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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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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.