This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
“No no, we’re not the real enemy, forget your crime stats, how about an illegal immigration story? No? A little cunning (((manipulation)))? Can’t I interest you into some slit communist bugmen?”
Deflection by racism is cringe when the Indians do it, it’s cringe when the Hispanics do it, it’s cringe when the Jews do it, and it’s cringe when black conservatives do it too. On the other hand, it’s again a hilarious reminder of just how diverse the dissident right is, it’s ethnics all the way down trying to convince each other they’re the real inheritors of huwhite civilization.
Candace can’t easily move left, so she’s just positioning herself for a minor update to the based black woman grift; it is a fundamental testatment to America’s inherent liberalism that it will always have an audience.
It is funny hearing Nick Fuentes say, in his typically tongue-in-cheek-but-serious-at-the-same-time manner, "blacks are cool, they can stay but Jews have to go." But I will defend a level of internal consistency there...
We can say those DR people are so racist they kind of circle back around to not attributing real agency to the problem of, say, black crime. It's just, like, the weather or something.
But political forces conniving to destroy segregation or drive demographic change and direct public consensus vis-a-vis the media apparatus are more of a real threat than street crime.
I do think you are on to something though. Nick Fuentes was very popular on the Fresh and Fit podcasts which IIRC has all black hosts, they loved the guy. Nick had a "JQ" debate with Destiny on the Fresh and Fit Podcast and I couldn't help but feel like it was highly significant. There probably is an element of "instead of commiserating over the failures in the black community we can go on the offensive against Jews with White racists on our side" that may be attractive to some black influencers.
You can joke about the "diversity" of the DR, but it's savvy for Nick to lean into this dynamic and I think Candace is an example of it producing results, along with Nick's appearances on the other podcasts with black hosts who seem to really like him and take his side.
While there have been some black nationalist groups that have ascribed a particular villainy to (white) Jews, in general it’s hard to see black identity-led movements or ideas ever absolving gentile whites of their significant list of complaints about them, both past and ongoing. In practice it’s often crime, more than religion or guns or borders, that most drives white American support for conservative movements. White and black identitarians will always be at loggerheads over fundamental American issues like reparations, some kinds of crime, segregation, civil rights law and white law enforcement interacting with black men. When the next Floyd moment happens (presumably with a gentile white cop), and everyone knows it will, any alliance will disintegrate pretty rapidly.
Beyond the third-worldists, who are often more third position types with some right-conspiratorial associations, and often even among them, very little white nationalist hostility toward Israel is motivated by any sincere concern for the Arabs, principled opposition to ethnic cleansing, firm emotional or other belief in or care for the Palestinian claim, or even by the US’ very limited spending on Israeli defense. It is motivated primarily and overwhelmingly by a feeling of impotence around supposed Jewish political power in the west and a simple, vengeful desire to bloody the nose of the enemy. It is about revenge, “if we don’t get to have our ethnostates, you shouldn’t get yours either!”. You know this and I know it.
Revenge can, as they say, lead to strange bedfellows. But piggybacking on the joint leftist and Muslim anti-zionist movement is unlikely to have the desired effect. The stronger that movement becomes, the more the pressure for open borders, for accelerated mass immigration from the Islamic world and beyond in sub-Saharan Africa, and the more powerful the sinecures, racial spoils and political favoritism for people who are even more genetically and culturally distant from you, in your homelands, than we are.
So in your mental model it's completely natural for White Americans to support Israel despite no reciprocity whatsoever from Jews. But then when white people decide to return fire, that's just out of hatred and revenge? How about it's just politics? Discrediting Zionism discredits Jews. It absolutely does. The notion that the DR should just sit on its hands or (lol) support Israel simply because it's being attacked on the Left flank is delusional. It is politically advantageous to press the confrontation on the other flank.
That doesn't mean the DR expects White liberals to drop their values. It is about confronting Jewish influence in culture and politics and they are over the correct, soft targets.
