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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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I was not aware that we had lost it.

Are you kidding me? There was a whole decade where anything to the right of Obama got deleted from Reddit and WordPress and YouTube and Twitter. Thought criminals were forced to flee to 4chan and invent alternatives planforms like Bitchute and Gab and The Motte just so we could keep talking to each other.

Twitter I will grant you, but my impression is that Reddit and WordPress were always explicitly Left-Wing/Blue-Tribe spaces (the right were all on Blogspot and substack) meanwhile YouTube had remained neutral/vaguely-libertarian until 2020 when they started cracking down on "misinformation" and footage of a "mostly peaceful" nature.

Reddit was very much grey tribe libertarian in its early days. As late as 2012, people were voting for Ron Paul, /r/atheism was huge, etc. Back then, Reddit was a bastion of free speech, with subreddits like /r/FatPeopleHate that would not last five minutes today being allowed to operate in peace. One hundred AR-15s were engraved with the Reddit logo as part of a licensing deal, but then the New York Times did a hit piece and /r/Gunsforsale got banned.

As for WordPress, the original Heartiste blog was hosted there until 2019. Heartiste was one of the big three of the manosphere. The banning spooked Spandrell into moving elsewhere.

I think you citing /r/atheism kind of proves my point. /r/atheism was always an explicitly progressive subreddit. It's whole reason for being was to be a place for members of the liberal striver class vent their spleens and organize against the religious right.

As I recall it /r/atheism was one of, if not the, primary attack vectors through which the woke gained access to the wider nerd/gamer sphere.

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