The main reason I like RH's writing is that he kind of blurts things out that other people, both left and right, will just dance around without mentioning.
I agree that most Republicans should just admit that they don't like minorities (except for the ones they do like) and think whites are better. No need to bend yourself in pretzels like JD Vance. Just come out and say it: I want a white country. Only liberals and people who work in liberal spaces get cancelled. You'll probably be okay. And you'll be more true to yourself and what you really believe.
And I think in the longer run being more honest with yourself might cause you to come to the same or similar conclusion that I did: that white people really aren't all that great. Yes, people who were white invented the airplane and the light bulb and democracy and the computer and whatever - wonderful!
But think about this: white "people" did not invent these things, individuals who happened to be white did. You as a white person do not own the patent on airplanes or computers. I as a white person have no claim on automobiles or whatnot. I didn't invent them, someone else did. And their skin color did not make them better at inventing things - being born in a rich high tech country with education and privilege did.
The truth is that white people actually kind of suck - because white people are people, and as a general rule: people suck. Yes, some white people have done amazing things. But so have asians, latinos, indians, and even blacks. But most regular people of all stripes just kind of suck. They are just mediocre humdrum nothings - including white people.
And that is the thing I've found about the whites who are obsessed with how great whites are. They are just kind of humdrum mediocre nobodies. They desperately believe that their whiteness means something probably because they themselves are not really all that remarkable. And the whites that are remarkable - are usually liberals or centrist conservatives.
For me personally, though I was raised to be another working class white loser. I decided that I didn't want to be that guy. I wanted to be better and more successful. So I left the white grievance politics behind - and damn, within a few years my life got better. Not that becoming say a liberal automatically makes you richer or something - it just forces you to look inward when asking "why is my life not where I want it to be?" Instead of blaming immigrants or jews, I learned to point the finger at myself.
And of course you have to be careful not to get caught up in wokeness either - which is the left's answer to "how can I embrace an ideology that is self defeating?"
Being racist and white nationalist is the road to loserdom (unless you are a media grifter - then it is probably your golden goose - but we all can't do it). Being real about your motivations will help you actualize this faster.
I’m always reminded of the whole “alcoholism is a disease” thing. Because it turns out that, even if that’s true (in whatever arbitrary sense), it doesn’t help alcoholics to tell them that their situation is the product of forces they can’t control. Telling someone they are a victim gives them permission to act like a victim.
I think this is one of the biggest poisons in our culture - the idea that we are victims. It doesn't matter who is saying it - left or right - it's toxic and self-destructive. And the people selling it are all grifters.
This has been obvious to me for years. I think I've even read stuff from decades ago saying basically this. People are attracted to racism because their belonging to a "superior" race gives them something to be proud of (and superior to others about) when their own lives are actually very unremarkable.
On a tangential note, I also think this is kind of true about intelligence in general. Maybe whites are on average more intelligent. But intelligence isn't everything. A lot of really shitty narcissistic people are intelligent. Sociopaths are intelligent. Intelligence doesn't make you a good person. It doesn't make you more likeable or happier. It doesn't make you a better parent, or a better spouse. I recall a line in The Wizard of Oz, where the tin man is asked whether he would rather have a heart or a brain and he answers that having had both in the past, he'd rather have a heart, because the heart gave him happiness.
So, even if it was true that blacks are on average less intelligent, it doesn't make them inferior, because intelligence is not the sole determiner of human value. Blacks are on average better musicians than whites and music feeds the heart and the soul. I love our modern inventions that make it possible for me to talk to people on the internet, I also love being able to listen to rock and roll, swing and jazz, and other music. Almost all of which are music styles invented or heavily influenced by blacks.
There are also different kinds of intelligence, and different types are fostered by the culture or subculture in question. I don't really buy the whole "whites are more intelligent than blacks" thing anyways because instead of trying to explain the IQ score variance, the celebrators of this belief use it to posit a permanent deficit on the part of blacks. Even if there is a deficit on the part of blacks, it is not permanent. Evolution does not work that way - we are always changing.
And if these folks are anti-evolution, then you can't have it both ways. If everyone is descended from one couple that God miraculously created, then we are all equals - created in God's image. If we evolved naturally, then blacks can overcome their temporary IQ score deficit - that is evolve. And that is if the deficit doesn't have social causes anyways - which I'm pretty sure it does.
I'm related through marriage to some lower class whites and they are not the sharpest tools in the shed. But they are not complete morons either as they have talents and skills they use - some that I don't possess. But I'm pretty sure most of them would score sub-100 on an IQ test. Not because they are "defective" but because intellectual pursuits are not highly regarded in their world.
They can change, but it would probably take a few generations. My take is that the low test scores for blacks are bascially the same thing.
"People are attracted to racism because their belonging to a "superior" race gives them something to be proud of (and superior to others about) when their own lives are actually very unremarkable."
For the most extreme cases, maybe. But I think "casual racism" it is simpler than that - it is easier to trust someone who looks like us. There is also how race correlates with culture, but is far more visible than culture, so in my neck of Europe everybody who is brown usually assumed to be a Muslim. And my Danish friend is furious how in his child's school they no longer serve pork, and of course he assumes everybody brown is supporting that - the reality is , in Europe, it is probably more often true than not.
Ultimately, nations exist for a reason, they revolve around people having a shared culture. And people tend to marry within their culture, so they share genetics / race too and that is what is visible. It is just that IMHO the US has always been too big and diverse for truly being a nation - white Montana would make more sense than white America, because the average US state is roughly the "usual" size for a nation, not the whole union. I mean already in 1776 the Roundheads in the North and the Cavalier in the South already not really a nation and look what happened... officially it was called a civil war, but not really, because they were really not one people. It was basically just a war.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that right-wing opposition to Gulf state-style guest worker immigration would be far lower than right-wing opposition to the status quo. Your "pitch" might actually work reasonably well as a defence of the former.
Be nice to have something like that if the migrants would go on schedule. But, every time there is a a liberal or moderate president, there will no effort to force the migrants to go somewhere else when their time in country is up. The Gulf states don't seem to be willing to make exceptions. How will you prevent the next President Kamala or President Joe from opening the flood gates? Hmm... After more thoughts, I realize the real advantage that the Gulf states have dealing with migrants is there is no group in a Gulf country that needs a "great replacement" to continue to be relevant.
Not sure if you understand how Gulf immigration works. The manual laborers have fixed terms, but the white collar guest workers can pretty much live there forever, enjoying a high standard of living, but without getting citizenship (primarily voting) rights. Hence, in some of the Emirates, you have far more residents from the subcontinent (mainly India) than native Arabs at any given time. The locals don't seem to mind this.
Gulf state-style guest worker immigration was basically the European model until the late 50s/early 60s (in a far lower scale of course). You just can't maintain such a system in a democratic context. You would have to go full authoritarians like the Gulf states
The problem of how to set up a law so that a President who doesn't like it can't just stop enforcing it has arisen before, in such contexts as anti-monopoly, "civil rights", and environmental protection. In those examples, the solution was to allow private citizens to sue for damages so that the judicial system acts to enforce the law regardless of what the President wants.
There are a few possible analogous approaches here, from least to most radical:
*Entrants are required to pay a large deposit to enter (say $10K; this is money that currently goes to "coyotes"). This deposit is returned only when they leave, and is deducted for all fines, damages, etc. that they incur while in the country.
*The law is written with a provision that if there is a certain net imbalance between people checking into the country and people checking out, entry is automatically shut down until the number of people in the country illegally has dropped sufficiently.
*If anyone is the victim of a crime committed by a person in the country illegally, the President is civilly liable for the full damages. This is not taxpayer funds; the President is required to pay out of their own pocket.
*Private citizens can apprehend and physically remove people who are illegally in the country. At that point, MAGA megadonors would presumably contribute money to pay bounty hunter firms to do this.
*A stronger form of the previous one: anyone in the country illegally has no legal protections whatsoever, like with outlawry in the old days. Any citizen can rob, rape, or murder them without legal consequences.
The Gulf-style worker program is 100% predicated on the fact that they are totalitarian states. Talking about doing something similar in the US is completely absurd. I should not have to spell this out.
Totalitarianism is when a senile old codger imports millions of illegal aliens into the country, then gives them far more government benefits than you will ever see.
That was a travesty, but one that stemmed from refusing to enforce the law. UAE can decide to get rid of someone and put them on the next plane out. We never will.
Oh definitely, Epstein donated to both parties and even Trump was a democrat for the longest time. This idea that only “the bad party” is fucking kids is ridiculous and part of the lib idea of there being a magical substance that makes all democrats allergic to money (except for all the democrats who magically begin voting with the Republicans, who were fine up until then and magically only start voting this way when they dont need to worry about re-election)
You just act like conservatives are just falling into socialistic arguments and ignore the facts that there are many people who ae economically left and culturally right. In fact this group is the major cross pressure swing group in our country.
