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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Well spoken and well reasoned. I'm curious what of the above @JeSuisCharlie would disagree with.

If I were to disagree with @Soteriologian's thesis, I think I would start with this part:

The right, in contrast, has no Movement, especially not one that compels moral authority over the state to any relevant degree in #currentyear. There are two wings of the right: the actual tradcons (which look like this), and the Nazis (which often LARP as tradcons and look like this). If you bomb an abortion clinic or a migrant detention center, there will be no rallying to your defense by women with hundreds of thousands of likes inquiring when the conjugal visits will begin in your prison, there will be no photographer taking Renaissance photos or featuring your drip in Time magazine. Now, I know Luigi is unusually attractive, and the Clavicular worldview is to attribute the fanfare to that. But let's be real: if Luigi had shot a leftist figurehead, this is not the reaction he would have received. Luigi's cuteness is useful to the movement: the movement is not subservient to the actions of the most cute, as the Clavicular model would contend.

The basic nature of the problem he's pointing out here is undeniable. Blues are mobilized, organized, and integrated into an overwhelmingly powerful machine. Reds are none of these things, and thus their ability to secure or effectively wield power is appallingly limited.

On the other hand, I think there is incontrovertible evidence that this reality is visibly eroding over time, as Reds do in fact mobilize, organize, and integrate for the purposes of fighting for and wielding power in a serious fashion. I think Reds' position is better now than it was two years ago, better two years ago than it was four years ago, and so on, in a pretty clear straight line back to the eruption of the current culture war in 2013-2014.

@Soteriologian gestures at the enormous power of the Media, and in fact the media is enormously powerful... only, that power is a bare fraction of what it once was, and is pretty clearly sliding toward zero.

Blues used to brag about their ideological stranglehold over the entertainment industry, but that industry has become a laughing-stock being actively scavenged by a new industry of not-Blues.

Blues continue to revel in their ideological stranglehold of the education industry, but that industry is in serious decline, and I hope to live to see its expiration.

Blues reveled in their political dominance, but that dominance appears to me to likewise be coming apart. The Overton window continues to expand beyond the narrow constraints they attempted to enforce. @Soteriologian is correct that Reds as a collective are not to the point of embracing real conflict theory toward Blue society, but it seems obvious to me that we have been moving significantly and steadily in that direction for years now, and that this trend seems unlikely to me to stop for the foreseeable future.

It also seems clear to me that these significant improvements in the Red situation were not driven by "Overminds" like Yarvin or Hanania, but rather by exactly the sort of slow, grinding, tedious, grass-roots common-knowledge-generation @Soteriologian is dismissive of:

All it can do is appeal to the existing laws and say, "See, the immigrant with a knife stabbed somebody! That's against the law! The police should ARREST him, and and... maybe even DEPORT him."

He is correct that pointing out the unworkable hypocrisy of Blue social systems is unlikely to secure short-term tactical victory. What it can and has done, I think, is generate steadily increasing capacity for meaningful resistance to those systems, by building a long-term shared understanding of the fractal wretchedness of the system that currently rules us. A good example of this, I think, is Spencer Pratt's run for mayor of LA. One might argue that such a run is quixotic, as he is almost certainly not going to secure the office. On the other hand, what his run offers is a stark reminder, from this day forward, that things might be otherwise than they are, a spotlight on the responsibility of those he ran against and those who voted against him for the continued misery and filth in which they cocoon themselves. One might argue that Red resistance is currently insufficient to turn the tide because of the failures of previous generations to do what was necessary; I think it will continue to be insufficient right up until it becomes decisive.

As for "Overlords", Hanania in particular seems constitutionally incapable of recognizing and cooperating with this process, apparently due to being too enamored with the existing formalities of power as they have heretofore been arranged. I would level a similar critique against Yarvin, but he appears to me to employ somewhat more humility and ideological flexibility than Hanania, who seems more inclined to picking a hill to die on.

Consider the following:

In fact, I'll go so far as to say a lot of the Overminds they do have are false, in the sense that I think incidents like Jan 6 are setups to get rightoids to clown themselves into getting arrested. They think they're crossing the Rubicon with Caesar, but they're really just being goaded into making fools of themselves by agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them in their fog of war.

Do you agree with this assessment of the events of Jan 6th? If you had a magical button that could erase the events of Jan 6th from the timeline, would you press it? I'm confident Hanania would, and if he would not it would be because he thought it was a net-harm to his populist enemies. I would not, because it seems to me that the outcome has been and will likely continue to be of net-benefit to Reds. Reds as a tribe did not abandon the J6 protestors, and many of the Red leaders who did do so have subsequently been coordinated against by the tribe as a whole. In fact, J6 looks an awful lot like exactly the sort of "real power" discussed above in the reactions to Mangione, doesn't it? And where did it emerge from? Certainly not from Hanania and his ilk.

Angela Davis probably thought she was "crossing the Rubicon" when she provided material support in a terrorist action that resulted in the murder of a federal judge. Was that a wise move on her part? Under most normie analysis, it shouldn't be, but can we argue with the results? @Soteriologian scorns "rightoids" "getting themselves arrested" while "agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them", but isn't this exactly the sort of action you seem to be arguing for?