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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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Ok, but what’s to stop thé SPLC from handing it’s list off to some other foundation?

The list itself is not as important as the SPLC's stamp of approval on it. The SPLC had a positive reputation on the political spectrum from all but the most extreme leftists down to the center right, covering most people who are within the Overton window, and certainly a majority of decision makers in the tech and financial sectors. To these people, they were credible as a non-partisan subject matter expert on what is a hate group or related. Of course, to people deeply aware of the culture war they were obviously a player in it, but there's still a shocking amount of people unaware of the culture war. Or who don't recognize it as a war between two sides with legit grievances, but only as a one-sided "my side who is obviously right" vs "uninformed, stupid and/or evil people". Using their data product for automated checks made sense. Anyone else, or the SPLC itself going forward if it survives this, is going to have a harder time laundering political interference as a non-partisan service. Certainly they'll face more scrutiny.

The reputation of the SPLC does not matter. The left can and does spin up new organizations all the time which are treated by the media and thus by all concerned as if they were absolutely credible experts. If the SPLC falls, they will simply spin up a new organization with some generic sounding name that will have the same reputation as the SPLC but none of its legal liabilities.

The list itself isn't very useful; not only is it public information, the vast majority of organizations are defunct, meaninglessly small, or so-clearly-legitimate than the SPLC couldn't meaningfully use it against them. There's some Schelling point value in having the list, but as Journolist demonstrated, you can build Schelling points fast.

I think Patio11's trying to motion around where this list itself is a legal risk, at least to the organizations involved here. I just can't tell whether that's actually the case, or him wishcasting.

50-odd years of legitimacy are difficult to hand off.

Whether or not that matters in practice probably varies by industry.

Its detailed in the linked article, but what the SPLC actually "sells" to its donors is the ability to do a massive, coordinated pressure/harrassment (depending on your outlook) campaign against noncompliant institutions that results in reputational damage that can be priced very highly.

So in some sense, it doesnt even matter if the SPLC is convicted, the mere fact that they now have the "potentially fraudulent" label hanging on them means compliance departments not only do not have to, but are arguable legally barred from, having contact with them in the way they used to operate. So the SPLC as a political operative NGO is basically dead in the water.

Also, not sure how they are going to weasel out of their CEO directly admitting to bank fraud in official communications, so as a going concern as well they seem to be in a lot of trouble.

So they basically ran the same playbook as AIPAC? Neither has crazy high funding - though SPLC more than I knew - but they were extremely good at targeting a few firms. AIPAC would chop off anyone who didn’t fund Israel.

If Mackenzie is right then the facts will scare the hoes Compliance enough to never again directly inject the SPLC agenda into the system, but there's got to be more than one way for the SPLC and friends to skin the cat. There's at least $700m reasons why the dangers of racism aren't going anywhere.

What are the chances this is wrapped up with a bow before a January 2029 inauguration? Even if the DOJ's prosecution wanted to move fast it seems possible this case remains in pre-trial come a Democrat's potential inauguration. Withdraw the prosecution at that point without a viable alternative for anti-racist quasi-regulator -- which Jeff Bezos keeps nervously asking about -- and it's probably back to business. What does MacKenzie think is going to happen when Joe "Thousand Year Reich" Smith makes the headlines in 2030? The regulators, politicians, and financial organs are not going to determine the money must flow simply because there's no more credible SPLC.

Nothing, obviously. Blue Tribe takes a week to hit consensus on who "owns" the list, and Bob's your uncle. Not to mention that anyone who claims that the SPLC itself will in fact be got here is out over their skis. Obviously, they have broken the law and so they should be prosecuted and convicted. But that's not actually how things work, is it? Procedural outcomes are not deterministic, but rather are manipulated.

