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.
Yeah, a lot of values immigrants bring aren't rooted in trying to be White at all. My parents told me to study hard in school, and a lot of Asian immigrant parents said the same. A lot of Nigerian and Ghanaian parents too. Getting a good education and having stable families are values that have been held by many cultures around the world since eternity. But somehow people think immigrants are trying to "assimilate" for having these values.
If those immigrants really want to assimilate, they should be like this child of immigrants that graduated from a top law school and threw a Molotov at a cop car. Her parents would never do this. But she did.
Remember when Prof. Amy Wax wrote a defense of the traditional verities at Penn Law. She was attacked and hounded by her progressive "colleagues." These people are lunatics and fools. It is long past time that we treat them as anything but that.
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?
Thanks for your kind words. To put it into perspective though, 22 likes and 15 comments is actually much better than the majority of Substack blogs. I’ve seen a lot of Substacks and most are barren wastelands where there will only be 2 likes and no comments. Like the one we both comment on a lot, Wood From Eden, does not get much views at all. I’ve also managed to make a few hundred dollars off subscriptions even though I have no paid-exclusive content yet.
Now to your main point: what are we all doing? The answer is, well, most people are complacent. They are fine with going to work and coming home to watch Netflix. Their entire life is nothing but consumption. They parrot the latest trendy slogans. That’s it.
For people to even come onto my blog and read my posts and leave comments is some sort of action. It shows people care. It might not feel like you’re doing something, but you are.
A lot of conservatives have abandoned classical liberal principles (valuing debate, etc) and have been fighting a scorched earth culture war. Ron DeSantis is the best example of what doing something looks like. Is it the only way forward? I don’t think so, I think classical liberalism can still work, but it’s getting harder and harder to justify it.
In the end, if the woke win, I’d rather lose knowing that I did everything I could to prevent it from happening, rather than just watch America crumble and collapse.
Late to this, but I was feeling all the same things - especially when I would go outside and see people looking at their phones instead of at their kids, when I see people looking at their phones instead of their poor dog who is desperately trying to get their attention, when I see people always, always, always looking at the world and even at themselves through the filtered lens of a phone camera.
And almost always wearing the cheapest possible clothes, the disposable foam rubber shoes, getting McDonalds *delivered* lukewarm and soggy for twice the price....if this is what people are going to be, what are we doing anything for? What is the point of making nice things? What is the point of trying? What did untold generations of humans live, toil & die for? This? This sad hoglike existence?
Shouldn't even say that. Even the long-domesticated pig will escape its fetters if given half a chance. A common pink pig will take its freedom and run wild, it will eat whatever it can find, it will grow hair and tusks as its wild nature comes back to it - this really happens! Soon an escaped pig is a feral boar. No hog will willingly return to slop & bondage. Not so with the somewhat more cunning yet far more easily tamed long pig.
Anyway, it gets one pretty low. But then it all changed. I moved to a place with an immigrant majority. My God! The lust for life! The people laughing, the children playing, the moms strolling in twos and threes! The teens running amok and making havoc on their newfangled ebikes, and not even recording it, just doing it for kicks. It's a different world.
I didn't think white suburbia could get more boring but it sure has. If I walk around my hometown now I might see a few teens walking around glumly glued to their phones. But even walking around purportedly-happenin' yuppie-white areas of NYC is brutally depressing. The phones are always out and the shoes are always squeaky white. You can see in a second each instagram trend with which almost every 'individual' is dressing in accordance. Not so on my block! Here I see guys dressed half to play soccer and half to ranch cattle, and that there is some visual richness.
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.
This is exactly what is happening already. College-educated affluent people do things that won't harm them so much but wreak major havoc on the less affluent. Affluent progressives often say that marriage isn't the end-all-be-all and that we should abolish the nuclear family, but they themselves still get married and have nuclear families.
It is very trendy these days to be "ethically non-monogamous". It works out well for the affluent, but produces a cycle of poverty for the less economically fortunate.
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).
During WWII, Chinese immigrants wore Me Chinese No Japanese pins and signs so that people would know they were allies and not "traitors" (even though in hindsight, no Japanese American was ever convicted of treason, and Congress granted reparations for Japanese American internment camps).
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.
Cosmopolitanism and being part of a “global community” is definitely a sign of coastal eliteness. Neoliberal economic policies have given them a very good life while the working class here suffer.
"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.
Great article. My view is that white liberals want immigrants to assimilate into liberal values, while white conservatives want them to adopt conservative values. Essentially, both sides want assimilation from immigrants (non-whites). The core issue is racial power dynamics: unlike white people, non-whites are expected to assimilate fully when they move to white-majority countries. White people, on the other hand, can live in non-white countries, have children there, and remain completely detached from the local culture and language. The expectation to assimilate is imposed on non-whites, while white people have the privilege of not assimilating.
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.
Yeah, a lot of values immigrants bring aren't rooted in trying to be White at all. My parents told me to study hard in school, and a lot of Asian immigrant parents said the same. A lot of Nigerian and Ghanaian parents too. Getting a good education and having stable families are values that have been held by many cultures around the world since eternity. But somehow people think immigrants are trying to "assimilate" for having these values.