You assume the main divide in politics will always be capitalism versus socialism but I argue that's not the case. This is the logical consequence of the end of the Cold war that these issues will matter less.
Richard isn't saying that those people are inconsistent as defined on a left-right ideological spectrum. He's saying that they're stupid and wrong and pandering to them is bad for society.
So your argument is that we now have a sizable bloc of genuine American national-socialists, and this is somehow the “natural consequence” of the Cold War ending? Explain how that follows.
Capitalism matters less now that it's not the locus of our ideological disagreement with a rival power, so people are free to have more left-wing economic views. Since most of the country is not rich (economically left) and the USA is much more religious than other rich countries (culturally right), this is to be expected.
Also, econ-left/culture-right isn't necessarily Nazi, Catholic social thought fits this quadrant as well and does not have a body count in the millions.
You’re shifting the frame rather than engaging Hanania’s argument. His claim isn’t that “econ-left/culture-right” people don’t exist, or that the quadrant is inherently Nazi. It’s that this specific American version emerged because the right needed non-racial pretexts for what are fundamentally racial/nativist preferences. That mechanism is the point of the essay.
Your Cold War explanation doesn’t actually connect to that dynamic — it just asserts that “capitalism matters less now,” without showing how this produces protectionism or immigration panic on the right at this moment. Likewise, invoking U.S. religiosity or Catholic social thought sidesteps the issue: those may describe the quadrant, but they don’t explain the shift Hanania is analyzing.
The core argument is that racial motivations are generating bad economics. Your reply replaces that mechanism with broad sociological vibes that don’t address why the right’s views on trade, immigration, and labor changed in precisely the way he describes.
I was responding to your response to Kashem's argument.
As to the overall point: I guess I would agree with that. I guess the thing is I'm willing to tolerate some degree of 'bad economics' in a rich country to avoid racial conflict and preserve a market-dominant majority a la Amy Chua (even if we have to change the definition of that majority group a little!) I'm not as huge a fan of markets as Hanania; they're good, and better than a centrally planned economy, but usually they need some regulation.
I think I get what you’re saying, and I’m broadly sympathetic: in a rich, diverse country some degree of “suboptimal economics” can be tolerable if the tradeoff is greater social stability. I’m not allergic to that framing at all — stability > ideological purity.
My concern is that the structure of our digital communication system pushes everything in the opposite direction. It rewards the most radical, zero-sum, tribal interpretations of every issue and systematically punishes moderation or stability-seeking arguments. So even if one prefers a harmony-preserving approach, the incentives of the system drown it out.
That’s the bind: reversing these dynamics would require interventions that the public would instantly interpret as authoritarian, even if the goal is simply re-establishing the pre-digital equilibrium where politics wasn’t a 24/7 rage-machine.
"A person who is honest about their motivations can simply oppose immigration and otherwise have sensible opinions on trade, letting technology replace jobs, and labor unions."
This is basically me. I don't support tariffs, generally speaking. I am fine with technology replacing jobs, generally speaking. I just don't want to live around foreigners. I don't want to share my country with foreigners. This is normal, healthy, and a sentiment shared at a deep level by most people, even if a large chunk of them know better than to admit it out loud. Personally, I believe that the artificial suppression of this preference is partially to blame for people like Nick Fuentes (and arguably even Donald Trump) gaining prominence.
Why can't Republicans say this? The problem is that politics is not about being intellectually honest. It is about "scoring points" and "dunking." This is because the average person is a "low decoupler" who has difficulty grasping the concept of trade-offs. If you say to him "yes, banning immigration will hurt the economy, but," your viewpoint is simply discredited wholesale in his eyes. He only understands the world in terms of viewpoints that are completely correct or completely wrong, completely good or completely bad.
This is the same reason why you would see the left trying to argue things like "actually feminism is good for men too" and "actually DEI helps white people also."
Honestly, I think this is largely wrong and shows that Richard spends too much time on X.
Pretty much every case of large-scale migration you look at has some kind of political blowback, regardless of the race or income of the group involved. Another constant is that the blowback gets worse in precarious economic times.
Anti-Indian sentiment in tech didn’t really start until the job market went to shit. It really accelerated after the Trump administration got rid of the other big scapegoat tech workers used (DEI), and H-1Bs—most of whom are Indian—were basically the only thing left to complain about.
Indians in the U.S. have always been brown, foreign, and often non-Christian. What’s new isn’t their identity; it’s the bad tech job market.
Now a lot of young, nerdy men who thought a good tech job was finally their ticket out of the low social position they had growing up—who feel like they made the sacrifice of taking a hard major while everyone else was having fun—are graduating into a terrible entry-level job market and seeing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers coming into the US every year. On top of that, they see what looks like strong in-group hiring and feel locked out. Obviously they, and their middle-class suburban parents, are going to be pissed.
Richard has this thing where he acts like, since immigrants aren’t actually taking American jobs, people can’t sincerely believe that immigrants are taking American jobs; as if people have never been sincerely wrong about anything. The reason we even have named fallacies like the lump of labor fallacy is precisely because they’re pushing back on common intuitive mistakes people make.
And the “Germans would have it harder than Indians” take is especially funny, because Germans historically faced way more prejudice in the US than Indians ever have. Polish plumbers were a major talking point for EU-skeptics in Europe.
There is, of course, a kind of racism Indians face because they’re brown / not Christian / have accents / whatever. But they had all of those traits during the first Trump administration and were never a major topic of right-wing outrage. What changed was the tech labor market and who was available to blame.
None of this means race and culture don’t matter at all; they clearly shape how people talk about immigrants. But you don’t need “hidden white nationalism” to explain why people freak out when a suddenly bad labor market collides with a big, visible foreign workforce in the exact jobs they wanted.
This is closer to the truth. Richard has an entertaining hot-take, but the best data we have to go on doesn't reflect it. Plus, in the last election it was minorities that shifted right in their vote.
Everything is about incentives. Populists might misunderstand how stuff works, but if they are correct and confident that some element of their current cultural and/or economic experience is now worse, they will attempt to place the blame somewhere.
What doesn't help is that concerns are either cast aside or not tactfully addressed. You can point to real-wages growing, or papers about immigration rate boosting GDP or whatever, but it's insufficient if you're side-stepping demand's impact on housing for instance (because of inelasticity of supply). Or the real factors behind a higher youth unemployment rate.
Dems for their part are starting to capitalize on the "Abundance" train and bitch-slapping the heterodox in their ranks. If that works out for them, the incoherency on the part of Republicans will be a liability. Long-bet is that Dems make some gains based on policies related to housing and easy wins like repealing tariffs once Trump is out.
To be honest I doubt Richard knows how things work either, he loves to talk about markets and how they work, but as far as I know he spent his 20s in school, then in a think tank, then graduated to being a substack writer.
While the later is a sort of market competition, it's hardly the type he writes about so confidently every day regarding DEI and immigration in the corporate world. The only corporate job I know of him working is flipping burgers as a teenager, which he admits he was terrible at.
I mean he once suggest we don't needs laws against discrimination, because firms that discrimination would be less profitable and thus be eliminated by the free market. It's hard to take a person like this seriously.
And while I believe he's correct about high skill immigration being a net good for the US, it's not as simply as "lump of labor fallacy" and he's never really engaged with any of the labor economics behind it.
My guess is he kinda knows all of this on some level, but does what makes him alot of money.
Right, I think a lot of writers on substack weave in some hot-takes to stand out, especially when churning out content fast and regularly. That can be difficult to balance. There's the fear that if you're too lukewarm and agreeable people will think you have nothing to say, but on the other hand if you're way out there you won't be taken seriously as you aren't interested in the truth.
This is an excellently written article for a belief I do not agree with. :) Let me try.
First of all, I'm not sure why we should want to emulate Gulf Arab states. These are countries that accumulated much of their money through sales of a single natural resource, rather than a diversified economy. Anyway, we don't have a single resource we sell like the Gulf Arab states.
Second, they have a large effectively exploited slave labor class. We...ah...tried that in the 18th and 19th centuries, you know how that turned out, race became the most toxic issue in American politics, with a black-white divide that's been a major problem ever since. You either send them back after they're done (not likely in the USA now given lots of them have kids here), don't give them full rights (in which case you have a large second-class citizen group that hates you and you have to keep in check through threat of violence), or do give them full rights (in which case you set off people's natural tribal instincts to fear foreigners).
I would argue for a pause in immigration of a few decades to allow the assimilation of new arrivals. We did this in the 1920s (notably after the foreign-born fraction reached about 15%, similar to the level it is now) and the decades that followed (apart from the Depression, which happened everywhere and we weathered better than, say, Germany) were pretty good for the USA. There were other reasons we became a world power--Europe basically blew itself up--but it wasn't as if we stagnated for all that time.
