Jews aren’t fake whites. They aren’t white. Loxism is their disease as they hate the goy. Their driving force is resentment. The right doesn’t hate Jews out of a sense of racial purity or superiority. It’s because the Jews want whites dead because of their beauty and strength. And you hate that which threatens what you love. It’s righteousness not arrogance. Jews are a race of spiteful mutants
It's a very silly meme that only liberals who see all conservatives as white Supremacists would enjoy. Shapiro doesn't hate immigrants and has been a staunch advocate for "high-skilled immigration" like Hanania has been. "I don't give a damn about the browning of America" is a well-known Ben Shapiro quote among the far-right.
semantics. He hates feminism. He's virulently anti abortion. He takes a paternalistic attitude toward women, saying that his view of what he wants for them is for their own good... so how can it be hate ?
If someone wanted to control me and my body in a way that conflicted with my identity and my desire for self expression, though laws and the promotion of social shuning to the degree he does for women, no matter how much they said it was for my own good, I'd feel disrespected, disliked and even hated.
I think at root this contradiction has always been destroying the conservative movement from the inside.
Capitalism (economics) rests on the rational secular ideas of individual rights and rights-protecting government (in politics). This is the polar opposite of religious conservatism, which does not respect individual rights in politics, and therefore cannot support capitalism in economics.
We're now witnessing in real time as this contradiction gets resolved, and it's not resolving in favor of rights and capitalism, but in favor of authoritarianism. Shapiro is falling in line just like everyone else, supporting MAGA, tariffs, state ownership of companies, etc.
I think if we actually look at it properly, today's GOP is more left-wing than even fringe democrat groups. It's why dems don't really know how to counter MAGA.
You could be a religious conservative, and a classical liberal, and support the sanctity of human existence without devolving to base identitarianism. Indeed, many of the most laudable thinkers in the 20th-century right met this description (Chesterton, CS Lewis, Belloc). More recently, the GOP nominated for president, in 2012, a strongly religious conservative who was also a sincere capitalist with a heartfelt commitment to a universal view of human dignity.
It was rational for religious intellectuals to support secular government when there were real possibilities of conflicting religion. Maintaining neutrality of the governing body, so you could run your communities as you wish is a stable view. But if the choice is between secularisms and all of the religious on the other side, the equilibrium dissolves.
Agreed — though I think Richard makes some valid points in his article (e.g., regarding anti-Fuentes voices calling for Muslim Americans to be deported).
Yes, I think that is a valid critique, but I'm not sure Hanania himself understands why that double standard exists. Anti-Muslim attitudes have been the most accepted form of anti-immigrant sentiment within the Republican Party ever since I can remember. I think it's particular, and it most likely has to do with the good standing of Jews within the republican party, and the "special relationship" with Israel. Muslims are identified as anti-Israel, civilizational enemies in a way that other groups are not.
If we've learned anything recently, it is that the electorate will eventually figure out the difference between conservatives who embrace racism and conservatives who don't. Regardless of what the left says.
I think the point is that if you take religious conservative ideas seriously, you're going to end up with something like Fuentes, and worse. Shapiro has basically created his own destroyer.
"Vance, for example, has said that Americans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have more of a claim to the country than their political opponents" . Funny how that applies to Trump himself right? His mother was born in Scotland, and his father was the son of German immigrants who came to the US after the Civil War. No one has pointed this to him because everyone knows that he really means that "Whites have more of a claim to this country than their political opponents"
Also it doesn't apply to blacks whose ancestors fought in the civil war (and were mostly here prior to 1808 for obvious reasons) and have a stronger claim to "heritage" Americans than many whites.
It's hard to imagine that JD Vance actually believes in the superiority of white and/or "ancestral" Americans given that he wrote a whole book about how all his family members and neighbors in his white ancestral-populated hometown were horrible people incapable of acting like anything but the most cracker version of ghetto dysfunctional conduct possible. And also he didn't choose to marry one but instead a high-class elite non-white second gen immigrant.
Which just lends more evidence to the already overwhelming pile that he is without any principles whatsoever and willing to say or "believe" anything to gain fame and power. He's clearly very smart yet willing to lie through his teeth and abandon previously articulated principles probably more than any politician I can think of and far more conniving and devious than Trump IMO who in a weird sense is borderline guileless.
As for Fuentes, makes no sense to me, he's at least a quarter Mexican and many of his followers are not white themselves, isn't that the case?? I think it's more that he seems relaxed, jubilant, and confident in his speaking manner and people just like his personality more than his actual ideas (not saying that's not dangerous). I keep reading "what are we going to do about Fuentes" panic pieces by Republicans who've realized that hit pieces and attempts to morally shame him just count as compliments and fuel his fire, so they don't know what to do. Sad to say that when you're dealing with that level of primitivist ideas impervious to moral persuasion, the best tactic against him is just something as shallow and mean as his own standard talking points: the fact that he's absolutely tiny and has the build and bobble head of a ten year old boy.
Just to add to your list re JD Vance, he is also the only senior politician to have compared Trump to Hitler. He called him “cultural heroine.” To me, JD Vance is the real scary future of the collapse of Western politics, because he knows exactly what he’s doing, and doing it anyway. I think he’s logic is something like, “since everyone wants authoritarianism, I may as well be the one holding the whip.”
As to Fuentes, I don’t think there’s anything that religious conservatives can do, since he represents the logical end point of the ideas they advocate.
I also think that people like Ben Shapiro have normalized unemployed and unqualified people talking about politics to an audience of millions. This too will lead to characters like Fuentes as a logical conclusion.
Conservatives need to realize that their fundamental ideas (religion and conservatism) are the actual problem and cannot lead to anything good. Instead, the more rational ones among them, need to embrace the secular and rational founding ideals of America: individual rights, and rights-protecting government.
Yeah I thought of that too. Or him being willing to say with a smile on his face during his debate that Democrats tried to get rid of a healthcare plan the GOP was pushing for. They all lie to some extent but he honestly takes it to another level and I agree with you seems far more dangerous to me than Trump, bc of it. Trump is just a charismatic egoistic gorilla basically, but Vance is creepy in his purposeful deviousness. Also hard to trust a guy who has changed his own name, religion, and all seeming principles multiple times, he's really a cipher.
Hey Richard, great article, quick question: Do you think this bodes well for the right wing quest to rule America indefinitely?
As of right now, Trump made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters (toughness), got some Asian ones (anti Affirmative action/Black crime against Asians). Do you believe that Fuentes maybe endangers this?
Nobody knows how a post-trump GOP pushes forward, but based on the stats you made in the article where non-hispanic whites are a minority, will an explicitly anti-brown rhetorical style succeed?
Many Hispanics see themselves as white, and many conservative non-whites are starting to vote more ideologically. Is embracing Groyperism the right wing equivalent of letting hyper-woke staffers run the comms department when the counrty is way further to the center?
Yeah, Richard has written all these articles, but he doesn’t address the question of how a groyper GOP can actually win. The vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of white Americans, don’t support groyper or white nationalist ideology.
The comparison he makes to abortion in this article is pretty apt: pro-life people can try to exert influence in the primaries, but Republican politicians understand just how politically toxic abortion bans are to the general public and thus try to stay away from the issue. The 2024 GOP platform took out almost all of its abortion language.
The point of the article is that "multiracial nativism" makes little to no sense, and eventually it is going to implode, particularly because a considerable amount of minorities exists in mixed-status families.
How does it make no sense? Most black Americans have no connection to any other country, so nativism is easy to envision for them, especially if they feel like they’re not America’s most important minority anymore. There are many Hispanic Americans that have been here for generations, and some Hispanic people were in the American West before those areas even became states. There are also a sizable number of Asian and Middle Eastern people that have been here for generations. There are even also some immigrants that are nativists: they come here and they don’t want more people to come here.
Looking through your subscriptions, you sub to Bronze Age Pervert. He’s a Romanian Jew that immigrated here when he was 10 years old. So that’s already an example.