A more relevant question is whether the political system he describes is one we should be upholding and maintaining. To a first approximation, it seems to me that everything works this way, and the novel development is that things are happening fast enough that the nature of the system is weakly perceptible. Obviously, the SPLC and every other organization that cooperated with them in their regulatory push should be nuked to ash. Equally obviously, that almost certainly isn't going to happen, and if it did it would not solve the actual problem, which is that Blues fundamentally do not believe that rules constrain their desires or behavior, and do not recognize a need to share society or its mechanisms with those who disagree with them. It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.

To the extent I personally have policy preferences, I prefer the orderly administration of law. Any law we would not be willing to enforce against a sympathetic lawbreaker, a friend, or an ally is a bad law. Until a bad law is changed, it is the law. I reject a legal realism, or legal cynicism, that says that power is the only law.

The Declaration of Independence and D.C. billboards agree: No one is above the rules. We have no kings in this country.

Okay, but power is observably the only law, and anyone who doesn't recognize it at this point is either a fool or a liar. Many people observably are above the rules, and exist in this pleasant state for long periods of time. We do have kings in this country, have and very likely will. Now what?

Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.

I don’t think anyone else can run this playbook again. It worked because most firms were looking to play ball so they would only need to get a few renegade scalps. Without everyone else playing ball then there are too many renegades to target at one time.

And you think the whole dirty alliance is going to fold up because one of their tentacles got stung? There are thousands of groups doing exactly what the SPLC is doing in every western country. The SPLC is just one of the more egregious examples, but that hole has already been filled and Amazon/FBI/All FDIC banks are now taking their orders from a different communist NGO funded by capitalist robber barons. We should be finding out which one and what it's called in a few decades, and it will be thrown to the wolves someday, maybe even before we die of old age.

That they had the guts to use the name "Center Investigative Agency" for one of their alleged shell cracks me up.

I wonder if that's deliberate for the purposes of paying people to rat - confusing/frightening them into thinking it's a legitimate government op.

Never mind that I'm pretty sure internal is supposed to be FBI's territory, but I doubt any of the people they were going after were the sort to be familiar with three-letter-agency jurisdictional conflicts.

It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.

One of the major issues for aware independents/neutrals is that while Blues are doing this while they are in power, can Reds offer any evidence that they wouldn't do the same? The Reds clearly had the power in the 1980s and used it to do pretty much the same thing the Blues are doing now. They used the federal government to write laws to ban behaviors that they felt were morally incorrect, to punish organizations in the outgroup. Is there any evidence that the Red tribe has learn the bitter lesson? Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class of authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

What did the Reds do in the 1980’s? Is this the war on drugs or banning some swearing? I guess we had LATAM commie death squads but that seemed like both sides were down.

Moral Majority. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the anti-conservative/anti-religious reaction today by the progressives is due to generational trauma inflicted by overzealous authoritarianism by the moral majority. Notice how most of it is not economic leftism but cultural leftism, the moral majority was authoritarian cultural rightism.

The moral majority also made a lot of people from Boomers to Millennials, incapable of even conceiving of the left as authoritarian. Gen Z having never experienced it seems a lot more comfortable pushing back against woke excess.

I wonder if its incapability or if has just created such a psychological scar that they perpetually view themselves as the underdog. A lot of ink has been spilled on the weird prog belief, that even as they control much of the establishment, they still genuinely see themselves as the underdog fighting the system. Part of that is undoubtedly the revolutionary marxism, but I wonder how much of it is scarring from the moral majority?

Yeah I predict Gen Z having experienced a decade+ of Leftwing Authoritarianism will swing rightward in the cultural direction while also being leftwing/populist in the economic direction as a direct consequence of their upbringing.

I guess I agree with the policies they want. But do you actually think they are the same as what we saw 2014-2024? Sure they did politics. And I could see how someone would find them annoying. But SPLC would basically ban you from the internet, maybe take away your job. Annoying family value rallies just doesn’t seem like the same thing.

I mean the internet didn't exist in the 70s and 80s. Considering the Moral Majority engaged in cancel culture at a similar levels as the Woke/SJW, I imagine, if it did exist the Moral Majority would have wasted no time in cancelling you on the internet. The Moral Majority did try to take away your job...

