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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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There's something not right here, I hear familiar bells of dissonance. I notice I am confused.

Opposition to immigration is the principal impetus for the right. Not just the American right, opposition is the common view among the native peoples of all western nations. The belief of what to do isn't uniform, but "Too many, greatly reduce" is dominant. Musk shows an awareness of this, he's also shown an awareness of the discussions of the deep online right apropos "You have said the actual truth." He should know. Consider also his loudly backing AfD, a party that can be defined by its opposition to immigration.

If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right? If his shift as has been supposed by many including myself was about viewing the left as a threat, how does he not view the right as a graver threat for their anti-immigrant sentiment extending to close the tap on his source of engineers? How does he ever buy Twitter? Or, after buying it, carrying out the lifting of bans, diving into the discourse of the right, and seeing there "No we mean literally all of them are going back," realize what he's courted, renege and cut a deal? The media would need maybe two weeks of news cycles and his image would be rehabilitated for the normie masses while in the background he received the necessary assurances of allowing him to continue his corporate administration as he sees fit. But there again, if how he wants to manage his corporations by his ostensibly aggressive prioritization of foreign labor, why does he ever consider the left a bigger problem than the right?

I had more and I cut it down and now I've again written more than I think I need because I'm pretty sure all of you reading this knows all of these points. What I run into is that for the last few years for Musk, though really it seems it's been basically all of his career, people have bet against him, for the absurdity of his ideas, for supposed incompetence, for ignorance, more lately for him being "evil", and they've lost every time. This must be stressed enough, they have lost every single time. Or at least every single time it's mattered. So I look at him and wonder, how does he believe the FEU view? He's not evil, stupid or incompetent. Did he just not know what's actually happening?

People are complex but plenty of times it is the mundane or contradictory explanation rather than the fun/schizo/5D chess theory. I'm probably grasping at nonexistent straws, as I so often do. Sure, he believes in this one area of hyper-pure tabula rasa egalitarianism, despite living a life of evidence against it. Sure, he holds the root ideal that underlies the California approach to homelessness and crime, not to mention trans advocacy, he's just not extrapolated one more step to shake it off.

Still I think a possible explanation for his response is this: he believed talent came from India because he had convincing, not necessarily good and certainly not great, but convincing enough reasons to believe it did. In a very short period of time he has since discovered those hiring for his corporations have prioritized Indians because they are Indians, have praised and promoted along Indians because they are Indians, and may be benefiting in appearances from work done primarily by not Indians, all while repeatedly rejecting superior talent because they are not Indian. And so he has struggled, in recognizing his mistake and perhaps in rationalizing against a roiling blood rage at not simply being taken for a fool, but taken in such a way that it is a direct attack on his life's work of getting off the rock and making humans an interplanetary species.

I don't know. Again I'm grasping at straws in seeking fantastic explanation over the simple and probable one. But, and I'm paraphrasing what Sam Hyde said in his video, if this is a real belief for him, not something from a lack of knowledge and understanding but something he won't get past, he's not the man we all hope he is, and he will lose.

Let's look at that Pew poll.

Overwhelmingly support deportation, overwhelmingly oppose "maintaining a diverse immigrant population," majority oppose "illegals gaining citizenship by marrying Americans," basically split on refugees, slight support for "filling labor shortages," supporting international students staying, and mostly supporting more "high skilled immigrants."

They support these things in the plain text, though that's not what's meant by the poll-makers. Let's update the poll to address the literacy issue on the topic by asking honest questions.

"Should we let literally anyone into this country who claims to be a refugee?"

I wonder how that one would do, because that's pretty much our current policy for people trying to get into this country except, just an example, white South Africans.

"Should we allow immigrants to fill labor shortages, even where 'labor shortages' include 'Indian hiring managers who will only hire other Indians' and 'employers who don't want to pay American citizens a living wage'?"

Something tells me that won't do so hot.

"Should universities be allowed to admit international students with worse applications than the American citizens whose spots they took? Should those students be allowed to then stay in the country?"

Might be a bit suspect.

"Admitting more high-skilled immigrants, and by 'high-skilled' we mean literally any foreigner with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree."

Probably a "let's not."

You take a poll question as indicative because for whatever reason you want or need it to be, but these are each a pinnacle motte and bailey. What a conservative thinks by "legal immigration" is not in any measure what the left has actually pursued, in America and in Europe. They are open to the idea of an easing of the rigorous legal process that culminates in naturalization because they still have the idealistic and decades-exploited view, but the essence of their opposition that can be seen through their view of mass illegal presence in this country would be applied exactly if informed on what people like the writers of this poll mean when they say "legal immigration." Because what the left means when they say that, after the examples above, includes but is by no means limited to something so bereft of effort as a rubber stamp on 20,000 Haitians dropped in Ohio or a group of young male "refugees" crossing the Mediterranean on an NGO-provided boat. (Both examples of the majority-opposed.)

They're "legal." Uh great, they think, so "legal" doesn't mean anything.