Dispatches from the Group Chats, Vol 5

Los Angeles, Canada, Immigration, Israel, China

1. Is the party that Elon is supporting a far-right party?

It’s similar to MAGA but does have some small amount of more insane far right, which to a Jew is scary given it’s Germany, but the Neo-Nazis et al clearly don’t seem to be in charge of it.

And Elon is right they are probably their only hope to save their broken country. If they win and the CDU is forced to finally take on more of their popular ideas and shift right to compete, that’s probably very good for Germany and the west.

2. What’s going on in LA?

1. Been a dry year

2. Very high winds all of a sudden

3. Govt terrible about brush management because of environmental concerns.

4. Lots of homeless encampments that run on open flames.

5. Above ground power lines aren’t maintained properly. They blow around in the wind and explode.

6. Once fires are burning, pyromaniacs get inspired to go start more fires (and it’s easier to get away with it)

7. Wind continues to literally fan the flames.

8. All firefighting services way over capacity, no option but to let areas burn.

Some of these have higher weighting than others, many are culture war lightning rods, narrative on both the left and the right still taking shape.

3. LA gov’t incompetence feels like it could introduce more accountability.

Feels like this could be a Oct 7th-level-moment in terms of political shifts in LA / CA.

A bunch of the most influential folks in LA / CA just experienced:

- A fire that, at a minimum, was significantly exacerbated by terrible forest management (and some probability traced back to homeless encampment or similar).

- A state-level insurer that will be completely wiped out after this (CA FAIR has $5.9b of exposure in the Palisades and $200m on the balance sheet + $2.5b in state-wide re-insurance), resulting in, at best, a protracted process for their claims to be settled and, at worse, claims going unpaid (and perhaps a state or federal bailout to avoid that).

- A local far-left gov response that will inevitably be ripe for valid criticism.

4. Trumps’ instincts (in referring to his Joe Rogan discussion about LA being unprepared for fires)

What's kind of amazing about Trump is despite the rambling and sometimes incoherent delivery, he's often very right about things, specifically about things the media itself gets foundationally wrong.

I recall he got so much flak about the electric catapults on aircraft carriers, and he was in fact right: the Navy was struggling to replace the old steam ones, a subtlety the MSM totally missed.

He seems to have this animal cleverness about him, probably due to all his NYC real estate skulduggery. He can see the EU/Russia relationship from the Putin side of the table in a way all the Ben Rhodes and Jake Sullivans can not.

Him sending his son-in-law with zero diplomatic experience to parachute in to Middle East and run rings around the entire diplomatic corps is both a surprise and not a surprise because they knew nothing but they also didn’t know any of the encrusted shibboleths that have become diplomatic conventional wisdom…Also, in hindsight, Kushner not so dumb after all.

Another thing he understands is that strong, vital societies grow and intuitively, when you look at maps old empires, you know they’ve peaked when their territorial expanse does. America getting bigger is almost inherently greater in some fundamental way

5. Follow up from intra-right struggles

Person A: Basically, the last week was a move about 20 points further right, to the point that Elon and Vivek are now on the *left* of the Republican party for being pro-merit.

2025 may turn out to be a lot like 2013. In 2012, tech helped Obama get re-elected. After a few weeks of congrats, repressed anti-tech sentiment suddenly surged on the left after the inauguration. Also, wokism went bananas in 2013 after Obama’s relatively moderate first term. In 2024, tech helped Trump get re-elected. After a few weeks of congrats, repressed anti-tech sentiment suddenly surged on the right after the election. (Things move faster on X these days so it didn’t even take till the inauguration to happen)

Basically, in the span of less than a year, tech went from getting congratulated in the Atlantic by the left to getting slammed by them in 2013. Of course, the left still hates tech, even more so than 2016 because they blame them for taking away their power in 2024. But now large swaths of the right also hate tech. Or have gotten memed into doing so.

Person B: The right had immense reason to hate tech from 2012-2020. Censorship was salient here. The tech/right coalition did not form on a premise of immigration maximalism, nor are the sane heads in tech demanding it, so I think we’ll be fine.

it's rational to want race and gender favoritism to end in the US while wanting citizen vs non-citizen favoritism to continue, because the latter is part of what constitutes a nation

One reason the MAGA nativists are winning the argument is that a lot of more middle class libs in tech (and other sectors) secretly agree with them. Also, post election, blanket diversity/immigration worship has fallen out of favor on the left as well

6. On decoupling from China

We're so far from cutting off Chinese parts that I don't think it's worth entertaining the hypo. There are innumerable pieces of essential infrastructure that have no path to decoupling. Even building one will take four years of careful, coordinated action that is very unlikely to happen…I had to go to the wall multiple times just to make the IoT cybersecurity certification potentially meaningful. There are very powerful interests that wanted it to be a rubber stamp, and if it wasn't for me personally, they would have won. I mean, tariffs are not going to move the needle on this stuff, they're not going to fundamentally change the incentives if you currently pay $9/hr to develop your firmware

