This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Going to jump in with what I want to see discussed:
Police and political leaders in Northern Ireland call for calm after Belfast knife attack.
What we know is that a MENA immigrant has attacked a native in the street, gouged out his eyes, and was attempting to behead him when stopped by passers-by.
Details beyond that seem shaky. I've seen the attacker described as Somali, though Sudanese is more consistent. I've seen the victim described as a man in his 40s, though 15-year old boy is also popular. And I've seen that the victim's life was saved, but also that he's perished in the hospital.
What's certain is that the major concern of the people in charge is, of course, that this is liable to upset the native population.
Perhaps that's more understandable than usual because of where it happened. Belfast! A storied town. Across twitter I see various historically-enemy paramilitary sympathizers calling to set aside their differences and unite against the common enemy; that it doesn't matter who controls Northern Ireland unless there's any such place left to save.
Last I heard, all major transport routes into and out of the city have been shut down, businesses are forced to close at 17:30, and curfews have been established. The place seems to be gearing up for major rioting.
Is it just me or have the straws been landing more heavily, lately, on the camel's back?
And, provided that the historically-armed underground belligerent factions of the area haven't withered into insignificance; provided that they do get serious about uniting and using force; might they serve as a template, or at least an inspiration, for other places?
I believe Kulak once predicted that the flashpoint for organized European resistance would happen in Northern Ireland.
I responded to FtttG here before realizing why there was so little action in that thread.
Tl;dr
Seriously, social media is probably the worst way to learn about public opinion. Unfortunately, most of the public which is opining probably got the idea through social media.
This is still pretty silly. If the IRA is plotting a cooperative pogrom, they’re not doing it on Twitter.
Just you. Belfast has a smaller total population than LA’s black population. In the 90s. I’m not expecting to see anything remotely on the scale of the ‘92 riots.
Kulak predicts a lot of things. I don’t know that he’s been right yet. I’d take the other side of this bet.
With respect, I think you are falling into the centrist trap. Twitter isn't radicalising people. All the horrible murders are radicalising people. Twitter is merely declining to censor them afterwards.
Again, it's not about the discourse, it's about the horrible murders. I don't think you're a leftist shill but I think you are okay, fundamentally, with this kind of thing happening. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't fix it if you could snap your fingers and magically prevent all horrible murders, but ultimately you seem to prefer all the horrible murders to any of the things that would prevent the horrible murders.
If "calling for calm" means "calmly discussing how we are going to begin repatriating these people" then that's fair enough, but otherwise "it's good that politicians are calling for calm" does absolutely translate to "I want you to sit down and do nothing". That's not a discourse thing. That's a basic divergence of political preferences.
Well, horrible murders of whites are radicalizing other whites. I don't care about horrible cartel killings, and I presume you don't either (well, I suppose (royal)you and I might "care" in the way you accuse netstack of "caring" about the Belfast murder).
"These people" might mean criminal and illegal migrants, the recent crop of migrants in general, all Sudanese, or even all nons. I can absolutely understand why a non-white person, or anyone who cares about non-whites and is familiar with the dissident right's rhetoric, might prefer to weather the current storm rather than concede the field and risk the chance of the DR going the distance with the Overton Window. After all, what comes after reclaiming your lands if not seizing theirs in kind?
This does seem to be have been the reaction of the Africans and Arabs to colonisation, who as always are very clear-eyed about how they see other civilisations.
In general you seem to be going off on a weird tangent. My point is that it is the constant murders of white people by ethnic minorities that is radicalising whites against ethnic minorities, not the Twitter algorithm.
