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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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I would also point to the popular reaction to the murder of Kirk and the attempts to murder Trump within Blue Tribe, and how these reactions compare to Blue Tribe's previous positions on how speech should be policed. I'll point to the endemic calls for the assassination of Musk, the organized vandalism and arson campaigns against Tesla dealerships and even (IIRC) individuals' personally-owned vehicles, and how major national politicians winked and nodded along rather than taking a stand against their mob. I'll point to Mangione's killing of the United Health CEO, and the obscene public reaction to the killing from grassroots Blues generally. I'll point to the continued Anti-ICE rioting and intimidation campaign, culminating in the shooting deaths of Good and Pretti, and how the discourse rolled out of those two shootings.

And I'll point to the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016, I'll point to the dozens of harebrained plots to assassinate Obama, I'll point to Sandy Hook and Columbine and Parkland and the Boston marathon bomber and mass protests around Occupy Wall Street and Gabby Giffords and Congressional baseball shooting and Bernie Bro socialists and Tree of life shooting and Arbery shooting and Charleston church shooting and a hundred other shootings and the Malheur ranch and Lavoy Finicum and the Tea Party and MAGA and and and...

The people celebrating the violence were always there. You just have a weaponized social media feed designed to shove outrage porn down your throat 24/7. You should know better! Listen to Mr. Rogers, not twitter.

I would point to the Kamloops graves scam and the subsequent rash of church arsons.

British Columbia, the 51st state?

much less a 1,000 year Christian Reich

From your triumphalism in the wake of Trump taking power and passing a barrage of laws:

I disagree that it's foolish; I think Blue Tribe's dominance was largely built on propaganda, and I think the decay of the propaganda apparatus is why Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing. This has been my thesis for near-on to a decade now. I think my side will win because, to put it as succinctly as possible, we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.

Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition. Sexual continence and self-control were a hard sell in the 90s; now we have OnlyFans and online dating and a generation of intense porn consumption and cratering relationship rates to do the argumentative heavy-lifting for us, to give an example on one of the relevant axes. We believe we genuinely have a better way of living, and it requires only our willful action and communal cooperation, not federal law or corporate funding. The further the cultural consensus moved away from us, the more obvious and undeniable the benefits our faith offers become, even by the materialist metrics of the World. We have stable marriages, children, even, amusingly enough, higher sexual satisfaction. We can forgive and turn the other cheek; we can offer a hand up to a defeated foe, we can restrain ourselves in the heat of the moment. We have a basis for charity, in all senses of the word, to the point that the pagan Right routinely mocks us for our pacifism, for doing nothing, for being cucked. And yet, we can also fight fiercely, when that seems necessary and prudent.

Deus vult!

Meanwhile, and I hope you can set aside the partisanship and appreciate the delicious irony in this, your president decided to launch another war in the Middle East. After you swore up and down that Bush was a uniparty Democrat, actually, and Trump was the first genuine Republican. Undoubtedly your arguments around the base reality of low inflation, killer economic growth and glorious victory over pathetic Iranians will resonate with the electorate.

I can also see the seeds of your doomposting for the 2028-2032 cycle in the complaints about the DSA, as if they're somehow a discontinuous break from Bernie Sanders and the Squad.

I have predicted that the violence is going to get worse, and it seems to me that it is getting worse.

You're the Shepard scale of predicting worsening violence. When measurable violence (homicides, rioting, general unrest, school shootings) decrease, you turn to cherry-picked singular incidents and say actually they're worse than anything that happened in 2022, which was worse than anything that came before it, which was worse than anything since the 70s. On the contrary, I see a continuous trendline of violence in America that has always been there. Maybe the 90s truly were some magical time as the nation basked in the glory of triumphing over the Soviets; I suppose I wouldn't know. But at least for my experience, it's been more or less the same.

And when that happens, what will you say when Blues here discuss how grassroots political extremism and popular support for murder as a political solution is a problem, actually, and I reply exclusively with @magicalkittycat quotes?

By all means, feel free. Fight on, brave culture warrior.

We can forgive and turn the other cheek; we can offer a hand up to a defeated foe, we can restrain ourselves in the heat of the moment. We have a basis for charity, in all senses of the word, to the point that the pagan Right routinely mocks us for our pacifism, for doing nothing, for being cucked. And yet, we can also fight fiercely, when that seems necessary and prudent.

Deus vult!

The Democratic party is now entering its own political civil war between a corrupt relatively-centrist establishment and grassroots ideological extremists

Hmm. We had Bernie Sanders v. Clinton and Sanders and Warren v. Biden, we've had a 'civil war' (such drama!) between the extreme and the center in both parties for the last 14 years, and you're trying to rile yourself up into pretending that the DSAs are some new unique communist threat to the Republic to rationalize a vote for jay dee. While I lack most of the virtues of a good Christian, I'll avoid talking about the 'corruption' (an utterly meaningless word at this point, along with communist and fascist) of the current admin.