Decoupling is not happening, it didn't happen under Trump 45, it didn't happen under Biden, the trend lines were monotonically anti-decoupling the whole time, the feds don't even really understand the issue yet and so struggle to frame a solution

Lots of Americans still mentally live in 2009, where the idea of a good Chinese $7k gas car or $10k EV would have seemed utterly risible, but the American auto manufacturers have utterly lost the export market and will leverage all their resources to maintain the protected American market that is the only one where they're competitive. This is a special case bc of the employment numbers, market size, and incumbent manufacturing capacity

7. H1B and AI

Person A: I’ve never really used H1B. I don’t think I’ve hired 5. But I have used off shore programmers. Not a lot. But I have for price conscious projects

All that said , I think the dynamics of H1Bs for the tech world should change considerably because of the impact of AI.

We can’t talk about H1Bs looking backwards. We have to consider that AI is the Sun and all things software revolve around it.

We need as many great AI engineers as we can get. If there is a way to prove their proficiency, hire them. All of them. H1B or something new. That’s a sovereign imperative.

But for run of the mill coders, nope. AI can generate 75 pct of the lines of code that need to be created by companies. We don’t need H1Bs for them

We need to train people , preferably Americans if possible, to manage the output of AI and how to use AI models.

I think we have enough people capable of being trained

We aren’t far from the time where we stop using AI to replicate what todays coders do, to using AI as the core code generators and agents , and training humans to do what AI can’t and to manage and leverage the evolving capabilities that AI has.

You can use all the data and examples of how H1Bs have been used in the past. But IMO, it’s shuffling deck chairs on the titanic.

If we want to stay ahead, we need to think ahead and modify the rules accordingly.

I don’t see why we would want any H1Bs approved for anyone who doesn’t move the needle on AI for the country

Person B: I appreciate this because I’m now seeing there is a large group of people who think (a) their country doesn’t need to import skilled talent anymore because (b) AI will take all the jobs.

I have the totally opposite view which is that (a) the global market for talent is heating up and (b) AI is right now amplified rather than truly artificial intelligence.

Person c: It would be silly suggest AI will supplant all "skilled talent," or serve unconditionally as a substitute rather than a complement for smart entry-level labor. But it would be equally silly for any sector that relies on a leveraged tier of lower-level knowledge workers to perform a semi-commoditized function -- basic coding, litigation document review, rudimentary financial analysis -- to ignore the likely impact of AI on its staffing structure. Certainly the legal profession isn't ignoring it.

All the more reason to calibrate our visas to truly attract the best, brightest talent, which Vivek, Sacks, and others have advocated for

8. Why was there a global shift to the right?

Elon's probably the #1 contender for "biggest factor," but I think "2020" is at least a contender. The "global elite" such as it is wagered a LOT of its credibility on a lockdown strategy for Covid + the whole global George Floyd reckoning thing. Both of those were big overreaches that alienated many people, and then the aftermath having a basically invalid Joe Biden at the helm intensified the sense the regime had "lost the mandate of heaven" or whatever.

2020 was the global elite venturing further and further on a limb. 2022 was Elon sawing off the limb

I'm a little skeptical of "inflation" as explanatory. Clearly a factor, but I don't think America's richest county (Loudoun) made a big shift towards Trump due to inflation

A lot of what happened is that liberals finally lost the culture war. They lost because a) They acted insane for years on race/gender issues and b) Elon bought the big agenda-setting machine

What's complicated is that the factors aren't compartmentalized. If your regime causes inflation, people are more skeptical of your cultural radicalism

***

Person B: To push back on the premise, one party had a candidate that was a POTUS and running as a candidate for 2 yrs.

The other had a candidate that ran for 120 days

Despite that enormous advantage, the winner couldn’t get 50 pct of the popular vote.

The definitive winner. But far far far from a mandate

Person C: (Sorry obligatory other opinion here: If you’d given her another few months and more exposure, I think we would have gotten well over 50% - but maybe D’s don’t realize this, and try her again…)

9. H1B and wages

That is not the issue. The issue is that the program was conceived at NSF to lower wages in aggregate by design.

For scientists and other STEM workers this is like being put under anasthesia for an appendectomy only to listen to the surgeons talk among themselves about who should get your spare kidney, blood plasma and portions of rib.

Let me try a different version.

Instead of a labor shortage let me suggest that there is a capital shortage. American workers need to be on the Cap Tables in a HUGE way to motivate them and make them aligned.

My solution is to use a printing press. Instead of Visas, we are going to print shares and maybe bonds too. For America. For the good of the Nation.

