So many words are misused in this country by media and academia, but until I read this essay I didn't understand completely why the use of "assimilation" bothered me. Now I know. Thank you for the enlightenment.
The real problem for the "left" these days is that much of what they define as "white supremacist values" are in fact just an old fashioned, nearly universal set of values that most cultures have shared from time immemorial (devotion to family, to some faith, to the community, to having a purpose and making yourself a useful member of society, generally through work of some kind). Those values are expressed in innumerable ways with variations in outcomes and priorities (god over family, family over god, community first or last, reasons for working hard and being ambitious, meaning are we honoring our family, trying to improve our circumstances, or serving our nation/community), but the foundations are all the same, and it's those foundations that they are intentionally or unintentionally eroding through this recoding and twisting of ideals and words.
Such a good essay. I love seeing things that I could never do; this is an essay that I could never write. Yet at the same time, it leaves me with a vague dissatisfaction - what are we all doing?
Yes, the left thinks America is bad, but the Democratic coalition really *is* America. It controls the national discourse, and relegates everybody who will not genuflect towards its sacred symbols into the conservative ghetto. Yet what good does it do to point this out? Your essay is brilliant, and instead of being a rallying point for sane people everywhere, it has 22 likes and 15 comments on substack. Shouldn't we have something better to do than put on YouTube music and browse through the latest documentation of the flaming nosedive that is the trajectory of American culture? Is this what all the Romans did in the 4th century - stand around and shake their heads at how weird everyone around them had become?
What about our kids? What are they supposed to *do* anyway? College connected me with the intelligent and hardworking woman who would someday be my wife, and gave me access to numerous career paths. But my kids can't meet smart, upwardly mobile people at college anymore, and the degrees are increasingly meaningless. I tell them to persevere in school and hold their nose against the propaganda, because there's something at the end; I tell them that liberal values like tolerance and creativity truly are worth something, because they help to build strong and innovative societies; but where does it all lead, and where will they end up?
This is all good, but I take a darker view. What if you wanted to kneecap your competition while still appearing to be “a good person”? Well, you’d publicly renounce positive “assimilationist” beliefs (like working hard, valuing education, not having kids out of wedlock etc) while quietly living out all these beliefs yourself. The people who listen to you and reject things like hard work and valuing education won’t succeed and you and your family will have fewer high performing people to compete against. It’s smart- selfish, but smart.
I hadn’t thought of using Latinx as forced assimilation. It reminds me of the spectrum of forced assimilation versus forced exclusion for immigrant cultures. Just as Asian immigrants used to be excluded — and formed China towns as a result — Germans also used to have German towns in the US. Then during WWI they were forced to assimilate. Speaking German in public was banned. German books were banned. Forced assimilation tends to occur in times of war when an immigrant group is viewed as suspect or undesirable. It would seem to imply that elite cosmopolitans view immigrant cultures (which are often very traditional) are seen as suspect and undesirable. In a similar way to how speaking German was banned, we've banned non-woke language (like Latino).
Well Peng, here's what Theodore Roosevelt said about immigration and assimilation and I believe it with all my heart.
“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Progressives don't believe this because they hate this idea of America and for all she stands. Progressives aren't even Americans because they profess to be citizens of the world (whatever the hell that means) and despise our history, our culture and our national sovereignty. Many immigrants came here to be Americans and cast their lot with us. Those are the kinds of people we want and whom we embrace. The others, who are like the proggies who detest America, we can do without.
"then it isn’t conservatives that support assimilation. It’s liberals."
Mind. Blown.
Mrs. Pi's Salvadoran and hates the word LatinX. And although she's a college grad and successful civil engineer, a few of her also- educated friends have become _very_ assimilated in this sense.
when leftists leave the plantation they never run far enough: apply this article's logic to geo-politics: if Republicans are the party of diversity then what were the Axis Powers? Exactly and I'm not being satirical. The defeat of Hirohito and the Big-H was a loss for humanity, a loss for the volkish/racial-world-view now being replaced with a corporate and dare-I-say jew-cultic world-view; for the jew, his race is both idea, and concrete, and so him imposing upon the world-stage, his deadly confusion leads to concepts of "idea-races" that is, of races that are nothing but ideas, which can then be managed and changed according to the will of the world-manipulator, himself. By fighting the jew, we are fighting for the freedom of our racial-spirits (aka our racial identities) and as such, for world-spirit (that is, for human desire as human), as opposed to a counterfeit world-spirit foisted upon us by the jew, and his priest-craft, as a the expression of his backward self-interests. The jews should know what they're doing to us, and know that if they want to be really friendly then they have to do some assimilating of their own: they should totally dissolve their tranny "self-identity" and birth something more in line with their physical bodies, something more eurocentric, that's how they'll make a contribution to "world-spirit", to humanity.