The Right passed actual laws in the 70s and 80s that banned gay people from teaching in public schools, or even someone advocating gay rights in public outside of school contexts. And there were the FCC crackdowns on indecent content, e.g. Howard Stern, the Helms Amendment.

There was also quite the panic around video games, movies, music, and board games, though that was admittedly bipartisan. I remember one teacher I had freaking out because I was reading one of those choose your own adventure books, which she associated with Dungeons and Dragons for some reason.

Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.

Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.

I'm not american, but welcome to how atheists (and gays, and so on) felt under the moral-majority-style religious right. It was the same kind of split were the moderate religious right was publicly saying not believing was fine, but they were actively politically allying (and thus empowering) a more rabid wing that would regularly go after people who do something that goes against their beliefs. Like, it's fine to be an atheist, as long as you don't do anything that might offend random christian activists.

To be fair, the woke actually still feels worse to me since it has more internal institutional backing inside academia, but there definitely is some symmetry here.

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I was more late 90s and 2000s, and the closest I got to feeling hated was around the Iraq War, when I was vocally anti-war in a time when everyone supported it, in what we would now call a red state (back then, the blue-vs-red framing barely existed).

I would say I feel more hated now than I did then; my politics are the same, but my visible identities create negative reactions (and my invisible ones--like being bi--I don't advertise).

Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

Obviously, which is why the most liberal times in American history come when either Blue is busy destroying Red institutions, or vice versa (or there's an economic boom which distracts everyone; you can't deploy cancel culture lists when people [and in particular cities] are so desperate for workers it doesn't matter at all what their political persuasion is).

Once one side starts consolidating things get bad, which is why 2014-2024 in particular were especially fucked.

This is why independents are the way they are: it's more about Noticing when one side is starting to accumulate enough power to pull this off, and [trying their best] to deal with them. And whether that best is good enough or not generally depends more on economic factors than anything else.

I think this is an interesting thought. Like a trace that economic need/prosperity requires cooperation among a larger subsection of the populace, but once a threshold is achieved, the luxury beliefs of intra-tribal warfare resurges until at which point all the economic surplus is consumed starting the cycle over again.

Of course we would, there's no constituency for classical liberalism. But ask yourself- do you prefer school prayer, or school secret gender transitions?

I view them as equal levels of bullshit. The fact that you think one is worse than the other is the point. You think the Red's way is the lesser of two evils.

You don't think one is worse than the other?

I understand you aren't a big fan of prayer in public schools, and probably not Christianity more generally. But if one is an atheist, then following along politely with the Our Father once per day is not a big ask, not in the way that 'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

The difference is that underage gender transition will only affect a vanishingly small proportion of the underage population, while school prayer affects everyone. There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

and what your own kids are forced to do

Ah, but [my kids] are forced to affirm a lie (as in, that a man magically becomes a woman because he donned fake breasts and cut his penis off), in exactly the same way, and for the same reasons, as it is for State religions. The school will punish them for blasphemy misgendering if they do not.

Naturally, for those who believe in that, especially for those who draw a salary from that belief, it's just Common Decency.

Naturally, for those who believe in that, especially for those who draw a salary from that belief, it's just Common Decency.

This is the biggest issue, both sides feel that they are just right and need to save others from poor behavior or bad decisions when its not asked for. The can't recognize that their beliefs are not the one-true reality.

There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

At the risk of channeling WhiningCoil, that implies that the progressive version stops at other people's kids. Even ignoring for now the difficult question of how consenting a 13-year-old getting browbeaten by the educational system gets, there's no shortage of directly compelled pro-transgender speech that the state has been quite happy to mandate in schools, and an even broader set that the schools 'don't mandate' they just punish anyone that doesn't go with.

Much of the worry about the school gender crap is precisely worry about what your own kids are being groomed to do.

To be clear you are clearly biasing the framing towards your viewpoint.