Our capitalists just don’t have the right level of drive. Too busy with F1, Art Basel, Burning man prep and McClaren owners meetups.

That is how it sounds. And has done so for 40 years.

If anyone talked like that I might call them a communist. I would defend my investor and founder friends.

Yet I hear no one in the H-1B discussion talking about Coasian rights, market solutions and separating harberger triangles from Borjas rectangles.

Which is what we would do if we were serious about efficiency merit and winning.

Person B: fwiw in the tech circles, the wages have not been lowered because there is a supply shortage of good engineers at the top end.

The way compensation works at tech companies is via structured bands based on levels and discretionary equity. This banding is a side effect of wanting to avoid racial and gender discrimination lawsuits. So most tech companies are not replacing US citizens with H1Bs and then paying those H1Bs less because the banding and leveling processes forces everyone to be paid formulaically. In practice, this means that H1Bs that most tech people are interacting with are making total comp of $200k and many are on a total comp package of $500k-$2m/yr once you factor in their equity packages.

H1B happens to be the solution to the talent problem in the software tech universe, regardless of how it was conceived by NSF. So people from that slice of the world have a very different lived experience with H1Bs (and O1s)

Person C: This is the lump of labor fallacy. Imagine a desert island with one person. Bringing a second person on the island doesn’t “take his job”, it increases total productive capacity if the new arrival is productive.

It doesn’t mean you bring just anyone onto the island — not a cannibal, not a layabout — but a hardworking new arrival increases the number of coconuts for both people.

Many skilled immigrants are tech founders and directly “create” jobs. But even those who are just net taxpayers are net beneficial for a country that’s $175.3T in debt, if they are culturally assimilated.

Person A: No. That would be the lump of labor strawman.

It *would* be super convenient if I was making an anti-economic argument. Or an anti-Indian argument. Or anti-tech. Or anti-market.

But I am not. We have brilliant foreign workers who create multi billion dollar companies. They also displace Americans who avoid flooded markets and who in their absence would create such companies as well. Same for scientific discoveries. Etc.

This is *not* that argument. This is the pro-market Coasian restrictionist position facing the pro-tech subsidy socialist appeal from VC/C-Suite socialism.

Person D: bring people in who raise the mean IQ of the island.

Person A: I don’t think todays scientific employers want high IQ/Brilliance at all. They want pliable and deferential competence.

High intelligence is too dangerous.

Did you Notice that no one is engaging the model of Coasian rights? We’ll, why is that?

High IQ people would do just that to solve this problem. And that is dangerous to those “capitalists” looking to capture labor’s massive Borjas Rectangle while complaining about the tiny Harberger triangle above it forming the trapezoid.

Let’s put it like this: it’s a Szilard problem.

Leo Szilard (a genius immigrant btw) is brilliant enough to get us a Manhattan project, but the Leslie Groves types don’t want him in the project. So they hire away. Too much independence. Szilard (while Hungarian by birth !) was too “American” if you will. Too headstrong and independent.

We want High IQ up to the point where these Smart people start talking about issues in public.

Like H-1B and the NSF / NAS / GUIRR conspiracy against American scientists led by Erich Bloch.

Person E: Yeah that’s the thing — you could theoretically recruit a mean-110 IQ population of law abiding immigrants who also poll in favor of panopticon state surveillance, a social credit system, and censorship

So emphases on culture and assimilation don’t become moot at higher IQ levels even though concerns about, eg, violent crime are greatly diminished

I don’t think we can afford to ignore the difference between a 2/10 censorship preference and 8/10

Some societies will demonetize charlie hebdoe and some societies will blow it up

These differences become less concerning if you are assimilating a gradual flow of immigrants vs. doing demographic replacement en masse

Person F: Per this discussion, I used to be all about IQ maxing, but Covid altered my perspective. The more conformist societies in the East were crippled by propaganda and rendered miserable with masking and rules. Florida, with its motley crew of Cubans, old white people and panhandle rednecks, bucked the trends and set a glorious example for everyone else. Civilization was saved not by the smartest necessarily, but by the most freedom loving

10. Why is Israel high-fertility?

The most convincing take I’ve seen on Israeli TFR is that religious jews (thus fertility) are high-status in israel

Working hard doesn’t mean less children. In fact people on farms in the 1800s probably worked harder

Well the current girlboss lifescript is something like: strive as an analyst/associate for a few years, then maybe go to business school if applicable, then have kids in 30s with more security and $. And anecdotally I’ve seen women ambivalent about kids become very kid-focused after coming into money. The U-shapes fertility curve is real; alleviating the sense of status-treadmill precarity that some junior professionals feel does seem to promote kidhaving. Obviously for subsistence farmers the 80h weeks have a different valence

Kids are a labor force on a farm, a cost in meritocratic meat grinder socieites

The very religious help, but it's not just them. They're only 10-15% of the population. Even seculars have a high birthrate. CEO of a company I invested in is on kid four. It's just cultural values...also, the military pushes people to become adults. If you live like a SF hipster Peter Pan until your 30s you're a loser in Israel. Also, contact with death and existential struggle...that's what modernity lacks. Israel has high GDP but also air raid sirens and constant battlefield deaths. Unique combo.

