Notes from the edge of civilization: January 18, 2026
Girls go left; the crows know; and a $3 Trader Joe’s tote becomes global social currency.
A viral X thread (16 million views) points out an inconvenient fact the culture has been denying: over the past 25 years, the partisan gap between young men and women has nearly doubled, driven almost entirely by women moving left, while men stayed roughly where they were.
As X user, IterIntellectus, puts it:
We’ve been told for a decade that men are “radicalizing to the right” and that this is dangerous. The actual data shows the opposite. Men barely moved. Women moved 20+ points leftward.
This isn’t just a pathology on American college campuses. In country after country, young women are moving sharply left on social and political issues, while young men remain stable or slowly drift right. That matters, because it rules out most of the easy explanations. This isn’t about campus politics, Title IX, or some uniquely American culture war. Whatever is driving this shift rolled out globally and roughly at the same time.
Many young women spend their formative years inside ideologically uniform environments where dissent is penalized. Men, less embedded in those environments, were captured differently; through withdrawal, distraction, disengagement and derision.
What we’re watching isn’t progress. It’s segmentation: two demographics pulled in opposite directions by the same system, optimized for attention, emotion, and control — with both sides drifting further from anything resembling a healthy society.
As our recent podcast guest, Dr. Dani Sulikowski, said forthrightly in a December 2025 interview:
If you… go through history and try to find a civilization that faced the same types of challenges that we are facing and got through them, you won't. Because a lot of past civilizations faced exactly the same challenges we’re facing and none of them got through them.
So if we somehow manage to do something very different, we will be the first civilization to have done something different in this circumstance. Every other civilization has just watched itself fall.
Dr. Sulikowski pulls no punches in one of the best interviews of 2025 linking the continued feminization of the West with its ultimate demise. If you have not seen it, you should. It will help you understand exactly where we land as a civilization.
Welcome to CORVID-26! (IYKYK)
There’s a guy on the social media site, Threads, who calls himself biz_dave. He says he’s a “big nerd” and a “crow friend.” He recently spent months training local crows to attack red hats (you know the ones).
Dave explains his motivation plainly: “I tried to be centrist for a long time but I no longer believe that is a moral option.”
Some people say Dave is a hero. In some ways, he is — but not for the reason they think he is.
Dave isn’t a hero because of his ability to harness passerine power. No — he’s a hero because he’s accidentally reminded everyone that modern politics has become a costume party — and costumes can be mocked, flipped, stolen, and made ridiculous.
In a country where political identity has been flattened into merch, responding at the level of symbol is actually coherent. If politics insists on being theater, then satire is an appropriate reply.
Are Dave and his hat-snatching birds going to change policy? Of course not. But neither are yard signs, hashtags, or earnest op-eds read exclusively by people who already agree with you.
And the crows? They’re not activists and they’re not anti-Trump. They’re just smarter than the rest of us and willing to take free snacks.
Which, frankly, might be the most rational political position remaining.
If the 'economy is fine so why does everything feel so expensive’ is giving you cognitive dissonance, this next story will give you whiplash.
People in other countries are willing to part with hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for a $3 Trader Joe's canvas tote.
Why? Because scarcity, not substance, is the product. Trader Joe’s doesn’t exist abroad, which means scarcity does all the heavy lifting. Carrying one of these totes in New York screams, ‘I just scored some frozen gyoza and a pound of cheap chocolate.’ But in trendy East London, the message goes more like, ‘I’m ironic, I travel, and I’m in on the TikTok joke.’ Which is exactly how you know they’re not joking.
The part that should make your eyes twitch is that people are willing to part with thousands of dollars not because the tote is good, but because everything else feels bad. When the future feels overpriced and underdelivered, a cheap Vietnamese-made canvas bag becomes actual social currency because it’s lowbrow, tactile, and limited.
When systems stop delivering stability, people cling to symbols. Especially cheap and cheerful ones that whisper, ‘things are normal somewhere, right?’
Yep — it’s just a grocery bag. And that’s the point.
I have to say, regardless of political leanings, training the crows is an awesome gag.
The only appropriate counter is to train other crows to go after blue and green hair. Maybe nose rings?