Despite your closely held beliefs regarding elite theory, you seem highly dismissive of the idea that the elites with influence in Academia, Culture, and Politics are indeed responsible for the ethos that is now consuming them. Why would the DR take the side of the Jews now that the political radicalism they created is being directed towards their own project?
A lack of reciprocity and revenge are often very much tied together. I said nothing about what white identitarians should do, only that their hostility toward Israel is not the result of any care for Palestinians or any actual concern with the status of Muslim-Jewish hostilities. And they typically freely concede this when asked what, say, they would do if they were Jewish and ran Israel. The problem for white identitarians is that they want their Israel, whereas what the left is deeply focused on is preventing any more Israels at all. Talking themselves into the DEI coalition is therefore likely to backfire, and it certainly isn’t politically advantageous if it only puts thirdworldist leftists in power who will be only too happy to open the West’s doors and wallets to the world far, far wider than they already are today.
Political liberalism predates substantial Jewish influence on Western politics and would surely postdate it too. If the insinuation is that discrediting Israel leads to a backlash against all Jews, how does that square with your own depiction of anti-Zionism as the very triumph of Jewish leftist ideology? Antizionist Jews, among them the countless prominent Jewish leftist academics over the last 150 years (including many leading critical theorists etc), succeeding in rallying public opinion to the leftist cause of rallying against ethnonationalism would be no win for the right. With the settler colony of Israel vanquished as South Africa was, attention can turn to the even more critical ongoing work of decolonizing Canada, Australia and - most necessarily - the United States, not to mention the rest of Western Europe. There will be plenty of gentile leftists - white, brown and beyond - plus those prominent antizionist Jews (who you will find grow quickly in number if the tides of public opinion change quickly) to continue to keep white nationalists firmly under the boot, while America Brazilifies ever further.
Why should wignats support Israel? I don’t know, but perhaps because if Israel is destroyed (or looks like it might be), many millions more Jews are coming to the US. And my guess is that, in said event, white identitarians won’t have enough political clout to stop them.
Jews are both extraordinarily successful in taking over Western institutions to benefit themselves and their tribe to the extent that they practically dominate politics, media and finance in the world’s most powerful country, but also dumb enough that - at the absolute height of their power - they allow a movement of Muslims, communists and TikTok zoomers to destroy public support for their ethnostate? If we had the influence you ascribe to us, why did we let this happen? Before the canned reply about hubris, golem, etc, that metaphor does not apply so easily when the scale of the influence alleged is as great as this.
Isn't the history of the Jewish people just a long series of such fumbles?
Here's a prominent member, the current US Secretary of Homeland Security. Could this fellow be said to have any influence over immigration flows into the US? Now isn't it surprising to learn that this man's mother fled not one but two separate countries within a lifetime?
With modern technology fueling political developments, I would not be surprised if some set a record at 3 or 4 in this century.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure the boot has legitimacy without the Holocaust mythos that fundamentally forms the foundation of Jewish power in the 20th century. And Zionism is eroding the power of that mythos. It means less and less to be called "antisemitic" or "racist." The old guardrails are beginning to weaken. Anti-Zionist Jews who invoke the Holocaust to tell White people they have to accept demographic change are discredited even though their position is more morally consistent than Zionist Jews.
They foremost have themselves to blame, not that they are capable of or willing to admit it. The pathological goodwill of the Anglos towards them was squandered with subversive and extreme hostility. The waxing and waning of Jewish influence in culture and politics is an apparently never-ending cycle. We now seem to be heading towards the "waning" phase, for the first time in our lives.
Have you read the - quite remarkable - Atlantic piece The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending from earlier this month? The author essentially admits to all the behavior by Jews which is charged by White identarians but of course spins it as a good thing, and it's only falling apart because the world cannot accept how morally good and pure Jews are. It's a fascinating piece:
There's a lot to unpack here, the whole article is fascinating and worth a read. The point is that accepting the reality of this "Golden Age of American Jewry" does not allege some sort of omnipotence or invincibility. As Franklin Foer emphasizes, this was a Jewish phenomenon with Liberal trappings. The cultural phenomena advocated by them was distinctly self-interested, and it created the world as we "know it" today.