I don't think cutting high- or low-skill immigration will make us poor. Poorer than we might have been, certainly, but at some point the hit to social cohesion just isn't worth it.
As a foreigner, I think the big mistake the United States made during Reconstruction was *not* repatriating all those former slaves to their homelands whence they and their ancestors had been so cruelly abducted. Conferring citizenship on them was a mistake. Had you done what the Emirates do, you could simply send them home. To atone for their having been brought over in hell-ships, you could fly them home now in Business Class.
They were there for several generations and wouldn't even know how to get by. The villages their ancestors lived in wouldn't have known them. And in the 19th century it would have been a huge undertaking, building the ships and so on.
I think you overemphasize the racial motivations behind much of the nativist sentiment at the moment on the right over cultural ones. There are consequences of mass immigration that negatively affect native-born Americans beyond economic considerations that have nothing to do with race. The most obvious being that the United States is trending towards becoming a de facto bilingual country. There is an increasingly strong pressure to learn Spanish if you live in the Sun Belt and work in fields such as education, healthcare, hospitality, or emergency services. This is particularly true in urban areas where immigrants tend to live in ethnic enclaves, where there is little pressure to learn English. That is evidence that not all immigrants assimilate extremely well, even if there is hope that their children may do so, assuming the public schools in those enclaves prioritize English instruction. That also assumes the Biden migration wave was a one-time fluke and that we have relatively steady immigration levels in the future, the lack of which is really what drives much of the animus behind this debate to begin with.
I think that relates to your point about an Indian with a heavy accent facing more hostility than a German immigrant in a heavily conservative area. I think you are implying an association between how the terminally online right behaves on X and how rural working-class whites behave in real life that I don't believe actually exists. To the extent that it does, I think it demonstrates the precariousness of an immigration policy that overwhelmingly clusters immigrants in particular areas of certain states, compared to past decades and centuries, when immigrants were more evenly dispersed among many culturally distinct parts of the United States.
"The most obvious being that the United States is trending towards becoming a de facto bilingual country."
There is no cultural product in the world more secure than the status of the English language, both practically and in matters of prestige. People who see a threat here have particularly vivid imaginations.
No one cares about the status of English in the world(unless they're traveling), they care about the status of English in their countries/towns.
If you come to Houston, Texas(where 40% of people speak Spanish at home) and go to a doctor's office, virtually all of the front desk staff will be bilingual Latinas.
If you're a working class anglophone mass immigration has absolutely disadvantaged you in certain customer facing service sector job, because you'll be outcompeted by immigrants bilingual kids, and in some cases because you can't communicate with certain coworkers.
The fact that more kids in Brazil or Jordan speak English than ever before is irrelevant to you.
The prestige of English stems from the prestige of the United States and, formerly, the United Kingdom as superpowers. The practicality of it stems from both countries being the most desirable immigration destinations, where learning English was/is a prerequisite for entering and succeeding in both societies. As the prestige of those countries declines, at least in relative terms, so does the prestige of the English language. If secondary languages become entrenched, then the language may well lose its practicality in the long run as well.
I would be more than happy if you are right. English may have become so entrenched as the global lingua franca, thanks to factors such as the internet and its widespread instruction as a secondary language globally, that its utility for second-generation immigrants and their descendants in the Anglosphere will remain unchanged, preserving its status for a very long time.
You’re neglecting one important factor behind English as lingua franca — it’s relatively consistent and easy to learn compared to most other languages. Spelling is a pain in the butt but technology makes that less impactful. Compare to any other possible contenders:
India - a billion+ people but no one language (other than English) is spoken by anything close to a majority
Chinese - a billion+ people but divided between Mandarin and Cantonese; tonal distinctions extremely difficult for non-natives to pick up on; Logographic writing requires enormous effort at memorization and isn’t ideally suited for keyboards
Spanish - probably the the most practical contender as far as ease of learning is concerned, but 3-4 different conjugations per verb per tense, plus subjunctive make it a bit harder than English (also spelling is dramatically easier). And unlike India or China there is no hope of the Spanish-speaking world achieving anything close to the economic or political dominance of the US + British Commonwealth.
Suppose you use the metrics that the Foreign Service Institute uses for ranking the difficulty of learning languages for native English speakers. In that case, the ease of learning English is highly dependent on the learner’s native language. For Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese speakers (The FSI’s very hard languages category), the peculiarities and inconsistencies of English vocabulary and pronunciation are incredibly foreign and challenging to learn. It is comparatively much easier for speakers of Romance languages and somewhat in between for everyone else. Luckily, compared to the UK, the majority of immigrants to the United States are starting from a native language that makes learning English easier.
Indeed, I'm a native English speaker and fluent in two other languages. I can't tell you how many times I ask native speakers how to say [INSERT ENGLISH WORD] in the other two languages, and people respond that there just isn't a word.
It almost never happens the other way around except when the source language is Yiddish -- but English has basically adopted all the best Yiddish words.
Interesting. I wasn't aware anyone made a ranking and I don't question it. And of course the difficulty in learning a new language will depend on the languages you already know. But nevertheless there's the question of 'what's the alternative?' English may be an absolute PITA for a native Gujarati speaker but what other language will he choose to learn if he wants to make it economically?
India is a peculiar example because it is so linguistically diverse, and, of course, there is the legacy of the East India Company and the Raj, which institutionalized the use of English. Given the rapid progress of AI, the alternative to a lingua franca might be a Star Trek-style universal translator. Very efficient for globalization, but very detrimental to social integration on a national scale.
Maybe I’m making this overly complicated. It’s actually rather absurd to think that English will lose its cultural dominance just because being bilingual gives you a leg-up in a few job categories in a few regions of the country, when every struggling parent from the Brazilian favelas to Himalayan highlands to the African Savannah would kill to get their children an education that includes English fluency.
To be honest, I think the best way to destroy the global dominance of the English language would be for the right wing to be successful in its attempt to end all meaningful international trade and institutions. In that case a young person in another country would be better off learning Chinese or French as opposed to English, the language of a strange isolationist former power.
The issue is not just the status but also the fact that having to learn another language to do your job is both annoying and increases the amount of labor you need to do to maintain status quo.
This is also why workers don't like new technology being introduced into their work a lot of the time. They have to keep doing everything they were doing before and now *also* learn how to do this new thing. Maybe eventually the technology pays off in efficiency, but 1) the worker themselves is not always the obvious recipient of the efficiency dividend and 2) it doesn't make the short term period of knowledge acquisition less of a slog.
Most people want to spend less time working, not more, and skills acquisition to stay relevant is itself a kind of work unless you just happen to love your job so much you want to do it during all waking hours. I love learning for its own sake personally but I certainly have preferences for what I want to be learning. I would absolutely rather spend my time reading history books than learning how to navigate yet another set of boring software that's supposed to be streamline something in an office.
I don't want to learn Spanish for the same reason some immigrants don't want to learn English. It's hard and tedious. They at least have the incentive that learning English corresponds with increased prosperity. It doesn't look like learning Spanish would result in *any* particular increased prosperity for me. Yes, over enough time, this would incentivize the continued dominance of English and the gradual eroding of Spanish, but what good does that do me *now* if I have to learn Spanish to do my job?
This is my biggest personal hangup with modernity. I'm very happy that I'm not starving, riddled with intestinal parasites, being traded as a concubine, dying in childbirth, or any number of physical horrors of the past. I don't want to go back. But what's my incentive to keep slogging through labor I don't want to do now exactly? Status? I'm in the top 25% income in the United States which is the richest country on Earth. At a point, continual striving for more status just becomes inane. I want my fucking freedom from labor, man. I don't feel like the amount of tedious work I have to do has diminished one bit in my 40 years of life. It's just different kinds of tedious work.
This is actually the only reason I can even muster the energy to do competent work at all anymore. The thought that if I bust ass, I might at least be *free* when I'm old. But, of course, I'll also be more likely to be decrepit and unable to enjoy the freedom then.
In all the world, only in the Canadian province of Quebec is English under threat. The statist government demands that all business, education, and government service be conducted in French, save for a few legacy institutions like McGill University that any year seems likely to get the axe, and backs that up with fines and other regulations. Of course the elite learn English so they can deal with the financiers in New York and present research findings, in English, at international conferences. (At Canadian conferences they present in French!) But increasingly the ordinary working class will find itself with no alternative but to take what Quebec employers offer because they won't be able to get jobs in the rest of Canada, where very little French is spoken, much less abroad. (Quebec French is not even easily intelligible in France.) Most English people, concentrated in Montreal, have fled to Ontario. The only immigrants who feel comfortable settling in Quebec are from La francophonie: Haiti, Senegal, Algeria, French Equatorial Africa, and other centres of excellence like that.
Some of these measures violate the Canadian Constitution but the Quebec government thumbs its nose at our Supreme Court and does what it wants to do anyway. "Justice Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!", indeed.