The safest countries have about one murder per year per 100,000 people. At least a quarter of those will be outrageous enough to make good social media copy. So a group of 5,000,000 people will commit one potentially viral murder per month, if they are as peaceful as the Swiss. And one a week if they are only as peaceful as white Americans or black Britons (both around 4 murders per 100k). Since there are more than 5,000,000 nonwhite people in the UK (and an order of magnitude more than that if you are looking at immigrant crime globally, as most of the Americans poasting about the situation in the UK are), your Twitter feed being full of murders of white people by ethnic minorities could just as easily be caused by the algorithm as by actual crime. If Elon Musk wanted your Twitter feed to be full of white-on-white murders, he could make it so. And if he wanted it to be full of cute cat pictures, he could make that so.
How much do you know or care about white-on-white crime in Belfast? It's a complex issue given the history of the Troubles and the number of ex-paramilitaries hanging around. And yet you feel the need to have an opinion about crime by asylum seekers in Belfast.
There is enough crime in Zurich to fill a tabloid or a social media feed with crime stories. To know whether the constant stream of crime being shoved in your face by people who don't have your own interests at heart (at best they want you to keep staring at the ads between the criminal fnords, and in the case of Twitter coverage of migrant crime in the UK, we know that these posts are being amplified by a foreign billionaire who has made no secret of his desire to foment political violence in the UK and drive the British government out of office) is caused by the people doing the crime or the people doing the shoving, you need to look at statistics. So let's do that.
Murder has dropped since mass immigration started in the UK and continues to fall slowly. Ditto stabbings*. Ditto violent crime where the victim ends up in A&E. Ditto violent crime measured by victim surveys. Ditto property crime measured by victim surveys. There is some evidence that property crimes which mostly target tourists and therefore wouldn't appear in a victim survey have increased, including phone snatching and pickpocketing. Shoplifting (which also doesn't appear in victim surveys because the victims are businesses and not individuals) has definitely increased. Sexual offences by ethnic Pakistanis in the UK were out of control 20 years ago, and these cold cases are being regularly relitigated on social media in a way which suggests to people not paying attention that the crimes are still going on. (I genuinely don't know if they are or not, and the people outrage-poasting about them aren't bothering to check either). Cyber fraud is also rising, but it isn't what right populist agitators or tabloid journalists are talking about when they say that "crime is out of control".
Right now the UK right-populist discourse is dominated by two murders that went viral on social media. One was a case of "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time, unfortunately someone is dead because someone else brought a knife to a fistfight". The murder of Henry Nowak is only newsworthy because of the shockingly poor (and probably racially motivated) police response - and yet the social media peanut gallery are calling for penal laws against a demographic who commit less crime than the white British. Nobody has run the numbers, but given the reputation of Sikhs in the UK** it is likely that kirpans prevent more crime than they cause (much like guns carried by CCW permit holders in the US). The other case is a real failure of the UK immigration system - the Belfast attacker was a Sudanese falsely claiming to be a Somali who crossed the open ROI-NI border in order to claim asylum in the UK instead of the EU. But you wouldn't have learned about the difference from social media posts by right-populists.
* Police recorded knife crime is up (but peaked in 2024 and is now falling again), but actual stabbings are down, as measured by NHS administrative data. The most likely reason is that the police have been told to be more careful about checking whether a knife was used in muggings and suchlike where violence is threatened but nobody gets stabbed.
** Singh is the second-most common surname of VC winners, after Smith.
What difference does it make? They're building a parallel society. If you give them a street and they commit less crime it's still not yours to live on. If you give them a city and they make it rich it's still not your money to spend. If you give them your country it's not yours anymore, it's theirs.
Unless they were integrating. Are the Sikhs integrating? Apparently they have their own rituals we have to grant them religious exemptions for. And they don't behave like White Britons -- by your own argument they don't commit crime at the same rate. Presumably they are different.
(Not that I would assume they commit crime at lower rates anyways. Basically every immigrant group commits more crime than native Brits with the exception of other European groups and the Japanese. It's possible the Sikh are genuinely exceptional and I know they are different from standard Indians / Muslims / Arabs / etc. But if a random Sikh murders a kid and his family helps him cover up the crime I'm going to assume that they're actually not exceptional: I've never heard of a Japanese immigrant family doing that.)
