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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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It was very odd to me to visit a Costco in Sacramento recently. I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees. Shoppers seemed fairly evenly split between Asians (mostly Chinese and Vietnamese) and Arabs, with most women in hijabs and even a few in niqabs. The staff was mostly Vietnamese or something like them. I couldn't understand the English of the person at the checkout.

In fact something I've seen a lot more of in general is immigrants with different strains of unintelligible English trying to communicate with each other only semi-successfully. The other day it was some Sikh guys arguing with a Cambodian proprietor. I could mostly understand each but they couldn't understand each other. Considered offering to translate but decided it would be rude.

Where / which Costco in Sacramento?

I grew up in Sacramento, the unincorporated areas of Sacramento County.

Sacramento has frequently seen demographic change, and there were often 'ethnic' neighboords or areas. I've of photo of my grandmother's nearly all white graduating class (1939) from C.K. McClatchy High School. Even the suburbs (built in the early 1950's) my grandparents lived in have seen substantial changes. It had been tree lined and owner occupied, now mostly rentals and all the Modesto Ash were cut down.

I had been away for ~15 years before going back for the first time in 2015. I made another trip in 2016.

The people and places I miss aren't there anymore.

May have technically been Elk Grove.

Elk Grove has certainly seen demographic change.

Yes! But I wanted to double-check for you and it was this one. 7981 E Stockton Blvd, Sacramento, CA 95823

That wasn't a great area when I was young. The Florin mall was always a bit iffy. That Costco is 2.6 miles from where this happened in 1991 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Sacramento_hostage_crisis

He has no way of knowing that.

I will eat the bullet and admit that people of different ethnicities tend to make me uncomfortable in large supply. I like that knowing that the people around me are like me in substantial ways. I have nothing against Chinese or Vietnamese who speak English as a second language, but I don't get the impression that I could speak to them as freely as a white person, if at all, and I think that my social missteps would be more harshly looked upon. Since humans communicate to each other, even as strangers, this has certain effects. For instance, at Sam's Club yesterday, I was asked if I was in line by another shopper, and I explained that I thought I was, but I evidently wasn't, and that furthermore, the line was too long for me to consider it worthwhile. I would not feel so free to give such an explanation to someone significantly different from me ethnically. Also, our definitions of "normal" are quite different. I don't think a practicing Muslim Arab would consider me normal, and I certainly wouldn't consider them normal, either. The details I have heard about immigration in Canada makes me think that even good liberals are generally bothered by vast quantities of foreigners in their country.

Would you consider a Chinese or Vietnamese person less American if they were born here and spoke English natively?

By that standard, Jared Taylor is Japanese.

In his book Shadows of the Rising Sun, he detailed how he lived and worked in Japan as an adult, so he presumably went back at some point.

I do think the standard is different for Japan, because Japan was founded in a different way than America was. Japan is pretty much by definition formed by Japanese people from its inception before the international concept of nations existed. America did not exist in that way.

I will note that this makes the cosmopolitan-ization of the western European states more sad. They used to be basically exclusively white, now they aren't, every single one of them has been globalized and diversified and I don't really know what it means to be French anymore. At least the shithole central European states haven't been touched in this way.

But the way historical America existed was keeping naturalization exclusive to whites only. Why does Japan get to keep its historical standard but not America?

Sorry for the late reply, but I think the founding principles of America vs Japan are way different. America has a ton of stuff about equality and freedom in its founding document. The natural outcome there is the liberation of the slaves. Japan had no such thing. Also, Japan, like the rest of the Old World, was a way older thing, so the historical standard is stronger.

You yourself don't consider them American, you call them what they are: Chinese, and Vietnamese.

Chinese and Vietnamese, no, I like Asian immigrants in general. I also consider Hispanics American good enough. There were just way too many of them coming in and straining the social services a lot and undercutting wages.

Arab or black or Indian, yes, probably, depending on how they turn out. Arabs are insular enough that there's a good chance their kids do not integrate, same for Indians, and black people have their own terrible culture that they're usually unfortunate enough to fall into even if they're born outside it.

