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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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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

  1. Fuck this guy. I hope he gets whatever punishment the law deems fit for a violent psychopath.
  2. It’s good that public figures are calling for calm. That is the most important part of their jobs.
  3. I realize that saying 2. automatically places me in the Leftist Shill category, and I don’t like that the discourse is so poisoned.
  4. Twitter delenda est.

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.

across twitter I see various historically-enemy paramilitary sympathizers calling to set aside their differences and unite against the common enemy

This is still pretty silly. If the IRA is plotting a cooperative pogrom, they’re not doing it on Twitter.

Is it just me or have the straws been landing more heavily, lately…

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 once predicted that the flashpoint for organized European resistance

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.

Twitter delenda est.

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.

I realize that saying 2. automatically places me in the Leftist Shill category, and I don’t like that the discourse is so poisoned.

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.

All the horrible murders are radicalizing people.

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).

If "calling for calm" means "calmly discussing how we are going to begin repatriating these people"

"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?

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.

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.

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".

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.

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 comments

After all, what comes after reclaiming your lands if not seizing theirs in kind?

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.

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.

After all, what comes after reclaiming your lands if not seizing theirs in kind?

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.

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.

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).

Why would you assume it's about race? There have been minorities in Britain for centuries

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.

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.

Otherwise you're right. People are very good at telling good immigrants from bad ones. The state, unfortunately, is not.

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.

But it wasn't zero.

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 British population could go their entire lives without encountering a single non-white person inside British borders.

I never used to hear about racial problems with minorities in Britain

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 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.