I mean, it is if you tax them and redistribute the money.
Although it doesn't actively proselytize as much as Christianity, Sikhism is not an ethnic religion; any person of any ethnicity can convert to it if they become convinced that its teachings hold the true answers about the Divine. Accordingly this is, as it says in the name, a religious, not ethnic, exemption. In other words, to not have it would infringe upon the religious freedom of Britons of any race by foreclosing the possibility for a white Englishman of converting to Sikhism if he wants to.
Now as an atheist, I'm not that big a fan of religious exemptions. But ultimately, they're a Chesterton's Fence whose origins are not very hard to dig up. Bad things happen if the government starts steamrolling over the faithful's objections with "there's not actually an angry sky man who will send you to Hell if you work on a Sunday/do indulgences/mix meat and dairies, get over it". Granted Sikhs are enough of a religious minority that pissing them off on their own wouldn't start a religious war, but it seems straightforwardly more principled for the state to say "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of any recognized religion" than "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of Christianity and Islam, but because there's so few of them we're going to functionally write it into law that you cannot simultaneously act in accordance with a belief in the divinely-inspired truth of the Guru Granth Sahib, and be a law-abiding citizen in our country".
We can do the same thing with tariffs. And then we don't have neighborhoods full of foreigners who will hide the Bataclan bombers after they make their getaway.
I don't agree with it, but the English have adopted weapons bans as a virtue. They also have religious freedom as a virtue. In accommodating immigrant Sikh values, they now have to accommodate exceptions in their weapons bans. These are two contradictory virtues. They can't actually coexist meaningfully. This is a conflict caused by immigration. Your proposed solution, essentially, is to jettison arms control in favor of religious freedom, i.e., that English society should change even more in order to accommodate the Sikh. It can be perfectly English to be Sikh! Well, it wasn't 50 years ago, and it wasn't even common until extremely recently. If the challenges of integrating migrants are to be solved by England changing to accommodate them, what's the argument in favor of accepting migrants? Trade deal: You change your society and culture and values, and we give you welfare consumers, a housing shortage, and endless supply of accusations of racism, and occasional stabbings. We will integrate on our terms, not yours, and maybe, just maybe, statistically, we'll perform better on some made-up statistical measures. Oh and you don't have a choice and this downgrade is permanent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are Jews integrated in the United States? Are the Irish? Are Texans? What are the standards for 'building a parallel society' such that we should apply it to British Sikhs?
If an Irish man used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon to murder somebody and his Irish friends and family closed ranks to help him hide the weapon and spin up bogus anti-Irish racism charges, I would not consider that proof of integration.
You put "building a parallel society" in quotes and I'm not sure if I should read that as scare quotes. But to be clear, there are absolutely Muslim, ethnic, and immigrant neighborhoods in major cities in Britain and across Europe that function as parallel societies. There are parts of London where it is not safe to be gay. There are parts of Marseilles where it is not safe to be white. Would it make a difference to you if those areas had lower reported crime stats? It doesn't to me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What a despicably misleading gloss of the Nowak murder. There is zero evidence that Nowak assaulted Digwa, or that he was a "hothead".
The video shows Nowak calling Digwa a "bad man" repeatedly while filming him shortly before the murder, and continuing to do so when Digwa is walking away from him. That isn't legal provocation, and nobody suggested it was, but it pattern-matches to "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time" much more closely than "unprovoked attack by crazed thug from violent foreign culture".
We don't know what happens in between "Digwa is walking away from Nowak, who continues to abuse him verbally" and "Digwa attacks Nowak with a big-ass knife", but "Digwa turns round and demands satisfaction, and a series of mutually escalatory threat displays lead to a fight" is quite plausible, as is "Digwa turns around and chops up the guy who he incorrectly thought was stalking him with no further warning", or anything in between. If we were trying to adjudicate Nowak's Darwin award nomination, the crucial point would be whether Nowak follows Digwa. Following someone while filming them and verbally abusing them is genuinely provocative (though not a provocation in the technical legal sense), and culpably stupid if the guy is visibly armed in a way which means they will win a fight. But the police didn't find any evidence either way on this point, and in any case it is legally irrelevant to Digwa's guilt.
