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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?

A far wiser man than either of us once noted that the principled application of left-wing equality and classism rhetoric results in sexual justice for incels.

A not insubstantial reason for the rightward shift of young men is that they notice that the left applies Marxist logic to every problem except the one problem that they are bothered by most of all.

"A far wiser man than either of us once noted that the principled application of left-wing equality and classism rhetoric results in sexual justice for incels."

Well, left winger would answer that sex is not necessity like food and shelter, and historically aware person would answer that lack of sex is not revolutionary force, that all historically documented revolts and revolutions were triggered by shortage of food, not sex.

Ahem:

“You can’t compare this to, like, poor people who complain about being poor. Food and stuff are basic biological human needs! Sex isn’t essential for life! It’s an extra, like having a yacht, or a pet tiger!”

I know that feminists are not always the biggest fans of evolutionary psychology. But I feel like it takes a special level of unfamiliarity with the discipline to ask “Sure, evolution gave us an innate desire for material goods, but why would it give us an deep innate desire for pair-bonding and reproduction??!”

And they'd be so wrong it's actually kind of embarassing.

Unmarried men surplus is probably one of the most well established predictors of political instability, it's just not as strong as famine, and it tends to coincide through banditry.

"Partheniae"

Mostly mythical event "at least three distinct traditions", and not rebellion - sending excess populaiton overseas to found new city was SOP at the time. None of the traditions say that Partheniae wanted to get laid, but to get land of their own.

"Sabine women"

Pure mythical event.

"Nian Rebellion"

From your own source:

"Their slogan was "'kill the rich and aid the poor.". Not: "Let's get laid!"

"Crusades"

Economic motive for crusades is completely discredited by modern scholarship - crusading was never profitable, emarking on crusade ruined both ordinary nobles and great kings, but they persevered for centuries, as if they really believed in Holy Land. And sex motive was never ever proposed by anyone.

If lack of sex is common motive for revolutions and urprisings, you would be able to cite numerous examples from well documented history, where well fed and comfortable people go set the world aflame just because they can't get laid.

I did not bring up the crusades and as you point out they are not relevant, so I don't see why you have to reflexively bring up Riley-Smith. The existence of the juvenis as a class generated by primogeniture, which is Duby's central relevant claim here is far less controversial.

And if that is criticized it's under the auspices of primogeniture not being as universal as he assumed, not because it can't mechanically generate the social class he names and its set of incentives.

As to the Nian Rebellion, I'm just going to straight up link the article that makes the relevant claim https://kar.kent.ac.uk/11430/1/surplus_men_IS_article.pdf I think it's a bit silly to deny that the Guang gun existed as a class because you want to believe bandit slogans literally.

Moreover, these are but the most famous examples, you can draw from an almost endless well here, James Barrett or Ben Raffield have made this same argument for the Viking invasions among others: https://profmarkcollard.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Raffield-et-al-2017-EHB.pdf

The claim that a surplus of unmarried men generates social instability because it creates incentives for defection and banditry is supported by a lot of cross discipline scholarship. I could also have mentionned the work of Laura Betzig which goes over a similar argument on 104 societies, surely that's numerous examples enough: https://www.academia.edu/48337408/Despotism_and_Differential_Reproduction_A_Darwinian_View_of_History

Now it's not airtight and beyond question, what is in social sciences, but the idea that this widely shared and not fringe at all thesis is something that an "historically aware" person could dismiss it out of hand is ridiculous.

Indeed thé crusaders bragged about being unusually non-rapey by the (low)standards of armies at the time. We can probably take this with a grain of salt, but it does indicate sex wasn’t the motive(armies which are motivated by sex slaves tend to brag about how many and how beautiful their captured women are).

Just because you don’t believe in medieval Catholicism doesn’t mean they didn’t.

A not insubstantial reason for the rightward shift of young men is that they notice that the left applies Marxist logic to every problem except the one problem that they are bothered by most of all.

No joke, this is one core reason Marxist movements will always fail, since sexual reproduction is a massive bottleneck, and yet by all lefty logic every person should be 'entitled' to reproduce, yet women are biologically wired to jealously guard their own reproduction, so 'distribution' of sexual contact, let alone actual reproduction, will ALWAYS turn hierarchical, unequal, and skewed towards the 'attractive' males, whilst attractiveness itself is never equally distributed.

Capitalism is unique in that it solves this in a way that enables a man not endowed with reproductive value at birth to channel his energies away from zero-sum conflict toward things (productive economic value) that benefit both himself and society.

I wouldn't say that's unique to capitalism, you are describing most functional social orders throughout history, hell probably the very concept of civilization as a whole.

"one core reason Marxist movements will always fail"

Strange that failure of IRL Marxism (after brilliant success after success that culminated in Marxist governments controlling one third of human race) had nothing to do with this "core reason".

No one opponent of Marxism, whether outside or inside Marxist states, ever cited lack of sex as reason why Marxism is wrong.

Yes, Marxism has multiple "core" reasons for failure; it's probably reasonable at a certain point to just call them reasons.

Still: can you imagine any factors that muddy the link between "X is a reason that Marxism fails" and "X is reported as a reason that Marxism fails"?

For example: can you imagine a social incentive against saying "I oppose X because it leads to me having less sex?"

I don't think the lack of explicitly reporting a particular reason is good evidence the the reason wasn't important.

But people being "entitled to reproduce" was never an actual issue in Marxist societies?

It's not clear to me how that connects to my comment.

Its not lack of sex, its the basic impossibility of economic calculation when society reaches a certain level of complexity.

The problem is, the distribution of sex is intractable at EVERY level above, maybe, the village, without some distributed coordination method.

Go look at various attempts at forming small scale communes and see how many of those failed because one guy started hogging all the women despite the representation that it was all about free love and equality. Okay, its also because all the labor ultimately fell on the men, or a small subset of them, they can't even get the distribution of LABOR right in these cases.

Ironically, you're thinking too big. Not every "Marxist movement" is the Soviet Union.

Oh, and just a note guess what China has to start cracking down on in the name of Marxism.

Because even under Marxism with Chinese characteristics, you can't make women WANT to settle for just any dude.

Because even under Marxism with Chinese characteristics, you can't make women WANT to settle for just any dude.

This issue is even more present in hyper-capitalist Korea and Japan it doesn't have anything to do with Marxism. It has to do with Asian family social structures being traditional while the economic structure has become more egalitarian along with small family size. Women don't want to get married because they are expected to work, take care of the house hold, take care of the children, take care of her husbands parents and take care of her parents. It's gotten to where Asian families are attempting to unload the entire social burden of an extended family onto one 28 year old woman it's not sustainable and is a big part of the collapse of birthrates and marriage in these societies.

China under Mao didn't have these problems. Many other more horrific ones but not these ones.