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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32198 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

  • -38

There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself. They are citizens; they have more in common with you if you are a wealthy white person; for evolutionary reasons, it is natural to have an interest in uplifting those that are similar to yourself; for reasons of national security, you do not want so many citizens who believe that the American project is not worth investing in; they may have a higher IQ than Hondurans; they may have different levels of compassion or a different taste in aesthetics which may be informed by genetics.

Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party

College-educated White males lean toward Trump. It’s just women who shifted a lot toward Harris.

Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor

This may have something to do with the millions of migrants brought in to undercut wages, the exact thing we’re talking about. No, you can’t ever compete with them, because —

  • Remittance payments mean that they can afford a higher quality life while temporarily living a lower quality life in America

  • They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will

  • They often live in illegal accommodations, requiring less funds, and these require a network that natives aren’t a part of

  • They live within a culture where the women expect to marry laborers

I’m also not sure if you’re agreeing with him that it would increase wages, and just disagree that this is important, or if you think it won’t increase wages.

They often live in illegal accommodations, requiring less funds, and these require a network that natives aren’t a part of

You, as a white American, can find these illegal accommodations really easily. Craigslist has some of them listed, but you can also just go to the back of a restaurant kitchen and ask.

Illegals are preferred to the native underclass partly because they cost less, but much more because they just cause less trouble, and the standard of living difference isn't the main driver of the cost difference- the native underclass uses their extra income over illegals for drugs, not better food or accommodations(and illegals probably make up for their lower hourly rate by working longer hours anyways).

Do you think that the Honduran or Mexican illegal tenant housing advertises their roommate openings in Craigslist, in English? No. This is absurd to believe. Especially not around farming operations.

The point was you can get significantly below market(and priced to match) housing really easily. You don't need to be plugged into the wetback network, and roustabouts are not known for their robust network building anyways. Go ask around at waffle house. Look on craigslist. The white trash underclass lives in very similar conditions, after all. Non underclass whites don't do this, but that's because they don't want to.

There's this motte conceit that you can't live like the other half. Yeah, you can, and pretty easily too.

So your answer to the question of how White Americans can compete with semi-slave illegal workers is

  • Go ask around a Waffle House

  • Look around on Craigslist for illegal housing

  • (Ignore remittance payments)

  • (Ignore cultural and early life influences involving manual labor, eg that some of these Hondurans have been doing it since 12)

  • (Ignore crucial cultural factors related to social wellbeing like finding a wife)

So your answer to the question of how White Americans can compete with semi-slave illegal workers is

Why in God's name would you want to?

As I keep saying, the conditions required to 'keep farms running so we can stock the shelves with a variety of produce' are not great, and first worlders will not do it without compulsion(or, I suppose, being deluded into halfway doing this for brief periods of time on partyfarms). Likewise lots of heavy construction labor etc.

Americans should mow their own lawns, watch their own children, etc. But the idea that we can replace illegal migrants and roustabouts with middle class whites is farcical. Manual laborers are by definition not middle class, at least when they're doing temporary grunt work.

Americans should mow their own lawns

Eh, f--- that, I've got hay fever.

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