Dean's profile - The Motte

Dean Flairless 20d ago

Looking Forward (In Time) To The Democratic (Midterm) Civil War (And Likely Trump Law Enforcement Accelerant)

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How about that Democratic National Committee drama last ~~week~~ month, am I right?

This post started being sketched out last month, in expectation of a predictable event just last week. Then the last couple of weeks happened, and what could have been an interesting culture war episode got overshadowed by, well, war-war. Crazy times… but the premise is still relevant in the future, if not now. So, ahem.

Last week’s resolution to some ongoing party drama has implications for the next year or so of American politics. Implications include intended infighting, pessimistic predictions for Senate prospects, and a predictable next ~~escalation~~ enforcement of federal laws that will feed the partisan polemics of dictatorship and whatnot. This is because as the progressives and establishment Democrats begin to position against eachother while trying to use Trump as a foil for their internal party power struggle, the Trump Administration looks to be preparing enforcement action against the professional protest apparatus involved in recent not-entirely-peaceful riots in LA and elsewhere, which both will strike at parts of the Democratic power base but also provide leverage for the Democrat factions to try and use against eachother even as they loudly decry it.

This post is looking to organize thoughts and identify trends that can help predict / make sense of some of the upcoming predictable public drama that will shape American media coverage through 2026. When equally predictable media campaigns follow, you’ll (hopefully) be taken less by surprise, and have an ear open for what may not be said at the time.

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Part 1: The 2026 Democrat Senate Prospects

Not to put too fine a line on it, but in some respects the 2026 midterms are a lost cause for the Democrats, and some of the ongoing politic are going to be a reflection of that context.

Part of the background of today’s subject really begins five years ago, in the 2020 US election. The same election that brought Biden to the Presidency also got the Democratic Party 50 seats in the US Senate, giving them control of the Senate with the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote.

At the time, this was a great and glorious thing for the Biden Administration, as it was a key part of giving the Democrats the might trifecta, which is to say control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. As narrow as the Senate margin was, it supported things like appointing judges, budgets via reconciliation, and so on. This was a highwater mark of Democrat institutional power, before last year’s 2024 brought in the current Republican trifecta.

Most people are familiar with this, and are also likely familiar with how the ruling party nearly always looses House of Representative seats in the midterms after an election. Presidential approval drops, the base gets complacent, the opposition gets hungrier / more motivated, all that jazz. The US House changes quickly, as every elected representative is up for re-election every two years.

What people may not realize is that only a third of the Senate is up for re-election every cycle, as the 6-year terms are staggered so that only one third are up for grabs at any given cycle. This means that far less of the currently Republican-dominated Senate is up for re-election. It also means that the seats that are, are the seats that were last voted in 2020.

It also means that senate maps can be deeply uncompetitive. Like how most Republican Senate seats this cycle are in solidly red states, so that there are about two competitive Republican seats, but four competitive Democratic seats.. While there are no guarantees in politics, it is not only plausible/likely for the Republicans to maintain control of the Senate this cycle, but to increase their margin of Senate control. After all, the last cycle these seats were up was 2020 pandemic election, and Biden’s results then were considered an especially good showing.

This is why US political watchers have been warning since the earliest parts of the Trump Administration- before any of the current drama- that the Democrats face a rough wall next year. While the House is often more competitive and up for being flipped, the Senate is much less malleable. And without control of both the House and the Senate, the ability of the opposition party to limit / oppose / impeach the President is relatively limited. (Or rather- they can impeach all they want, but lose in the Senate.)

The lack of formal ability is important. It would mean that even if the Democrats take the House, then they could impeach Trump however many times they want, but not remove him due to a lack of the Senate. It means the House could refuse to pass a funding bill, but they couldn’t use Control of Congress to dictate terms of short-term spending bills to prevent Trump’s options to further gut parts of the federal government during a shutdown. Having one chamber of Congress is better than none, but it makes those leaders relatively impotent.

This is relevant scene setting, because this is a clear and obvious wall that the Democratic Party is heading towards. If they fail, they can take solace in ‘just’ retaking the House, but the worse they do, the more bitter the recriminations. At the same time, while the senate map is daunting, there is also a clear way forward.