To your point: Spanish could achieve primacy against the natural supremacy of English only if a state where, say, two-thirds of the people spoke Spanish as a first language, decided to commit suicide by suppressing the use of English using a state law, as Quebec does. Nonetheless there is a risk that immigrants who don't assimilate will become so isolated by language that they will not be reachable by English-speaking politicians and cultural icons like the Internet and (ages ago) TV. This might not be so bad with Spanish but it is a risk in multi-cult cities like Toronto where thousands (not millions) of people each speak one of 150 fragmented minority languages and don't learn English at all.
Doesn't explain the anti Indian hate. Indian-Americans have assimilated well, speak English, and generally follow the law. Yet people online rage because they shop at Costco, adopt stereotypical white hobbies like camping/birding or visit national parks.
There's so little to complain about actual Indian American behavior, people need to go to Canada and the UK to find examples of Indian immigrants causing problems or invent issues such as caste discrimination (for which there is little evidence that it occurs here).
The weird thing is this hate appears to be politically neutral and appears even among the Anti-Maga.
I can’t explain it either. I have never met or seen anyone outside of social media who has a problem with Indian-Americans. The fact that they take on the same hobbies, views, and work in the same sectors as white liberal elites might explain it as partially racially motivated and partially motivated by resentment towards that larger class by the online right.
Yes, America gets the best of the Indian immigrants. We (Canada) get the ones who couldn't get into the U.S. Do you have a faction of Indian immigrants who agitate for the creation of the Sikh homeland of Khalistan in India? This annoys the Indian government to no end that we harbour people trying to destabilize India. A couple of their spooks even bumped off a guy in Canada a few years ago. Is this just a Canadian thing, due to having a lower class of immigrant? Or is it a thing in America, too.
Very few Germans want to move to the U.S. or Canada anyway. They've got it made with their state pensions and union protected jobs. Why would they want to emigrate? It's artificial to say that an Indian with an accent would be bullied in Alabama -- if that's even true -- more than a German would. There won't be any Germans to compare.
I've known a couple of dozen elected senators and representatives through my work over the years. About two-thirds of them have invited into their offices and homes. We've had discussions concerning many matters of interest. Everything I write from this point on was explicitly discussed with them, and they would tell you so.
I can tell you flat out that none of them...NONE of them...are (or were) ideologically intelligent, nor did they "vote their conscience." Party line all the way. Only about five of them would I classify as intelligent or well-versed in the subjects and topics that national politicians debate and vote on. Most of them ran on "values" or "principles" or "bringing change and leadership to the Senate or House, respectively. Once a politician gets into office, they have a modicum of power. When they see what that little bit of power can do, and then they see their more senior colleagues' power, they just want more, and will do anything to keep it. Even though they know that they are flesh-covered marionettes who have sold their soul and backbone to the wealthy and influential people who really run this country for the privilege of doing what their masters want, and when they want it.
I harbor no illusions on where this country is going. The guardrails have rusted out. The Constitutional and Democracy purists have fallen by the wayside. Nothing short of a total capitualation of Trump and MAGA sycophants will turn this thing around, but then again, we've been moving in this direction since that fateful day in 1964 when Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 Presidential election, well, "bigly." This whole cluster**** wer're going through now is just the final manifestation of the last half-century plus.
Having watched politics for over 40 years, I've come to the conclusion that a key prerequisite for success in elected office is to have a personality disorder.
Pelosi making millions through insider trading is a good example of that. Same with Biden and Harris prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens.
Your pitch seems to be to get Republicans to admit they are racist, so that they can adopt a Caplanian keyhole solution where immigrants have few to no rights, on the assumption that it is only the confession of racism that is preventing a mass adoption of cosmotarian economic views. It seems a stretch. Republicans are at least as sacrally committed to voting and the bill of rights as they are to secret racism.
The keyhole solution is a nonstarter. Would require a constitutional amendment, not happening. What about birthright citizenship? Voting rights, due process? And anyway it's not plausible that we'll have robust crime and immigration enforcement under a flood of guest workers.
It's also odd you bring up Millei in this context, given Argentina is majority white. Ditto Chile. If anything, these examples cut against your thesis that a minarchist dictator might frictionlessly take power under any polity.
There's also the elephant in the room that Republicans just aren't particularly racist compared to other groups worldwide. All groups have homophily, and during the great awokening the tendency was to tar white people as intrinsically evil and racist. So the approach of, “just admit you're racist, guys,” seems to have already been tried, at fever pitch, yet here we are. Worth noting that immigration restrictionists going back to the 80s warned that as whites became a minority in the USA we'd see balkanization and white identitarianism come to the fore, yet here we are.
Anyway, I'm not aware of any regime built on acknowledging racism that had sound economic policies.
“My argument to racists is that even if you hate Indians, you should hate being poorer and dying of cancer or suffering from Alzheimer’s more.”
The natives have rightful ownership of the streets, roads, etc. and may choose to keep immigrants off of their property. Also, it is not remotely immoral to reject alien phenotypes anymore than it is “immoral” for a woman to reject a short man (phenotypes in both cases). In the absence of private ownership of roads, a good compromise would be to push for racial enclaves or guest workers, which would still allow for immigrants in certain areas. Arguing for liberty rather than tediously moralizing against racism is the correct approach.
Good thought. FYI: Migrants are racists, too. I one suggest to a group in Indian software guys I worked with that America would become browner as the integrated. They were horrified by the possibility that their sons and daughters could marry non-Indians even though the software people had no plans to return to India. They wanted Indian ghettos in America. Note the problem is Texas having with Indians and Arabs trying to build "our race only" suburbs.
The last part is just because they are first generation. Their kids will want to be normal participants in American culture. There are Indian enclaves in Jersey. The kids don’t stick around and work at 7/11 and put dots on their heads, they become normal and generally are successful net contributors to society. That’s (part of) why America is better than Europe.
Yeah, immigrants form insular neighborhoods. They always have. You need a support system in a new country and you ease into a new culture by retaining elements of your old one. Only really matters when you’re fresh off the boat, though.
I think they come easier to that notion because it fits with their caste systems in their home countries. They just aren't as bothered by racism as a moral failing the way white Americans are. For some weird reason Canada is obsessed with anti-black racism, too, even though we never had a slave economy. All our black people are descended from people who came voluntarily as United Empire Loyalists -- King George III promised freedom to any slave who made it to British territory, i.e., Halifax Nova Scotia where the Royal Navy base was --, later in the Underground Railroad, and more latterly as immigrants from the Caribbean and still later (now) from Africa, particularly Somalia. Despite never having been slaves in Canada, we still seem to believe their higher criminality, every single wave no matter where from, is due to us being racists. (We didn't used to. We used to look down our smug noses at American racism but it became fashionable to blame ourselves too about 20 years ago, I guess when black crime became too prevalent to ignore, so we had to invent a reason for it that wasn't the obvious racist reason..)
I do not understand the point of your analogy to ownership of private property. Our system that decides the manner in which “the natives” exercise dominion over “their property” is representative democracy.
"Clearly, there was never anything special about whites that made them uniquely inclined towards loving capitalism"
I agree with almost all of what you're saying here, but this particular statement is not obviously true, and I think it needs to be supported more. If, say, the Western European marriage pattern created a stronger-than-usual genetic selection for young men who are good at earning lots of money, who seek their fortune instead of going with the flow, it's possible there's a genetic component here. This is not trivially refutable.
I don’t accept the premise of “implicit white nationalism.” Take out “white” and the motivation to favor US manufacturing, workers, etc. without accompanying racist motivation is equally defensible. While this may not be optimal from a pure capitalism free markets are good perspective, both R and D governments have always had their thumb on the scales of per country immigration quotas, tax credits and subsidies to favored infrastructure companies and industries, legs up to unions and cronies, and all manner of pure market distortions. Torching DEI is the most anti-racist thing to happen since the Civil Rights Act. There are countervailing national security, crime, education, safety net, housing and, yes, electoral self-interest factors that could justify nationalistic policies, at least in the short term. If HB1 visas are so great, what’s wrong with a $100K application fee? Same fee for white German as brown Indian applicants (which they will negotiate with their prospective US employer to pay).
The main reason I like RH's writing is that he kind of blurts things out that other people, both left and right, will just dance around without mentioning.
I agree that most Republicans should just admit that they don't like minorities (except for the ones they do like) and think whites are better. No need to bend yourself in pretzels like JD Vance. Just come out and say it: I want a white country. Only liberals and people who work in liberal spaces get cancelled. You'll probably be okay. And you'll be more true to yourself and what you really believe.
And I think in the longer run being more honest with yourself might cause you to come to the same or similar conclusion that I did: that white people really aren't all that great. Yes, people who were white invented the airplane and the light bulb and democracy and the computer and whatever - wonderful!