Because it doesn’t make sense, and you can see it right now with the collapse of Hispanic support, both evident in the recent election and in current polls. The monumental increase in the Hispanic population of the U.S. comes from waves of mass migration, not from an endogenous population increase.
Most non-MAGA Hispanics who voted for Trump did so because of Biden’s inflation and, like the median voter, they’re low-information voters who didn’t know who Stephen Miller is, nor were they aware of the implications of “mass deportations.” I live in a predominantly Hispanic community, and the collapse of Trump’s support is, anecdotally, observable here: people who were campaigning for him are now becoming rabidly anti-Trump, and so on. As I said, a not insignificant portion of them are in mixed status families or are in mixed-status friend groups.
It’s also ironic that one of the GOP’s strongholds among Hispanics is Miami (where Trump’s support is now declining), considering that Miami is, by far, the most non-American city in America: a majority-bilingual population, with a considerable share who use Spanish as their primary language. Don’t you see nativism contradicting reality here? Neo-nativism is, as Hanania shows, at odds with the current and future demographic realities of this nation, whose national ethos is rather vague and dynamic, unlike countries such as Hungary or Japan.
Black voters still support the Democrats by a considerable margin, and once the VRA gets re-enacted, you can expect an intensified wave of support. You can only achieve micro-gains within that demographic. I’m not sure about Indian or Asian voters, but Muslims are definitely not going to vote GOP anytime soon, especially after the levels of Islamophobia displayed by both Zionists and non-Zionists within the party.
Multi-raciality may well be the future of the GOP, but not the immediate one. I’m sorry.
It was, for the most part and in practice, a civic nation for whites with an Anglo-Protestant core. After WWII (largely in reaction to Nazism) civic universalism began to take shape, and ideas like the “nation of immigrants” or the “civic creed” became truly solidified. That post-War America is what "gave us" the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which is not really in vogue among the "multiracial nativist" crew right now.
Also, “multiracial nativism” is not the same as “civic nationalism.” Multiracial nativism is a chimera, nobody genuinely believes in it. Perhaps some right-wing Zionists do, framing the “evil Muslim” as a kind of Third World invader, but then people will rightfully and quickly begin questioning the foreignness of Jews themselves.
My sense is that it will be similar to Bernie Sanders effecting a pincer movement on the left. Republicans will get stuck between an electorate that still thinks Hitler is bad and a vociferous fringe that insists that he was good, actually.
Also, frankly, Jews are possibly the most politically engaged ethnic group and punch way above our weight in political influence. As a lefty, I’m not loving the rise of antisemitism on my side, but Fuentes explicitly says we are evil parasites who must be cleansed from the US. There is simply no comparison.
70% of Jews are Democrats, and the 30% who are Republicans are extremely pro-Israel. Conservative Jewish billionaires aren’t going to become Democrats, but they will stop writing $500 million checks to the GOP.
What you call "multiracial nativism" is what in France call "Republican Universalism" which is not to conflate with multiculturalism or melting pot (those are typical anglo-saxon things, according your average French intello), but the idea all citizens, besides their origins and background are bounded to an only political community: The Republic and her laws. But considering its communitarian emphasis I don't know how can be appliable to a strong individualist country like US.
I'm actually not sure about this. I think the GOP might make the mistake the Democrats made in the woke era, of believing that extremely online X users are the people they are trying to appeal to. Or having the GOP leadership get trapped in that bubble. They might converge on multiracial nativism after losing a few elections however.
It would be hilarious if the *Democrats* embraced a soft form of multiracial nativism in response to Groyperism, totally boxed out the GOP and got themselves an electoral landslide.
three blue states. and trump was not on the ballot. many of the Hispanic men who voted for him last year in those states are low propensity voters who stayed home.
Something Tucker mentioned during his discussion with Nick last week was that, even though they agree on 90% of everything, Nick has spent a significant portion of his airtime attacking people like Candace Owens, MTG, Joe Kent, and Stephen Miller. Nick said that it is because they attacked him unfairly first, but that is part of a larger trend I've noticed on the right. It would be one thing if all the GOP infighting were between different factions with fundamental differences. However, there is also significant intra-factional infighting among individuals who share almost entirely the same policy goals. Nick is against everyone, and everyone is against him. Steve Bannon and Elon Musk are now nemeses. Now there is an open civil war between the pro-Israel faction of the party and anyone who has an even remotely positive assessment of Tucker because he did an interview. I feel like it's all going to fall apart when the day comes when everyone can't hide under Trump's banner anymore.
Yeah, Trump is able to hold the coalition together because of his weird charisma, but also his complete lack of guile and general cluelessness. Nothing can stick to him because he doesn’t stake out many substantive positions beyond Trump = good and people who oppose Trump/what he wants to do at any given moment = bad and his pathological victimhood. It allows the current conservative movement to basically follow the same logic to a tribal and cultish extent. Thus, even while very large fissures exist below the surface Trump is the purple Elmer’s glue stick that barely holds the thing together. Without Trump, they won’t be able to play footsie with the Groypers while still distancing themselves sort of from them. They will either have to go full Groyper or denounce them and either way, neither faction holds enough power to maintain the full coalition Trump has managed to cobble together.
You're making the same mistake people made with Trump and trying to explain Nick's influence via his beliefs. Obviously that's part of it. But mostly people just like Nick because he is handsome & charmingly antisocial in a way that most politicians fail to pull off.
I mean I wouldn’t go that far. He has his audience because he’s not a politician so he doesn’t need to fear saying the quiet part out loud as much. Even though the MAGAfication of the GOP there aren’t many quiet parts left unsaid, Fuentes’s willingness to go there makes him popular with those who like someone breaking through those last boundaries.
At the same time, while Fuentes might be popular, the whole Affiare d’Tuck shows that those with some amount of mainstream opinion can’t openly engage with him. Like you can subscribe to Fuentes’s podcast but you can’t openly acknowledge that you do and the Based Ritual still only takes place as mostly edgelord one-upmanship in conservative only “safe spaces” where participants can maintain plausible deniability that they were only joking or it was an error of youth.
The issue for American conservatives is even if antisemitism is a crude, base and idiotic conspiracy theory, it's less crude, base or idiotic than most of the other conspiracy theories they voice
Candace Owens was fired from the Daily Wire for turning anti-Israel, but had previously claimed that Brigitte Macron was male, that vaccines on the whole were unsafe for children and that evidence for the existence of dinosaurs was a fabrication of paleontologists. Pro-Israel republicans ask their audiences to entertain all of these as reasonable contributions to debate, but to shun the idea that Israel exerts an overbearing influence on American politicians to the detriment of US interests as an obviously ridiculous conspiracy theory.
The idea that the Israel lobby or whatever is a huge detriment to US interests hasn’t survived contact with reality very well. The people who said that fearmongered so much about a war with Iran. Meanwhile we might get in an actual war with Venezuela.
Granted it’s less crazy than the Macron stuff, you’re right about that.
I have a modest proposal to combat white nationalism: make advertisements and entertainment media (TV, movies, video games) targeted at potential white nationalists 90-100% white. And digitally alter news media and reporting so that prominent politicians and celebrities appear white.
Completely unironically, I think this would kneecap white nationalism. As revealed preferences in real estate demonstrate, very few people, if any, actually care about living in a homogenous polity in the US. The desire for ethnic homogeneity is purely based on an abstract aesthetic preference. Satisfy that, and the Groypers will stop trying to implement dumb real world policies.
I think that probably would help a lot. The backlash we have now is what woke hath wrought. I just watched the Last of Us, S2E1, and there wasn't a single non-Hispanic white man in a signifiant role among a number of protagonists. Of course that kind of hostility provokes a reaction.
I guess I’m not sure why this article was written now rather than say a year or two ago. Republicans’ rhetoric in the 2024 campaign was far more right wing in terms of race and immigration than the previous two Trump campaigns, and a lot of these examples you cite didn’t start in 2025.