Who said it made me uncomfortable?

What about my comment made you uncomfortable enough to feel the need to say something?

I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees.

When I go to Costco, there is not necessarily a shortage of white people. However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40. I assume it's related to day/time when I go, but it's an ominous feeling.

"Ominous" how?

Probably ominius in the same way Arabs in Palestine saw it as ominious, when their neighborhood changed its "vibe" over the decades in first half of 20th century. Or maybe how American natives carefully watched their new neigbors with strange culture. And ultimately they were correct.

Ominous that the land and country my forefathers struggled and fought for is being silently overrun by foreigner who neither share nor respect my values, culture, and race.

Pretty obvious if you consider it for a moment.

"Ominous" how? They're just normal people who are trying to get by let everyone else.

Some of us like having a country / nation. When you import a whole new population, with a completely different culture, with absolutely no attachment, no loyalty, and quite possibly not even basic respect, for the culture that's hosting them, and you see that all the young people are from that foreign culture, and all the old people are from yours, it's pretty clear who's in, and who's out. For example, I read somewhere that 80% of people under 20 in Belgium are not Belgian, effectively that means that that nation is over. For a lot of people that's going to be ominous, even if they people replacing them bear them no ill will.

The enemies are the billionaire class selling out the country, not everyday immigrants raising a family.

What about the everyday immigrants who do nothing all day, and get housed in private hotels, paid for by the government? Or the ones setting up grooming gangs that the police and social workers run cover for?

These are people who stock your grocery store shelves, clean your bathrooms at the malls, pick your fruit.

Yeah, we should be doing that ourselves.

What about the everyday immigrants who do nothing all day, and get housed in private hotels, paid for by the government? Or the ones setting up grooming gangs that the police and social workers run cover for?

That's not something that happens in America.

Yeah, we should be doing that ourselves.

Poverty fetish again.

That's not something that happens in America.

I'm admittedly more familiar with Europe, but I'm pretty sure there were some weird stories in the US as well. Wasn't there some gang that took over some apartment complex, or something?

Poverty fetish again.

So in the other comment you criticized conservatism for being the ideology of the uneducated. Guilty as charged, I am an uneducated moron. But do you maybe see why ideologies of the educated "elite human capital" aren't compelling to anyone, when you can't seem to be able to string a sentence together in order to describe your opinion and back it?

I think a society should be able to carry out all the tasks necessary for it's own maintenance without relying on foreign workers. It's not a "poverty fetish" any more than wiping your own ass is. If you can't do it, you're not in good health by definition. If you can but won't, and prefer to hire a servant to do it for you, you're a sociopath.

Your entire idea makes even less sense to me, since from what I recall, in the long term you want to automate away these jobs anyway. So, you import millions of people to form an underclass of low-wage workers with no attachment to your nation or it's culture... how do you expect things to play out, once you take away their jobs?

I think a society should be able to carry out all the tasks necessary for it's own maintenance without relying on foreign workers. It's not a "poverty fetish" any more than wiping your own ass is. If you can't do it, you're not in good health by definition. If you can but won't, and prefer to hire a servant to do it for you, you're a sociopath.

Why is having non-Americans pick crops more like having someone else wipe my own ass than it is like... Having someone else pick my crops? Now, perhaps you are one of those people (and we have some on this board) who think that every man should be a completely autarkic island. If you are such a person, you can stop reading now.

But if you aren't, and you do agree that I don't need to be a psychopath to not want to pick my own crops, and that maybe my crops don't even need to be picked by my blood relatives, why should I insist that the crops must be picked by an American if Americans largely don't want to do this? There are farm jobs, people can go and get them if they like. They suck, though, and Americans, myself included, generally have better paths open to them than farm labor.

For example, I read somewhere that 80% of people under 20 in Belgium are not Belgian, effectively that means that that nation is over.

