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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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But the UK elite love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household. This is a key part of the identity of the progressive elite in the Anglosphere. The problem with the grooming gang seems to be instead that, for the Anglo to care about the White poor, they had to go against the minority community. The math (maths?) on this was that their reputation would be more harmed by representing White poor than by representing the minority community, because its higher status to be worldly and pro-diversity than pro-White. But it’s the same group of people who promote welfare benefits and spots for the poor at Oxford who were unwilling to go against the minority block, no?

The problem with the grooming gang seems to be instead that, for the Anglo to care about the White poor, they had to go against the minority community.

I agree that this is true, but (to my knowledge, I’m not British) there’s an additional element of class at play in Britain. It’s obviously true that western elites writ large “love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household” but in the UK this attitude is standing on the back of a long history of especially stark class differences which persist to this day, such that the poor are not merely “the poor” but fully other, a separate and inferior culture. Today they deserve pity and perhaps charity but are still broadly contemptible. This differentiates the native lower-class from poor immigrants, who are now seen as Diverse and Enriching to the culture, where the native poor are seen as the same drag on the culture they’ve been seen as for centuries.

I suspect this cultural history is the secret sauce for how this problem became so much more pronounced in Britain than anywhere else: other countries have problems with migrant crime, including sexual violence, but not with mass-scale organized rape gangs.

My intuition is that if it were the White poor who were raping the Pakistanis, it would be an instant cause célèbre among the upper classes who would demand the most severe punishments against those responsible, just as they do for racial incidents. It’s hard for me to imagine the British covering up the crimes of Whites against minorities, and it actually seems they try to do the opposite. So it’s not actually a class issue at all, because the Pakistanis are not in their class, yet would be a sympathetic victim group. It’s more like the intricate social class dynamic of the UK has been applied onto ranking a hierarchy of sympathy, where minorities are simply higher on the ranking of Innate Value. Just as in America, for many decades you couldn’t criticize Blacks for being violent, they had to be a sympathetic and you needed to make excuses.

Yeah I agree with that. I was really just wondering why Britain, specifically, had this particular problem. Plenty of places with problematic migrant groups (France, Germany, Sweden) did not have this qualitative kind of problem or this degree of coverup. I do think their particular history likely plays a role. But it could also be down to something as simple as no other country having large-scale migration of the particular Pakistani subculture that forms these rape gangs, like how only Sweden has issues with migrant gangs regularly throwing bombs at each other.