But a year or so ago, Fuentes was telling his followers to vote for Kamala and was saying things like “your body my choice” while Trump was denouncing the idea of supporting a federal ban.
Also around this time, your position on MAGA was that it wasn’t really about ideas; they were at most secondary concerns. The core tenet of MAGA was fealty to Trump. Whatever he says or does is what MAGA is. Fuentes obviously violates this tenet. Add Israel to this, and I’m not sure why Fuentes is being portrayed as the real face of MAGA all of a sudden.
Other than seeking new Democratic voters (and increasingly Hispanics are voting Republican) it’s not clear to me exactly why the Biden administration decided that it was a good idea to open our borders to millions of unskilled, unvetted people. It ended up costing the Democrats the 2024 election.
This was one of the most disastrous policies the country has seen in my long lifetime. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here undermines the wages of our working class and exacerbates our national housing crisis when we can’t house our own citizens. It consumed billions of our tax dollars which could have been put to better use.
The age of mass migration is over. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
It’s a supposed truism that no one in the United States is above the rule of law. No one except, perhaps according to many, these same millions of illegal immigrants. Why do so many believe that group to be beyond any consequences for breaking our immigration laws?
I believe that like almost all of our laws except those banning murder, illegal immigration should be subject to a statute of limitations. Even an armed bank robber is off the hook five years after his crime. Those apprehended soon after their illegal entry should be immediately deported but, anyone who has lived a crime free life here for seven years should be permitted to stay (without the benefits of citizenship) so long as they remain innocent of serious crimes. This proposal would guarantee that no illegal immigrant would ever gain the protection or privileges of citizenship and could always be deported for serious misconduct. The current unrest being caused by ICE in our big cities is untenable and is likely to put the open borders people back in power. That would be a true disaster. This statute of limitations approach is the only solution to the chaos that is sweeping our country.
While Biden’s policy was an obvious political disaster, it was economically a good idea given the inflationary environment. Higher wages drive inflation. I doubt that’s what Biden really had in mind, but part of the reason immigration became such a problem was the economy was actually quite good under Biden.
I haven’t seen one substantive complain about how immigration from our southern border actually made anyone’s lives worse. It’s all vibes.
Also, I’d love to see the myth that Democrats are laxer on immigration because they envision voters twenty years from now to die. No politician looks further than the next election, which is rarely more than two years away. Democrats were soft on immigration for a number of reasons, but counting on voters that haven’t even been born yet was not one of them.
Come: Those millions of people clearly are competing for housing and therefore driving up rents. They are also competing for jobs and therefore driving down wages. Both results are simply Economics 101 at work.
Children just take the place of their grandparents, keeping the population stable. Add mass immigration on top of that and you've got to rebuild your cities or something to fit more people, which is politically not viable. Not like immigrants nowadays are creating new cities, they're crowding out native-born Americans from their homes.
A bigger economy maybe, but immigrants get most those gains while native-born Americans bear the downsides.
If that were true, populations that grow through reproduction would automatically get poorer, as the additional children are forced to compete for the same number of jobs that existed in the days of their great-grandparents. But that’s obviously not the case.
Richard has written a lot about this type of zero-sum thinking, which may be wired into us by evolution. But if we’re talking about American values, where is the confidence, the optimism? We should want to make the future bigger and better. To advance, not retreat.
I literally said nothing about the number of jobs staying the same.
Getting to live in a desirable location can be zero-sum though. Only so many people can live in low-density homes in sunny LA for example.
If you're so optimistic how about making immigrants create their own great cities instead of taking over existing cities? Aren't you optimistic they can do it?
This can’t be said enough. To be fair Biden’s immigration policy can best be described as shambles, but part of the problem is that they were caught off guard by how much faster the US economy started to recover compared to pretty much everywhere else, which was a huge factor in driving up emigration to the US post-COVID. A lot of Trump’s immigration policies remained in place whether as a choice or because of judicial orders. It wasn’t like his administration just decided to blow the doors open and declare a free for all.
> it’s not clear to me exactly why the Biden administration decided that it was a good idea to open our borders to millions of unskilled, unvetted people.
I actually know the answer to that. The key is the phrase I've seen a few times in the Boston Globe ("reliably liberal, but not thoughtfully so"): "people fleeing persecution, war, or poverty". Note that the three categories are treated enormously differently in the immigration law, people fleeing persecution are owed asylum, people fleeing poverty are the "economic migrants" that the law is explicitly designed to keep out. But once you go far enough left, there is the concept of the United States as the universal place of refuge for everybody whose life is bad, which implies that you don't distinguish between these categories.
And its clear that immigration policy inside the Biden administration was controlled by a bunch of people who subscribed to that concept. From there, the question is how to craft policy to basically allow everybody in who wants to get in. Though it did help that was about the time when people figured out the loophole in the system: enter illegally, immediately surrender and apply for asylum, stay in the country for a few years while your case works through the overburdened immigration courts.
“…the two problems that he pointed to were too much trade and immigration. As I’ve pointed out, this makes no sense when placed alongside his support for AI and automation…”
IMO there is a messaging issue here, where normal people feel like they're being simultaneously told to prepare for AI and automation to destroy the job market, but also we need mass migration to fill a bunch of jobs. “Wait, so my job and my kid's jobs are going to be AI'd or sent to India, but we also want to import more domestic competition on top of that?”
You could compare the “how do we teach 50 year old redneck truckers to code?” freakout of about 10 years ago (anticipating self-driving trucks) to today's headlines revealing that a huge number of truckers are recent immigrants who seem to think that the field is both stable and lucrative. “Just learn to code” was a failure of forecasting and narrative, and it was largely not a product of conservatives.
MAGA is defined by the cult of personality around Trump, not white identity. Maybe he has some vague white identitarian sympathies, but what do you think Vance's reaction is to Fuentes calling his wife a "jeet?"
Vance's reaction? Some part of me wonders if it was to quietly draw up contingency plans for how to divorce her if he needs to to set himself up for 2028, and political strategies to try and sell it to people. It'd be nice to be wrong about this—but he does give off a "careerist enough to dump his family for a shot at the presidency" vibes
if Left-wing Democrats and pro-israel right-wing jews get to play identity politics, why can't White people play identity politics for their own benefit?
Hanania, you said it yourself that White kids are _already_ a minority in the US. Therefore they can play all the political games that other minorities have done, which cinclude Identity Politics.
This is the essense of groyperism. They want for White people whatever Jews have done for themselves.
Yahya alone, of those posts made [up to 10:30am CST on 11/5/25], grasps the necessary response to Mr. Hanania's article. It is necessary at least some responsive posts here respond to the article from the Groyper point of view. Viz.: "We continue under an assumption that that whites alone are prohibited from self-defense. This is the necessary self-handicapping we in the U.S. expect of whites." Mr. Hanania signals that cracks are appearing in that dyke of whites' self-imposed restraint. I doubt the Left is listening. The Left will be largely caught unawares when the consequences of accumulated cracks unleash. It is a shame. If the Left were willing to grasp the significance of how far Right the Right has gone, Left-wing denizens downstream could have made the appropriate preparations. Said 'preparations' include refraining from legislation that further antagonized the Right.
"It is necessary at least some responsive posts here respond to the article from the Groyper point of view. Viz.: 'We continue under an assumption that that whites alone are prohibited from self-defense. This is the necessary self-handicapping we in the U.S. expect of whites.'"
It's better for a race to be "handicapped" in identity politics by not fighting back then have the "advantage" of getting behind leaders like Fuentes or Al Sharpton. You want someone to blame for your problems, do some research on NIMBYism and the coming entitlements crisis. Old people are the most deserving of blame for what has gone wrong in this country.
Indeed the undiscussed elephant in the room in all politics is, as you write, "the coming entitlement crisis." Unfunded and undisclosed liabilities are multiples the size of annual US GDP.
Hanania, you go out of your way to blame Americans, like boomers, or NIMBY who don't call the shots, and completely ignore people who actually dictate US policies and who are actually in charge of the state?