I do not think that this will result in an increased likelihood of peace and prosperity for all, but I'm ready to stand corrected.

You aren't, though.

Your bar for being corrected is that a country of 350 million people have no mentally ill whackjobs for the next 4 years. Someone's going to shoot up a school, someone's going to do something stupid like zerg rush the white house security gates or fly a drone grenade into Trump's ballroom or shoot Kamala if it looks like she's going to win. Then you'll crow that violence is getting worse, the country is going to the dogs and liberalism is a failure.

Meanwhile, by your own admission, you and your family live good lives. Me and my family live good lives. Hundreds of millions of people live in peace and prosperity, and they would live in happiness too if they could lay off the outrage porn and touch grass.

Maybe the 90s truly were some magical time as the nation basked in the glory of triumphing over the Soviets; I suppose I wouldn't know.

If you are looking at violence in general, the 1990's were the tail end of the massive crime wave that began in the 1970's - the US murder rate peaked in 1991. If you are looking at American political violence in particular, there was Ruby Ridge, Waco etc. at the start of the decade and the Oklahoma city bombing in the middle of it. OKC killed 168 people, which on most counts is more than the total number of Americans killed by domestic (i.e. not Islamist) political violence so far in the 21st century in a single incident.

In the UK, the 1990's was the tail end of the Troubles (the IRA ceasefire was in 1996, but the last big bombing was by dissident Republicans in 1998), as well as the tail end of the crime wave. If you grew up in a British city in the 1990's, the present day is safer in a way that most people can feel viscerally.

Modern media dynamics mean that a single incident with zero deaths can be the current thing (particularly in the partisan filter bubble on the victim's side) for weeks.

I may not be as "Blackpilled" as FacelessCraven but I do think you are being a bit unfair to them here when examples like "the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016". "Boston marathon bomber", and "The Congressional Baseball shooting" would seem to support their position rather than refute it.

Recall that Tsarnaev got the teen heart-throb treatment from MSNBC and Rolling Stone, Hodgkinson had a list of the House Freedom Caucus members in his pocket when he died, and that during the "unrest" surrounding Trump's election businesses weren't boarding up their windows because they were worried about Trump voters might do might do but rather their opposition would.

I will set aside the bit where you implied that the mere existence of the Tea-Party and MAGA are affronts to civilization of similar moral weight to a mass shooting. Something about Arson Murder and Jaywalking.

Here is what I think is happening. I think that Democrats and Republicans have a fundamentally different relationship with violence and very different ideas about when/where it is appropriate. The former views violence as a thermostat that can be dialed up an down to suit the situation, where the latter views it more as a switch or circuit breaker. I think this leads a lot of Democrats to mistake reluctance to engage in certain tactics for a lack of capacity, and I think that a lot of the consternation surrounding incidents like Kenosha, Jan 6th, and the ICE raids on Minneapolis, has stemmed from Democrats who had convinced themselves that the right would never "punch back" having that belief falsified.

Here is what I think is likely to happen. I think that if current trends continue, calls for violence against Jews, Christians, Transphobes, suspected Trump voters, and other "undesirables" will become an increasingly normal part of living in a Democrat controlled state or municipality. Actual violence will also become increasingly normal but get dismissed as a nothingburger or simply "the price of doing business". Eventually one of these perfectly ordinary incidents will cross a line or go viral in some way, and all the rhetoric here on theMotte will be about how everyone is overacting the switch will have been flipped, the circuit breaker popped.

I have argued previously that it wasn't the caning of Charles Sumpter that set the United States on the path to civil war but rather the reaction to it, and I see something like that happening here. The threat to the union is not that in a country of 350 million people he have a handful of mentally ill whack-jobs. The true threat to the union is that there seems to be a sizeable portion of those 350 million people who want the whack-jobs to succeed.

I may not be as "Blackpilled" as FacelessCraven

Is that what Fc stands for? Is FacelessCraven a phone autocorrect or a boo light?

"the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016". "Boston marathon bomber", and "The Congressional Baseball shooting" would seem to support their position rather than refute it.

Their model of the world is that the left and the right have irreconcilable differences, liberalism and tolerance is a failure, and American society is disintegrating as partisanship increases and everyone's goal becomes to hurt the outgroup as much as possible. He started beating this drum especially hard during the Floyd riots, and hasn't stopped beating it as the violence has subsided and in fact argues that violence has increased since then.