Notably in Israel things like childcare are still expensive, and of course real estate is as expensive as SF/NYC. While the Nordics offer everything and everyone's a Panda bear, fertility-wise.

***

In 2008, the head of the Orthodox Church offered to baptize every born born and become godfather to every 3rd child or beyond born in a family. He made it high status to have more kids.

I think this is also part of why the U-curve exists for wealthier people in my experience. It's a way to differentiate from the middle class so it's a status symbol for the wealthy. So many rich VCs and founders are rolling around with 3 or 4 kids while the middle managers at FAANG are having 1-2.

Average for left-wing secular Israeli families: 2.5

For traditional/semi-secular: 4

For religious living in settlements: 6

For Haredim: 8-10

Btw this isn’t just true in Israel. It’s true in literally every more religious community in the US.

Mormons: 3.4

American Orthodox Jews: 3.3

American Haredim: 6

American Christians are difficult to measure because it’s hard to identify who is more religious - but there is no question that higher church attendance correlates with higher fertility rate.

If the question is how do you raise societal fertility rates, the answer is get people to engage with religion. If the question is how do you get secular people to have more kids, the answer is still get everyone around them to engage in religion.

11. Meritocracy and open borders are not synonymous

Affirmative action quotas and jewish quotas seem inapposite to immigration quotas, because they aim to engineer (and kneecap) job and education prospects for target groups — not simply limit who can come into the country. Before the advent and after the sunset of these various racist quota systems, nearly every country has limited immigration. Meritocracy and open borders have never been synonymous.

And it’s interesting to conflate them more aggressively now, at a moment when the internet has made geography less of a labor-market rigidity than ever before.

***

The other question is: what % of the global elite are “organically” Chinese and Indian?

In 1950 it was like 0% because both countries were wrecked by communism and socialism respectively

And many in MAGA have an implicit belief that 1950 is the true state of the world and without outsourcing and offshoring it would still be like that

But it was actually a highly atypical time in world history

***

Person A: It's a great book (Albion’s Seed), but a lot of people take the wrong message from it to argue that there is no cohesive British culture that informed our nation's founding. If East Anglians, Scots Irish, and Cavaliers created significant cultural differences that can still be seen today hundreds of years later--then we can't say "Oh well, everyone from Pakistan, China, Mexico, Venezuela, etc." is going to assimilate perfectly so long as they learn english and pay taxes.

Person B: How is that not the right lesson to take from it? What exactly is this hypothetical mainline American culture to which people should be assimilating? If we're setting aside the procedural business of English-language skills, law-following, and tax-paying, what then should the Rahuls of the world adopt as their new identity?

I don't think anyone could realistically dispute that they change things.

The question, is from what exactly? We're so beyond having anything like a common cultural or social fabric, this all seems a bit of nostalgic RETVRN to me.

Or perhaps the statement is true in small rural communities, and there what few immigrants end up do change things for the worse. But the thought that there'll be cultural assimilation problems in the larger cities...again, seems a bit delusional. Matters are already a total circus.

Person A: We aren't going to Retvrn, but we can make things worse. We have the highest % of foreign born residents since 1910.

We are lacking a common culture, but I don't see that as a reason to make it even more diffuse.

Person B: Lomez is right that short of a WWII situation, hard to see how you gel this circus into a nation, and that conflict isn't likely to come anytime soon.

Person A: Tbh you can also basically meme a common culture into being

But it does require attempting to define it and old Anglo folkways are a good choice

That’s a solid point in favor of slowing down — The immigration pause of ~1920-1965 helped America digest a lot of cultural intake

The assimilationist position does not argue that most Americans are WASPs but that WASP cultural norms were beneficially hegemonic for awhile and other continental immigrants assimilated to them somewhat

“What is Person B’s point exactly? It’s so bad already that we have no choice but to make it worse?…Person B makes a big deal about how diverse Israel is when denying accusations that it is a white (evil) nation. But he apparently does not believe that that diversity (as well as the diversity added by converts like himself) is so significant as to mandate importing an arab majority. It’s just a fallacious point”

“America is less trusting, less honest, less clean, less peaceful than it used to be. Ergo we should engineer even worse outcomes on all of those metrics”

“The idea that there is no distinct culture to preserve here is also ridiculous. And it is incoherent for these guys to use it as a point in their favor when “superior culture” is their only explanation for group and national differences. Though I suppose Person A thinks it is a worse culture , and the third world is just terrible because it got exported”… Ironically, these guys have a much less flexible view of race than “race realists.” If you aren’t a mayflower wasp, you might as well be dravidian

It’s not that these conceptual challenges are wholly meritless, but they often involve selective demands for rigor.