So many words are misused in this country by media and academia, but until I read this essay I didn't understand completely why the use of "assimilation" bothered me. Now I know. Thank you for the enlightenment.
The real problem for the "left" these days is that much of what they define as "white supremacist values" are in fact just an old fashioned, nearly universal set of values that most cultures have shared from time immemorial (devotion to family, to some faith, to the community, to having a purpose and making yourself a useful member of society, generally through work of some kind). Those values are expressed in innumerable ways with variations in outcomes and priorities (god over family, family over god, community first or last, reasons for working hard and being ambitious, meaning are we honoring our family, trying to improve our circumstances, or serving our nation/community), but the foundations are all the same, and it's those foundations that they are intentionally or unintentionally eroding through this recoding and twisting of ideals and words.
Such a good essay. I love seeing things that I could never do; this is an essay that I could never write. Yet at the same time, it leaves me with a vague dissatisfaction - what are we all doing?
Yes, the left thinks America is bad, but the Democratic coalition really *is* America. It controls the national discourse, and relegates everybody who will not genuflect towards its sacred symbols into the conservative ghetto. Yet what good does it do to point this out? Your essay is brilliant, and instead of being a rallying point for sane people everywhere, it has 22 likes and 15 comments on substack. Shouldn't we have something better to do than put on YouTube music and browse through the latest documentation of the flaming nosedive that is the trajectory of American culture? Is this what all the Romans did in the 4th century - stand around and shake their heads at how weird everyone around them had become?
What about our kids? What are they supposed to *do* anyway? College connected me with the intelligent and hardworking woman who would someday be my wife, and gave me access to numerous career paths. But my kids can't meet smart, upwardly mobile people at college anymore, and the degrees are increasingly meaningless. I tell them to persevere in school and hold their nose against the propaganda, because there's something at the end; I tell them that liberal values like tolerance and creativity truly are worth something, because they help to build strong and innovative societies; but where does it all lead, and where will they end up?
What are we all doing anymore?
This is all good, but I take a darker view. What if you wanted to kneecap your competition while still appearing to be “a good person”? Well, you’d publicly renounce positive “assimilationist” beliefs (like working hard, valuing education, not having kids out of wedlock etc) while quietly living out all these beliefs yourself. The people who listen to you and reject things like hard work and valuing education won’t succeed and you and your family will have fewer high performing people to compete against. It’s smart- selfish, but smart.
I hadn’t thought of using Latinx as forced assimilation. It reminds me of the spectrum of forced assimilation versus forced exclusion for immigrant cultures. Just as Asian immigrants used to be excluded — and formed China towns as a result — Germans also used to have German towns in the US. Then during WWI they were forced to assimilate. Speaking German in public was banned. German books were banned. Forced assimilation tends to occur in times of war when an immigrant group is viewed as suspect or undesirable. It would seem to imply that elite cosmopolitans view immigrant cultures (which are often very traditional) are seen as suspect and undesirable. In a similar way to how speaking German was banned, we've banned non-woke language (like Latino).
Well Peng, here's what Theodore Roosevelt said about immigration and assimilation and I believe it with all my heart.
“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Progressives don't believe this because they hate this idea of America and for all she stands. Progressives aren't even Americans because they profess to be citizens of the world (whatever the hell that means) and despise our history, our culture and our national sovereignty. Many immigrants came here to be Americans and cast their lot with us. Those are the kinds of people we want and whom we embrace. The others, who are like the proggies who detest America, we can do without.
"then it isn’t conservatives that support assimilation. It’s liberals."
Mind. Blown.
Mrs. Pi's Salvadoran and hates the word LatinX. And although she's a college grad and successful civil engineer, a few of her also- educated friends have become _very_ assimilated in this sense.
Didn't see this til late but... Wow. Good crowd.
when leftists leave the plantation they never run far enough: apply this article's logic to geo-politics: if Republicans are the party of diversity then what were the Axis Powers? Exactly and I'm not being satirical. The defeat of Hirohito and the Big-H was a loss for humanity, a loss for the volkish/racial-world-view now being replaced with a corporate and dare-I-say jew-cultic world-view; for the jew, his race is both idea, and concrete, and so him imposing upon the world-stage, his deadly confusion leads to concepts of "idea-races" that is, of races that are nothing but ideas, which can then be managed and changed according to the will of the world-manipulator, himself. By fighting the jew, we are fighting for the freedom of our racial-spirits (aka our racial identities) and as such, for world-spirit (that is, for human desire as human), as opposed to a counterfeit world-spirit foisted upon us by the jew, and his priest-craft, as a the expression of his backward self-interests. The jews should know what they're doing to us, and know that if they want to be really friendly then they have to do some assimilating of their own: they should totally dissolve their tranny "self-identity" and birth something more in line with their physical bodies, something more eurocentric, that's how they'll make a contribution to "world-spirit", to humanity.
Great essay. Too bad hacker news flagged it