My model of the world is that there has always been a basal level of violence and unrest in American society, and that the modern period is not particularly unremarkable. My position is that things are largely good, liberalism is not a failure and the majority of people are not partisan hacks or outgroup harmers. There has been unrest and discontent with spikes here and there more or less from the early 2000s to today. And partisanship and unrest have decreased from the pandemic through today.

I will set aside the bit where you implied that the mere existence of the Tea-Party and MAGA are affronts to civilization of similar moral weight to a mass shooting.

You shouldn't. You should look at where FC groups DSA members running competitive primaries with political violence. This fails to support his thesis in two ways - firstly, that strain of leftism struggling against the centrist core has been there at least since 2008 and is not indicative of violence increasing in 2026, and secondly that it perfectly mirrors populist movements on the right like the Tea-Party and MAGA trying to primary the establishment from the extremes. Presenting this as some new, dangerous phenomenon is ludicrous.

I have argued previously that it wasn't the caning of Charles Sumpter that set the United States on the path to civil war but rather the reaction to it, and I see something like that happening here. The threat to the union is not that in a country of 350 million people he have a handful of mentally ill whack-jobs. The true threat to the union is that there seems to be a sizeable portion of those 350 million people who want the whack-jobs to succeed.

And I would argue that if the Floyd riots and clashes in the streets between leftist and rightist agitators didn't trigger a civil war, if the Charlie Kirk assassination didn't trigger a civil war, what do you think would? I wouldn't have wanted to see the reaction on the right to Trump being assassinated on live TV in Butler, but I still believe the backlash would have been the left facing a 2008-tier election loss rather than a shooting war in the streets. When the whack-jobs get their way, the center is repulsed and the pendulum swings the other way.

Their model of the world is that the left and the right have irreconcilable differences, liberalism and tolerance is a failure, and American society is disintegrating as partisanship increases and everyone's goal becomes to hurt the outgroup as much as possible.

Is their model necessarily wrong? It seems trivially true to me that the left and right have increasingly divergent views on basic foundational questions like the existence of free will and what constitutes "basic human dignity" or "a legitimate authority". Disagreements on which the Covid lockdowns and "Summer of Love" threw into stark relief by rendering such disagreement immediately relevant to millions of peoples' livelihoods.

I don't think you (or anyone else here on theMotte for that matter) really grasps just how much damage was done to the social fabric in those 3 months between March and June of 2020 and how the memory of those three months is coloring current relations.

You shouldn't. You should look at where FC groups DSA members running competitive primaries with political violence. This fails to support his thesis in two ways - firstly, that strain of leftism struggling against the centrist core has been there at least since 2008 and is not indicative of violence increasing in 2026, and secondly that it perfectly mirrors populist movements on the right like the Tea-Party and MAGA trying to primary the establishment from the extremes. Presenting this as some new, dangerous phenomenon is ludicrous.

You are misunderstanding the concern, the DSA is not the new phenomenon. Violent radicals seeking to install themselves as the heads of an intellectual vanguard class are as old as leftism itself. The worrying new phenomenon is that wishing death on one's political opponents seems to be increasingly inside the Overton Window. Characters like Hakeem Jeffries, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker are not some wacky fringe, they're who both "moderate" democrats and the anti-populist right seem to be rallying behind.

As for potential for Civil War, I think the US literally dodged a bullet in Butler PA.

I don't know if it would have triggered a war on it's own but I'd put the odds at something like 1 in 3 which is far higher than I'd like. A lot would depend on what happens next, knowing what we know now about the US Secret Service's performance on the day I think there would be a broad consensus on the right that the "Deep State" had purposefully allowed the shot to occur. As I recall the democrats did not loose the 2008 election, in such a situation i think it would take a deft hand on the part of President Harris to avoid a serious constitutional crisis and I wouldn't be surprised to see a repeat of OKC or three.

Regarding why Charlie's killing didn't set things off, two big reasons spring to mind. The first is that Charlie wouldn't want that. Second is we had a President and AG who could believably claim that they were committed to bringing his killer to justice.

We've been agitating for criminal and police reform for years if not decades, and nobody listened until the riots started. We've got two relatively centrist proposals in congress right now unless things have changed since the last time I looked. Unfortunately, if we don't make it outrageous or biased the inertia of the system is too great to actually change anything. Do you think Mitch McConnell would ever have allowed that bill if it weren't for George Floyd and the subsequent reaction?

Maybe another part of the polarization in this country is that you have to dial it up to 11 to ever change anything whatsoever. If the right had listened to us years ago, would we have had the riots we had? Will the right listen to us now on trans rights, or is it going to take a trans woman getting raped or murdered on camera and more rioting before we can do anything about that issue?

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