If those immigrants really want to assimilate, they should be like this child of immigrants that graduated from a top law school and threw a Molotov at a cop car. Her parents would never do this. But she did.
https://apnews.com/article/death-of-george-floyd-new-york-city-brooklyn-bombings-293d6183dbc6ec37d4f0dd5d1a31fd5a
Remember when Prof. Amy Wax wrote a defense of the traditional verities at Penn Law. She was attacked and hounded by her progressive "colleagues." These people are lunatics and fools. It is long past time that we treat them as anything but that.
I'd call them religious zealots, but the outcome is the same.
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?
Thanks for your kind words. To put it into perspective though, 22 likes and 15 comments is actually much better than the majority of Substack blogs. I’ve seen a lot of Substacks and most are barren wastelands where there will only be 2 likes and no comments. Like the one we both comment on a lot, Wood From Eden, does not get much views at all. I’ve also managed to make a few hundred dollars off subscriptions even though I have no paid-exclusive content yet.
Now to your main point: what are we all doing? The answer is, well, most people are complacent. They are fine with going to work and coming home to watch Netflix. Their entire life is nothing but consumption. They parrot the latest trendy slogans. That’s it.
For people to even come onto my blog and read my posts and leave comments is some sort of action. It shows people care. It might not feel like you’re doing something, but you are.
A lot of conservatives have abandoned classical liberal principles (valuing debate, etc) and have been fighting a scorched earth culture war. Ron DeSantis is the best example of what doing something looks like. Is it the only way forward? I don’t think so, I think classical liberalism can still work, but it’s getting harder and harder to justify it.
In the end, if the woke win, I’d rather lose knowing that I did everything I could to prevent it from happening, rather than just watch America crumble and collapse.
Late to this, but I was feeling all the same things - especially when I would go outside and see people looking at their phones instead of at their kids, when I see people looking at their phones instead of their poor dog who is desperately trying to get their attention, when I see people always, always, always looking at the world and even at themselves through the filtered lens of a phone camera.
And almost always wearing the cheapest possible clothes, the disposable foam rubber shoes, getting McDonalds *delivered* lukewarm and soggy for twice the price....if this is what people are going to be, what are we doing anything for? What is the point of making nice things? What is the point of trying? What did untold generations of humans live, toil & die for? This? This sad hoglike existence?
Shouldn't even say that. Even the long-domesticated pig will escape its fetters if given half a chance. A common pink pig will take its freedom and run wild, it will eat whatever it can find, it will grow hair and tusks as its wild nature comes back to it - this really happens! Soon an escaped pig is a feral boar. No hog will willingly return to slop & bondage. Not so with the somewhat more cunning yet far more easily tamed long pig.
Anyway, it gets one pretty low. But then it all changed. I moved to a place with an immigrant majority. My God! The lust for life! The people laughing, the children playing, the moms strolling in twos and threes! The teens running amok and making havoc on their newfangled ebikes, and not even recording it, just doing it for kicks. It's a different world.
I didn't think white suburbia could get more boring but it sure has. If I walk around my hometown now I might see a few teens walking around glumly glued to their phones. But even walking around purportedly-happenin' yuppie-white areas of NYC is brutally depressing. The phones are always out and the shoes are always squeaky white. You can see in a second each instagram trend with which almost every 'individual' is dressing in accordance. Not so on my block! Here I see guys dressed half to play soccer and half to ranch cattle, and that there is some visual richness.
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.
This is exactly what is happening already. College-educated affluent people do things that won't harm them so much but wreak major havoc on the less affluent. Affluent progressives often say that marriage isn't the end-all-be-all and that we should abolish the nuclear family, but they themselves still get married and have nuclear families.
It is very trendy these days to be "ethically non-monogamous". It works out well for the affluent, but produces a cycle of poverty for the less economically fortunate.
Luxury beliefs, how do they work?
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).
During WWII, Chinese immigrants wore Me Chinese No Japanese pins and signs so that people would know they were allies and not "traitors" (even though in hindsight, no Japanese American was ever convicted of treason, and Congress granted reparations for Japanese American internment camps).
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/chinese-americans-during-ww2-1941/
I would say "Latinx" is more about showing off social status than about forced assimilation though.
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.
Cosmopolitanism and being part of a “global community” is definitely a sign of coastal eliteness. Neoliberal economic policies have given them a very good life while the working class here suffer.
Nah
"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.
Great article. My view is that white liberals want immigrants to assimilate into liberal values, while white conservatives want them to adopt conservative values. Essentially, both sides want assimilation from immigrants (non-whites). The core issue is racial power dynamics: unlike white people, non-whites are expected to assimilate fully when they move to white-majority countries. White people, on the other hand, can live in non-white countries, have children there, and remain completely detached from the local culture and language. The expectation to assimilate is imposed on non-whites, while white people have the privilege of not assimilating.
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