The reason for US downfall is simple: Special interest groups, foreign unregistered lobbies, dual-citizens across all branches of the US government (with their primary loyalty not to the US). International clique of people who are not loyal and not accountable to the American people. It all starts from there
NIMBYs and boomers voted repeatedly for the people who call the shots you mention who in turn rewarded them by letting them extract a bunch of wealth from the system leaving the generations to come (regardless of when their ancestors came here) to fight over the scraps.
From a cultural standpoint it absolutely DOES matter how long one's family has been in the country. Full cultural assimilation generally takes 3-4 generations. There are mappable political differences in voting preferences based on national origin from 2-3 generations back.
So it just isn't true that a recent naturalized arrival is as fully culturally American as someone whose ancestry goes back to the pilgrims. This goes both ways. Expat Americans are still culturally American even if they renounce their citizenship. Naturalization is ultimately just a piece of paper. It does not have a magic power to change who a person fundamentally is and how they were raised from childhood.
I'm not sure I follow. My ancestors arrived in North America 400 years ago. My wife's, a few decades before that. We have more in common - ideologically, socially - with many people who arrived in the US in the past few decades than we do with many people who've been here 3-4 generations. I've also lived outside the US at times. The experience for immigrants (or visitors) to the US is very different than that of US citizens going to other countries. (At least it used to be.)
> There are mappable political differences in voting preferences based on national origin from 2-3 generations back.
Actually, there are mappable differences that persist indefinitely. E.g., there's a blob of unusually Democratic voting around the meeting point of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin (near where I grew up) that turns out to be the persistence of an early, largely Catholic immigration into the area to support lead mining.
You should read (or skim) "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. He outlines four of the major regional cultures of the US, all of which were well established before the Revolution and persist to this day. Indeed, pretty much all of the "culture wars" map directly onto the different political/social views of those regional cultures.
From a legal standpoint, yes, a naturalized citizen is 100% as American as a descendant of the Puritans. IMO that's the only workable legal approach.
But I agree that there is something counterintuitive about the idea that a person who has been a citizen for a day has equal "American-ness" as a 12th generation citizen.
Every decade, many White (mostly) southerners list their ethnicity as "American" in the Census. And liberals have a field day mocking the idiot rednecks. But why is that wrong? Especially if identity is a social construct, as many liberals insist.
I think it boils down to national ties. Every first or second generation immigrant I know regularly travels back to their "old country" to see family, buy special things, vote and do other government processes, etc. They are American, yes. But they're also something else. By contrast, I'm a 12th-gen English-American. In practice, English-American means nothing. I have never been to nor do I know anyone in England. America is my only home and the only country I feel bonded to. If America goes belly-up, I will stay to fight and right the ship, instead of flashing a second passport to flee (like many dual-citizens in Ukraine did).
So in my mind, your "American-ness" level is a measure of how undivided your bond to the country is. People who have been here longer naturally have higher American levels, although it's possible a really all-in America-loving immigrant could score high as well.
A naturalized citizen had to work for years and formally declare an oath of loyalty to the US. They are more likely to pass a civics test than the average twelfth-generation American.
Therefore, a naturalized citizen is on average more American than you are.
You're implicitly defining "more American" as going through the naturalization process, and then declaring that naturalized Americans are more American. Circular argument?
Arguably naturalized citizens are less American because they had to go through a naturalization process in the first place.
By the way, low-IQ people in general are less likely to pass a civics test. Are low-IQ people less American in your opinion?
I don’t think that’s a circular argument. I am pointing out that natural born citizens have done nothing to demonstrate loyalty to this country, so if loyalty is key to being American, naturalized citizens are arguably more American than those who simply fell out of an American vagina.
I’m of the opinion that claiming extra American-ness is like obsessing over how white you are. The people who do that have nothing else to pin their self esteem to. If you’re born here, or you take a citizenship oath, you’re American. There’s no hierarchy to it, any more than there’s hierarchy in foot size.
American citizenship is one of the world’s greatest blessings, which is why some people are literally willing to give their lives to come here. It’s humbling.
How are the things you brought up evidence of loyalty when they're a required part of naturalization, something that people generally do out of self-interest?
My bunkmate in Navy boot camp was Filipino. I spent about 3 hours tutoring him on the material in his study guide for the citizenship test.
(Which he wanted me to do because he knew I was a nerd. Nerds are clearly more likely to pass such a test. Does that mean nerds are more American?)
He didn't seem to have known any of the material in it before, and boot camp was requiring him to learn a lot of other things at the same time. He passed first try. "Years" is a (waivable) bureaucratic thing, not how long it actually takes to pass the test.
Granted, someone who signs up for the armed forces might be "More American" than average in another way entirely, but that's less about culture and more about decisionmaking.
I agree wholeheartedly. Anyone with a dual loyalty is not fully American at heart. Part of the problem is foreign citizenship by descent laws in parts of Europe and Latin America which state that if a parent (or in some cases a grandparent or even great grandparent) was a citizen of that foreign country then you can apply for second citizenship. This inherently generates a dual loyalty (even if just a minor one) as a Plan B option should the US go downhill, which creates an incentivize structure to support policies that prop up the Plan B country and to marginally prioritize high current consumption and low taxes over the long term economic health of the US (since the person and/or their children can just leave). The perverse incentive only dies out after enough generations have passed so that the US citizen is ineligible for a foreign citizenship by descent.
American Jews have a similar incentive structure which is even more egregious because of Israel's Law of Return (which provides a standing right for all Diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen at any time). This law does not even require close generational ties to Israel, so it is not time-bound, making the implicit dual loyalty option permanent (it doesn't expire after 2-3 generations so long as the descendants are also religiously Jewish). Descendants of African-origin slaves have a comparable option (since they have a standing ability to gain citizenship in numerous African countries like Benin or Ghana). Even if these rights are never used their mere existence creates a conflict of interest as an insurance option. A final category of Americans who have a dual loyalty incentive are the super wealthy because they can buy numerous citizenships around the world by investment.
The solution to the dual loyalty problem is to completely ban dual citizenship, to ban US citizenship revocation after the age of 19, and to aggressively sanction any country that enables Americans to escape their citizenship obligations. Those raised in the US should be forced to choose between the US and their ancestral/religious homelands in the year after they turn 18. After that their decision should be locked in and unrevocable for any reason. Their personal fate should be tied to the ship of the US so that it receives their exclusive loyalty and dedication.
Or, an alternative solution would be to create a two-tier citizenship structure where individuals could choose their tier after they naturalize or turn 18 if raised in the US. The top tier would be exclusive (no dual citizenship allowed) and unrevocable, while those in the second tier would retain citizenship optionality but would pay for that "insurance" through a higher income tax rate and less access to social safety net benefits (it would be somewhat comparable to a permanent green card that never has to be renewed and can't be revoked for political reasons). Only those in the top tier would be eligible to vote, run for political office, or donate money to political campaigns or Super PACs.
To the far left, Jews are the very epitome of whiteness.
To the far right, Jews are fake whites who pollute whiteness.
Politically speaking, Jews are, and have always been, whatever others want (or don't want, as it were) them to be.
Jews aren’t fake whites. They aren’t white. Loxism is their disease as they hate the goy. Their driving force is resentment. The right doesn’t hate Jews out of a sense of racial purity or superiority. It’s because the Jews want whites dead because of their beauty and strength. And you hate that which threatens what you love. It’s righteousness not arrogance. Jews are a race of spiteful mutants
If only humans didn’t believe in fairytale sky daddies.
Leftists have been posting this meme for a while:
https://x.com/BrandonLBradfor/status/1985787020057387416
It's a very silly meme that only liberals who see all conservatives as white Supremacists would enjoy. Shapiro doesn't hate immigrants and has been a staunch advocate for "high-skilled immigration" like Hanania has been. "I don't give a damn about the browning of America" is a well-known Ben Shapiro quote among the far-right.