If that exact scene were put into a Sopranos style prestige drama, the point of the scene would be to show that the murderer was an unhinged psycho with a pathetic, brittle ego and "random encounter" levels of impulse control.
More options
Context Copy link
The term "fight", to my mind, implies that the two men were attacking each other. Likewise "fistfight" implies that both men were punching each other. I don't think "one man insults another man, to which the second man responds by physically assaulting the first man" can reasonably be characterised as a "fight". Despite Digwa's insistence that Nowak attacked him first and he was defending himself, he was unable to present any evidence that this was the case, and there were no cuts or bruises on his person at the time of his arrest.
So: I think the claim that "Nowak and Digwa got into a fistfight" is simply untrue. No one has presented any evidence that Nowak punched (or even tried to punch) Digwa. If you said "Nowak insulted Digwa, and Digwa responded by stabbing him", I'd have no objection.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This would mean that the reason they are coming here is to seize all our lands, so we should kick them out all the harder, no?
That bit was adopting the DR's language to emphasize my point; also see my use of "nons" to refer to non-whites two sentences earlier. I'm not countersignaling the general right-wing response (I'm in favor of fedposting the murderer and kicking most of his ilk out), I simply note that merely removing the recent arrivals and leaving it at that is not the natural end of the DR's philosophy (which is sounder than the more moderate alternatives), just as desegregation was not the natural end of the social justice movement's goals.
I don't know that there is a natural end to any political movement, beyond what reality permits. Sadly, it seems like we need to constantly exercise our agency, prudence, etc.
I’m not sure what the point of this comment is. It seems clear to me that the prerequisites for coordinated white resistance to globohomo (at least basic common understanding of HBD and rekindled pride of race) are also prerequisites for restarting the course of history that was set in motion in 1492, only this time without any preconceptions of “uplift”*. If you believe otherwise, I’d like to know why; I certainly don’t wish for this to be the case, given my own dubious whiteness.
*Assuming the lack of some mass gene-drive technology or dedication to more traditional population-scale eugenics, though both of those options can still be argued against.
I think you radically underestimate the extent to which technological progress can accelerate when we don't have a communist albatross around our necks. Particularly considering the wider reforms to the State ethos which would be required. But I appreciate the phrase "restarting the course of history that was set in motion in 1492", it's a great slogan. We just gotta freeze the Germans out like the last colonial race or they'll start killing everyone out of sheer autism again - Anglos don't got that dawg in them and the Latins are too venal/horny not to make nice with the locals once they're in charge.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why would you assume it's about race? There have been minorities in Britain for centuries. There have not been not been horrible and prolific murders and rapes in Britain like this. Nobody cared about minorities when they acted British and identified as British and cared about British people and their values.
I don't care much about horrible cartel killings in practice (though I do in a theoretical sense) because they're not happening around me. But if a cartel murdered the family next door to me, I would care very very much. And I would not care whatsoever what race the victims were, I would care about the proximity and the threat to me and my friends and family. And I would advocate radical anti-cartel policies that did whatever they needed to and broke whatever they had to in order to get me safe.
People are selfish much more than they're inherently racist. If people feel like they need to deport or ostracize everyone of a certain race because that is the only or the most effective way to protect themselves then they'll suck it up and accept being racist. The key to actually helping sympathetic and non-murderous minorities is to clearly and unambiguously differentiate them from the murderous one. If you have a sane and careful immigration policy which tests the temperament, reputation, and civic-mindedness of potential immigrants and only lets in ones that want to integrate into their new home and actually make it their home, then those immigrants will not stand out from the native population. They might visually be distinguishable, but nobody will care because their behavior and safety won't meaningfully differ from white people. If you let in one million sane and civilized immigrants and one million looters, scammers, and murderers of the same race then people will become racist to protect themselves from the 50% chance that any minority they meet might be a looter/scammer/murderer.