But think about this: white "people" did not invent these things, individuals who happened to be white did. You as a white person do not own the patent on airplanes or computers. I as a white person have no claim on automobiles or whatnot. I didn't invent them, someone else did. And their skin color did not make them better at inventing things - being born in a rich high tech country with education and privilege did.
The truth is that white people actually kind of suck - because white people are people, and as a general rule: people suck. Yes, some white people have done amazing things. But so have asians, latinos, indians, and even blacks. But most regular people of all stripes just kind of suck. They are just mediocre humdrum nothings - including white people.
And that is the thing I've found about the whites who are obsessed with how great whites are. They are just kind of humdrum mediocre nobodies. They desperately believe that their whiteness means something probably because they themselves are not really all that remarkable. And the whites that are remarkable - are usually liberals or centrist conservatives.
For me personally, though I was raised to be another working class white loser. I decided that I didn't want to be that guy. I wanted to be better and more successful. So I left the white grievance politics behind - and damn, within a few years my life got better. Not that becoming say a liberal automatically makes you richer or something - it just forces you to look inward when asking "why is my life not where I want it to be?" Instead of blaming immigrants or jews, I learned to point the finger at myself.
And of course you have to be careful not to get caught up in wokeness either - which is the left's answer to "how can I embrace an ideology that is self defeating?"
Being racist and white nationalist is the road to loserdom (unless you are a media grifter - then it is probably your golden goose - but we all can't do it). Being real about your motivations will help you actualize this faster.
I’m always reminded of the whole “alcoholism is a disease” thing. Because it turns out that, even if that’s true (in whatever arbitrary sense), it doesn’t help alcoholics to tell them that their situation is the product of forces they can’t control. Telling someone they are a victim gives them permission to act like a victim.
I think this is one of the biggest poisons in our culture - the idea that we are victims. It doesn't matter who is saying it - left or right - it's toxic and self-destructive. And the people selling it are all grifters.
This has been obvious to me for years. I think I've even read stuff from decades ago saying basically this. People are attracted to racism because their belonging to a "superior" race gives them something to be proud of (and superior to others about) when their own lives are actually very unremarkable.
On a tangential note, I also think this is kind of true about intelligence in general. Maybe whites are on average more intelligent. But intelligence isn't everything. A lot of really shitty narcissistic people are intelligent. Sociopaths are intelligent. Intelligence doesn't make you a good person. It doesn't make you more likeable or happier. It doesn't make you a better parent, or a better spouse. I recall a line in The Wizard of Oz, where the tin man is asked whether he would rather have a heart or a brain and he answers that having had both in the past, he'd rather have a heart, because the heart gave him happiness.
So, even if it was true that blacks are on average less intelligent, it doesn't make them inferior, because intelligence is not the sole determiner of human value. Blacks are on average better musicians than whites and music feeds the heart and the soul. I love our modern inventions that make it possible for me to talk to people on the internet, I also love being able to listen to rock and roll, swing and jazz, and other music. Almost all of which are music styles invented or heavily influenced by blacks.
There are also different kinds of intelligence, and different types are fostered by the culture or subculture in question. I don't really buy the whole "whites are more intelligent than blacks" thing anyways because instead of trying to explain the IQ score variance, the celebrators of this belief use it to posit a permanent deficit on the part of blacks. Even if there is a deficit on the part of blacks, it is not permanent. Evolution does not work that way - we are always changing.
And if these folks are anti-evolution, then you can't have it both ways. If everyone is descended from one couple that God miraculously created, then we are all equals - created in God's image. If we evolved naturally, then blacks can overcome their temporary IQ score deficit - that is evolve. And that is if the deficit doesn't have social causes anyways - which I'm pretty sure it does.
I'm related through marriage to some lower class whites and they are not the sharpest tools in the shed. But they are not complete morons either as they have talents and skills they use - some that I don't possess. But I'm pretty sure most of them would score sub-100 on an IQ test. Not because they are "defective" but because intellectual pursuits are not highly regarded in their world.
They can change, but it would probably take a few generations. My take is that the low test scores for blacks are bascially the same thing.
"People are attracted to racism because their belonging to a "superior" race gives them something to be proud of (and superior to others about) when their own lives are actually very unremarkable."
For the most extreme cases, maybe. But I think "casual racism" it is simpler than that - it is easier to trust someone who looks like us. There is also how race correlates with culture, but is far more visible than culture, so in my neck of Europe everybody who is brown usually assumed to be a Muslim. And my Danish friend is furious how in his child's school they no longer serve pork, and of course he assumes everybody brown is supporting that - the reality is , in Europe, it is probably more often true than not.
Ultimately, nations exist for a reason, they revolve around people having a shared culture. And people tend to marry within their culture, so they share genetics / race too and that is what is visible. It is just that IMHO the US has always been too big and diverse for truly being a nation - white Montana would make more sense than white America, because the average US state is roughly the "usual" size for a nation, not the whole union. I mean already in 1776 the Roundheads in the North and the Cavalier in the South already not really a nation and look what happened... officially it was called a civil war, but not really, because they were really not one people. It was basically just a war.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that right-wing opposition to Gulf state-style guest worker immigration would be far lower than right-wing opposition to the status quo. Your "pitch" might actually work reasonably well as a defence of the former.
Be nice to have something like that if the migrants would go on schedule. But, every time there is a a liberal or moderate president, there will no effort to force the migrants to go somewhere else when their time in country is up. The Gulf states don't seem to be willing to make exceptions. How will you prevent the next President Kamala or President Joe from opening the flood gates? Hmm... After more thoughts, I realize the real advantage that the Gulf states have dealing with migrants is there is no group in a Gulf country that needs a "great replacement" to continue to be relevant.
Not sure if you understand how Gulf immigration works. The manual laborers have fixed terms, but the white collar guest workers can pretty much live there forever, enjoying a high standard of living, but without getting citizenship (primarily voting) rights. Hence, in some of the Emirates, you have far more residents from the subcontinent (mainly India) than native Arabs at any given time. The locals don't seem to mind this.
Gulf state-style guest worker immigration was basically the European model until the late 50s/early 60s (in a far lower scale of course). You just can't maintain such a system in a democratic context. You would have to go full authoritarians like the Gulf states
The problem of how to set up a law so that a President who doesn't like it can't just stop enforcing it has arisen before, in such contexts as anti-monopoly, "civil rights", and environmental protection. In those examples, the solution was to allow private citizens to sue for damages so that the judicial system acts to enforce the law regardless of what the President wants.
There are a few possible analogous approaches here, from least to most radical:
*Entrants are required to pay a large deposit to enter (say $10K; this is money that currently goes to "coyotes"). This deposit is returned only when they leave, and is deducted for all fines, damages, etc. that they incur while in the country.
*The law is written with a provision that if there is a certain net imbalance between people checking into the country and people checking out, entry is automatically shut down until the number of people in the country illegally has dropped sufficiently.
*If anyone is the victim of a crime committed by a person in the country illegally, the President is civilly liable for the full damages. This is not taxpayer funds; the President is required to pay out of their own pocket.
*Private citizens can apprehend and physically remove people who are illegally in the country. At that point, MAGA megadonors would presumably contribute money to pay bounty hunter firms to do this.
*A stronger form of the previous one: anyone in the country illegally has no legal protections whatsoever, like with outlawry in the old days. Any citizen can rob, rape, or murder them without legal consequences.
The Gulf-style worker program is 100% predicated on the fact that they are totalitarian states. Talking about doing something similar in the US is completely absurd. I should not have to spell this out.
Totalitarianism is when a senile old codger imports millions of illegal aliens into the country, then gives them far more government benefits than you will ever see.
That was a travesty, but one that stemmed from refusing to enforce the law. UAE can decide to get rid of someone and put them on the next plane out. We never will.
Not to sound like a lib but I think they should stop protecting elite pedophiles first and then focus on whether or not the racist vote is valuable
That's a bipartisan problem, as I think the Epstein files will wind up showing...
Oh definitely, Epstein donated to both parties and even Trump was a democrat for the longest time. This idea that only “the bad party” is fucking kids is ridiculous and part of the lib idea of there being a magical substance that makes all democrats allergic to money (except for all the democrats who magically begin voting with the Republicans, who were fine up until then and magically only start voting this way when they dont need to worry about re-election)
No he wasn’t. Maybe for a few years.
Oh alright mr pedantic
Go fuck yourself ho.
You just act like conservatives are just falling into socialistic arguments and ignore the facts that there are many people who ae economically left and culturally right. In fact this group is the major cross pressure swing group in our country.
You assume the main divide in politics will always be capitalism versus socialism but I argue that's not the case. This is the logical consequence of the end of the Cold war that these issues will matter less.
Richard isn't saying that those people are inconsistent as defined on a left-right ideological spectrum. He's saying that they're stupid and wrong and pandering to them is bad for society.