He's also capitalist and doesn't hate women
semantics. He hates feminism. He's virulently anti abortion. He takes a paternalistic attitude toward women, saying that his view of what he wants for them is for their own good... so how can it be hate ?
If someone wanted to control me and my body in a way that conflicted with my identity and my desire for self expression, though laws and the promotion of social shuning to the degree he does for women, no matter how much they said it was for my own good, I'd feel disrespected, disliked and even hated.
I think at root this contradiction has always been destroying the conservative movement from the inside.
Capitalism (economics) rests on the rational secular ideas of individual rights and rights-protecting government (in politics). This is the polar opposite of religious conservatism, which does not respect individual rights in politics, and therefore cannot support capitalism in economics.
We're now witnessing in real time as this contradiction gets resolved, and it's not resolving in favor of rights and capitalism, but in favor of authoritarianism. Shapiro is falling in line just like everyone else, supporting MAGA, tariffs, state ownership of companies, etc.
I think if we actually look at it properly, today's GOP is more left-wing than even fringe democrat groups. It's why dems don't really know how to counter MAGA.
You could be a religious conservative, and a classical liberal, and support the sanctity of human existence without devolving to base identitarianism. Indeed, many of the most laudable thinkers in the 20th-century right met this description (Chesterton, CS Lewis, Belloc). More recently, the GOP nominated for president, in 2012, a strongly religious conservative who was also a sincere capitalist with a heartfelt commitment to a universal view of human dignity.
That intellectual faction is long dead now.
It was rational for religious intellectuals to support secular government when there were real possibilities of conflicting religion. Maintaining neutrality of the governing body, so you could run your communities as you wish is a stable view. But if the choice is between secularisms and all of the religious on the other side, the equilibrium dissolves.
Agreed — though I think Richard makes some valid points in his article (e.g., regarding anti-Fuentes voices calling for Muslim Americans to be deported).
Yes, I think that is a valid critique, but I'm not sure Hanania himself understands why that double standard exists. Anti-Muslim attitudes have been the most accepted form of anti-immigrant sentiment within the Republican Party ever since I can remember. I think it's particular, and it most likely has to do with the good standing of Jews within the republican party, and the "special relationship" with Israel. Muslims are identified as anti-Israel, civilizational enemies in a way that other groups are not.
If we've learned anything recently, it is that the electorate will eventually figure out the difference between conservatives who embrace racism and conservatives who don't. Regardless of what the left says.
I think the point is that if you take religious conservative ideas seriously, you're going to end up with something like Fuentes, and worse. Shapiro has basically created his own destroyer.
"Vance, for example, has said that Americans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have more of a claim to the country than their political opponents" . Funny how that applies to Trump himself right? His mother was born in Scotland, and his father was the son of German immigrants who came to the US after the Civil War. No one has pointed this to him because everyone knows that he really means that "Whites have more of a claim to this country than their political opponents"
Also it doesn't apply to blacks whose ancestors fought in the civil war (and were mostly here prior to 1808 for obvious reasons) and have a stronger claim to "heritage" Americans than many whites.
Exactly!
Why everyone always forget Native Americans?
It's hard to imagine that JD Vance actually believes in the superiority of white and/or "ancestral" Americans given that he wrote a whole book about how all his family members and neighbors in his white ancestral-populated hometown were horrible people incapable of acting like anything but the most cracker version of ghetto dysfunctional conduct possible. And also he didn't choose to marry one but instead a high-class elite non-white second gen immigrant.
Which just lends more evidence to the already overwhelming pile that he is without any principles whatsoever and willing to say or "believe" anything to gain fame and power. He's clearly very smart yet willing to lie through his teeth and abandon previously articulated principles probably more than any politician I can think of and far more conniving and devious than Trump IMO who in a weird sense is borderline guileless.
As for Fuentes, makes no sense to me, he's at least a quarter Mexican and many of his followers are not white themselves, isn't that the case?? I think it's more that he seems relaxed, jubilant, and confident in his speaking manner and people just like his personality more than his actual ideas (not saying that's not dangerous). I keep reading "what are we going to do about Fuentes" panic pieces by Republicans who've realized that hit pieces and attempts to morally shame him just count as compliments and fuel his fire, so they don't know what to do. Sad to say that when you're dealing with that level of primitivist ideas impervious to moral persuasion, the best tactic against him is just something as shallow and mean as his own standard talking points: the fact that he's absolutely tiny and has the build and bobble head of a ten year old boy.
Just to add to your list re JD Vance, he is also the only senior politician to have compared Trump to Hitler. He called him “cultural heroine.” To me, JD Vance is the real scary future of the collapse of Western politics, because he knows exactly what he’s doing, and doing it anyway. I think he’s logic is something like, “since everyone wants authoritarianism, I may as well be the one holding the whip.”
As to Fuentes, I don’t think there’s anything that religious conservatives can do, since he represents the logical end point of the ideas they advocate.
I also think that people like Ben Shapiro have normalized unemployed and unqualified people talking about politics to an audience of millions. This too will lead to characters like Fuentes as a logical conclusion.
Conservatives need to realize that their fundamental ideas (religion and conservatism) are the actual problem and cannot lead to anything good. Instead, the more rational ones among them, need to embrace the secular and rational founding ideals of America: individual rights, and rights-protecting government.
Yeah I thought of that too. Or him being willing to say with a smile on his face during his debate that Democrats tried to get rid of a healthcare plan the GOP was pushing for. They all lie to some extent but he honestly takes it to another level and I agree with you seems far more dangerous to me than Trump, bc of it. Trump is just a charismatic egoistic gorilla basically, but Vance is creepy in his purposeful deviousness. Also hard to trust a guy who has changed his own name, religion, and all seeming principles multiple times, he's really a cipher.
He's also apparently a virgin.
And he's 27. I thought he was like 19.
That's why he says "having sex with women is gay!"
But I suppose that could be adjacent to your claim that "femininity is gay"?
Hey Richard, great article, quick question: Do you think this bodes well for the right wing quest to rule America indefinitely?
As of right now, Trump made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters (toughness), got some Asian ones (anti Affirmative action/Black crime against Asians). Do you believe that Fuentes maybe endangers this?
Nobody knows how a post-trump GOP pushes forward, but based on the stats you made in the article where non-hispanic whites are a minority, will an explicitly anti-brown rhetorical style succeed?
Many Hispanics see themselves as white, and many conservative non-whites are starting to vote more ideologically. Is embracing Groyperism the right wing equivalent of letting hyper-woke staffers run the comms department when the counrty is way further to the center?
Yeah, Richard has written all these articles, but he doesn’t address the question of how a groyper GOP can actually win. The vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of white Americans, don’t support groyper or white nationalist ideology.
The comparison he makes to abortion in this article is pretty apt: pro-life people can try to exert influence in the primaries, but Republican politicians understand just how politically toxic abortion bans are to the general public and thus try to stay away from the issue. The 2024 GOP platform took out almost all of its abortion language.
The future of the GOP is multiracial nativism.
The point of the article is that "multiracial nativism" makes little to no sense, and eventually it is going to implode, particularly because a considerable amount of minorities exists in mixed-status families.
How does it make no sense? Most black Americans have no connection to any other country, so nativism is easy to envision for them, especially if they feel like they’re not America’s most important minority anymore. There are many Hispanic Americans that have been here for generations, and some Hispanic people were in the American West before those areas even became states. There are also a sizable number of Asian and Middle Eastern people that have been here for generations. There are even also some immigrants that are nativists: they come here and they don’t want more people to come here.
Looking through your subscriptions, you sub to Bronze Age Pervert. He’s a Romanian Jew that immigrated here when he was 10 years old. So that’s already an example.
Because it doesn’t make sense, and you can see it right now with the collapse of Hispanic support, both evident in the recent election and in current polls. The monumental increase in the Hispanic population of the U.S. comes from waves of mass migration, not from an endogenous population increase.