This can easily be seen by the fact that racism is targeted specifically towards minorities with high crime rates and not others. Nobody really goes around trying to harass or deport the Japanese minorities. This is not a coincidence. Fix the crime and the racism goes away for free.
Why does something have to come after? Most people just want their homes and their friends and family to be safe. Even if the most radical of the right might be true racists who want to conquer the world in the name of Whiteness, as soon as the majority of sane people feel safe the radical right who try to push for wars of conquest will lose their support and things will return to normal.
The largest immigrant minority in Britain before the Empire Windrush docked in 1948 was the Irish. (They were legally British, but so were the Jamaicans on the Windrush - people who are inclined to racism didn't see either group as remotely British). Moral panics about Irish wickedness were an ongoing feature of 19th and early 20th century British politics. There is also the notorious indigenous minority with their own unique kind of sexual deviance, the Welsh. Anti-Welsh racism has also been an on-and-off feature of British politics, and there was at one point in the 19th century a semi-serious moral panic among a certain type of conservative Anglican about the spread of Welsh-influenced Nonconformism* in England.
The British are less prone to ethnic hatred than most countries, but we are not immune to it. It is just that the ur-racism in England was never about skin colour, and this confuses Americans and lefties raised in the American tradition of anti-racism.
* Nonconformism is a general term historically used in British religious politics for and form of Protestantism that is not Anglican or Scottish Presbyterian (both of which are official state religions in different parts of the UK).
More options
Context Copy link
Ah yes, they've been here from the start.
Until 1948, Britain's non-European population was effectively zero. Sure, you can find isolated individual's like Henry VIII's trumpeter or whatever, but to jump from that to claiming 'there have been minorities in Britain for centuries' is just motte and baileying.
Otherwise you're right. People are very good at telling good immigrants from bad ones. The state, unfortunately, is not.
It would be funny to start using this argument in reverse. Vikings discovered part of America a thousand years ago, so naturally Europeans have been in the Americas "since the start". There are even rumour of Jews in ancient Israel!
More options
Context Copy link
But it wasn't zero. And, I could be wrong since I'm not actually British, but to the best of my knowledge they were treated relatively normally and not faced with the levels of racism seen in the U.S. Or... maybe centuries is too far. But the past century, at least. I never used to hear about racial problems with minorities in Britain, though I suppose that is confounded with the low prevalence, it could be that the few minorities that were there were poorly treated.
Start with "anyone without a legal visa or immigration paperwork is immediately put back where they came from", or in the rare instance they seem like an actual legitimate refugee from an unsafe place you put them in the nearest European country or country adjacent to their home country as if they had merely crossed that border and not yours. Wherever they were before coming here, they go back as if they had never crossed your border.
That should address like 90% of the problem immediately, since the illegals are going to be the most greedy, selfish, uncaring, and unwilling to follow rules and wait in lines, and make up a substantial fraction of the population.
Then you adopt civic nationalism tests. Ensure they speak English, want to be British, are willing to swear loyalty to the Crown and set aside their old nation. Know what it even means to be British and have rights. Are not radical zealots for some religion or ideology incompatible with first world British values. Make sure they have some sort of skill or work ethic that makes them employable. Only let in people who pass the test.
Disqualify anyone from social services for the first five years. Maybe you help them with housing and job-finding program for the first month or two, but then they need to get a job and support themselves. Anyone who commits crimes or ends up unemployed is sent back as above.
All of this is legible to a state. The civic nationalism tests are probably going to end up subjective and a bit exploitable, but even something as simple as forcing people to state out loud "I don't want to bring Shariah Law to this country" is going to filter out a lot of people who would be too offended to say that out loud. And the English language requirement is not so easily cheated.