So your argument is that we now have a sizable bloc of genuine American national-socialists, and this is somehow the “natural consequence” of the Cold War ending? Explain how that follows.
Capitalism matters less now that it's not the locus of our ideological disagreement with a rival power, so people are free to have more left-wing economic views. Since most of the country is not rich (economically left) and the USA is much more religious than other rich countries (culturally right), this is to be expected.
Also, econ-left/culture-right isn't necessarily Nazi, Catholic social thought fits this quadrant as well and does not have a body count in the millions.
You’re shifting the frame rather than engaging Hanania’s argument. His claim isn’t that “econ-left/culture-right” people don’t exist, or that the quadrant is inherently Nazi. It’s that this specific American version emerged because the right needed non-racial pretexts for what are fundamentally racial/nativist preferences. That mechanism is the point of the essay.
Your Cold War explanation doesn’t actually connect to that dynamic — it just asserts that “capitalism matters less now,” without showing how this produces protectionism or immigration panic on the right at this moment. Likewise, invoking U.S. religiosity or Catholic social thought sidesteps the issue: those may describe the quadrant, but they don’t explain the shift Hanania is analyzing.
The core argument is that racial motivations are generating bad economics. Your reply replaces that mechanism with broad sociological vibes that don’t address why the right’s views on trade, immigration, and labor changed in precisely the way he describes.
I was responding to your response to Kashem's argument.
As to the overall point: I guess I would agree with that. I guess the thing is I'm willing to tolerate some degree of 'bad economics' in a rich country to avoid racial conflict and preserve a market-dominant majority a la Amy Chua (even if we have to change the definition of that majority group a little!) I'm not as huge a fan of markets as Hanania; they're good, and better than a centrally planned economy, but usually they need some regulation.
I think I get what you’re saying, and I’m broadly sympathetic: in a rich, diverse country some degree of “suboptimal economics” can be tolerable if the tradeoff is greater social stability. I’m not allergic to that framing at all — stability > ideological purity.
My concern is that the structure of our digital communication system pushes everything in the opposite direction. It rewards the most radical, zero-sum, tribal interpretations of every issue and systematically punishes moderation or stability-seeking arguments. So even if one prefers a harmony-preserving approach, the incentives of the system drown it out.
That’s the bind: reversing these dynamics would require interventions that the public would instantly interpret as authoritarian, even if the goal is simply re-establishing the pre-digital equilibrium where politics wasn’t a 24/7 rage-machine.
"A person who is honest about their motivations can simply oppose immigration and otherwise have sensible opinions on trade, letting technology replace jobs, and labor unions."
This is basically me. I don't support tariffs, generally speaking. I am fine with technology replacing jobs, generally speaking. I just don't want to live around foreigners. I don't want to share my country with foreigners. This is normal, healthy, and a sentiment shared at a deep level by most people, even if a large chunk of them know better than to admit it out loud. Personally, I believe that the artificial suppression of this preference is partially to blame for people like Nick Fuentes (and arguably even Donald Trump) gaining prominence.
Why can't Republicans say this? The problem is that politics is not about being intellectually honest. It is about "scoring points" and "dunking." This is because the average person is a "low decoupler" who has difficulty grasping the concept of trade-offs. If you say to him "yes, banning immigration will hurt the economy, but," your viewpoint is simply discredited wholesale in his eyes. He only understands the world in terms of viewpoints that are completely correct or completely wrong, completely good or completely bad.
This is the same reason why you would see the left trying to argue things like "actually feminism is good for men too" and "actually DEI helps white people also."
Honestly, I think this is largely wrong and shows that Richard spends too much time on X.
Pretty much every case of large-scale migration you look at has some kind of political blowback, regardless of the race or income of the group involved. Another constant is that the blowback gets worse in precarious economic times.
Anti-Indian sentiment in tech didn’t really start until the job market went to shit. It really accelerated after the Trump administration got rid of the other big scapegoat tech workers used (DEI), and H-1Bs—most of whom are Indian—were basically the only thing left to complain about.
Indians in the U.S. have always been brown, foreign, and often non-Christian. What’s new isn’t their identity; it’s the bad tech job market.
Now a lot of young, nerdy men who thought a good tech job was finally their ticket out of the low social position they had growing up—who feel like they made the sacrifice of taking a hard major while everyone else was having fun—are graduating into a terrible entry-level job market and seeing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers coming into the US every year. On top of that, they see what looks like strong in-group hiring and feel locked out. Obviously they, and their middle-class suburban parents, are going to be pissed.
Richard has this thing where he acts like, since immigrants aren’t actually taking American jobs, people can’t sincerely believe that immigrants are taking American jobs; as if people have never been sincerely wrong about anything. The reason we even have named fallacies like the lump of labor fallacy is precisely because they’re pushing back on common intuitive mistakes people make.
And the “Germans would have it harder than Indians” take is especially funny, because Germans historically faced way more prejudice in the US than Indians ever have. Polish plumbers were a major talking point for EU-skeptics in Europe.
There is, of course, a kind of racism Indians face because they’re brown / not Christian / have accents / whatever. But they had all of those traits during the first Trump administration and were never a major topic of right-wing outrage. What changed was the tech labor market and who was available to blame.
None of this means race and culture don’t matter at all; they clearly shape how people talk about immigrants. But you don’t need “hidden white nationalism” to explain why people freak out when a suddenly bad labor market collides with a big, visible foreign workforce in the exact jobs they wanted.
This is closer to the truth. Richard has an entertaining hot-take, but the best data we have to go on doesn't reflect it. Plus, in the last election it was minorities that shifted right in their vote.
Everything is about incentives. Populists might misunderstand how stuff works, but if they are correct and confident that some element of their current cultural and/or economic experience is now worse, they will attempt to place the blame somewhere.
What doesn't help is that concerns are either cast aside or not tactfully addressed. You can point to real-wages growing, or papers about immigration rate boosting GDP or whatever, but it's insufficient if you're side-stepping demand's impact on housing for instance (because of inelasticity of supply). Or the real factors behind a higher youth unemployment rate.
Dems for their part are starting to capitalize on the "Abundance" train and bitch-slapping the heterodox in their ranks. If that works out for them, the incoherency on the part of Republicans will be a liability. Long-bet is that Dems make some gains based on policies related to housing and easy wins like repealing tariffs once Trump is out.
To be honest I doubt Richard knows how things work either, he loves to talk about markets and how they work, but as far as I know he spent his 20s in school, then in a think tank, then graduated to being a substack writer.
While the later is a sort of market competition, it's hardly the type he writes about so confidently every day regarding DEI and immigration in the corporate world. The only corporate job I know of him working is flipping burgers as a teenager, which he admits he was terrible at.
I mean he once suggest we don't needs laws against discrimination, because firms that discrimination would be less profitable and thus be eliminated by the free market. It's hard to take a person like this seriously.
And while I believe he's correct about high skill immigration being a net good for the US, it's not as simply as "lump of labor fallacy" and he's never really engaged with any of the labor economics behind it.
My guess is he kinda knows all of this on some level, but does what makes him alot of money.
Right, I think a lot of writers on substack weave in some hot-takes to stand out, especially when churning out content fast and regularly. That can be difficult to balance. There's the fear that if you're too lukewarm and agreeable people will think you have nothing to say, but on the other hand if you're way out there you won't be taken seriously as you aren't interested in the truth.
Another great column. I appreciate Hanania so much that I may choose his household to live in when I retire. As is my right.
This is an excellently written article for a belief I do not agree with. :) Let me try.
First of all, I'm not sure why we should want to emulate Gulf Arab states. These are countries that accumulated much of their money through sales of a single natural resource, rather than a diversified economy. Anyway, we don't have a single resource we sell like the Gulf Arab states.
Second, they have a large effectively exploited slave labor class. We...ah...tried that in the 18th and 19th centuries, you know how that turned out, race became the most toxic issue in American politics, with a black-white divide that's been a major problem ever since. You either send them back after they're done (not likely in the USA now given lots of them have kids here), don't give them full rights (in which case you have a large second-class citizen group that hates you and you have to keep in check through threat of violence), or do give them full rights (in which case you set off people's natural tribal instincts to fear foreigners).
I would argue for a pause in immigration of a few decades to allow the assimilation of new arrivals. We did this in the 1920s (notably after the foreign-born fraction reached about 15%, similar to the level it is now) and the decades that followed (apart from the Depression, which happened everywhere and we weathered better than, say, Germany) were pretty good for the USA. There were other reasons we became a world power--Europe basically blew itself up--but it wasn't as if we stagnated for all that time.
I don't think cutting high- or low-skill immigration will make us poor. Poorer than we might have been, certainly, but at some point the hit to social cohesion just isn't worth it.
As a foreigner, I think the big mistake the United States made during Reconstruction was *not* repatriating all those former slaves to their homelands whence they and their ancestors had been so cruelly abducted. Conferring citizenship on them was a mistake. Had you done what the Emirates do, you could simply send them home. To atone for their having been brought over in hell-ships, you could fly them home now in Business Class.
