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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi violent dirtbag leftist sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis violent dirtbag leftists. The simple truth is that activists can forcefully occupy territory in downtown Madison, a jurisdiction controlled entirely by the left from the city council all the way up to the governor, because they have enough political power within the left coalition to make it politically infeasible to send in riot cops or the national guard.

If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi violent dirtbag leftist sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis violent dirtbag leftists.

This is not true whether we're talking about Nazis or about violent leftists.

The simple truth is that activists can forcefully occupy territory in downtown Madison, a jurisdiction controlled entirely by the left from the city council all the way up to the governor, because sending in the national guard to break it up is not politically feasible.

There are leftist activists in all parts of the US. However, leftist territory occupations that are permitted by the local leftist authorities are extremely rare. And the overwhelming majority of the time, leftist violence is met with police reaction.

It's never been true. It may be necessary, however, to act this way.

leftist territory occupations that are permitted by the local leftist authorities are extremely rare.

Yet when it happens literally not a single leftist or democrat speaks out against it

I seem to recall left-wingers and Democrats criticising CHAZ, for instance, while it existed. There were people who praised it, and plenty more who were willing to tolerate it, and I think that is worthy of condemnation, but you set the bar at literally zero, and there were more than literally zero who criticised it.

Were there not enough? Certainly. Did the incident show the weakness and timidity of the party? Absolutely. But - more than zero.

I seem to recall left-wingers and Democrats criticising CHAZ, for instance, while it existed.

Name a single elected official at the federal level or high ranking unepected party member that did this.

(And to preempt the accusations of moving the goalposts obviously I didn't mean twitter randos, it's possible to find some of those saying nearly anything no matter how zany)

Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.

You've now narrowed the claim. I don't think that's bad faith, since setting goalposts is necessary, but you did just narrow it to federal elected official, which is a significantly narrower category than 'Democrat'. I do not have an example of a federal elected Democrat who took a strong stance opposing it. My read is that this was mostly polarisation - Republicans were strongly condemning it, and Democrats generally don't want to say the same things as Republicans. Since in this case they had the option of dodging the question by saying it's a local matter, they took it.

For local Democrats, well, they eventually sent in the police and shut it down, but I'm guessing you wouldn't count anything from Jenny Durkan or any of the police?

She certainly shut it down eventually but this was after months of supporting it. I don't believe any of her actions showed any opposition to the movement itself, just that the fact that the bad optics of weekly murders threatened to make her look bad.

For local Democrats,

I'm certainly open to hearing of any other democrat officials strongly against it, preferably in the highest positions of power possible.

We have a prosector and a judge in the Hendrix case, so I think it's fair to hold you to at least that level of participation and prominence.

m guessing you wouldn't count anything from Jenny Durkan or any of the police?

Not unless it came before the murders. Not unless it was the unwavering and unchanging stance expressed consistently throughout.

I remember, they gave up the police station because they didn't want to police the rioters. They might even have mouthed something about how bad this was, but they let it happen in the first place.

Local democrats called it the summer of love until there were multiple murders so…yeah they don’t get much credit.

Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.

Are you sure about this? That's not how I remember it. From what I recall mainstream Democrats circled the wagons around it, and the only communists that criticized it as bad praxis were /r/stupidpol types that routinely got called nazis themselves.

Well, looking at Reddit, I noticed threads like this. That's from June 15, about a week into CHAZ's existence, but prior to the murders that I think turned most people against it. There's also this one from the 18th, again early on but prior to the shootings. Also consider this from the 11th, which is mostly communists pointing and laughing at the anarchists.

I think the responses can roughly be split into three camps: 1) CHAZ is great, I'm thrilled, 2) interesting idea, wait and see, 3) pointless, it'll do nothing. (There are also, as far as I can tell, a few non-communists who jump on to criticise, but I'm not counting them here.)

I think the responses can roughly be split into three camps: 1) CHAZ is great, I'm thrilled, 2) interesting idea, wait and see, 3) pointless, it'll do nothing.

None of these are really serious criticism.

This is not true whether we're talking about Nazis or about violent leftists.

Why do you recon not a single leftwinger stood up and said that, back when it was a fashionable thing to say, even on our forum?

When are you talking about? 2020 or thereabouts? That was when the Motte was still on Reddit, right? How many left-wingers did the Motte even have then?

No, somewhere between 2016 and 2020. Back on /r/ssc.

Either way people tend to undersell thr amount of left wingers that are present even now. We have more left wingers here now than there are right wingers on any subreddit.

I think that would only be possible with a pretty idiosyncratic definition of left and right-wing.

Why? We literally did have people saying "If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis.". They were somehow magically right wing? Apolitical?

I've found it helpful to ask them, just so we're sure we understand each other, what specifically is so bad about nazis. Like, the mass murder, sure, but that's fairly historically common. What is it about nazis in particular?

Obviously some people take the question very poorly, but that saves us both a lot of time.

Well to start I think its important to remember that the Holocaust failed, it was incomplete. Had the Nazis won they would have extended there dominion over basically all of Eurasia and enslaved or slaughtered every slav down to the last child more or less (see Generalplan Ost). That level of violence is even by historical standards absolutely massive and unlike the peoples of yesteryear Germany knew better as they had technology and education and cant argue that it was a "necessity" to do what they did.

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