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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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School shooting in Turkïye claims ten lives.

By this point, you know the drill. Teenaged male, terminally online, obsessed with anime (to the point of preferring to be addressed by the name of his favourite anime character), idolises Elliot Rodger and the Columbine shooters, in a polyamorous LDR with two people he'd never met in person. According to his manifesto (because these fuckers always have manifestos – the second you create a Google Doc with the word "manifesto" in the title, Google should automatically red-flag your Google account), he thinks he's the intellectual superior of everyone around him, and decides to prove it by shooting up his local secondary school. Nine students killed, along with a teacher who died heroically shielding them. Shooter is pronounced dead at the scene.

And, in what by now has become a trope just as tiresomely predictable as any of the foregoing, the perpetrator likes to be referred to with the pronouns "she/they/it", making it at least the third mass shooting by a trans-identified male so far this year (and this one, like Tumbler Ridge, occurred outside the US, so we can't just blame it on the NRA and call it a day). Boy, that sure is an awful lot of heresy misinformation, isn't it Wikipedia? As I said recently, it infuriates me that the threat of incel-motivated mass violence is so relentlessly hyped up while trans-motivated violence is denied outright, even though the latter has surely claimed more lives this century than the former.

People often talk about the demise of the monoculture, how we've splintered into a hundred niche echo chambers and no new true household names have been minted since 2014. This is true up to a point, and yet untrue in another sense: being autistic and terminally online is its own monoculture. It's not like there's one culture for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in the US and another for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in Turkïye: from San Diego to Shanghai, this demographic has just the one culture, with its own argot, cultural practices and set of values. If you're depressed, have a hard time fitting in at school and your parents buy you a smartphone, sooner or later you'll end up speaking in the same voice and with the exact same set of fixations (anime, gender ideology, Columbine) as everyone else meeting that description. I'm so grateful not to have been born a decade later.

By this point, you know the drill. Teenaged male, terminally online, obsessed with anime (to the point of preferring to be addressed by the name of his favourite anime character)

I in fact, do not know the drill. I'm not even aware of a single school shooter known to be obsessed with anime, though if I'm simply ignorant please enlighten me.

the perpetrator likes to be referred to with the pronouns "she/they/it", making it at least the third mass shooting by a trans-identified male so far this year

I do know this drill though.

being autistic and terminally online is its own monoculture.

Not quite, autistic, terminally online, and trans is its own monoculture. A large portion of cishet terminally online autists find their own spaces. For example, the kiwi farms is populated by terminally online autists, the proof is in the fact that they spend hours cyberstalking and compiling dossiers on their targets, certainly something a normie would never be seen doing. And in fact this very place, themotte.org is also populated by terminally online autists, and our culture here is absolutely nothing like the autistic, terminally online, trans monoculture.

I would argue that the trans monoculture is especially susceptible to globohomo due to the fact that the community is heavily evangelistic, going through great lengths to promote their ideology to anyone who will listen. Meanwhile most other autistic subcultures are more insular, and happy to do their own thing while staying under the radar.

known to be obsessed with anime,

There are almost certainly others, because in 2026 being obsessed with anime is like being obsessed with video games in 2006. Finding it remarkable is the base rate fallacy; tons of people like anime now, especially teenagers.