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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32508 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

Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"? During the Biden administration, could I quote some random official and say that their position is the position of online radical leftists?

People accuse you of unfairly representing other groups opinions... because you don't understand their positions and represent them unfairly. And when people point out that you have done this you throw a big hissyfit. Then, you go right back to doing the same thing.

Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"?

She's a member of the United States Cabinet!

Lotta people have gotten used to being out of power. Now that Trump is President they're forced to either defend the administration they supported and voted for or criticize their own side, and they don't want to do either.

Relevant mod comment. If you want to say "these are the views of the Trump administration", then say "these are the views of the Trump administration".

Also, what do you mean by the adjective "racialist"? WN defines it as:

  1. A believer or advocate of racialism, the ideology of racial nationalism.

  2. (UK, dated) A racist.

Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people? Do they want a white ethnostate in the US? Are they HBD-believers who want to restrict immigration based on what they see as genetic group differences? Did you just want to call them straightforward racist, but knew that this would generate a backslash, so you picked a rare word which strongly implies racism without saying the r-word outright?

On the object level, I think I share most of your opinions about Trump's immigration policy, which I detest. But I do not think you are doing a good job of accurately representing the beliefs of the Right, which is a prerequisite to honestly criticizing them.

I don't think that the Right has a great answer to what will happen to the fruit prices once the migrants who are willing to pick them in shitty conditions for low wages because they can feed their family in their country of origin with these wages are all deported. I think that a significant fraction of the MAGA base imagine that Trump, being a stable genius deal-maker, will simply pull the US into a golden age of prosperity and nobody will worry about fruit prices. The more realistic Trump voters might concede that prices of fruits might skyrocket if the pickers are US citizens earning a competitive wage, but simply see this as a price worth paying to kick the illegal immigrants out. Your framing which includes White druggies kicking their habit getting of their asses and start to pick fruits seems to me to be a minority viewpoint on the Right, to put it charitably.

The primary dividing line between members of this group is the degree to which Jews should be blamed for societies various ills.

Sounds unpleasant. Personally, I came to believe that some HBD claims are true by reading Scott Alexander on the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis. "HBD explains why there are many Jewish Nobel laureates without having to resort to conspiracies" is actually a major selling point for me. (Of course, I would also prefer if the left would give up to insist that any inequality of outcome was due to unfairness and in return people would shut up about HBD until we can CRISPR everyone.)

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