Most non-MAGA Hispanics who voted for Trump did so because of Biden’s inflation and, like the median voter, they’re low-information voters who didn’t know who Stephen Miller is, nor were they aware of the implications of “mass deportations.” I live in a predominantly Hispanic community, and the collapse of Trump’s support is, anecdotally, observable here: people who were campaigning for him are now becoming rabidly anti-Trump, and so on. As I said, a not insignificant portion of them are in mixed status families or are in mixed-status friend groups.
It’s also ironic that one of the GOP’s strongholds among Hispanics is Miami (where Trump’s support is now declining), considering that Miami is, by far, the most non-American city in America: a majority-bilingual population, with a considerable share who use Spanish as their primary language. Don’t you see nativism contradicting reality here? Neo-nativism is, as Hanania shows, at odds with the current and future demographic realities of this nation, whose national ethos is rather vague and dynamic, unlike countries such as Hungary or Japan.
Black voters still support the Democrats by a considerable margin, and once the VRA gets re-enacted, you can expect an intensified wave of support. You can only achieve micro-gains within that demographic. I’m not sure about Indian or Asian voters, but Muslims are definitely not going to vote GOP anytime soon, especially after the levels of Islamophobia displayed by both Zionists and non-Zionists within the party.
Multi-raciality may well be the future of the GOP, but not the immediate one. I’m sorry.
So civic nationalism makes no sense? The ethos of our military forces makes no sense? The mutts who quashed axis powers made no sense?
It was, for the most part and in practice, a civic nation for whites with an Anglo-Protestant core. After WWII (largely in reaction to Nazism) civic universalism began to take shape, and ideas like the “nation of immigrants” or the “civic creed” became truly solidified. That post-War America is what "gave us" the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which is not really in vogue among the "multiracial nativist" crew right now.
Also, “multiracial nativism” is not the same as “civic nationalism.” Multiracial nativism is a chimera, nobody genuinely believes in it. Perhaps some right-wing Zionists do, framing the “evil Muslim” as a kind of Third World invader, but then people will rightfully and quickly begin questioning the foreignness of Jews themselves.
My sense is that it will be similar to Bernie Sanders effecting a pincer movement on the left. Republicans will get stuck between an electorate that still thinks Hitler is bad and a vociferous fringe that insists that he was good, actually.
Also, frankly, Jews are possibly the most politically engaged ethnic group and punch way above our weight in political influence. As a lefty, I’m not loving the rise of antisemitism on my side, but Fuentes explicitly says we are evil parasites who must be cleansed from the US. There is simply no comparison.
70% of Jews are Democrats, and the 30% who are Republicans are extremely pro-Israel. Conservative Jewish billionaires aren’t going to become Democrats, but they will stop writing $500 million checks to the GOP.
What you call "multiracial nativism" is what in France call "Republican Universalism" which is not to conflate with multiculturalism or melting pot (those are typical anglo-saxon things, according your average French intello), but the idea all citizens, besides their origins and background are bounded to an only political community: The Republic and her laws. But considering its communitarian emphasis I don't know how can be appliable to a strong individualist country like US.
Tea Hanania is enamored of cult studies lately
"The future of the GOP is multiracial nativism."
I'm actually not sure about this. I think the GOP might make the mistake the Democrats made in the woke era, of believing that extremely online X users are the people they are trying to appeal to. Or having the GOP leadership get trapped in that bubble. They might converge on multiracial nativism after losing a few elections however.
It would be hilarious if the *Democrats* embraced a soft form of multiracial nativism in response to Groyperism, totally boxed out the GOP and got themselves an electoral landslide.
It’s early, but the election results last night showed a huge drop off in Latino support for the GOP.
three blue states. and trump was not on the ballot. many of the Hispanic men who voted for him last year in those states are low propensity voters who stayed home.
Presumably Trump will never be on the ballot again?
Yes. And that's why if Vance is the nominee Rubio will be his running mate and they'll have to work hard on outreach to Hispanics.
Something Tucker mentioned during his discussion with Nick last week was that, even though they agree on 90% of everything, Nick has spent a significant portion of his airtime attacking people like Candace Owens, MTG, Joe Kent, and Stephen Miller. Nick said that it is because they attacked him unfairly first, but that is part of a larger trend I've noticed on the right. It would be one thing if all the GOP infighting were between different factions with fundamental differences. However, there is also significant intra-factional infighting among individuals who share almost entirely the same policy goals. Nick is against everyone, and everyone is against him. Steve Bannon and Elon Musk are now nemeses. Now there is an open civil war between the pro-Israel faction of the party and anyone who has an even remotely positive assessment of Tucker because he did an interview. I feel like it's all going to fall apart when the day comes when everyone can't hide under Trump's banner anymore.
This post/response contains a great analysis of how things stand.
Yeah, Trump is able to hold the coalition together because of his weird charisma, but also his complete lack of guile and general cluelessness. Nothing can stick to him because he doesn’t stake out many substantive positions beyond Trump = good and people who oppose Trump/what he wants to do at any given moment = bad and his pathological victimhood. It allows the current conservative movement to basically follow the same logic to a tribal and cultish extent. Thus, even while very large fissures exist below the surface Trump is the purple Elmer’s glue stick that barely holds the thing together. Without Trump, they won’t be able to play footsie with the Groypers while still distancing themselves sort of from them. They will either have to go full Groyper or denounce them and either way, neither faction holds enough power to maintain the full coalition Trump has managed to cobble together.
You're making the same mistake people made with Trump and trying to explain Nick's influence via his beliefs. Obviously that's part of it. But mostly people just like Nick because he is handsome & charmingly antisocial in a way that most politicians fail to pull off.
I mean I wouldn’t go that far. He has his audience because he’s not a politician so he doesn’t need to fear saying the quiet part out loud as much. Even though the MAGAfication of the GOP there aren’t many quiet parts left unsaid, Fuentes’s willingness to go there makes him popular with those who like someone breaking through those last boundaries.
At the same time, while Fuentes might be popular, the whole Affiare d’Tuck shows that those with some amount of mainstream opinion can’t openly engage with him. Like you can subscribe to Fuentes’s podcast but you can’t openly acknowledge that you do and the Based Ritual still only takes place as mostly edgelord one-upmanship in conservative only “safe spaces” where participants can maintain plausible deniability that they were only joking or it was an error of youth.
The issue for American conservatives is even if antisemitism is a crude, base and idiotic conspiracy theory, it's less crude, base or idiotic than most of the other conspiracy theories they voice
Candace Owens was fired from the Daily Wire for turning anti-Israel, but had previously claimed that Brigitte Macron was male, that vaccines on the whole were unsafe for children and that evidence for the existence of dinosaurs was a fabrication of paleontologists. Pro-Israel republicans ask their audiences to entertain all of these as reasonable contributions to debate, but to shun the idea that Israel exerts an overbearing influence on American politicians to the detriment of US interests as an obviously ridiculous conspiracy theory.
The idea that the Israel lobby or whatever is a huge detriment to US interests hasn’t survived contact with reality very well. The people who said that fearmongered so much about a war with Iran. Meanwhile we might get in an actual war with Venezuela.
Granted it’s less crazy than the Macron stuff, you’re right about that.
israel lobby is one if the most cuckiest moments of this empire.
I have a modest proposal to combat white nationalism: make advertisements and entertainment media (TV, movies, video games) targeted at potential white nationalists 90-100% white. And digitally alter news media and reporting so that prominent politicians and celebrities appear white.
Completely unironically, I think this would kneecap white nationalism. As revealed preferences in real estate demonstrate, very few people, if any, actually care about living in a homogenous polity in the US. The desire for ethnic homogeneity is purely based on an abstract aesthetic preference. Satisfy that, and the Groypers will stop trying to implement dumb real world policies.
I think that probably would help a lot. The backlash we have now is what woke hath wrought. I just watched the Last of Us, S2E1, and there wasn't a single non-Hispanic white man in a signifiant role among a number of protagonists. Of course that kind of hostility provokes a reaction.