““Culture” “religion” “race” are not so easily disentangled, but the demand that they be disentangled (and also rendered individually meaningless) is only made of western european peoples….Part of the freakout around the largely anonymous-driven

H1B response is that white people are increasingly conscious of themselves in those terms for reasons other than, e.g. allocating slots away from themselves at harvard”

“It’s not so much that clannishness of that sort is desirable as such, but it is a natural response to being forced into competition with others who think (and are permitted to think) in those terms. Israelis don’t really have a choice in the matter (even if they wanted to), but in the colorful diverse future of pakistani rape gangs and elite human capital indians getting into stanford by writing blacklivesmatter on their apps, it’s less of a choice here as well…But that’s also why it comes off as disingenuous when someone like Person A says there’s no such thing as an American. The best possible version of his argument still relies on the implicit threat that any honest response under one’s real name will be forwarded to one’s employer”

I could explain aspects of American culture, and Anglo-Saxon culture more broadly…. As I said above, honesty, cleanliness, respect for law in a certain sense, independence, many things…

But the tenor of the past week’s discussion has been to avoid and even condemn acknowledgment of a racial component, because doing so is treated as immoral.

I am interested in the Israeli/Jewish example because (1) it is clearly racial to *some* degree (religion cant account for atheists like Ben Gurion), but (2) it is not *entirely* so, as people like Person A demonstrate.

The question is why we have to continue to have this discussion in terms which assume the moral illegitimacy of comparable sense llegitimacy of comparable sense of race in understanding western nations, subject to high-barrier-to-entry conversion policy for small number of people with genuine affinity, rather than infinity indians….Israel doesn’t actually tolerate people like Person A saying “you know, the jewish law of return might be perceived as raycis by a graduate of bengaluru technical institute, you’d better change that…” But do people have an account for why this is? Maybe there is a good one, but nobody feels compelled to explain. Perhaps because even now you will get blacklisted for asking….Btw I am not even saying that racial primacy is good way for west to think of itself , at least not in simple sense, but it is increasingly unavoidable in presence of others who think same way about themselves. Which is actually good argument against engineering such a presence. But is also, in any case, why discussion on this topic more generally feels so dishonest.

Many of our supposedly assimilated immigrants actually still think of themselves primarily as members of the national or ethnic group they originate from, rather than as members of the nation they have immigrated to. Otherwise, restricting immigration from India wouldn’t be inherently alienating to Indians in America.

For instance, I assume Person A does not have a problem with the jewish law of return, which is in part lineage based (aka racial). That is because he has so thoroughly assimilated to jewish identity that he sees that law as benefiting and maintaining the integrity of *his* (new) group, rather than as unfairly excluding his cousin who’s just graduated from X technical institute. That’s what real assimilation means.

Person A: Just to add some more color on why Israel is different, it's not quite ethnonationalist in the traditional sense, and the reason it's hard to define is that Jewish identity doesn't really fit into our post-Enlightenment breakdowns of citizenship, ethnicity, and religion.

As Dara Horn, one of the best chroniclers of the modern Jewish experience put it, in a recent Atlantic piece:

Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature.

So it's not quite right to call the law of return a purely blood-and-soil mechanism. You can in fact convert and become Israeli...it just takes a while.

Person B: What a question-begging response from Person A. First he suggests it’s morally wrong to be aware of race in discussions of national identity (some suspect je ne sais quois). Then he suggests the entire concept of national identity is itself logically incoherent with his Nozick Ship of Theseus example. Then he pivots and says it is *both* morally acceptable *and* coherent for Israel because, tautologically, it just is. And finally, he says that Israel is actually some esoteric special thing…” a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature.”

But that last line, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the concept of nationhood that many people have for america and other countries of the west (no, you cant rely on the universalizing vs. nonuniversalizing religion bit when huge portions of both societies are atheist). He makes no attempt to explain why such a definition suddenly ceases to be morally palatable or logically coherent when asserted by a non-israeli westerner.

I am glad to see that you’ve conceded the point on the morality and/or coherence of ethnicity in defining national identity. But the historical claim that America has always been a racially agnostic melting pot fares no better. Certainly the founders would be surprised to hear it. As, for that matter, would the proponents of the 1965 immigration act, who promised at the time that it would not “upset the ethnic mix of our society.” The phrase “diversity is our strength,” meanwhile, was apparently coined by Dan Quayle in 1992.