I don't think that's correct. Some limited version of that statement may be true for brussels:

In 2020, among those aged under 18 (of Brussels residents), 83,9% had at least one parent of non-Belgian origin and of those 60,1% of non-European origin (including 37% of African origin). wiki

Yeah, it could have been Brussels.

Just something I remember I saw while doomscrolling, and my brain might have rounded off the capital for the country. Though your link is for 2020, and I think the info I saw was more recent. Either way, I can't find at the moment, so I'm happy to concede.

You sound European?

Correct.

but my Asian and Hispanics friends in southern California are just as American as me

Are you sure they are as loyal to you, as you are to them? Does this statement include the fellows flying Mexican flags during the recent riots?

Right-wingers who went them gone from the country or to feel less American have no place in politics.

Sure they do. Their views are just as legitimate as yours, and have the advantage of not being suicidal.

Yes? The vast majority of second and third generation Mexican-Americans are never going to fly a Mexican flag in their life. This is a strawman.

Strawman would be a caricature of you position. You're being a bit guarded with it, and so I have to ask some clarifying question about the extent of your beliefs, and such questions cannot be a strawman be definition. So answer please: are the blokes flying the Mexican flag just as American as you?

How the descendants of immigrants are going to integrate is an open question. If they're a tiny minority in an otherwise unified culture, they'll probably integrate. If they're a plurality, and / or the host culture is fragmented, reasons to integrate start disappearing, and there might not even be anything to integrate into, even if they wanted to do it.

Wanting to deport non-white citizens is a suicidal political position because it foments civil war.

I'm not sure citizens can be deported, which is the whole point of doing it now, rather than waiting until the second or third generation. In any case unlimited immigration foments civil war too. Deportations at least have the benefit of not demographically replacing your own nation on top of that.

Importing large amounts of people who have radically different beliefs and allegiances also foments civil war.

The sons of those who beat a thoroughfare for freedom across the wilderness are absolutely those who have a place in politics. It is the bitter and resentful foreigners, the unnaturalized and unassimilable ethnics, and anyone who considers himself an American and something else besides who have no place here, in politics or otherwise.

After all, you yourself don't even call your friends American. You call them Asian and Hispanic. Hyphenated, at best, and therefore not American, and I won't let you give away my inheritance that my forefathers struggled for and bequeathed to me. Not to Asians, not to Hispanics, not to foreigners, not to traitors and backstabbers, either.

The sons of those who beat a thoroughfare for freedom across the wilderness are absolutely those who have a place in politics.

The right accurately resists the progressive tendency to transmit blame through the generations, but transmitting credit is no less ridiculous.

It is the bitter and resentful foreigners, the unnaturalized and unassimilable ethnics, and anyone who considers himself an American and something else besides who have no place here, in politics or otherwise.

Accusing Americans of Asian descent of being bitter and resentful foreigners is a little strange considering that they are way better off in just about every dimension compared to white Americans.

It's not credit I care about, it's ownership. These people are not American, will never become American, and ought not be citizens nor voters.

As for Asians, if not even material success can prevent them from opportunistic anti-american, anti-white attitudes, then what hope do we have for the less successful races?

I'll give the east and southeast Asians credit where due: I vastly prefer them to Africans, Indians, and Mestizos of various countries. One reason is they have given their children English names like Emily or Grant or Michelle or Christopher. Another is their relative lack of criminality.

I still don't want them outnumbering Americans in America.

Be polite, please.

Edit: now I see the other drama going on. To be clear, your opinion is perfectly defensible. Presenting it in a mocking, inflammatory way is the only problem.

The pioneers of yesteryear most likely would have turned out just like Harold, had they lived in a Schlaraffenland where you get paid for existing and sugar comes in through every pore.

