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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3670 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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Let's get this thread rolling with something interesting. I happened to come across this clip on Twitter of a post-midterm interview with Trump, posted by America First Post. I'm just gonna transcribe the whole thing here:

Narrator: Whether it was the message, or the record, the Republican collapse will give Democrats in Congress new powers over budgets, hearings, and subpoenas.

Interviewer: You came out after the midterms, you congratulated the Democrats, you said you were open to working with them. What is one thing you would like to work with a Democratic majority on?

Trump: I'd love to do something on immigration.

Interviewer: What? Do you think immigration hurt you in the midterms? Do you think the crackdown hurt you?

Trump: I think it both helped and hurt. I got an A+ for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out, but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation or breaking of the law and that was that they came into the country illegally. Now, there is a large part of the country that think they should be put out and there is a large part of the country that think they should be allowed to stay if they're good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel or doing something right? And in some cases paying taxes. And there's a large group of people think that they should be allowed to stay.

Interviewer: So you think your deportation policy went too far? It was too tough.

Trump: I think it was too tough. I think it might be too tough yea.

Interviewer: What would happen? What does the deal look like with the Democrats?

Trump: Well, the deal would be we would work something out and I think it's something, I think that's something that's actually doable.

Interviewer: Doable to create some kind of legal status for the landscapers and the -?

Trump: Yea. When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that's worked there as a, you know, as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lot of good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden they're being taken out of the country it's tough. It's a tough thing. But there's a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody to connect.

Interviewer: Do any of those people work in your administration? Are they in the building with us right now?

Trump: No, no. Well, there are a lot of those people. Then there's also people that are more modified on that. In other words get the killers out, get all the rough ones out, get the drug dealers out but let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.

Interviewer: Do you think, the Democratic party right now, has people in it that are interested in this kind of deal?

Trump: I think so, yeah. People have already called me.

Interviewer: So I'll say, I saw James Talarico, the new Democratic senator from Texas. I saw him on Fox News and he said immigration was one of the things he wanted to work with the audience.

Trump: Others too, South Carolina said. Numerous people.

Interviewer: You did, in the course of the campaign, you did occasionally call him Talafreako.

Trump: Yea, I did.

Trump is Trump of course so take everything with a massive grain of salt, especially since he announced Stephen Miller would be taking over as his chief of staff, but this is crazy? Perhaps Trump's "Only Nixon can go to China" moment will be an Eisenhower-esque amnesty for illegals. I have heard other commentators suggest that Trump would be open to adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states from a self-glorifying kind of way. "President Trump, you could be remembered as the first President to add states to the union since 1950! What a legacy!"

Immigration was a winning issue. You need to deport the most sympathetic cases in order to instill a strong deterrence effect, because lawfare prevents enforcement in large numbers. This means rounding up grandmas here for 20, 30, 40 years and keeping them in jail for a month before deporting them so that no illegal ever feels safe. If you fail to deport abeulita, 10 chicas will plan to vamanos on over with the expectation that if they just have uno chico and wait 10 years they’ll get to remain safely forever. It’s just that good to live in America compared to South and Central America.

There’s no way America will survive with an eternal unrelenting flood of 80-90iq foreigners from below. Either it balkanizes into competing racial groups or we become just another Brazil, with world history being played out by nation states like China and Japan until the end of time. There’s no coming back from this.

I don't think HBD is keeping Latin America back. Argentina is Whiter than the US, yet is still a shithole due entirely to cultural and political reasons. Meanwhile, El Salvador is now the safest country in the Americas, with a homicide rate well below that of the United States, following a radical shift in policy. It's still poor – that can't change overnight – but having the country run by gangs was a major impediment to growth that has now been removed.

I don't think HBD is keeping Latin America back. Argentina is Whiter than the US, yet is still a shithole due entirely to cultural and political reasons.

I dare to believe that HBD made the culture and the politics, and that HBD is not « over here » whilst culture and politics is cleanly « over there ».

I don't see how this responds to the fact that Argentina is Whiter than the US.

Do you think HBD is just skin tone?

Right, the Argentinians are a different kind of White people. Mostly Italians and Spaniards. Yet neither Italy nor Spain is anywhere near as dysfunctional as Argentina, and Italian-Americans are well assimilated. As far as I know, New Jersey hasn't been governed by Peronists for the last 80 years.

Argentina used to be much richer relative to the rest of the West. (There was a Reddit post on this topic on a SSC/Motte-type subreddit that I'm unable to find right now.) They literally just came up with one terrible idea, Peronism, and ran with it, destroying their country in the process. But as other places populated by Italians and Spaniards show, this was a historical accident, not the inevitable outcome.

Right, the Argentinians are a different kind of White people. Mostly Italians and Spaniards. Yet neither Italy nor Spain is anywhere near as dysfunctional as Argentina

There are two gaps. The one you mentioned is HBD. You said:

I don't think HBD is keeping Latin America back. Argentina is Whiter than the US

Buenos Aires and Chicago received immigrants under the same resources, shipping grain and meat from fertile hinterlands, but Chicago drew Germans and Buenos Aires drew Spaniards and Italians. Chicago was over 95% literate from 1870; Buenos Aires was under half in 1869, 72% in 1895, and passed 90% only in 1939. Campante & Glaeser conclude that human capital explains « the lion's share » of the divergence between the two cities and their countries. Europe is the same. In 1900 the average adult had 1.7 years of schooling in Italy and 3.3 in Spain, against 6.4 in the US (Lee & Lee). The US was very Germanic until very recently (~78% European ancestry).

Now as for Argentina vs Spain or its neighbors. It's not ideas, we know that much. In 1913 Argentina was about 1.5 times as rich as Italy and twice as rich as Spain (Maddison; Glaeser, Di Tella & Llach), and in 1950 it was more literate than Chile or Uruguay. But it declined because of instability: 8 regime changes from 1946 to 2010, vs. 2 each for Chile, Uruguay and Brazil (Geddes, Wright & Frantz). Since 1990 its rule-of-law score has been about 0.57, v.s. 0.96 for Chile and Uruguay (V-Dem).

Perón, obviously, was a man and not an idea. Kind of puts a wrinkle in what you said. And the issue predates Perón. It started with the 1930 coup, but Perón came out of the 1943 coup. The army then banned Peronism from 1955 to 1973, and in 1962 it removed Frondizi eleven days after Peronists won 10 of 14 provinces (source). This instability, not Peron himself, messed up the economy further. But Argentina was still richer than Chile and Uruguay in 1975. It fell behind absolutely between 1975 and 1990, shrinking 1.5% a year while they grew (Maddison).

But there's no research on why Argentina is so unstable. One hypothesis was positive feedback loop, but the effect size does not explain the magnitude of the excess over its neighbors, so that's ruled out.

It could be purely random chance. It could be HBD dark matter we're not seeing. Basic ancestry captures most of the deficit Argentina has vs. Germanic nations but it is in fact useless for explaining the difference from its neighbors. Maybe its immigrants were belligerent in a way not captured by their source countries. We don't know for sure but logic suggests to me it will be something like this, or else bad luck ... one calculation I did suggests it's about 1.5 SD among its peers. So it could be top 10% « bad luck » if you consider all of the variance among the peers (ethnicity and income matched) to be totally random. That is not one bad idea, in general people barely listen to anything, these countries share information lines and languages and yet they differ. So ideas differences are not plausible core drivers IMO.

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