The idea that American immigration policy is simply a consequence of some unique and purely propositional identity is also belied by the fact that Europe is currently undergoing a comparable demographic shift, justified in much the same terms. The fact is that these are wealthy societies which people from all over the world want to live in, and that even european ethnostates have not been able to effectively respond because doing so is stigmatized as “racist,” much as it is here.

People are increasingly aware that the demographic shift is changing the character of these societies, however. And that awareness overlaps with a realization that, even if “whiteness is just a social construct,” it is a social construct that nobody seems to have trouble using when, e.g., discriminating against “white” people in hiring. These phenomena obviously produce a racialized political response, and it seems unfair to dismiss that response as immoral or logically incoherent.

White Americans, and white people more generally, are indeed the most open and least clannish people in the world. That is a strength in many ways. But the societies that they have produced as a result are sustainable only if that attitude is reciprocated by newcomers. And as of right now, immigration to the west involves no meaningful screening for that attitude (or other, distinctive cultural traits), nor does the weight of the evidence suggest that it is what we are getting anywhere the experiment has been run

Almost everyone would be happy to welcome Indians or others who shared these traits, in assimilable numbers. Something like the process that Person A went through to convert would be great for that. But instead we’re being told that white Americans are lazy, that they deserve to be discriminated against, that they’ll lose the support of newcomers if they don’t racially pander to them, and that they’re evil and stupid if they react negatively to any of the above

It doesn’t contradict the creedal view in principle. There are obviously all sorts of small-scale organizations that are purely creedal, though many things change once you scale up past the level of personal familiarity. My points are therefore that (1) racial concerns are coherent and morally legitimate under the present conditions that she notes, (2) the United States (and Europe) have not been *purely* creedal as a matter of historical fact, and (3) the facts of ingroup preference and the heritability of behavior (whether due to biology or ordinary processes of cultural transmission), even when they are not combined with a prevailing ideology that reifies such things, makes the process extraordinarily difficult.

Even France, with its color-blind civic ethos, is struggling to digest mass immigration of identifiable groups that behave differently and attain different social outcomes. How to avoid racial balkanization under those conditions while also preserving the existing culture is not something anyone has figured out. And because doing so seems to be almost impossible in practice, it is a necessary consideration in any honest discussion of immigration policy in the modern world

Person C: I am creedal for the most part, but I am a follower of the Huntington school of thought here: the creed is based on the culture of a uniquely American breed of Anglo-Protestantism ("the dissidence of dissent, the protestantism of the Protestant religion").

Huntington recognized that without the creed, assimilation becomes far more difficult (how do you push for “Americanizing” immigrants without anything to include them into? He notes that the concept itself came in being in the late 18th c alongside the concept and term “immigrant”.)

But unlike us, our forefathers took Americanizing seriously, openly and deliberately aiming to create not a “melting pot” but a “tomato soup” (as in, immigration adds flavor and enriches, celery, parsley, and so forth, but nevertheless, it remains tomato soup). The latter is fundamentally an “Anglo-Protestant conformity” model, and according to Huntington, was the implicit framework of immigration prior to the 60s.

IMO at least part of the European assimilation failure can be laid at their lack of creed. It is more antifragile than pure blood and soil precisely because it is both implicitly culturally conformist but also explicitly welcoming to outsiders (who are given both a carrot and stick to incentivize assimilation). Huntington believes that American catholicism began to distinguish itself from European version in part because while they would never accept “protestantizing” their faith, they would accept “Americanizing” it.

The question now is whether the people who hold this supra-ID now have the power to enforce cultural conformity in the immigrant pop, as their ancestors did.

And it is not unreasonable to presume that as the ethnic group that holds this belief system most strongly decreases in number--with no leavening of un/non-American sentiment elsewhere--we are going to see America become less "American".

Having said that, it is also true that American creed / national identity has been weakening for some time now. I am in the camp of resist/reverse this vs. exploit/accept.

My main, basic immigration take is that the melting pot needs time to simmer. You generally don’t cook by continuously adding ingredients without regard for proportion. There should be times of adding and times of pausing (1924-1964). Otherwise you won’t really have a unified people

Person B: I’m glad we’re having this convo because it feels like this is where the debate is going and where consensus needs to be reached. For those who missed it, here’s JD Vance saying that America is not just an idea, it’s also a people—which seems to be a split with past republicans even going back to Reagan, but might have legs in a post DEI world https://www.instagram.com/senatorvance/reel/C9Sk5wcOcv5/?hl=en

I am perfectly willing to accept that individual people of other races can join a society, become productive members of it, and be properly deemed members. Much as I am willing to accept that you became Jewish and that you could immigrate to Israel on that basis—even if many others could do so simply on the basis of blood. After all, I have accepted “a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which religion is but one feature” as a definition of nationhood. At a minimum, however, I would ask that newcomers to a society not immediately demand that the society accommodate them. Just as, I imagine, you did not immediately demand Israel repeal the jewish law of return.