Except in that, by your own admission, the ‘people’ are turning against Israel not because they reject “Jewish leftist” ideas, but because they embrace them. You gloss over this fact.
I’ve read the article in The Atlantic a couple of times, I think we may even have discussed it. It’s the same eulogy that’s been given thirty times over the last twenty years. I’ve made many of the same points here myself. But the real reason is that a combination of high intermarriage and low birthrates among bourgeois secular Jews have eroded the intellectual core of the American Jewish population, hence the decline from 40% to 10% or fewer of Ivy undergraduates etc. Again, Sailer, Unz and others have been writing about that for decades.
There has never been an age of substantial antisemitism in the 250 year history of the United States.
More generally, you still cannot actually explain where the Jewish mistake was. Why couldn’t they keep a lid on anti-Zionism? Why were liberal palestine activists able to so successfully subvert ‘us’, if we were in possession of all the power you say we are? Why does Zuckerberg allow pro-Palestine content on Facebook and Instagram? Why does Sulzberger print stories alleging the IDF struck hospitals before quietly retracting them days later? This is poor coordination at best, outright (almost white style) ethnomasochism at the worst. You ignore the more credible explanation, that while Jews disproportionately participated in liberal politics from the haskalah onward, we could not alter the more fundamental trajectory, which did eventually come for our settler colony populated in substantial part by (what are, to the vast majority of whites and essentially all nonwhites) white people.
The same golem (if you will), invented by white gentiles and a few Jews here and there (cf Spinoza etc), came for both of us in the end. But assigning blame is easier that reckoning with one’s own failures. As you suggest, that is another thing we have in common.
The Jewish mistake was their implacable hostility towards their most important base of support - White American Christians. Proof that no matter how much white people
cucktry to be friendly and allied with Jews, Jews will wage Culture War on them to advance their own security and interests. White American Christian magnanimity towards Jews was rewarded with an immense decimation of them by establishment Institutions in every respect: politically, culturally, demographically...One observation made by Churchill in his essay was that the fact Jews and synagogues were exempt from the universal hostility of the Bolsheviks provided a hint towards the genealogy of that ideology. The fact that what we now call "wokeness" has so heavily been directed towards White American Christians with Jews completely exempt from the hostility of that discourse - protected even (until now), proves that this is not simply a case of Liberalism run amok.
Although that was their greatest mistake the actual cause for the land shift is indeed social media. Back when everyone got their information from a small set of sources, even something like Talk Radio, there was almost no way to share information outside the kosher political spectrum. Sure, you had some dissident journals, publications, and societies. But the level of engagement with that content was microscopic compared to social media engagement.
The past 10 years they have aggressively sought to wrangle Social Media, which is why we are all here instead of on Reddit, but the cat is already out of the bag.
Go back further. The origin story of the Jewish people starts with their existence as a minority under an imperial hegemon. Then they gain political influence, a social radical wreaks plagues upon the empire, and they get expelled by an exasperated Pharoah. They seem to take immense pride in coming into conflict with every single Civilization that has taken them in.
Given the possibility we will see a substantial level of antisemitism in the United States, who could the Jews blame that on except themselves? White American Christians? Are they really going to go with the "and for no reason at all..." narrative despite America's historic support for Jews? Looking at Foer's article in the Atlantic, the answer to that question seems to be yes, they are going to blame the White American Christians.
That's a heck of a spin on the Old Testament. Every people has an "origin story" that is basically all about their early conflicts with their neighbors/occupiers/invaders. Only the Jewish one has such a sinister subtext, apparently.
"Hitler did nothing wrong" memes are old, but I have to admit that "The Pharaoh did nothing wrong" is a new one for me.
"Takes them in" meaning enslaving them? Is there any case of oppression of Jews, ever in history, anywhere in the world, that you don't think was justified? Is "They had it coming" just a universal axiom where Jews are concerned? Or do you deny any oppression has ever occurred? Are the Russian pogroms and the expulsions from European countries as fictitious as the Holocaust? Either they had it coming or it didn't happen.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link