They were there for several generations and wouldn't even know how to get by. The villages their ancestors lived in wouldn't have known them. And in the 19th century it would have been a huge undertaking, building the ships and so on.
Seriously, slavery isn't just wrong, it's stupid.
Get over it. You abolished it. Move on.
I think you overemphasize the racial motivations behind much of the nativist sentiment at the moment on the right over cultural ones. There are consequences of mass immigration that negatively affect native-born Americans beyond economic considerations that have nothing to do with race. The most obvious being that the United States is trending towards becoming a de facto bilingual country. There is an increasingly strong pressure to learn Spanish if you live in the Sun Belt and work in fields such as education, healthcare, hospitality, or emergency services. This is particularly true in urban areas where immigrants tend to live in ethnic enclaves, where there is little pressure to learn English. That is evidence that not all immigrants assimilate extremely well, even if there is hope that their children may do so, assuming the public schools in those enclaves prioritize English instruction. That also assumes the Biden migration wave was a one-time fluke and that we have relatively steady immigration levels in the future, the lack of which is really what drives much of the animus behind this debate to begin with.
I think that relates to your point about an Indian with a heavy accent facing more hostility than a German immigrant in a heavily conservative area. I think you are implying an association between how the terminally online right behaves on X and how rural working-class whites behave in real life that I don't believe actually exists. To the extent that it does, I think it demonstrates the precariousness of an immigration policy that overwhelmingly clusters immigrants in particular areas of certain states, compared to past decades and centuries, when immigrants were more evenly dispersed among many culturally distinct parts of the United States.
"The most obvious being that the United States is trending towards becoming a de facto bilingual country."
There is no cultural product in the world more secure than the status of the English language, both practically and in matters of prestige. People who see a threat here have particularly vivid imaginations.
No one cares about the status of English in the world(unless they're traveling), they care about the status of English in their countries/towns.
If you come to Houston, Texas(where 40% of people speak Spanish at home) and go to a doctor's office, virtually all of the front desk staff will be bilingual Latinas.
If you're a working class anglophone mass immigration has absolutely disadvantaged you in certain customer facing service sector job, because you'll be outcompeted by immigrants bilingual kids, and in some cases because you can't communicate with certain coworkers.
The fact that more kids in Brazil or Jordan speak English than ever before is irrelevant to you.
The prestige of English stems from the prestige of the United States and, formerly, the United Kingdom as superpowers. The practicality of it stems from both countries being the most desirable immigration destinations, where learning English was/is a prerequisite for entering and succeeding in both societies. As the prestige of those countries declines, at least in relative terms, so does the prestige of the English language. If secondary languages become entrenched, then the language may well lose its practicality in the long run as well.
I would be more than happy if you are right. English may have become so entrenched as the global lingua franca, thanks to factors such as the internet and its widespread instruction as a secondary language globally, that its utility for second-generation immigrants and their descendants in the Anglosphere will remain unchanged, preserving its status for a very long time.
You’re neglecting one important factor behind English as lingua franca — it’s relatively consistent and easy to learn compared to most other languages. Spelling is a pain in the butt but technology makes that less impactful. Compare to any other possible contenders:
India - a billion+ people but no one language (other than English) is spoken by anything close to a majority
Chinese - a billion+ people but divided between Mandarin and Cantonese; tonal distinctions extremely difficult for non-natives to pick up on; Logographic writing requires enormous effort at memorization and isn’t ideally suited for keyboards
Spanish - probably the the most practical contender as far as ease of learning is concerned, but 3-4 different conjugations per verb per tense, plus subjunctive make it a bit harder than English (also spelling is dramatically easier). And unlike India or China there is no hope of the Spanish-speaking world achieving anything close to the economic or political dominance of the US + British Commonwealth.
French, Latin, Greek - been there, done that.
Suppose you use the metrics that the Foreign Service Institute uses for ranking the difficulty of learning languages for native English speakers. In that case, the ease of learning English is highly dependent on the learner’s native language. For Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese speakers (The FSI’s very hard languages category), the peculiarities and inconsistencies of English vocabulary and pronunciation are incredibly foreign and challenging to learn. It is comparatively much easier for speakers of Romance languages and somewhat in between for everyone else. Luckily, compared to the UK, the majority of immigrants to the United States are starting from a native language that makes learning English easier.
English is so ubiquitous that every on Earth has a vocabulary of basic words even without trying. That helps make it easier.
Indeed, I'm a native English speaker and fluent in two other languages. I can't tell you how many times I ask native speakers how to say [INSERT ENGLISH WORD] in the other two languages, and people respond that there just isn't a word.
It almost never happens the other way around except when the source language is Yiddish -- but English has basically adopted all the best Yiddish words.
Interesting. I wasn't aware anyone made a ranking and I don't question it. And of course the difficulty in learning a new language will depend on the languages you already know. But nevertheless there's the question of 'what's the alternative?' English may be an absolute PITA for a native Gujarati speaker but what other language will he choose to learn if he wants to make it economically?
He will have to get the pronunciation of this sentence correct:
"The rebels are rebelling very vigorously."
even if he knows the difference in meaning between the noun and the verb.
India is a peculiar example because it is so linguistically diverse, and, of course, there is the legacy of the East India Company and the Raj, which institutionalized the use of English. Given the rapid progress of AI, the alternative to a lingua franca might be a Star Trek-style universal translator. Very efficient for globalization, but very detrimental to social integration on a national scale.
Maybe I’m making this overly complicated. It’s actually rather absurd to think that English will lose its cultural dominance just because being bilingual gives you a leg-up in a few job categories in a few regions of the country, when every struggling parent from the Brazilian favelas to Himalayan highlands to the African Savannah would kill to get their children an education that includes English fluency.
To be honest, I think the best way to destroy the global dominance of the English language would be for the right wing to be successful in its attempt to end all meaningful international trade and institutions. In that case a young person in another country would be better off learning Chinese or French as opposed to English, the language of a strange isolationist former power.
The issue is not just the status but also the fact that having to learn another language to do your job is both annoying and increases the amount of labor you need to do to maintain status quo.
This is also why workers don't like new technology being introduced into their work a lot of the time. They have to keep doing everything they were doing before and now *also* learn how to do this new thing. Maybe eventually the technology pays off in efficiency, but 1) the worker themselves is not always the obvious recipient of the efficiency dividend and 2) it doesn't make the short term period of knowledge acquisition less of a slog.
Most people want to spend less time working, not more, and skills acquisition to stay relevant is itself a kind of work unless you just happen to love your job so much you want to do it during all waking hours. I love learning for its own sake personally but I certainly have preferences for what I want to be learning. I would absolutely rather spend my time reading history books than learning how to navigate yet another set of boring software that's supposed to be streamline something in an office.
I don't want to learn Spanish for the same reason some immigrants don't want to learn English. It's hard and tedious. They at least have the incentive that learning English corresponds with increased prosperity. It doesn't look like learning Spanish would result in *any* particular increased prosperity for me. Yes, over enough time, this would incentivize the continued dominance of English and the gradual eroding of Spanish, but what good does that do me *now* if I have to learn Spanish to do my job?
This is my biggest personal hangup with modernity. I'm very happy that I'm not starving, riddled with intestinal parasites, being traded as a concubine, dying in childbirth, or any number of physical horrors of the past. I don't want to go back. But what's my incentive to keep slogging through labor I don't want to do now exactly? Status? I'm in the top 25% income in the United States which is the richest country on Earth. At a point, continual striving for more status just becomes inane. I want my fucking freedom from labor, man. I don't feel like the amount of tedious work I have to do has diminished one bit in my 40 years of life. It's just different kinds of tedious work.
This is actually the only reason I can even muster the energy to do competent work at all anymore. The thought that if I bust ass, I might at least be *free* when I'm old. But, of course, I'll also be more likely to be decrepit and unable to enjoy the freedom then.
In all the world, only in the Canadian province of Quebec is English under threat. The statist government demands that all business, education, and government service be conducted in French, save for a few legacy institutions like McGill University that any year seems likely to get the axe, and backs that up with fines and other regulations. Of course the elite learn English so they can deal with the financiers in New York and present research findings, in English, at international conferences. (At Canadian conferences they present in French!) But increasingly the ordinary working class will find itself with no alternative but to take what Quebec employers offer because they won't be able to get jobs in the rest of Canada, where very little French is spoken, much less abroad. (Quebec French is not even easily intelligible in France.) Most English people, concentrated in Montreal, have fled to Ontario. The only immigrants who feel comfortable settling in Quebec are from La francophonie: Haiti, Senegal, Algeria, French Equatorial Africa, and other centres of excellence like that.
Some of these measures violate the Canadian Constitution but the Quebec government thumbs its nose at our Supreme Court and does what it wants to do anyway. "Justice Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!", indeed.
