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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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We Won

On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.

Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.

The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.

This is anecdata, but the other night, I asked a woman at a bar about what book she was reading. [She was black, and a sociologist]. This escalated into making out and some light groping and her dragging me to her doorstep. I left her at her doorstep, because:

  1. At one point, she repeatedly said White Supremacy, like three times over the course of five sentences. Like she was baiting me to engage with it (I didn't).
  2. She accused me of "sounding/dressing conservative", apparently my wisconsin accent and open denim shirt were some sort of red flag. Still kept cuddling up to me, though.
  3. A long rant about how 17-year-olds get catcalled, and that proves all men are pedos. Attempts to redirect the conversation failed repeatedly.
  4. "Why haven't you kissed me yet?" [I kiss her] "Hey, you didn't ask if you could kiss me before kissing me! [she keeps kissing me]

Which is why I left her at her doorstep, the last one in particular, for obvious reasons, I don't find that game very cute. 3rd party observers said she really just wanted to bang a white guy. She went about it in very much the wrong way.

Miss sociologist got left at her door by a guy because she still seems to think peak woke is in this season. If woke is over, no one around me has gotten the memo.

On the one hand, they say "don't put your dick in crazy", advice I've never really taken to heart: I'll smile and nod at a lot of nonsense if it means getting to smash, even if I know it'll never progress beyond that. (My favourite was one time a girl shared a meme on her Instagram story which read "at some point a man has to choose between making fun of astrology and getting laid". On my first date with this girl, I made fun of astrology to her face; she still had sex with me later that day.)

On the other hand, this sounds like the exact type of woman to falsely accuse you of raping her, so you likely dodged a bullet.

On the other hand, this sounds like the exact type of woman to falsely accuse you of raping her, so you likely dodged a bullet.

This piece of advice exists precisely for this and other similar reasons (domestic violence etc). The issue isn't whether you get to smash or not, but what happens to you afterwards.

Of course, but I think the advice is a little underspecified. Some crazy girls will go out of their way to try and ruin your life after you dump them, and some won't. Lumping all crazy girls into one box unnecessarily limits your pool of prospective one-night stands/fuckbuddies.

Better safe than sorry, I guess.

True. When in doubt, maintain the drought.