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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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I was going to write a post about ripples in the pond of social sciences but plans are on hold due to a happening. Shooter kills one civilian and cop in Montreal outside a Hilton.

Officers were responding to a report at 11:35 a.m. of shots fired and a gun protruding from an upper-floor window at a hotel in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood when they encountered a gunman on the ground and exchanged fire, Montreal Police Chief Fady Dagher said at a news conference. Dagher said the shootout took place outside a Hilton. The video indicated that the location is the Hilton Garden Inn Montreal Midtown.

Robots Sources say that "the headquarters of Aylo (the parent company of Pornhub) is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Montreal, Quebec." That might place this shooter in the neighborhood of Aylo's headquarters to target Pornhub, which fits with the general anti-degeneracy notions in a 104 page manifesto that surfaced. It has been so long since we've gotten a proper manifesto, and this is a proper manifesto (PDF). Broadly, we are reading the thoughts of a man who wants to represent, organize, and better the lives of "dispossessed" men-- with many topics familiar to this forum about men and women in Western world touched upon in the first half. Moral decay, Chad-Stacy hypergamy, and unfair, undesirable, or dysfunctional dating/mating norms. He wants to do this by replacing the capitalist "neoliberal hypergamy state" with communism, won and run by those formerly dispossessed, which would not be quite as common here. Some highlights I saw while reading.

To fix modern gender relations and society he wants to place theories of class consciousness to one side (by no means out of the way) while introducing a new biological consciousness so that dispossessed men can organize and act upon. Put those men to work in a revolution.

So, it may be said that the insurgency process of the dispossessed class exists in two main stages. The first of them is the spreading of biological conciousness to the dispossessed on a massive scale. This must be done because, as we know, the vanguard cannot form effectively until the conciousness of the dispossessed reaches critical mass.

The second stage is the seizure of positions of power by the revolutionary vanguard, and the subsequent usage of their newfound power to carry out the liquidation of the hypergamy state. The revolutionary vanguard should operate in a clandestine manner throughout this process however, not presenting their core doctrine as being the elimination of systemic hypergamy. Instead, they should take on the visible forms of a variety of political movements (e.g. conservative socialism, Duginism, communism, Islamic theocracy) in accordance with the social conditions of their respective areas, while keeping their main intentions either hidden or ostensibly marginal.

It'd be difficult to organize the incel vanguard on a good day, it's hard enough to get men to queue up on video games. To do so covertly, under the auspices of established political movements, seems extra difficult. Our author partly recognizes this, so he offers a stage one insurgent phase. First, pay more attention to women who lie about dating preferences and ruminate on it. Second, self-improvement ("body purification") but no weight lifting, because it takes too much time, is a bourgeois scam, and sports are suspect as well. No distraction from the revolution. After self-improvement there are a few paragraphs reminding future revolutionaries to avoid rap music:

I will say that there is one form of music in particular which is and always shall be absolutely unacceptable for any self-respecting insurrectionary of our cause to listen to. This is so-called ‘rap’ music, which is unfortunately the most popular music in the west at the time of this writing.

Finally, become an insurgent, which means killing certain people identified later in the document. In short, he thinks the insurgents should kill pretty much everyone in a position of power or wealth including influencers of all stripes. That makes sense, reforming society and all. He also thinks all the drug dealers, gangsters, and so on should be liquidated. The author features many inspirational quotes by Bolsheviks, as well as other rabble-rousers such as Ulrike Meinhof and Robespierre. Following the insurgency comes the revolution.

The essential political conditions of a society in which capitalism/liberalism, and thereby, hypergamy itself, are not part of the established order of things, have mostly already been laid out by Marx, Engels, and others in works such as The Communist Manifesto. In my view, the most important of these basic conditions are:

The full abolition of private property,91 without compensation, and the subsequent nationalization of this property.

  • Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, with the establishment of a central bank and a planned economy.
  • The establishment of state control over the means of transport and communication

No mention of government issued gf's. I believe the hope it won't be necessary, though I don't think the author would be opposed.

To make monogamy prevalent again, one of the main factors will be to get the female out of the workplace, and to generally stop her from having her own income. One of the ways that this can be done 91 Private property as in bourgeois private property, and not personal property. 95 gradually, without using too much force, is to simply quietly start introducing robots into female workplaces, as robots will easily be able to perform the sedentary and easy jobs that females overwhelmingly prefer.

Without an income of her own, and without unlimited access to an unlimited number of potential mates, the female will simply need marriage in order to live, just as she once did; and thus she will engage in monogamy willingly. With the new order having introduced robots to replace the vast majority of female workers, the remainder of female workers may then be removed from their workplaces through some legislation that can be quietly passed and enforced on ostensibly mundane pretences, and this will serve to make the male-dominated fields free of what few females are in them or should wish to enter them.

Someone has probably made this argument on The Motte before. We aren't missing any communists from roll call, are we? This is boring social engineering in the context of the manifesto which drifts into more fantastical theory, like the cyborg-augmented "extraordinary branch" of the new state to "augment both the bodies and minds" as a kind of Stasi/special forces mixture. Did he forget to mention total war or eternal struggle? No, of course not.

Now, regarding the question of internationalism, it should be said that wherever capitalism survives, the hypergamy state survives, and wherever the hypergamy state survives, it can spread. Therefore we must not allow any liberal or capitalistic enclave, no matter how small, to remain in existence after we take power.

I rate the manifesto 6/10 with significant points given for effort in the context of modern manifestos. Points deducted for my personal revulsion to revolutionary Bolshevism, communism, tangents, and reddit posts. He shares a vision that I don't share with solutions I consider disastrous and/or unrealistic, so I could be unfair. Also, a neoliberal hypergamy state theory is not anywhere as novel or cool as the anarcho-primitivism based vision of Ted K. As an expression of deep frustrations in an atomized world I can understand, though I really think he should have made some money, bought some land, worked it, and entered the BAP-sphere with a Substack via Starlink.

EDIT: "I will go over this methodology briefly here, but for a more complete look at it, see my work The Smile of the Dispossessed; or, Further Instruction on the Implementation of Terror." All I can find by the first title is gay genre fiction, and I get no hits on the latter by a Seth Hatfield or anyone else. AI assisted hallucinations?

Someone has probably made this argument on The Motte before. We aren't missing any communists from roll call, are we?

People making this general argument on the motte are rightwing traddies or dissident righties. Another piece of evidence for horseshoe theory. Are there even outed Marxists on the Motte at this point? Our ideological diversity leans pretty right, such that people that are left of the motte average are more likely to be centrists, and a few dissident progressives. I'm not sure I remember any outspoken old-school Marxists in the last 3 years.

I think this demographic makeup dates back to the SSC days. Even in 2019, Scott noted that he attracted readers across the political spectrum, with the exception of Marxists.