. Ryan Faulk (AKA the Alternative Hypothesis) had an excellent article contending with those censuses:

  • The pre-war population estimates were revised upwards after the fact
  • The post-war population estimates were revised downwards decades after the fact
  • The 1945 survey was the only one not revised despite the fact it would have been the most unreliable survey due to the chaotic immediate postwar period with refugees flooding from every direction.

So all of the historical revisions of Jewish population in Europe have worked to inflate the theoretical death toll of the wartime period- except the 1945 census, they totally got that one right apparently despite the fact it would have been the most unreliable one of all.

It is especially disputable give there is no list of names associated with the claimed 2 million victims of those camps, they are anonymous. Imagine filing a missing person's report for someone who is anonymous, and then demanding the cops find the missing anonymous person- no name, no description, nothing. That is what the Holocaust does times 2 million. The reason there is no list of victim identifications, which would be evidence to prove that people were actually killed there, is because it didn't happen. It is also one of the reasons that Revisionists point out that the ban on any scientific investigation of those grounds is essentially spoliation. If these really were anonymous victims then excavating the mass graves in order to attempt to identify the victims would be SOP. But not only has that not ever happened, not a single mass grave on these sites alleged to contain the remains of two million people has ever been excavated (if they were real they would be the largest mass graves in human history, by far - AKA outliers), Jewish authorities forbid it.

Anonymous victims, no documentary evidence, no physical evidence, no contemporary witness accounts, no contemporary clandestine reports of the alleged cremation operation which would have been clearly visible in the sky to every single person from Warsaw to Lublin, no bodies, no mass graves. The exact same claims made at several other camps are proven to have been false. The story itself is absurd:

900,000 Jews were tricked into walking inside gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then they were gassed with carbon monoxide from a captured Soviet tank engine- a highly unusual and exotic killing method that so happens to resemble ubiquitous delousing procedures. Then they were buried. Then they were unburied and all cremated on makeshift open-air pyres over the course of like 120 days (no less than 5,000 every single day in camps that did not have state-of-the art crematoria like the concentration camps). And then they were all reburied. And all of this escaped any documentary trace. Excavation to scientifically analyze what actually happened is forbidden.

When the Kamloops Children's Mass Graves hoax broke in the news media, I immediately predicted that the Tribes would forbid excavation of those alleged mass graves in order to protect the lie (which is exactly what has happened since, the tribal leaders give the exact same reasoning as the Jews for forbidding excavation to investigate the claim). I predicted that because it pattern-matches to exactly what the Jews did at Treblinka and the other camps. They claimed massively inflated death tolls on the basis of extremely flimsy hearsay and witness testimony and forbade any manner of scientific investigation that any rational person would expect for a crime of this magnitude.

None of us believe the Holocaust because of the evidence presented for those crimes. We believe it because we watched Steven Spielberg growing up, and as children were shown horrific footage of typhus victims and victims of Allied bombings at the Western camps which aren't even the camps that have the real alleged Holocaust mass graves that have never been excavated.

I just said that I was not interested in getting into the weeds of Holocaust denial.

I believe it is telling that you chose to engage exclusively on the point that I said I was not going to nitpick, and chose to ignore the more substantial points regarding your position on Jews.

Ah, you claim that something is indisputable while simultaneously asserting you don't want to go into the weeds and therefore I am not allowed to contest your false claims.

It is disputable, if you tell me something is indisputable but it's actually false, I'm going to contest it despite your protestation.

Well, bluntly, it is that I don't consider you a remotely objective assessor of any kind of evidence related to Jews or the Holocaust because you, at such tedious and repetitive length, clearly hate Jews.

And I think your continual evasion of that question - the way you duck and weave, unwilling to, even under the shield of an obviously-Nazi-inspired screen name, on an anonymous web forum, where, again, everybody already knows how you feel about Jews - is plainly bad faith. Worse, I think it is cowardly.

The Holocaust numbers are not actually important here, because you're not a disinterested observer, and they are not motivating for you. If you became convinced that the six million figure is true exactly as popularly reported, I do not think it would change your feelings on Jews one iota. It's just not the operative thing.

Thus to repeat myself:

The more important point is that those details are in themselves a red herring, because it seems to me that, as Amadan says, even though you say that the Holocaust didn't happen, your openly-stated positions on Jewish people imply that it would have been a good thing if it had.

Bit of funny lore on that front. Be me:

  • Have traditional conservative upbringing/perception of Jews
  • Watched a couple Ryan Faulk (Alternative Hypothesis) videos on HBD
  • Start getting red-pilled on HBD
  • See, for the first time ever in the wild on unrelated subreddit, some Reddit user called "TrannyPornO" who defends HBD in the discussion thread, visit his profile
  • He poasts on some subreddit called "TheMotte", how I arrived at TheMotte
  • AltHype stops posting on YouTube because of the ascension of the YouTube censorship regime
  • AltHype posts to BitChute to avoid getting his account banned
  • I go to BitChute to watch AltHype videos
  • I see Chemistry of Auschwitz in sidebar
  • lol it's Covid let's see what the Holocaust Denier Flat Earthers have to say
  • Don't understand a lot of it, am not remotely convinced, but there is one easily digestible argument, which is that all of the extant blueprints of Krema I in Auschwitz (the one shown on tour to tourists) label it as a morgue and they all through the years document a swinging door leading to the furnaces, which makes sense for a morgue but no sense for a gas chamber.
  • Hmmm I wonder what the mainstream response to this is, it sounds like a good argument but I'm sure there's a good refutation
  • Realize there is no refutation, they just engage in authoritarian tactics to absolve themselves from even feeling the need to respond to criticisms like this because those arguments are made by Holocaust Deniers - scum of the earth and not worthy of acknowledgment by our credentialed academics
  • Reminds me of my own HBD awarness arc in which the established academics just dig into their narrative and denounce valid criticisms that question prevailing dogma
  • Sufficiently gaslit into diving deep into the topic because I don't know what's true
  • MFW Revisionists are right after reviewing essentially all the arguments and counter-arguments (this part takes years honestly)

It is fair to say honestly that most Holocaust deniers, especially the Denier repoasters on Twitter, are antisemites who use Denial as a bludgeon. I think I am rare in that investigating this topic was my own red-pill on broader Jewish Question, so-to-speak, the reason I spent so much time investigating it is because I was resistant to Revisionist conclusions. And then my change in opinion on that topic also led to questioning many other institutional norms, prevailing cultural criticisms, and finding common patterns and I share my thinking here on this forum. The end, true story. My Holocaust Denial came before my (alleged) Antisemtism, I don't think there are many such cases.