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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Way to miss the point.

The japanese have a word that means foreigner, and it doesn't distinguish between citizen or not, or care where you were born.

You're using foreign concepts from foreign languages to try to tell me about America. There's a reason that there is no equivalent American word, because there is no equivalent American concept, because that is a fundamentally foreign belief system.

More like I'm using foreign language to break free of the propaganda that is relentlessly imposed upon us all.

No more illegal this, alien that, hyphenated American the next one. Foreigner. They're just foreigners, no other description necessary.

You're using a foreign language to try to import a foreign concept from a foreign culture. Akhil Reed Amar is not a foreigner, you'd know this if you knew anything about him, or his work.

"Foreigner" as a word in American English does not describe a person born in Michigan, raised in California, living in Connecticut. If you used it in conversation it would confuse people. You're reaching for the Japanese concept because you want to make my country more like Japan, I don't.

Well, I'd rather not get into a prescriptivist vs descriptivist argument.

They are foreigners to me, and no passport will change my mind.

You're reaching for the Japanese concept because you want to make my country more like Japan, I don't.

The Japanese concept is not exclusive to Japan, and you find it throughout American history. Those parts of which have been excised from the common teaching, and therefore I had to come to it from Japan.

The thing that makes America more like Japan is more Japanese people, which is why I don't want America to become more like Somalia, Mexico, India, or elsewhere. I want America to be for the Americans, that is, the pioneers and settlers whose labor tamed this continent and brought civilization to its farthest reaches. The people who, by the time of the American Revolution, had already become a separate and distinct people.

Tradition ist die Weitergabe des Feuers und nicht die Anbetung der Asche.

The thing that will make America more like Japan is if we turn into an insular people, focused on our past and our heritage and our purity. You're so frightened of America you want to turn it into a foreign country.

Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living, and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry, or in high, cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin.

A fair and level criticism. However, there are other ways to make America not-America, and that includes whatever the hell Alejandro Mayorkas did for four years.

You can guard against America becoming Japan, I suppose. But the weapons against becoming Japan cannot stop you from becoming Brazil or, worse, Zimbabwe.

If one loves America, extant America not imaginary America, one must guard against both.

I do not love extant America, because extant America is three generations into suppressing me and mine, and replacing us with compliant foreigners, in all defiance of history and culture. Extant America threw open the doors to every criminal alien from Central America that could get here, and is firing White men to replace them with Indians on H1-B visas, or shipping jobs overseas to practice wage arbitrage. Extant America is protecting "Maryland man" from deportation and releasing violent criminals because if we punished them properly the true differences between races could not be denied. Extant America is exactly the polyglot boarding house TR warned against, and it was deliberately built this way, and people like Wanderer are telling me it's too late to change anything, and people like you are telling me it's Truly American, actually. To him I say, So what? To you I say, No.

I love the America of my father's birth, and but feel no great love for the America of my son's birth. I'd like the America of my great-grandson's birth to have reversed the direction, but I, too, think that's less likely than genocidal civil race war, which itself is less likely than just the same strangulation, the frog boiling, we've seen my entire life.

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