Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - How Contrapoints Presaged the Conclusion of the Culture Wars

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Dec. 5, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:50

How Contrapoints Presaged the Conclusion of the Culture Wars

Maybe stop being unfair.

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	So an academic agent just did this video called ConchraPoints predicted the left can't win debates and she was right.
	And as a pronoun respecter, I appreciate him using she.
	But the important thing about this is this was a video that ConchraPoints made years ago in like 2017.
	I'd never actually seen it before.
	I do watch some of ConchraPoint's work.
	But it's based on an anti-fascist book.
	I can't remember the name of the author now.
	It's about the vulnerability of the discourse to having what characterizes Nazis advancing their arguments with the classical liberal against the left-wing hegemonic narrative that Nazis just equal bad.
	Obviously, I do think Nazis equal bad.
	And there are also other things that are contained within it that I think is very interesting.
	So the reason that I think this works so well, which is, as AA points out, the arguments are never actually rebutted, right?
	The arguments are always just, well, if these people deserve homeland or if these people deserve interest groups within society, then surely the white people deserve interest groups in society.
	And the answer coming from the left is never an actual argument.
	Here is why white people do not deserve interest groups.
	Here is why these people do not deserve interest groups, etc., etc.
	And it becomes like an it becomes a more transparently obvious way of advancing these groups against the majority.
	It's an exercise of power, as AA might put it, an organized minority against the disorganized majority.
	And it comes to a point where the damage that is being done to the majority society begins to require some kind of response.
	It is too much, too far, too, in a way, exploitative to allow numerous different minority groups to have essentially an unlimited run over the society and extract what they can from it at the expense of the minority group.
	And so the argument that, of course, the leftist makes in this, I'm sure I can get them up on the screen.
	There we go.
	The sort of leftist academic makes in this becomes one of taboo, as AA rightly points out.
	There's nothing that they can actually argue because often the facts are as the facts are, that the data is actually against their position.
	And the reason that this was never addressed to the point where it becomes something that a Nazi ends up with actually the ability to make a strong argument about is because the unfairness of the system has allowed the facts to accrue in the other direction and not in their direction.
	And this person, unable to give a little, ends up in a kind of position of psychosis where they're like, oh my god, I can't believe we're having these arguments.
	But if you've only argued from taboo and shame, then of course you're going to actually lose the rational debate the classical liberal wants to have.
	And so it is kind of inevitable, as he points out, that the debate goes in this way.
	And ContraPoints has actually done a really good job of pointing out that the left basically failed because they set the terms of the cultural debate and these were terms they were bound to inevitably lose on.
	Because it is just a matter of fairness.
	Is it fair that some people get to exploit certain kinds of, in the case of 2017 SJW discourse, identity politics, and the people against whom that blade cuts don't get to exploit it back.
	Is that fair?
	It is literally that simple, a basic question of fairness.
	And the answer is just no.
	It's not fair to have one side with a weapon that they can use against the other side.
	The other side isn't even allowed to defend themselves with.
	It's not fair to constantly rig debates using taboos in order to maintain a certain position of privilege.
	It is not fair to do these things.
	And moreover, as the unfairness builds, the classical liberal who sat in the center trying to be fair to both sides and gives both sides a hearing, this character, they're just trying to hear out and make a rational judgment for themselves.
	And of course, the warning in the piece is, well, this is going to lead to the rise of Nazism.
	It's like, well, no, I don't think that's true.
	I think that actually the rise of Nazism is a consequence of the suppression of the fair concerns of the group that's not being allowed to actually consider its own interests.
	And so what the left has done here is essentially made the problem themselves by declaring these are the terms of engagement, but you're not allowed to engage.
	Well, obviously that's, and I said this back in 2017.
	I remember going on Maddox's podcast and saying, look, this is going to create white identity politics and there's just no getting around it.
	This is just an inevitability.
	And no amount of screaming taboo is going to fix that, is going to change that.
	You're not going to get people to be like, well, you know what?
	They said it was taboo and therefore I just will take the, I'll be the whipping boy forever.
	That's not going to work.
	That's not going to happen.
	And ContraPoints is, you know, basically trying to tell the left this in this video.
	And of course they didn't listen and, you know, who cares?
	And the discourse has advanced so far in the last eight years or so that it's actually kind of crazy to see how well ContraPoints represents both sides of the argument, frankly.
	You've got to give them credit.