I think this is how Britain should handle it. I think this is how America should handle it. I think this is how basically every first world country should solve their immigration issues. We have a functioning society, we want cheap labor, immigration trades some amount of the former for some amount of the latter. Supply and demand dictate that the market price is massively in our favor and we can make whatever demands we want and still find people willing to fulfill the role. We can ask for anything we want that good, honest, hardworking people can fulfill, and they will continue to flood us with applications that we can pick and choose from.
This seems like hair-splitting. For most of the history of what we call Britain, the non-white population was as close to zero as made no difference, a rounding error. Until the mid-twentieth century, the majority of the British population could go their entire lives without encountering a single non-white person inside British borders.
By "racial problems with minorities", are you referring to racism experienced by minorities, or problems with racial minorities committing disproportionate numbers of crimes etc.? I'm not sure what timeframe "I never used to" covers, but in either case, it's not a new phenomenon.
For the former, the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 sent shockwaves throughout the UK, and was the subject of a government inquiry which concluded that the British police service was institutionally racist. (The handcuffing of Henry Nowak is ultimately downstream of recommendations made by said inquiry.) The murder was the impetus for new legislation surrounding double jeopardy in murder trials.
For the latter, last week we discussed Enoch Powell's (in)famous "rivers of blood" speech. He was sounding the alarm about the increased crime and societal dysfunction that appears to accompany mass immigration as early as 1968. While the grooming gangs scandal only really became common knowledge in the 2010s, it had been ongoing since the mid-90s.
The earliest newspaper report about a Pakistani rape gang is from 1955!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The amount of times people use historical anecdotes along the lines of 'A person of moderate Arabic complexion rocked up in court one day, the entire country came to look upon this oddity as they had never ever seen the like of it in many many years and it was the talk of the town for the next 20 years' as proof of dark people being in Northern Europe is kinda hilarious.
My dad is about the color of Tom Jones (and of Isles ancestry for atleast the last 2-300 years) and growing up in Northern England in the 1950s he used to routinely be called the N-Word and referred to as if he were the darkest person in the world. And this was a major port town after the empire had already happened.
Yep, Marco Polo in China means that white people were ALWAYS there. They're completely acclimatised to whites. Never mind hordes of Chinese adults coming to touch your blonde kid's hair when you visit Beijing.
I've been to Beijing. They are so used to white people that they don't care and don't want to touch your hair. Maybe decades ago they were like that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why do you call that "the centrist trap"?
Because it’s a mental trap I see friends and family who think of themselves at centrists fall into a lot.
Something along the lines of:
In short, blaming the discourse for popular upset flatters centrist sensibilities/*, gives an excuse for authoritarian action to silence the scary people before they ruin everything, and best of all it’s sometimes correct. So it’s very alluring.
* like all of us, centrists are only human
Perhaps a misleading phrasing I admit.
That is a minor variation on the populist trap. The essence of populism (both left-populism and right-populism) is to channel inchoate anxiety among the populace into hatred of the designated (ideally but not always foreign-coded) scapegoat. The centrist trap @Corvos is referring to is to attempt to dismiss inchoate anger by pointing to a non-existent scapegoat.
The essence of populism is that it is popular because it takes the stated concerns of people seriously rather than airily dismissing them.
I have no idea what you are talking about here, but thank you for providing a perfect example of the type.
Although there are popular populists, it isn't necessary for the term to apply. Nigel Farage was still a populist back when UKIP were getting single-digit percentages of the vote.
Even now, populists are generally not popular, in the sense that they tend to lose elections to centrists. (Yes, Trump won. But the Republican theory of the 2024 election is that there was no centrist on the ballot, not that Trump beat a centrist).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think this is just a centrist thing. The socialists at Novara media play the same games and then call for eating the rich as their solution. It's just a standard anti-other-people's-radical-politics stance.
More options
Context Copy link
Got it. Yeah, I just asked because I sometimes call myself a centrist but I don't make those kinds of arguments. It's certainly possible that the majority of centrists would make such arguments, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link