To your point: Spanish could achieve primacy against the natural supremacy of English only if a state where, say, two-thirds of the people spoke Spanish as a first language, decided to commit suicide by suppressing the use of English using a state law, as Quebec does. Nonetheless there is a risk that immigrants who don't assimilate will become so isolated by language that they will not be reachable by English-speaking politicians and cultural icons like the Internet and (ages ago) TV. This might not be so bad with Spanish but it is a risk in multi-cult cities like Toronto where thousands (not millions) of people each speak one of 150 fragmented minority languages and don't learn English at all.
It is ironic considering that Miami, which is effectively bilingual, voted for Trump
Doesn't explain the anti Indian hate. Indian-Americans have assimilated well, speak English, and generally follow the law. Yet people online rage because they shop at Costco, adopt stereotypical white hobbies like camping/birding or visit national parks.
There's so little to complain about actual Indian American behavior, people need to go to Canada and the UK to find examples of Indian immigrants causing problems or invent issues such as caste discrimination (for which there is little evidence that it occurs here).
The weird thing is this hate appears to be politically neutral and appears even among the Anti-Maga.
I can’t explain it either. I have never met or seen anyone outside of social media who has a problem with Indian-Americans. The fact that they take on the same hobbies, views, and work in the same sectors as white liberal elites might explain it as partially racially motivated and partially motivated by resentment towards that larger class by the online right.
Yes, America gets the best of the Indian immigrants. We (Canada) get the ones who couldn't get into the U.S. Do you have a faction of Indian immigrants who agitate for the creation of the Sikh homeland of Khalistan in India? This annoys the Indian government to no end that we harbour people trying to destabilize India. A couple of their spooks even bumped off a guy in Canada a few years ago. Is this just a Canadian thing, due to having a lower class of immigrant? Or is it a thing in America, too.
Very few Germans want to move to the U.S. or Canada anyway. They've got it made with their state pensions and union protected jobs. Why would they want to emigrate? It's artificial to say that an Indian with an accent would be bullied in Alabama -- if that's even true -- more than a German would. There won't be any Germans to compare.
“In Europe, close to 50% of the population is proficient in at least two https://www.foreigntongues.co.uk/can-we-dream-in-more-than-one-language, though language proficiency varies among countries. Approximately 65% of Europeans can https://www.foreigntongues.co.uk/what-are-the-most-spoken-languages-in-europe, a notable contrast to the United States where only about 20% of adults speak more than one language.”
I've known a couple of dozen elected senators and representatives through my work over the years. About two-thirds of them have invited into their offices and homes. We've had discussions concerning many matters of interest. Everything I write from this point on was explicitly discussed with them, and they would tell you so.
I can tell you flat out that none of them...NONE of them...are (or were) ideologically intelligent, nor did they "vote their conscience." Party line all the way. Only about five of them would I classify as intelligent or well-versed in the subjects and topics that national politicians debate and vote on. Most of them ran on "values" or "principles" or "bringing change and leadership to the Senate or House, respectively. Once a politician gets into office, they have a modicum of power. When they see what that little bit of power can do, and then they see their more senior colleagues' power, they just want more, and will do anything to keep it. Even though they know that they are flesh-covered marionettes who have sold their soul and backbone to the wealthy and influential people who really run this country for the privilege of doing what their masters want, and when they want it.
I harbor no illusions on where this country is going. The guardrails have rusted out. The Constitutional and Democracy purists have fallen by the wayside. Nothing short of a total capitualation of Trump and MAGA sycophants will turn this thing around, but then again, we've been moving in this direction since that fateful day in 1964 when Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 Presidential election, well, "bigly." This whole cluster**** wer're going through now is just the final manifestation of the last half-century plus.
Having watched politics for over 40 years, I've come to the conclusion that a key prerequisite for success in elected office is to have a personality disorder.
Pelosi making millions through insider trading is a good example of that. Same with Biden and Harris prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens.
Your pitch seems to be to get Republicans to admit they are racist, so that they can adopt a Caplanian keyhole solution where immigrants have few to no rights, on the assumption that it is only the confession of racism that is preventing a mass adoption of cosmotarian economic views. It seems a stretch. Republicans are at least as sacrally committed to voting and the bill of rights as they are to secret racism.
The keyhole solution is a nonstarter. Would require a constitutional amendment, not happening. What about birthright citizenship? Voting rights, due process? And anyway it's not plausible that we'll have robust crime and immigration enforcement under a flood of guest workers.
It's also odd you bring up Millei in this context, given Argentina is majority white. Ditto Chile. If anything, these examples cut against your thesis that a minarchist dictator might frictionlessly take power under any polity.
There's also the elephant in the room that Republicans just aren't particularly racist compared to other groups worldwide. All groups have homophily, and during the great awokening the tendency was to tar white people as intrinsically evil and racist. So the approach of, “just admit you're racist, guys,” seems to have already been tried, at fever pitch, yet here we are. Worth noting that immigration restrictionists going back to the 80s warned that as whites became a minority in the USA we'd see balkanization and white identitarianism come to the fore, yet here we are.
Anyway, I'm not aware of any regime built on acknowledging racism that had sound economic policies.
“My argument to racists is that even if you hate Indians, you should hate being poorer and dying of cancer or suffering from Alzheimer’s more.”
The natives have rightful ownership of the streets, roads, etc. and may choose to keep immigrants off of their property. Also, it is not remotely immoral to reject alien phenotypes anymore than it is “immoral” for a woman to reject a short man (phenotypes in both cases). In the absence of private ownership of roads, a good compromise would be to push for racial enclaves or guest workers, which would still allow for immigrants in certain areas. Arguing for liberty rather than tediously moralizing against racism is the correct approach.
Good thought. FYI: Migrants are racists, too. I one suggest to a group in Indian software guys I worked with that America would become browner as the integrated. They were horrified by the possibility that their sons and daughters could marry non-Indians even though the software people had no plans to return to India. They wanted Indian ghettos in America. Note the problem is Texas having with Indians and Arabs trying to build "our race only" suburbs.
The last part is just because they are first generation. Their kids will want to be normal participants in American culture. There are Indian enclaves in Jersey. The kids don’t stick around and work at 7/11 and put dots on their heads, they become normal and generally are successful net contributors to society. That’s (part of) why America is better than Europe.
Yeah, immigrants form insular neighborhoods. They always have. You need a support system in a new country and you ease into a new culture by retaining elements of your old one. Only really matters when you’re fresh off the boat, though.
I think they come easier to that notion because it fits with their caste systems in their home countries. They just aren't as bothered by racism as a moral failing the way white Americans are. For some weird reason Canada is obsessed with anti-black racism, too, even though we never had a slave economy. All our black people are descended from people who came voluntarily as United Empire Loyalists -- King George III promised freedom to any slave who made it to British territory, i.e., Halifax Nova Scotia where the Royal Navy base was --, later in the Underground Railroad, and more latterly as immigrants from the Caribbean and still later (now) from Africa, particularly Somalia. Despite never having been slaves in Canada, we still seem to believe their higher criminality, every single wave no matter where from, is due to us being racists. (We didn't used to. We used to look down our smug noses at American racism but it became fashionable to blame ourselves too about 20 years ago, I guess when black crime became too prevalent to ignore, so we had to invent a reason for it that wasn't the obvious racist reason..)
I do not understand the point of your analogy to ownership of private property. Our system that decides the manner in which “the natives” exercise dominion over “their property” is representative democracy.
When the government controls what should be private property, then, yes, rightful ownership is exercised via democracy.
Hanania nails it — the right’s entire economic confusion is downstream of refusing to admit racial motives. Honesty > the fake “labor economics"
"Clearly, there was never anything special about whites that made them uniquely inclined towards loving capitalism"
I agree with almost all of what you're saying here, but this particular statement is not obviously true, and I think it needs to be supported more. If, say, the Western European marriage pattern created a stronger-than-usual genetic selection for young men who are good at earning lots of money, who seek their fortune instead of going with the flow, it's possible there's a genetic component here. This is not trivially refutable.
I don’t accept the premise of “implicit white nationalism.” Take out “white” and the motivation to favor US manufacturing, workers, etc. without accompanying racist motivation is equally defensible. While this may not be optimal from a pure capitalism free markets are good perspective, both R and D governments have always had their thumb on the scales of per country immigration quotas, tax credits and subsidies to favored infrastructure companies and industries, legs up to unions and cronies, and all manner of pure market distortions. Torching DEI is the most anti-racist thing to happen since the Civil Rights Act. There are countervailing national security, crime, education, safety net, housing and, yes, electoral self-interest factors that could justify nationalistic policies, at least in the short term. If HB1 visas are so great, what’s wrong with a $100K application fee? Same fee for white German as brown Indian applicants (which they will negotiate with their prospective US employer to pay).