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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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Obviously no one got up and said "I'm wrong", but climate issues have taken a back seat to open borders / Palestine as the things that the left cares about.

It was in 2019 that AOC said "The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change."

No one is doing that anymore, even though since 2019 that climate has warmed as projected by forecasts or even faster.

Obviously no one got up and said "I'm wrong", but climate issues have taken a back seat to open borders / Palestine as the things that the left cares about.

It was in 2019 that AOC said "The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change."

No one is doing that anymore, even though since 2019 that climate has warmed as projected by forecasts or even faster.

Well I think it comes down to what it means to have a "view." When it comes to culture war issues, beliefs are often more about signalling virtue and group membership than anything else. As opposed to serious beliefs which form the basis of actions and decisions which are not necessarily for public consumption and entail personal stakes.

Given that nobody seriously believed in climate alarmism in the first place, arguably it doesn't even make sense to talk about an admission of error. It's like admitting that bell bottom jeans or poodle skirts are wrong.

All you can really say is that the Current Thing has changed. The way you show that you are a good progressive is no longer to parrot doom and gloom predictions about global warming but instead to accuse Israel of genocide. And probably in a couple years the Current Thing will change again.

Given that nobody seriously believed in climate alarmism in the first place

People definitely believed and still believe in climate change.

On another note, it's astonishing how little Roe v. Wade is discussed. To paraphrase NIN, that god is dead and no one cares.

Obviously no one got up and said "I'm wrong", but climate issues have taken a back seat to open borders / Palestine as the things that the left cares about.

This is certainly true. I've gone to many environmental meetings/protests over the year and they have withered in the past few years. Though I would say a lot of this isn't necessarily that the environment has shrunk in salience, it's just that for a certain activist cohort it has been replaced as the issue by which to advance the omnicause. There were people who thought that the way they were going to abolish capitalism was by convincing people that capitalism was the fundamental cause of climate change. Now those people are saying capitalism is the root cause of the genocide in Gaza. I would say those people probably care about the environment just as much as before (which is to say, very little).