That said, I absolutely understand the nostalgic mewling. Wanting to preserve and contribute to the legacy of one's forbears, in their and one's own country, seems perfectly natural and like a desire that society ought to promote, if not for aesthetics then in its own good interest. And the failure of western societies to square this outlook with immigration is, IMO, a pretty severe one. Widespread national self-hatred leading to and giving space to the exaggerated self-confidence of immigrant ethnicities is a very fine recipe for ethnic tension even in a sometimes-purportedly post-ethnic world. It's hard not to see immigrants as invaders and parasites when your personal ancestors put a lot of work into making a place for themselves, and you yourself put a lot of work into maintaining it, but in comes a foreigner whose allies overty and epxlicitly hate you, and who retains his distinct and foreign culture, who send money back home, and who inhabits not the remnants of the old localized and intergenerational country that you yourself might see yourself in, but its modern, atomized, globalized replacement.

It's not like this is uniquely American.

My German ancestors immigrated to the village I still live in five generations ago, having come from and brought in wives from places as far away as...another village a few hours' walk way. To them, it was perfectly natural that you stay in one place, or very close to it. You maintain your social connections without even thinking about it. You constantly exert yourself to improve the commons. You behave well and work hard and accept that if you deviate from that, you will be shamed into the ground. And so they behaved and worked, for generations, and went out of their way to keep the commons ing ood shape, and here I am in a world of lies and distractions and addictions aplenty, sticking to the straight and narrow, do-the-hard-work-and-obey-the-rules, neither living beyond my means nor resting on welfare, paying taxes on taxes, trying my best to help rather than harm the rotting edifice of "the commons", in no small part because that's what generations before me did and I'll be damned if I'm the one to break with that.

And in come M'beke and Muhammed, rightfully convinced that us Germans are just sheep that need to be fleeced because what else are we, with our own young women telling them that they have a right to be here and everyone has a right to a high standard of living and nobody has a duty to work and white people are evil and then old Germans will remind them that no, actually, it's Germans who are uniquely evil, and M'beke and Muhammed just laugh fly their own flags and loudly blast gangsta rap and muslim music and swagger through the streets while drab little Germans dodge them on their way to work or to, sheepishly rather than triumphantly, to pick up gibs alongside these immigrants. They're parasites and proud of it. They might learn to speak German, but will do so in an ostentatiously ridiculous accent that marks them as separate.

Meanwhile, the other M'beke and Muhammed actually get jobs and become economically productive members of society...but still remain M'beke and Muhammed rather than become Martin and Matthias, and raise their children as lilttle M'beke and Mohammed, because they see the insanity of German ethnic self-hatred, the decrepitude of our culture, and sensibly stick to what they know. They barely speak enough German to make themselves understood. They're here for as long as the money is good, but even then they associate with their co-ethnics and can we rely on them to stick with us whent he going gets tough?

And then of course there's Nguyen and Pajeet, who come into the country, work their asses off, shame us with their immense productivity and modest standard of living, speak German with barely an accent, bring in their whole family form abroad who all do the same. These are the guys we want, right? Not so sure about that, really. If they can move around half the world and seamlessly make a good life for themselves here...then they can probably repeat that trick once this country goes to shit.

Immigration is touchy. The ideal immigrant comes here not because his home country is a shithole, or because life here is easy and you get paid for showing up, or because his co-ethnics invited him to join their enclave, but because he wants to be German. But who would? Germany hates Germans. Germans hate Germans. Germans teach everyone to hate them. And as with all these tendencies towards national suicide, I suppose it's rather similar in America.

The ideal immigrant comes here not because his home country is a shithole, or because life here is easy and you get paid for showing up, or because his co-ethnics invited him to join their enclave, but because he wants to be German.

But of course, they all already want to be German. They obviously desire your material wealth and geopolitical power, and while they don't want to adopt your pro-social habits per se, they certainly enjoy the more immaterial fruits of your labor: your clean streets, your trusting and friendly people, your effective governance. They openly desire your women's gracile features and quietly envy your men's tall stature.