	They did a good job there.
	But like I was saying, it is inevitable that this will just come back to bite the left on the question merely of fairness.
	Because the facts will actually be loaded on the side of the right as against the side of the left.
	And I'm not even saying that this wasn't the case in 2017, but it's become undeniable now.
	It's come to the point where things are so advanced that it is irrational to deny it.
	It's irrational to say, no, you don't have a claim.
	Because they do have a claim.
	And everyone can tell that people have a claim.
	And it would be better not to have to force the issue.
	It would be better to actually concede, actually, yeah, the other fellow has a claim.
	I mean, this is a very nature of what it is to have a civic polity.
	If it's based on friendship, friendship is fundamentally founded in taking the other guy's position into your own consideration.
	I'm friends with someone and therefore I'm not going to do something that harms them, harms their interests, harms their emotions, harms them anyway.
	I'm going to look out for that as part of my considerations about me and myself and my family and whoever in the world.
	That's what being a friend is, is being considerate of someone else's interests and concerns.
	And if you can't do that, then what you have done, as he loves to point out again, is reduce all of politics to the friend-enemy distinction.
	And if politics is boiled down to merely who are my friends, who are my enemies, and with and all politics becomes just a fight over the resources of society, and ideological arguments are presented on either side in order to justify us taking your resources for our group and you not having resources from our group to your group, well,
	you're going to get quite a strident response from the group that is being told they're not even allowed to engage in that debate.
	You're obviously going to get quite a hard line ideological response from them where they just say, no, look, we don't care anymore.
	The argument's over.
	Clearly, you're not listening.
	Clearly, you're not considering our position in all of this.
	And so clearly, we have to become quite hardened in our own hearts to what it is you're saying.
	So when the leftists are saying, well, look, you know, what about the Holocaust?
	What about Nazis?
	What about all this?
	Okay, yeah, obviously those things are bad, right?
	No one's in favor of anything like that.
	However, you can't just use that as a defense to continue in the way of identity politics in the 2010s taking privileges, taking resources, taking prestige, occupying the space that otherwise ought to be for the people on the other side.
	You can't just keep taking advantage forever and expect the taboo to be the thing that holds back the tide of resentment, of bad conscience that is built up from the injustice that is actually being perpetuated.
	Because it is unjust to say through the mechanism of identity politics that we're just going to steal your stuff.
	You are going to give up.
	Like when the feminists were like, men need to give up their positions of privilege.
	Why?
	Why should they?
	I mean, it looks like the men earned those positions of privilege and you didn't.
	And so through a mechanism of injustice, you've managed to take a large number of them away.
	And that's not fair.
	That builds up resentment.
	Resentment causes bad conscience.
	This becomes something that has its own moral force when the group from which you've been taking begins to push back.
	And taboos, the problem with taboos is because they are not rationally justified, as soon as Kameyamiya or whatever his name is, the Hawaiian king, when he abolished them, nothing happened, right?
	Because they're not founded on any real reasons.
	When they're abolished, and you can see this in the Zoomers now, if you think the Zoomers give a shit about your taboos because the reality of their lives has been sculpted by this unfair regime of identity politics, if you think that your taboos will hold these people back, you're wrong.
	They do not care about your shame.
	They do not care about what you try to impose upon them.
	And they are concerned that they are getting stiffed, absolutely shafted.
	And it's not fair.
	And moreover, what you have declared to them is you don't care about them.
	You don't care about their futures.
	You don't care about the unfair two-tier nature of the society in which they've been born, raised, and are expected to continue indefinitely, and they will find ways of expressing themselves.
	I mean, this is why Nick Fuentes is popular in the first place.
	And what the responsible thing for the left to do in this case would be, would be to concede the basic points upon which they are actually correct.
	Actually, if we're going to have a multicultural society in which identity plays a large part in determining who deserves what, then the question needs to be settled, what does the majority deserve?
	You can't just continually take forever and expect them never to have a response.
	You can't just expect them to be on the raw end of this deal forever, because the more that is taken from them and the fewer opportunities, the more difficult their lives get.
	Well, they're going to realize that the system stacked against them and they're going to start forming a coalition of their own.
	And as AA points out, the contra points presaged this.
	And because the facts will be on their side, the centrists, she's using Dave Rubin as the example here, which I don't think is a fair example really, but the centrists will be persuaded by their argument because it will have moral force.

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