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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18016 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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My conspiracy take is legacy establishment figures like Tucker and Piers at least to some extent agree with Fuentes's message and are intentionally amplifying it by inviting him on their shows to be slain by him. In the words of Mycroft Holmes (from the British TV series): "This is a battle we must lose, because they are right and we are wrong."

That said, it's kind of a shame that Fuentes is the best the dissident right can produce. He has a lot of problems, certainly not the least of which being that he complains without proposing any serious solutions. Take the illegals question: what is the actual proposal here? There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin. Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them? Because apparently saying "They trust me. Dumb fucks." is not a compelling enough signal for the masses to not cede their entire social infrastructure to that person.

My personal take is there is no serious way to solve the problems Fuentes names. For a country that never got itself into these situations in the first place, like Poland, sure. Fuentes's ideology can work. But for countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, this is not feasible. The best they can hope for is a non-bastardised implementation of classical liberalism: maybe actually put the criminals in prison for once, instead of releasing them on some harebrained pretense of "the Pakistanis don't know rape is bad." Bukele, basically. But any notion of "retvrn to ethnostate" is fundamentally non-serious. And I mean that in a deeply practical sense: I don't think any amount of "the secret is just be evil" makes it realistic.

There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.

It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well. In other words, illegal immigrants entered the US due to incentives without force; change the incentives, and they will leave peacefully. You don't necessarily have to agree with him of course, but this argument surely has some legs to stand on.

It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well...but this argument surely has some legs to stand on

What? That's obvious nonsense that couldn't stand up to any scrutiny. Either it's using the novel expansive definition of "violence" where it just means "bad actions", or else finding counterexamples is trivial.

  • I can non-violently scramble an egg. Good luck unscrambling it.

  • Libel/slander is not a violent crime, yet the harm is often irreversible and can only be punished and compensated for.

  • Robbery and fraud are often not violent, but recovering stolen goods practically requires the use (or at least threat) of violence.

They might be able to stem the tide without needing any enforcement, but that's a long ways from actually reversing it. I think this is obvious enough that the argument would get shut down before it got any real traction.

I’ve made this point a million times. Deny all benefits to illegal immigrants. Strictly enforce their inability to work. Tax remittances heavily. Put a harsh jail sentence for catching an illegal. Turn off chain immigration.

Illegals go bye bye.

campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking

The reconquista took > 700 years and then only in retrospect.

Pelagius wasn't 'trusting the plan', as others have said it's incremental improvements

Then as now it will look more random walk than trend at times. You need the macro view to see the arc.

A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memor

"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic, and I'm going to take this opportunity to address it.

It's a pernicious mindset that argues that there is no value in incremental improvement. It's akin to saying that since you can't shove an entire cheeseburger down your gullet in one bite, you might as well curl up in the fetal position and starve to death. To quote Barack Obama, it's letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good".

The Trump administration, for all its flaws, allegedly managed to deport 605,000 people who were not legally residing in the US in 2025 alone. This does not count individuals who returned to their home country without any state interaction. These 605,000 individuals were deported over the strident objections of institutions all across the country, which attempted to use legal strategies and manufactured public sentiment to stymie those deportations to the fullest extent possible.

You can argue that those 605,000 deportations were bad on the grounds of morality or realpolitik, but it's difficult to argue that they are not happening. You can say that you would like them to happen faster, but you cannot argue that 605,000 is orders of magnitude larger than what had happened from 2020 - 2024.

It's fairly clear that the US has the state capacity to do something here, because they're doing it.

"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic

I don't do rhetorical tactics. I'm not a streamer, I have no fanbase or audience to pander to. I'm not going to lose my ad revenue if I say an oopsie.

I say it's not realistic because it isn't. To engage in the deportations of 15+ million people is ludicrous, and as I mentioned, that's not even the bailey: the bailey is a white ethnostate, which would require 40+ million deportations. That's either a chart-topper in all world history or very close, in terms of quantity of people relocated by a government. The notion that the United States, in anything like its current incarnation, could engage in 1930s Stalin-level population migration is not realistic. You would need a Julius Caesar-tier figure, and that's not the sort of political personnel you can pick up the phone and order from CATO.

And to the perfect being the enemy of the good: I'm not sure "good" is the word to use here, so let's use the word "partial": does reducing the quantity of non-whites by, say, 3 million, change anything at all about the trajectory of the country? Not really. You still have tens of millions of non-whites. All you've done is inflame a bunch of racial animosity among the still-very-much-muilticolored demographics of the country. And make no mistake, these people aren't just going to sit there and let you do this: if millions of coloured people actually believe they're under serious threat of deportation, you will have major political instability--not the BLM sort, the full-scale civil war sort. And you still have sub-replacement white fertility and a massive generation of retiring boomers.