However, if HBD is to be believed, they can never be Germans, nor can their descendants be Germans; at least, not any recognizable descendants. For the foreseeable future, the only way that they may truly secure the prosperity they desire at scale is to intermarry with your people en masse and encourage their half-breed offspring to do the same. In doing this, they must internally accept the intrinsic inferiority of their type and witness the subsumption of their own clan and lineage into a wholly alien and unrecognizable gestalt.

... to be clear, I derive no pleasure from these words; I am one of the aforementioned half-breeds myself. I've been wanting to do a big top-level post detailing my outlook on these matters for a while, and writing this comment has given me the drive to actually write out the whole thing, so be on the lookout for that, i guess.

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Hispanics use SNAP at a far higher rate than whites and are also more obese and less educated than whites. I don't get what the point of your anecdote is.

We have terrible problems with muslims: poverty, criminality, hostility, and increasingly, political demands from a repressive fundamentalist religion. Learn from our mistakes: not every immigrant is the same. Let in hispanics if you want, but avoid the green ones at all cost.

Hey, Costco shopper! I am very dissatisfied with Sam's Club. They didn't have pork butt yesterday, and their pork loin was 40 cents more expensive than the wholesale store and 40 cents more expensive than their own website said it was. Are you satisfied with Costco meat prices? If only I had one near me. Please tell me more about Costco. What do you like about it? When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?

Please tell me more about Costco. What do you like about it? When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?

My (european) wife's reaction upon entering Costco for the first time could have been described as "awestruck". Like within seconds of entering and seeing the inside, she knew she loved it and that it was one of the best places on earth. And that's just inferior Canadian Costco. I can't imagine what American Costco would do to her.

From in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die:

Costco is ENORMOUS. The parking lot must fit hundreds of cars, and on a Saturday afternoon it's mostly full. The shopping carts look practically big enough to drive down the street themselves. They go in through the huge automatic glass doors into a high-ceilinged, concrete-floored, vast echoing room with shelves and shelves and shelves of food. And a lot of things that aren't food, too, clothes and toys and bicycles and electronics and even furniture.

...

It's wonderful. She is not totally flabbergasted, she's been inside a small-for-this-world ethnic grocery store in California, but this is a glorious height of human achievement that belongs among the wonders of the world, and she loves it, and she bounces on her heels and squeals and praises God who made civilization and all who made this bit of it with His hand guiding.

"Everyone should live to see Costco, and Heaven and Hell should have it," she concludes this praise.

Though note that Costco was the first first-world supermarket foster-kid Iomedae saw - she isn't comparing it to the rest of modern retail. The Soviet Union was a lot richer than a sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting, and a random suburban Randalls was sufficiently mind-expanding to flip an important Soviet politician in a way which would eventually lead to the fall of the Soviet Union.

It isn't Costco that is special - it is the abundance of food that a first-world supermarket represents. Given the consistent failure of grocery retailers (Costco included) to compete outside their home countries, I don't think there is a final boss of supermarkets, and if there is it would be Walmart.

Take Europeans to Buccees. Everything is bigger in Texas, indeed...

When I expressed interest in having a custom house built, my mother nonjokingly suggested that it might be nice to have a house whose interior looked like a Costco warehouse's, with exposed electrical conduits making diagnosis of problems easy. My design has a "flat" (1:12) roof, but no exposed conduits. Still, the wiring should be easy to access through the suspended ceiling.

When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?

Yet the shoppers managed to evade your security, drive to the sacred Costco, and desecrate it with their filthy footsteps!

However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40.

Perhaps they’re at work.

It reminds me of how pre-COVID—but even to a lesser extent to this day—if I saw another white-collar-looking young man in the wild during the weekday daytime, we’d often briefly gawk at each other out of surprise like the Umbrella Academy driving meme, such as when we’re pushing shopping carts past each other at the grocery store.

I remember stopping by Trader Joe's during the mid-morning on a day off... completely different demographic from the weekend/evening crowd.

Perhaps they’re at work.

Probably not. I go on weekends around opening time. I realize the demographics might be different at 1pm, 3pm, or 5pm on the weekends compared to opening.