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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Drive through certain areas there and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single sign in English. You’ll see Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean

In 1910, there were 2.7M German speakers and 544 German-language newspapers in the US. As we all know, the result was a Germanization and Nazification of the US as seen in the documentary series "the Man in the High Castle". Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society. As are the immigrants which came from Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, and so on one hundred years ago.

In 2011, the US had 1.1M people who spoke Korean at home. I don't know how many newspapers they have in the US, Wikipedia has a grand total of two Korean-language newspapers with articles. In time, most of their descendants will certainly be fluent in English. (Given the cliches about East Asians, I would not be surprised if it turned out that most of them are fluent and have actually read more Shakespeare than the median White American.)

The US has been integrating (not assimilating in the borg sense) people of various origins for about as long as it has been a thing. What you observed is part of that process.

Also, my gut feeling is that either for cultural or HBD reasons, East Asians are severely underrepresented in gang criminality, religious motivated violence and the like.

Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society.

I think it's noteworthy that the proximal cause for this was a war waged by America against the mother country, with no small amount of pressure applied to assimilate. We do not really do that at all any more. More likely the opposite, I think: by the undisputed teachings of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-American intellectual output, assimilating to hegemonic values generally and white capitalistic American values specifically is morally wrong.

FWIW multiple studies have found that on most relevant metrics (English/other language usage, crime, social and vocational integration) Hispanics today are tracking where Italians were.