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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Solid and fact-based post.

IMO the error of the Charlottesville protest was all optics. As the White undergrad admissions rate at UVa decreases by 7.5 points per decade, there are only 60 years until there are 0 White undergrads at UVa, or at least a South Africa style pittance alloted to the dispossessed kin of Jefferson. A protest against replacement is a no-brainer if your interest is to increase the wellbeing of your group. (Were you a Tibetan, a wigger Uyghur, or a Kurd, this activity would be amply funded by USAID). If you want to signal strength, ie with a torchlit march, you need control of every single camera in the vicinity. You should have hand-selected thirty people and gone somewhere private and just made it seem like it was a big march. The point of this, I suppose, would be to recruit members. Of course the media would be there and find the ugliest person saying the dumbest thing and link that to your movement. This is 101 stuff. And you didn’t actually want to signal strength anyway, you wanted to signal victimhood. You needed to show a White Virginian having to work at a slaughterhouse surrounded by Hondurans who don’t speak English, and then show a random Muslim from Pakistan getting a scholarship to UVa with a clear look of superiority on his face. Then you had to send those flyers to wealthy Virginians, and do such things hundreds or thousands of times, and then do like fifty other things, and then you get to do a public torchlit march. The ancient victory triumph is the last of the things you do, not the first thing you do.

You should have hand-selected thirty people and gone somewhere private and just made it seem like it was a big march. The point of this, I suppose, would be to recruit members. Of course the media would be there and find the ugliest person saying the dumbest thing and link that to your movement. This is 101 stuff. And you didn’t actually want to signal strength anyway, you wanted to signal victimhood. You needed to show a White Virginian having to work at a slaughterhouse surrounded by Hondurans who don’t speak English, and then show a random Muslim from Pakistan getting a scholarship to UVa with a clear look of superiority on his face.

I ask you to consider that the rally, despite its name, was specifically organized to protest the planned removal of General Lee’s statue. This is the starting point that needs to be considered first.

Wealthy Virginians have 0 sympathy for West Virginian slaughterhouse workers.

Yes, that’s why you have to present them with these stories hundreds or thousands of times.

I can't speak for wealthy Virginians explicitly (although Albion's Seed logic suggests they are similar), but traditional elites in the UK have always favoured well-behaved foreigners over our native working class*. Seeing the story hundreds of times just confirms the obvious moral and intellectual superiority of the kind of immigrant who sends their kids to UVA over West Virginian slaughterhouse workers.

* Traditional English left-populism, now defunct, said that this is because the traditional elite were Norman settler-colonialists for whom the native working class were foreigners.

That’s a post-1960s change. It shouldn’t be difficult to find the opinion that the British had on other races in the 1800s. “Seeing the story hundreds of times just confirms the obvious moral and intellectual superiority” is not how stories of victimhood work. They induce feelings of compassion, care, and gradually in-group preference. This was behind BLM and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

As much as I despise dickens for what he did to English storytelling conventions, you really should check out the attitude he portrays the British elite holding towards their social lessers.

But Dickens was a hugely popular author! He did portray these attitudes, mostly as being from a past age, and thus created and rode a huge wave of public sympathy for the British poor.

No 19th century Brit, no matter how much he had pride in his social class, would have preferred a Mohammedan Pakistani or a Heathen Indian (as they would have called them) to take the place of their own race in their own universities en masse. This would have been unthinkable to them. Read about how Kipling didn’t want White blood wasted trying to civilize them. Or look at Mulready’s paintings which were specifically designed to make his viewers care about their own poor instead of foreign aid. Dickens literally wrote about his desire to exterminate the Indian race while he was writing those empathy-laden stories to inculcate love for the White poor in his novels

Dickensians, understandably, speak of his humanity, of his generosity of spirit; and yet, this humane author advocated mass-slaughter of the Indian people. In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, Dickens – not once, but several times – made his feelings quite explicit, writing in a letter at one point that were he Commander-in-Chief in India, he “would do [his] utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of late cruelties rested … with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth…”

It’s not atypical of cultures which practice in-group preference to also have a class system. Everything is relative.

By around 1900, you did get the sons of rajahs attending English public schools and universities. I'm pretty sure there was still no room for non-noble Indians though.

The rich have always been very class conscious.