Exactly
I guess I’m not sure why this article was written now rather than say a year or two ago. Republicans’ rhetoric in the 2024 campaign was far more right wing in terms of race and immigration than the previous two Trump campaigns, and a lot of these examples you cite didn’t start in 2025.
But a year or so ago, Fuentes was telling his followers to vote for Kamala and was saying things like “your body my choice” while Trump was denouncing the idea of supporting a federal ban.
Also around this time, your position on MAGA was that it wasn’t really about ideas; they were at most secondary concerns. The core tenet of MAGA was fealty to Trump. Whatever he says or does is what MAGA is. Fuentes obviously violates this tenet. Add Israel to this, and I’m not sure why Fuentes is being portrayed as the real face of MAGA all of a sudden.
Other than seeking new Democratic voters (and increasingly Hispanics are voting Republican) it’s not clear to me exactly why the Biden administration decided that it was a good idea to open our borders to millions of unskilled, unvetted people. It ended up costing the Democrats the 2024 election.
This was one of the most disastrous policies the country has seen in my long lifetime. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here undermines the wages of our working class and exacerbates our national housing crisis when we can’t house our own citizens. It consumed billions of our tax dollars which could have been put to better use.
The age of mass migration is over. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
It’s a supposed truism that no one in the United States is above the rule of law. No one except, perhaps according to many, these same millions of illegal immigrants. Why do so many believe that group to be beyond any consequences for breaking our immigration laws?
I believe that like almost all of our laws except those banning murder, illegal immigration should be subject to a statute of limitations. Even an armed bank robber is off the hook five years after his crime. Those apprehended soon after their illegal entry should be immediately deported but, anyone who has lived a crime free life here for seven years should be permitted to stay (without the benefits of citizenship) so long as they remain innocent of serious crimes. This proposal would guarantee that no illegal immigrant would ever gain the protection or privileges of citizenship and could always be deported for serious misconduct. The current unrest being caused by ICE in our big cities is untenable and is likely to put the open borders people back in power. That would be a true disaster. This statute of limitations approach is the only solution to the chaos that is sweeping our country.
While Biden’s policy was an obvious political disaster, it was economically a good idea given the inflationary environment. Higher wages drive inflation. I doubt that’s what Biden really had in mind, but part of the reason immigration became such a problem was the economy was actually quite good under Biden.
I haven’t seen one substantive complain about how immigration from our southern border actually made anyone’s lives worse. It’s all vibes.
Also, I’d love to see the myth that Democrats are laxer on immigration because they envision voters twenty years from now to die. No politician looks further than the next election, which is rarely more than two years away. Democrats were soft on immigration for a number of reasons, but counting on voters that haven’t even been born yet was not one of them.
Come: Those millions of people clearly are competing for housing and therefore driving up rents. They are also competing for jobs and therefore driving down wages. Both results are simply Economics 101 at work.
This is like saying that having children destroys the economy, because those children compete for jobs and housing.
More people create a bigger economy. It’s not a zero sum game.
Children just take the place of their grandparents, keeping the population stable. Add mass immigration on top of that and you've got to rebuild your cities or something to fit more people, which is politically not viable. Not like immigrants nowadays are creating new cities, they're crowding out native-born Americans from their homes.
A bigger economy maybe, but immigrants get most those gains while native-born Americans bear the downsides.
If that were true, populations that grow through reproduction would automatically get poorer, as the additional children are forced to compete for the same number of jobs that existed in the days of their great-grandparents. But that’s obviously not the case.
Richard has written a lot about this type of zero-sum thinking, which may be wired into us by evolution. But if we’re talking about American values, where is the confidence, the optimism? We should want to make the future bigger and better. To advance, not retreat.
I literally said nothing about the number of jobs staying the same.
Getting to live in a desirable location can be zero-sum though. Only so many people can live in low-density homes in sunny LA for example.
If you're so optimistic how about making immigrants create their own great cities instead of taking over existing cities? Aren't you optimistic they can do it?
This can’t be said enough. To be fair Biden’s immigration policy can best be described as shambles, but part of the problem is that they were caught off guard by how much faster the US economy started to recover compared to pretty much everywhere else, which was a huge factor in driving up emigration to the US post-COVID. A lot of Trump’s immigration policies remained in place whether as a choice or because of judicial orders. It wasn’t like his administration just decided to blow the doors open and declare a free for all.
> it’s not clear to me exactly why the Biden administration decided that it was a good idea to open our borders to millions of unskilled, unvetted people.
I actually know the answer to that. The key is the phrase I've seen a few times in the Boston Globe ("reliably liberal, but not thoughtfully so"): "people fleeing persecution, war, or poverty". Note that the three categories are treated enormously differently in the immigration law, people fleeing persecution are owed asylum, people fleeing poverty are the "economic migrants" that the law is explicitly designed to keep out. But once you go far enough left, there is the concept of the United States as the universal place of refuge for everybody whose life is bad, which implies that you don't distinguish between these categories.
And its clear that immigration policy inside the Biden administration was controlled by a bunch of people who subscribed to that concept. From there, the question is how to craft policy to basically allow everybody in who wants to get in. Though it did help that was about the time when people figured out the loophole in the system: enter illegally, immediately surrender and apply for asylum, stay in the country for a few years while your case works through the overburdened immigration courts.
Worley: It’s stay in the country for the rest of your life.
It is almost like the core of MAGA is just antisemitism with more steps...
“…the two problems that he pointed to were too much trade and immigration. As I’ve pointed out, this makes no sense when placed alongside his support for AI and automation…”
IMO there is a messaging issue here, where normal people feel like they're being simultaneously told to prepare for AI and automation to destroy the job market, but also we need mass migration to fill a bunch of jobs. “Wait, so my job and my kid's jobs are going to be AI'd or sent to India, but we also want to import more domestic competition on top of that?”
You could compare the “how do we teach 50 year old redneck truckers to code?” freakout of about 10 years ago (anticipating self-driving trucks) to today's headlines revealing that a huge number of truckers are recent immigrants who seem to think that the field is both stable and lucrative. “Just learn to code” was a failure of forecasting and narrative, and it was largely not a product of conservatives.
MAGA is defined by the cult of personality around Trump, not white identity. Maybe he has some vague white identitarian sympathies, but what do you think Vance's reaction is to Fuentes calling his wife a "jeet?"
Vance's reaction? Some part of me wonders if it was to quietly draw up contingency plans for how to divorce her if he needs to to set himself up for 2028, and political strategies to try and sell it to people. It'd be nice to be wrong about this—but he does give off a "careerist enough to dump his family for a shot at the presidency" vibes
100%
He basically already said he thinks his wife is going to burn in Hell.
Vance and Fuentes getting into a homosexual relationship feels more likely than Vance ever defending his wife.
🤣🤣🤣
if Left-wing Democrats and pro-israel right-wing jews get to play identity politics, why can't White people play identity politics for their own benefit?
Hanania, you said it yourself that White kids are _already_ a minority in the US. Therefore they can play all the political games that other minorities have done, which cinclude Identity Politics.
This is the essense of groyperism. They want for White people whatever Jews have done for themselves.
Yahya alone, of those posts made [up to 10:30am CST on 11/5/25], grasps the necessary response to Mr. Hanania's article. It is necessary at least some responsive posts here respond to the article from the Groyper point of view. Viz.: "We continue under an assumption that that whites alone are prohibited from self-defense. This is the necessary self-handicapping we in the U.S. expect of whites." Mr. Hanania signals that cracks are appearing in that dyke of whites' self-imposed restraint. I doubt the Left is listening. The Left will be largely caught unawares when the consequences of accumulated cracks unleash. It is a shame. If the Left were willing to grasp the significance of how far Right the Right has gone, Left-wing denizens downstream could have made the appropriate preparations. Said 'preparations' include refraining from legislation that further antagonized the Right.