Further, I don't trust the Trump administration's numbers on deportations, mostly because I don't trust them on anything else. They seem to be outright fabricating economic numbers (with the not-so-subtle intent to bully their own central bank), so I'm certainly not going to trust their remigration numbers.

In my estimation, there are only two realistic routes to a white ethnostate for Americans: major economic collapse, which might shake things up enough that large numbers of people who don't have some connection to agriculture (which is mostly white) flee the country as refugees, then hope the Mormons and Amish can form new state(s) and rebuild everything. Or you try the Israel tactic, of gathering some sort of white identity community, flying off to a hopefully-not-already-inhabited piece of land somewhere (cough), and make your ethnostate from scratch. Both of these are extremely uncomfortable, but the former is something that occasionally happens even without anyone trying to make it happen, and the latter is quite literally how the United States was founded.

With this sort of thing in mind, how many voters would choose any of the above over Gavin Newsom and AOC running in 3 years, promising a return to the regular old world of 2013?

Semi-Forced remigration via economic and legal means is the only way to make this happen at a large enough scale. And is definitely possible. It’s what the right should be aiming for.

The thing is you have to force economic conditions that are worse than the place they came from -- sufficiently worse to overcome the activation energy to get up and move again, at an older age than they did the first time!

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place. But the time to do that was decades ago, back when.. US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants, and many of them are on welfare, this is a much easier matter.

No you have to force economic conditions to suck for immigrants. Strictly enforce e verify. Heavily tax remittances. Harshly restrict benefits to immigrants. Turn off chain migration.

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place.

No one knows how to do that. I mean, if Trump really does get rid of Maduro that will likely help, but only a little bit.

It's tricky, but the premise does seem to hold: checking out the El Salvador emigration data, we can see it's 5x lower than it used to be. And it dropped by a factor of 2 the moment Bukele took office!

Now that Bukele has shown that you can, in fact, just put the violent criminals in prison, maybe others will give it a shot.

I mean I'm given to understand that tattooing 'I am evil' on your face is pretty specific to el salvadorean gangs and so it's a lot harder to replicate that strategy elsewhere.

Gang tattoos are a thing everywhere gangs are. Drug gangs are not exactly bastions of high human capital. They are very primitive in their mental processes.

In the age of cheap camera surveillance, solving low-class crime is purely a problem of political will. There are no other relevant factors.

No one knows how to do that.

Oh no, the US has Manifest Destiny, but their founding myth also kind of involves them not being an empire so they don't want to. Plus, the pro-Empire faction is too busy trying to establish a domestic successor empire to bother with taking over other countries in this way.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants

Europe is in a much, much worse position when you consider the ages involved. The Muslims are disproportionately young adults and children, and the middle aged and elderly dying people are disproportionately white.

The thing is the US is already so non-white. Whites account for around 50% of US births, which is pretty bad compared to most of Europe, as far as I can tell, although it's a bit tricky to compare numbers due to how data is collected and classified.

And Eastern Europe is mostly okay (I mean, they still have cratering fertility. But at least it's not buoyed by third-world migrant births).

Sure, but the different non white groups may not like whites, but they hate each other. The blacks meeting an indian(or oriental, but that's a lot less likely) boss will beg for the klan to come be in charge again. The Hispanics often won't accept a black manager. Etc, etc.

But in America, the different ethnic groups are held in tension. In Europe there’s one mostly contiguous ethno-religious block waiting in the wings to seize power.

US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Sure, but without US intervention Latin America would have instituted Communism in a bunch of places, and it's extremely difficult to imagine they would have been any more economically prosperous under Communism.

There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.

Maybe, but there are a lot of potentially-billion-dollar-bills laying on the sidewalk which the US political system won't pick up for various reasons.

  • highly taxing/regulating remittances
  • vigorous enforcement of H1B and other educational/employment visa requirements
  • ramp up of enforcement of existing Orders of Removal / hiring more IJs to help clear the case backlog
  • increasing workplace audits/lawsuits against bad actors in immigrant-heavy employment sectors (agriculture, food processing, construction, hospitality).

Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them?

Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective, as well as just a general grass-roots push against the more obnoxiously-obsequious Israel focus. Barring that, just wait a generation - most of the well-assimilated liberal ashkenazi will just die off or fully submerge into the general population through intermarriage without any/many kids in a generation or two anyway.

Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective

As Randy Fine noted in response to Fuentes a couple of months ago on this subject, to his knowledge (and I think he’s probably more accurate than not) no Jewish congresspeople are Israeli citizens. In the same way, very few Jewish American billionaires or otherwise powerful figures are Israeli citizens. Zuckerberg, Ellison, Altman, Iger, none of these people have Israeli passports in all likelihood (I say because it’s possible they do in secret, but it’s very unlikely - there is no reason for them to).

Technically speaking, all Jews are Israeli citizens, no? It's kinda meaningless when you haven't gotten an Israeli passport, but it's a handy piece of antisemitic rhetoric.

It's worth noting this isn't unique to Jews; a surprisingly high percentage of native born Americans are technically citizens of a foreign country(I would imagine Italy is slightly ahead of Israel here) through descent.

The of return is an application rather than an entitlement, it's subject to the whims of the Israeli state and can be denied for many reasons at the relatively arbitrary whim of the state. Israel doesn't consider non-Israeli Jews to be, legally, citizens. In that case it's closer to 'ancestry visas' for e.g., great grandchildren in countries that support them, like Portugal, England and others. Italian hereditary citizenship (until earlier this year) was automatic for subsequent generations, you applied for recognition of citizenship, not for citizenship or a visa itself.

There was a weird interview with Bernie Sanders years ago. A journalist asserted he was an Israeli dual citizen in lead up to a question. He cut in and said he is not an Israeli citizen. The journalist pushed on reiterating that he is a dual citizen and tried again to ask Bernie about his foreign loyalties. He couldn't answer and just repeated that he is not an Israeli. Such an awkward exchange.

The demand for 'ZOG' exceeds the supply. People want an explanations such as dual citizens with divided loyalties composing a significant portion of Congress. That's not true in a factual sense, but it feels right to them.

Then I guess I'm confused about who Fuentes is talking about....because a lot of the most obnoxious pro-Israel activists, even to me, a Zionist-sympathetic secular half-Jew, either have dual citizenship themselves or have close family who does who they talk about incessantly. I'm thinking of chattering class people like John Podhoretz, etc. I didn't realize that Iger, Altman, etc. were viewed as being particularly Zionist.

I think even if all these were implemented tomorrow, the US would not look meaningfully different in 20 years.

That said, it's kind of a shame that Fuentes is the best the dissident right can produce.

Why? The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker, and the best the neoliberal center can produce is Destiny. Seems like everyone's roughly on par.

The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker

Zohran Mamdani got elected Mayor of New York on a DSA/third-worldist platform. Hasan is just modern-day left wing Bill O'Reilly. AOC, KBJ, Randi Weingarten, Brandon Johnson - all of these people hold significant office and/or policy influence.

To be clear, I don't actually think either of the people I or Soteriologian mentioned are "the best X can produce", that was kinda my point. Sorry for the snark, but I didn't appreciate someone from the other side declaring who is supposed to be my champion.

Understood. Sorry for not reading the room. Lol.

Maybe they're all feds from the same school.

Or if rumors and videos about Fuentes and Destiny are true, the same bathhouse.

Take Contrapoints, for example. Beneath the tongue-in-cheek pizzazz and glamour, and modulo the enormous blindspot of his/her own sexuality, there really is a person who has deep affection for western philosophy and art. Almost scholarly. There is nobody remotely comparable on the dissident right.

There’s a strong case to be made that Contrapoints to some extent agrees with core aspects of the Blanchardian hypothesis. Not in its entirety, but they understand that they approach life in a certain context as a performance and that gender is part of that.

There are trans forums where they dislike Wynn for this reason, because they understand that there’s an acknowledgement, on some level, that it’s drag.

Yeah, the reason I call it a blind spot is how unable to acknowledge the traditional roles (s)he is: as soon as you open your analysis to timescales longer than a human lifespan, the tradcon worldview makes a lot of sense. It's not arbitrary. It's not silly mysticism on par with a shaman performing rain dance.

Even if you find the traditional arrangement infuriating, at least have the basic intellectual honesty to acknowledge that this is how humans reproduce, and you need both pieces for this to work. In the words of Augustus:

If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.

Today, one might label him gay (although I don't like applying modern labels to ancients), but the point is he's at least clearheaded enough to acknowledge the underlying mechanics of why society is the way it is, rather than gaslight himself and everyone else into thinking some weird degen lifestyle is totally equal to traditional marraige.

Lomez has an entire company dedicated to publishing abandoned books, and manages to do so without pizzas, glamour, or talking about his sexuality. Next!

Destiny is also left. You could call him neoliberal left, I suppose, but there's nothing center about him.

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