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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 can't find it, but there's a graph floating around that lists the real changes in household net worth by quintile.

The long and short of it is that the top 20% (already the capitalized class) is going to the moon. That's assumed the same way that the bottom 20% has seen a massive negative "return" in real net worth. The more interesting part is that the 2nd and 3rd quintiles are close to flat and the 4th quintile represents a stair-step in terms of wealth accrual.

In other words; K-shaped economy split 40% to bottom 60%, with a massive albatross in the bottom 20%.

What this looks like every day; if you have a 40+ hr week job that is either skilled trade or white collar of any sort, you don't have horrific anti-social impulses, and don't abuse substances, you're probably fine.

Two major caveats; 1. a divorce can temporarily or permanently drop you into that 3rd quintile - the miserable middle. 2. AI might scramble a few of those white collar job classes.

The problem, however, is that that stair step I mentioned earlier. Goign from 3rd to 4th quintile isn't just a matter of keeping your head down and staying disciplined for five or even ten years. It's a leap of faith and a lot of people make it by starting their own business, taking a risk on equity comp in a startup, or swinging for the fences on a new job / job relocation. The risk is that, if something doesn't work out, you don't stay where you are in the third quinitile, but might tumble down to (nearly) the 2nd. (First quintile is reserved for the truly degenerate. Gotta be all about the game, homie).

And so the American economy turns more and more into risk-taker-winners and risk-taker-losers. That's a bad social position to be in because it rewards a lot of, well, risky behavior that, while necessary and potentially good in the aggregate, can go really sideways at a smaller scale. I love seeing SpaceX catch a rocket with robot chopsticks. High risk. Massive reward. Moves science and technology forward. I hate seeing Draft Kings exploit lonely, risk-on young men. But these two things will coexist if the overall concept of "risk" as wealth mechanism endures.

What does all of this have to do with immigration?

The way to wean young men off of risk-on behaviors is to give them prestige and status within their communities for taking a longer term view of things. If stable, married men are seen as pillars of the community who receive status because of it, you've got a model for The Bros to follow. If stable men are not valued and given status, then we devolve to our animal selves and The Bros gamble away any and all extra pay.

An overly hetergeneous local and national culture makes risk-off behavior and life planning much, much more difficult. The more immigrants you have who do not have a natural respect and understanding of American Culture, the more you risk American boys rejecting the long term vision of community and family. This is because there is less and less of a community from which to derive respect and status and, following that, fewer and fewer opportunities to marry a woman of quality.

K-shaped economy + immigration + male-female relationships and family formation. All of this times the strength of culture, which, right now, is probably -0.65 and declining.

How are you defining the bottom 20%'s lack of net worth? LIke they probably own less real estate than they did historically, but they're also probably wealthier in random crap than they were 50 years ago. Condition in their commons is maybe hard to calibrate since probably more drug issues, but also genuine poverty and starvation has been largely stamped out in the West.

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