To me you asked me:

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to give a little Sig Heil in the morning and have the school teach them why being gay, crippled, jewish, romani, black, not white and straight is evil and should be killed for the betterment of the community

Or

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to recite the communist manifesto and have the school teach them why being a dirty selfish capitalist is the root of all evil in the world, and if they don't share everything or report on people, including their parents, to the state then they are anti-revolutionary and thus evil.

long politely with the Our Father once per day

Yes a polite Sig Heil is not a big ask.

'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

Have you tried not oppressively forcing your child to adhere to evil capitalist notions that people are not all inherently created equally?

Your conception of the prayer vs gender pronouns is hysterically biased. It's never just a polite "oh father" just like its never just a polite "please use they/them". Give an inch and everyone takes a mile.

In practice we kinda do know what religion in schools looks like(and it’s not the handmaid’s tale)Christian schools are a dime a dozen.

Private Christian Schools are a dime a dozen. You know the kind that selects for parents who want to send their children to a Christian school in the first place? If you don't like Christian practices, then you can easily remove your child from the private school. If you like the other benefits then you can weigh your distaste against them.

In practice we kinda do know what progressive schools look like, and its not 24/7 Groomers, pedos, and gender transitions. Just because you have a personal distaste for one over the other doesn't mean there isn't symmetry. In my eyes, you are standing in a glass house and trying to justify why you should be allowed to throw stones. Every argument you make against progressive schools can just be flipped and applied to Christian schools. In part because progressivism is just derived from Christianity and holds similar memetic characteristics, but also because its a totalizing belief system than for some reason requires you to force it on others who don't want it.

Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.

It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history.

Which is why we must never rest on our laurels and assume that liberalism has decisively won. We must always be on the lookout for those who seek to turn this world into a penitentiary and themselves into warders. We must maintain CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!

Damn why does this sound so much like revolutionary Marxism... Yes! Comrade the subversive illiberals must be rooted out before they poison the discourse! Vigilance must be maintainted!

Sure, but is not history evidence that WEIRD Anglo's enforced a classical liberalism morality that strongly emphasized a "fuck you stop bothering me" morality. Seems to me that it won so hard that people are like fish: they aren't even aware they have it until its gone. People are slowly waking up to that fact, and currently are re-inventing all the sectarian conflicts that lead to that morality even emerging.

Maybe people should stop being barely evolved apes and actually just grow up.

I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.

I think giving Anglo's the credit/blame for inventing the idea of conquest to be a bit nonsensical. And I'd say classical liberalism and democracy are two separate things. I'd go further and argue that democracy actually exacerbates that weakness/failure of classical liberalism. The crowd is always dumb, and there is nothing dumb people like more than dopamine triggering behaviors. The failure of democracy is that it provides a means to allow such easy thrills to be indulged, provided by the state. And what thrill is more primal, more intrinsic to human nature, and more destructive to communities than intra-tribal warfare.

Universal Suffrage has pretty much fucked us.

As moderate evidence, the fact that the Reds tolerated this behavior from people who were often open insurrectionists acting in accord with a hostile foreign power. Just saying, we live in a world where a third of academics refuse to tolerate the hiring of colleagues they consider to be right-wing, no matter how qualified. If Reds were willing to act the same, Bill Ayers would still be rotting in a prison instead of teaching Education at Columbia and communist sympathies would be as much of a hiring black mark as Nazi sympathies.

See I am increasingly cynical that this is not a Red vs Blue split but an Elites vs Proles split. While a case could be made on the sanctity of freedom of speech, to me this looks like the Red Elites not punishing the Blue Elites so that they won't be punished in return. The common man still gets fucked by the laws. The common gay/lesbian was still barred from marriage, Abortion was still banned, Porn is still trying to be banned, DnD was still shunned as devil worship. The rich/elites didn't have to worry about any of these "laws" because they were rich/elite. Evidence of them being exempt is about as convincing as rich blues being exempt from DEI and woke-shit.

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