They Said the Culture Wars Are Over

I noticed the pitch changed almost as soon as the results settled.

Texas went blue. A Democratic governor and a Democratic senator for the first time in decades. The talking point that arrived with it was that the culture wars are finished. Nobody has time for them anymore. Focus on the pocketbook. Put money back in people’s hands. That is the new line.

Ben Shapiro took it up in a clip from the day after: [VIDEO]

He calls the old approach woke 1.0 — the racial and sexual demagoguery of 2020 and 2021. What he hears now is woke 2.0: economic demagoguery aimed at capitalism itself. Progressives play the long game. They chip away at the free market until the universal acid of socialism can finish the work.

He plays a clip of Rep. Summer Lee. Voters in deep-red districts are talking about data centers and AI, about health care, about ending wars. That is not a retreat from progressivism, she says. Progressivism gets there first and then builds. This cycle showed people want bold change.

Shapiro’s read is that the train is still the same train. The people out in front of it — Lee, AOC — run ahead and wait for the rest to catch up. The moderates just change the language.

Gina Hinojosa, the new governor of Texas, is the exhibit. She said nobody has the luxury of culture wars in 2026. A governor who works for you, saves the schools, puts money in your pocket. Those wars are over. The only ones who won them were the billionaires.

Shapiro notes that the billionaires did not, in fact, win the culture wars of 2020. He also notes that her concrete promise — freezing residential electricity rates until data centers pay their own way — runs into Texas’s actual market. Retail providers set the prices. A governor’s order does not move them. What the order can do is put pressure on the tech companies and the data centers. That, he says, is the redistribution under a different name.

Then he moves to New York. Zohran Mamdani’s second bill as mayor gives nonprofits first dibs on distressed residential buildings. Landlords of rent-stabilized properties have to wait out a bidding window before they can list on the open market. Shapiro’s claim is that the goal is not lower prices. The goal is to end private ownership of the buildings.

The pattern he sees is the same in both places. The culture-war language is dialed down. The institutional targets — markets, private property, the capacity of private capital to decide what gets built — stay in place. The long game continues under the new clothes.

Re: Texas

The land next to Starbase is still public. Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa asked the Parks and Wildlife Department to take no action on a possible sale of roughly 1,300 acres in Cameron County—land that includes Boca Chica State Park—until she takes office in January. She grew up in the Valley and has talked about the beach as a place she used. On the campaign she said Texas is not for sale and framed the deal as Abbott handing public land to a major donor. After the election the tone softened. She has said a working relationship with Musk and his companies is possible, but it has to be on her terms and cannot simply run over people in Texas.

Musk answered on X without naming her. SpaceX and Tesla prospered in Texas, he wrote, because they were not constantly operating under an oppressive and extractive state government. California’s taxes and overregulation are why the major expansions and headquarters moved. Right after the results he had already posted that data centers in space looked pretty appealing. The Boca Chica pause is the early test of which set of terms actually governs once she is in office.

In the House, Democrats filed a stack of gun bills the first day pre-filing opened for the 90th Legislature. One creates extreme-risk protective orders that can, on certain findings, restrict access before a full hearing. Another would make it a state-jail felony to transfer most semi-automatic rifles that take detachable magazines to anyone under 21, with narrow exceptions. Another would require background checks through a licensed dealer for private transfers. There are more. Republicans still hold the Senate. Hinojosa has not spoken specifically on these bills yet; in the past she has supported versions of the same ideas. None of this has passed, and the session does not convene until January.

In Houston, Mayor John Whitmire signed an executive order limiting when police contact ICE. Officers will notify only if the person is arrested for a jailable offense (or has a criminal warrant), not on a traffic stop that ends with a citation solely because of an administrative immigration warrant. Whitmire said elections matter, that he had consulted the incoming statewide leadership, and that the point is to reduce fear while still going after people charged with crimes. The federal side called it sanctuary politics. Texas already has a 2017 law against local limits on immigration cooperation; Whitmire voted against it as a senator. Whether the new administration treats that law as a priority is the open question the order is testing.

The Shapiro clip treats the midterm result as a pivot from culture-war fights to economic ones against markets. The land pause, the gun bills, and the Houston order are the first practical exhibits of what that pivot looks like on the ground in Texas.