I worry, however, that the immigrant in question feels more kinship with his own ethnic group than with the existing members of the society his parents immigrated to. That is presumably why he has joined a party that is now explicitly committed to undermining the rights, the history, and the demographics of the people who for a long time predominantly constituted that society. And it is why, despite presumably being an atheist for all practical purposes, he has chosen to conspicuously identify with a religious symbol that implicitly affirms continued identification with his ethnic heritage. If that process continues, at scale, then I worry America will become unrecognizable. And because I like America, I would like to resist that outcome.

Person D: There is nothing more obnoxious than being told over and over again we don’t have a culture while proponents of this view (explicitly on the right) acknowledge the introduction of enormous numbers of new people from a “very different” country will change our culture

If you were to force a spaniard or a german to describe their culture in detail they would not be able to rattle off a list of a kind we are forced, consistently here, to provide. because that is not a normal question to ask a person. culture is the oxygen we breathe.

forcing us to defend it in this way is insulting, and of a kind of insult americans feel consistently from elitist second generation immigrants in particular — like vivek

Just because you don’t care about our culture doesn’t mean we don’t have one

Person B: For a long time, arrest stats like the one X just posted were used to prove how evil and racist white societies are for locking the wrong people up (the same societies that everyone they’re supposedly racist against still wants to immigrate to). Unfortunately, given the nature of tribal identity, such narratives become politically salient. People from those tribes feel personally aggrieved by any suggestion that they’re not living up to the standards of the society they’ve immigrated to, while also chafing at expectations that they act in accordance with its norms. It was exactly that political salience that motivated Rotherham coverup for instance. The more diverse your society is, the more pressure there is for every institution to lie in a way that assuages the narcissism of this or that ethnic group

To only partly answer Person A’s question about how grooming occurs, the first step is to import a bunch of people into your society because people convinced you that you don’t actually have a society in the first place, and therefore that nothing would change. Then those people youve imported exercise political power as an ethnic bloc. Then , surprising things start happening in your society. Things that didn’t happen before. But because you forgot to ask everyone whether they’d become groomer gang rapists on your citizenship test, now there’s nothing you can do about it because they’re as british as you are. Whoops

Incidents like Rotherham demonstrate the emptiness of logic-chopping about culture. English people are now suffering in a way that they didn’t before. And that’s true whether or not we can write an exhaustive definition of what England was up until a couple decades ago.

12. Comparison of USA to USSR

We actually have the natural experiment of where a libertarian/nationalist coalition took down a far-left empire, made its way through the subsequent collapse and tribal shattering, regained their ethnic majority, rebuilt their churches, united under a strong leader, strengthened their military, and confronted the deep state. It’s called Russia.

At the end of the USSR, ethnic Russians were 50.8% of the Soviet Union. After the collapse and reboot, they are now 72% of Russia.

There are many things one can say about the process of giving up empire to become a country. It was mixed in outcome, but a better outcome than keeping the USSR around.

Nevertheless — even with 100M white people, even as a based far-right traditionalist Christian country etc, Russia would have lost in Ukraine without China, India, the UAE, and the Rest of World.

In other words — even the largest far-right ultranationalist white country in the whole world understood concepts like “allies” and “diplomacy.” And it learned it couldn’t fight everyone at once.

Put bluntly: Russia is only winning in Ukraine because it’s on good terms with the nonwhite world.

The reason Democrats just lost — by one point — is because they took on Russia, China, Tech, and Trump at once. They also alienated Israel, Saudi, and many smaller countries.

Republicans may be repeating this avoidable mistake by battling Democrats, Russia, China, Europe, Canada, Panama (?), and even Tech/Indians (!?!) — all at the same time.

Point being: if socialists don’t understand self-interest, nationalists often don’t understand other-interest. Does your coalition include enough capable people to attain your objectives? Explicitly hostile racialism isn’t even Russia’s strategy — and if it was, they would be in worse shape.

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1) First, the entire US stock market is leveraged on the Magnificent 7 tech cos, which in turn are leveraged on growth in India. They want “infinity Indians” to buy and use their products. So, heaping racial abuse out of the blue on random Indians will collapse their financial empire and will lose them money on net.

2) Second, the US military has troops deployed in 159 countries, often against their will. This is not the posture of a people that just wants to quietly stay behind its borders.

The transition from empire to country is possible, maybe even inevitable (like the USSR to Russia) but it will have real costs and is not a free lunch.

13. Trump on Canada

Person A: I do really worry if Trump keeps doing these random dominance plays toward our allies it's going to backfire in some hard to predict way

Person B: Disagree. He has everybody on their back foot. His unpredictability and lack of orthodoxy in negotiating are his greatest advantages.