"It is necessary at least some responsive posts here respond to the article from the Groyper point of view. Viz.: 'We continue under an assumption that that whites alone are prohibited from self-defense. This is the necessary self-handicapping we in the U.S. expect of whites.'"
It's better for a race to be "handicapped" in identity politics by not fighting back then have the "advantage" of getting behind leaders like Fuentes or Al Sharpton. You want someone to blame for your problems, do some research on NIMBYism and the coming entitlements crisis. Old people are the most deserving of blame for what has gone wrong in this country.
Indeed the undiscussed elephant in the room in all politics is, as you write, "the coming entitlement crisis." Unfunded and undisclosed liabilities are multiples the size of annual US GDP.
Hanania, you go out of your way to blame Americans, like boomers, or NIMBY who don't call the shots, and completely ignore people who actually dictate US policies and who are actually in charge of the state?
The reason for US downfall is simple: Special interest groups, foreign unregistered lobbies, dual-citizens across all branches of the US government (with their primary loyalty not to the US). International clique of people who are not loyal and not accountable to the American people. It all starts from there
Because that’s completely wrong.
NIMBYs and boomers voted repeatedly for the people who call the shots you mention who in turn rewarded them by letting them extract a bunch of wealth from the system leaving the generations to come (regardless of when their ancestors came here) to fight over the scraps.
From a cultural standpoint it absolutely DOES matter how long one's family has been in the country. Full cultural assimilation generally takes 3-4 generations. There are mappable political differences in voting preferences based on national origin from 2-3 generations back.
So it just isn't true that a recent naturalized arrival is as fully culturally American as someone whose ancestry goes back to the pilgrims. This goes both ways. Expat Americans are still culturally American even if they renounce their citizenship. Naturalization is ultimately just a piece of paper. It does not have a magic power to change who a person fundamentally is and how they were raised from childhood.
I'm not sure I follow. My ancestors arrived in North America 400 years ago. My wife's, a few decades before that. We have more in common - ideologically, socially - with many people who arrived in the US in the past few decades than we do with many people who've been here 3-4 generations. I've also lived outside the US at times. The experience for immigrants (or visitors) to the US is very different than that of US citizens going to other countries. (At least it used to be.)
> There are mappable political differences in voting preferences based on national origin from 2-3 generations back.
Actually, there are mappable differences that persist indefinitely. E.g., there's a blob of unusually Democratic voting around the meeting point of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin (near where I grew up) that turns out to be the persistence of an early, largely Catholic immigration into the area to support lead mining.
You should read (or skim) "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. He outlines four of the major regional cultures of the US, all of which were well established before the Revolution and persist to this day. Indeed, pretty much all of the "culture wars" map directly onto the different political/social views of those regional cultures.
From a legal standpoint, yes, a naturalized citizen is 100% as American as a descendant of the Puritans. IMO that's the only workable legal approach.
But I agree that there is something counterintuitive about the idea that a person who has been a citizen for a day has equal "American-ness" as a 12th generation citizen.
Every decade, many White (mostly) southerners list their ethnicity as "American" in the Census. And liberals have a field day mocking the idiot rednecks. But why is that wrong? Especially if identity is a social construct, as many liberals insist.
I think it boils down to national ties. Every first or second generation immigrant I know regularly travels back to their "old country" to see family, buy special things, vote and do other government processes, etc. They are American, yes. But they're also something else. By contrast, I'm a 12th-gen English-American. In practice, English-American means nothing. I have never been to nor do I know anyone in England. America is my only home and the only country I feel bonded to. If America goes belly-up, I will stay to fight and right the ship, instead of flashing a second passport to flee (like many dual-citizens in Ukraine did).
So in my mind, your "American-ness" level is a measure of how undivided your bond to the country is. People who have been here longer naturally have higher American levels, although it's possible a really all-in America-loving immigrant could score high as well.
A naturalized citizen had to work for years and formally declare an oath of loyalty to the US. They are more likely to pass a civics test than the average twelfth-generation American.
Therefore, a naturalized citizen is on average more American than you are.
You're implicitly defining "more American" as going through the naturalization process, and then declaring that naturalized Americans are more American. Circular argument?
Arguably naturalized citizens are less American because they had to go through a naturalization process in the first place.
By the way, low-IQ people in general are less likely to pass a civics test. Are low-IQ people less American in your opinion?
I don’t think that’s a circular argument. I am pointing out that natural born citizens have done nothing to demonstrate loyalty to this country, so if loyalty is key to being American, naturalized citizens are arguably more American than those who simply fell out of an American vagina.
I’m of the opinion that claiming extra American-ness is like obsessing over how white you are. The people who do that have nothing else to pin their self esteem to. If you’re born here, or you take a citizenship oath, you’re American. There’s no hierarchy to it, any more than there’s hierarchy in foot size.
American citizenship is one of the world’s greatest blessings, which is why some people are literally willing to give their lives to come here. It’s humbling.
How are the things you brought up evidence of loyalty when they're a required part of naturalization, something that people generally do out of self-interest?
Okay. Let’s say not 100% of the people who take the oath mean it. This is still more than the 0% of natural born citizens who take it.
"For years"
My bunkmate in Navy boot camp was Filipino. I spent about 3 hours tutoring him on the material in his study guide for the citizenship test.
(Which he wanted me to do because he knew I was a nerd. Nerds are clearly more likely to pass such a test. Does that mean nerds are more American?)
He didn't seem to have known any of the material in it before, and boot camp was requiring him to learn a lot of other things at the same time. He passed first try. "Years" is a (waivable) bureaucratic thing, not how long it actually takes to pass the test.
Granted, someone who signs up for the armed forces might be "More American" than average in another way entirely, but that's less about culture and more about decisionmaking.
I didn’t mean it takes years to study for the test. I mean that it takes years to earn citizenship.
I agree wholeheartedly. Anyone with a dual loyalty is not fully American at heart. Part of the problem is foreign citizenship by descent laws in parts of Europe and Latin America which state that if a parent (or in some cases a grandparent or even great grandparent) was a citizen of that foreign country then you can apply for second citizenship. This inherently generates a dual loyalty (even if just a minor one) as a Plan B option should the US go downhill, which creates an incentivize structure to support policies that prop up the Plan B country and to marginally prioritize high current consumption and low taxes over the long term economic health of the US (since the person and/or their children can just leave). The perverse incentive only dies out after enough generations have passed so that the US citizen is ineligible for a foreign citizenship by descent.
American Jews have a similar incentive structure which is even more egregious because of Israel's Law of Return (which provides a standing right for all Diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen at any time). This law does not even require close generational ties to Israel, so it is not time-bound, making the implicit dual loyalty option permanent (it doesn't expire after 2-3 generations so long as the descendants are also religiously Jewish). Descendants of African-origin slaves have a comparable option (since they have a standing ability to gain citizenship in numerous African countries like Benin or Ghana). Even if these rights are never used their mere existence creates a conflict of interest as an insurance option. A final category of Americans who have a dual loyalty incentive are the super wealthy because they can buy numerous citizenships around the world by investment.
The solution to the dual loyalty problem is to completely ban dual citizenship, to ban US citizenship revocation after the age of 19, and to aggressively sanction any country that enables Americans to escape their citizenship obligations. Those raised in the US should be forced to choose between the US and their ancestral/religious homelands in the year after they turn 18. After that their decision should be locked in and unrevocable for any reason. Their personal fate should be tied to the ship of the US so that it receives their exclusive loyalty and dedication.
Or, an alternative solution would be to create a two-tier citizenship structure where individuals could choose their tier after they naturalize or turn 18 if raised in the US. The top tier would be exclusive (no dual citizenship allowed) and unrevocable, while those in the second tier would retain citizenship optionality but would pay for that "insurance" through a higher income tax rate and less access to social safety net benefits (it would be somewhat comparable to a permanent green card that never has to be renewed and can't be revoked for political reasons). Only those in the top tier would be eligible to vote, run for political office, or donate money to political campaigns or Super PACs.