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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.

This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).

Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?

Are all of our institutions really so rotten?

And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?

Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine; but Trump is singular (derogatory).

It's hard to know what his , lets call them fans would do, or what they could do; but at least some of his haters have been listening to what he was saying and interpreting it literally, so who knows what THEY would do.

In brief: Yo maybe those were load bearing norms, maybe we shouldn't have started removing struts to save weight, maybe the civility and political correctness and all those cancelations on tumblr I'm told were happening to prevent some real ass Sullian cancelations in the street, type of thing.

Yeah. Because clearly tumblr was a long standing fence in the middle of nowhere that reformers wanted to tear down without understanding why tumblr cancellations were there in the first place.

You joke but that is a true fact. People confused getting yelled at with actually getting prescribed out of existence; they seem to think that nobody should be allowed to make them feel bad and the power of the state should be deployed to that effect.

It's the other way around. Cancel culture was about a lot more than private citizens / liberals "making people feel bad". Among other incidents:

  • Chicago citizens were fired from their jobs for making the OK hand signal, because progressives hallucinated that this was a White Supremacist hand signal because of 4chan

  • Mass censorship campaigns on social media platforms which included government officials emailing i.e. twitter and asking for accounts to be throttled / banned. (In the case of the pandemic specifically, many of the things that would get one censored turned out to be true.)

  • Academics and university speakers protested for having opinions unacceptable to liberals: this created a really perverse political culture on universities which culminated in e.g. corporations imposing mass DEI policies in the wake of George Floyd because nobody could say out loud that it's illegal to not hire white people because of their race.

  • Google broke a wonderful search engine that materially contributed to the benefit of all humanity because sometimes when you search the news you can find things that liberals think aren't true.

  • The host of The Bachelor was fired because he posted comments in defense of a contestant who attended an event at a plantation. The Dr. Seuss company stopped printing several of his books because they contain language progressives now consider unacceptable. James Watson was canceled and dishonored to the point that he had to sell his Nobel because he believes that race and IQ are real.

Cancel culture was real and progressives would have prescribed people out of existence if they had the power to. They clearly tried to many times. Instead of letting them we created a parallel society where they can't do that, which is now mainstream. You are choosing to participate in a forum that abides by these norms, and not by the cancel culture norms progressives tried to ensconce.

To make a little joke, None of those things happened, and if they did happen they didn't happen like that, and if they did happen like that then it was good.

  1. You are gonna need to source me the first claim, it doesn't seem to have happened according to google.

  2. Mass censorship is when fact checked, got it. Crazy that I was actually there during that time and I would have paid money to get away from those types; it's the "I was Canceled!" from the front shelf in the bookstore meme in real life.

  3. Got it, free speech is when you can say whatever you want and if people get mad about it they should restrict their tone and only complain in the free speech zone on designated protest days. The knife cuts both ways, if you get to say what you want as a public figure, the public gets to call you a fascist/marxist depending on which direction the yelling is coming from.

4 and 5: so, the government should step in and force corporations to do things that the public at the time didn't like? Is that your solution? What do you actually want to do about this? When the republicans get washed this year and then again in 2028, should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?

Cancel culture was fake, it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit for the first time after 600 years of being on top and instead of realizing "Hey, free speech is great actually" doubling down on "No, only we should be allowed to cancel, now lets gut every US anything that has trans in the title. Transgenic? Transnational? Transorbital? Sounds woke to me."

You can get arrested in Britain for "hate speech" and hundreds of people do every year and the position of mainstream liberals was that we should have laws just like that. Look, just admit you're in favor of cancel culture, that's a much more consistent position to hold. Just admit that you're fine with the government monitoring twitter so they can throttle accounts they don't like. You can't actually coherently claim that "mass censorship is when fact checked" so it's no big deal and then also claim to somehow be against it.

should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?

This is what actually happened. Dems on the Hill held hearings excoriating tech CEOs for not censoring more. Officials in the State Department had working relationships with social media companies to censor content they didn't like. The files were all released by Elon when he bought twitter. The case went up to SCOTUS and John Roberts ruled that it isn't illegal because the State Department has a 1st Amendment right to tell twitter to ban things.

You can be for it or against it. It's real and it happened.

Cancel culture was fake, it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit for the first time after 600 years

See, you're not even against cancel culture, you're essentially arguing in favor of it. I don't actually need to provide a citation for every instance of cancel culture in the world: You are arguing on a forum that was created because reddit would no longer allow us to have these conversations on their platform. You are literally participating on a platform that exists as a consequence of the forces you deny exist. Your position is inherently ridiculous.