All part of the plan. Goad Canada into a pre-emptive strike across the Niagara Falls, and then we are greeted as liberators

Person A: This is aesthetically what I hate so much about Trump/Musk era - it just sends a big message to people that being an anti-social jackass who flaunts their ability to exert power on people weaker than them is the path to success.

My personal experience has been that the richest/most successful people that I've met have been trustworthy and kind and gracious.

In general income and education are quite correlated in my psychometric data with pro-social traits and quite anti-correlated with anti-social traits, and in social psychology experiments you see that high IQ people are much more cooperative than low IQ people.

This just reminds me a lot of the thuggish bullshit you see from elites in shithole developing countries.

Person B: I totally hear you on this; as a temperamentally mild-mannered Canadian I really have a hard time being a dick like this

But on the other hand, Canada and UK inter alia have had their cooperativeness weaponized against them by elites who may be personally mild but are quite comfy exerting harsh and unilateral control over their populations, whom they clearly loathe and despise

Person C: Here’s the thing: foreign policy is a playground ruled by bullies. Either the bully happens to be a person who makes the world better or it’s China and Russia and Iran and North Korea and their ilk walking all over Canada, Panama, and the UK. If those countries are going to pansy out against the world’s worst players, then they should bend the knee to us instead.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Don’t want to be treated like America’s bitch? Then don’t bend over for Chinese control of the Panama Canal or make way for Russian adventurism in the Arctic while we pay your defense bills or allow your country to be infiltrated by terrorist-friendly hordes.

All the same people whining about independence from America seem just fine with Chinese interference in their own affairs, for example.

I think it's just not straight forwardly obvious that dialing up aggression toward your neighbors/allies is a good idea.

Reasonable people can disagree on how aggressive to be about Iran or w/e but once you start threatening your neighbors things can spiral out of control and leave everybody poorer.

Person A: I just kind of get back to the idea that we want Europe's cooperation on tariffs with China and on chip controls, and so it just doesn't make a ton of sense to spark a trade war by threatening to tariff Denmark to force them to come to the negotiating table.

My biggest critique of Biden was that he refused to prioritize things and so we ended up doing an incoherent mess that didn't make anyone happy, and this just screams to me the same sort of pathology.

But I also get the sense that I am just more worried about China/AI than you all

Person C: I do think Trump, in his own unreflective animal instinct way, is grazing something deep by aspiring to more territory. Expansion is inspiring. It's growth. We've stigmatized the impulse after the horrors of world wars, but it's in us. We wouldn't think so much about ancient Rome if it was just confined to Italy

Person D: You know how Democrats went on this global campaign to expand the boundaries of “democracy” (meaning blue control) from 2013-2024, and overstretched by fighting everyone from Tech to Trump to Russia to China?

I think we are basically seeing the inverse red version, an even more explicitly imperialist project under the banner of “Red America”, which is in stark contradiction to closing the borders.

Eg if you do turn Canada into the 51st state, guess what — that means millions more Indians and Chinese people join the US.

Blue America at least preserved the optics of diplomacy, kind of, by branding all their expansionism in terms of “democracy.”

The Red American MAGA ultranationalist simply isn’t calibrated on their relative financial, institutional, and military strength. And they are starting from an even weaker base than the Blue American did.

The most charitable interpretation of their mental model is “if we throw everyone out and get back to an ethnically uniform core, we can return to 1800s expansionism and Manifest Destiny!”

But 2025 is the end state of that, not the beginning state. The US empire already extends over the entire world, it already has military bases everywhere.

The US multinationals are everywhere, the US passport gets you everywhere, the US dollar is accepted everywhere.

Formal annexation like renaming things “Gulf of America” or planting the flag in Greenland just arouses local resistance. The whole point of democratic capitalism was to build a global empire with *minimum* resistance.

It’s actually the right wing version of left wing retardation in 2020.

The journos thought being explicitly leftist would make them stronger, but it made them weaker. They decloaked and revealed themselves as far left, abandoning the pretense of covering both sides. But the whole *point* was the illusion of neutrality.

Similarly too many MAGAs think being explicitly nationalist will make them stronger on the world stage, but it will make them weaker. US military bases suddenly get reframed as “AMERICAN” rather than defenders of the rules-based order. But the whole *point* was the illusion of neutrality.

Saying FU to Pierre Poilevre (the Canadian conservative who would otherwise be a natural ally) means that literally no leader is safe.

Starting fights with everyone at once is the failure mode of the ultranationalist who just thinks their group is the strongest and “doesn’t need any partners.”

Democrats lost because they fought Russia, China, Tech, and Trump at once. Also internally divided over Israel.