If the Democrats want to defeat Trump over all else, they need to (re)build the anti-Trump coalition. Use opposition and public discontent to Trump to turn out their base. If there isn’t enough organically, then manufacture and generate more, using all the levers of influence and political mobilization they can across the institutions they still control. To do as well as they can, they need to work together.

Insert laconic ‘If.’

Alternatively, a dismal year where Senate gains are unrealistic is the best election cycle for internecine conflict over the soul, leadership, and composition of the Democratic Party going into 2028.

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Part 2: DNC Drama

Insert the multi-month Democratic National Committee drama that resolved last Friday, when Washington State Democratic Party Chair Shasti Conrad won the election for the open vice chair position of the DNC. Shasti Conrad herself is irrelevant to this story, besides that she is an establishment democratic, and onboard with the DNC’s job of helping get Democrats elected across the country.

Why was there an open vice chair of the DNC? Because the Democratic establishment defenestrated the previously elected chair, David Hogg, over his still current intention to primary ‘asleep at the wheel’ sitting elected Democrats with younger (and more progressive) challengers.

Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. No one literally threw David Hogg out a window. He “resigned” before he could be formally removed. And his removal technically wasn’t because he promised to use his DNC position to give $20 million USD to his personal super PAC ‘Leaders We Deserve,’ breaking DNC neutrality to primary his internal-party political opponents. Rather, a DNC subcommittee recommended a redo of the otherwise uncontested DNC election on grounds of procedural issues.

And by procedural issues, the standard media coverage is obviously referring to

In her complaint, shared with Semafor by a Democratic source, Free argued that she lost a “fatally flawed election that violated the DNC Charter and discriminated against three women of color candidates,” and asks for “two new vice chair elections.” In February, after several rounds of voting, the race came down to five candidates – Kenyatta, Hogg, Free, and two other women. Kenyatta and Hogg claimed the open spots.

“By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity,” argued Free, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.

If that parsed to what you think it parsed to- yes. David Hogg, a young white man whose ascent into progressive politics was based primarily on being a school shooting survivor](https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/article286954330.html), got out-progressive stacked by a female minority over… a race and gender quota.

Ms. Free filed her objection at the end of February, well before Mr. Hogg was called a Jackass by notable / still influential Democratic strategist James Carville in late April](https://www.drewberquist.com/2025/05/james-carville-calls-out-jackass-david-hogg-directly-to-his-face-watch/). Clearly her action was unmotivated by any desire for personal advancement, and her complaint was not a convenient pretext for senior Democratic party officials like DNC Chair Ken Martin to remove a vocal progressive who sought to style himself as the next AOC.

If it were, though, then it seems the DNC establishment won an important victory. Given the first-past-the-post nature of (most) US elections, primarying your own party is a great way to expose almost-certain-win seats for a Republican upset if the primary dispute bleeds over to the general election. (American politicians are infamous for their magnanimous forgiveness in such things.) Additionally, even though Hogg ‘only’ wanted to primary dems in ‘safe’ seats, that in itself would have represented an attempt to make the permanent / core Democratic party more progressive, and leave the non-Progressives in the unstable / competitive seats. Over time, attrition would ensure that the powerful committees (which tend to go to those with seniority, i.e. safer seats over time) would go to progressives, while the non-progressive Democrats stood to be turned into the next round of Blue Dog Democrats- tolerated to a point, but sacrificed in the name of some policy priority popular with the core but unpalatable to the broader electorate in competitive areas.

Or perhaps the geriatric problem got worse. David Hogg was, after all, supposed to be part of the solution by getting the younger gen-Z into Democratic offices. His earlier PAC efforts of $8 million for young progressives was lauded at the time for getting candidates on the ballot and elected at lower levels in various red states, such as the youngest Texas-Senate senator. This was supposed to be all the more important after Trump made major gains amongst young voters in the 2024 election. David Hogg was (supposed) to be part of the solution for that, hence his relatively meteoric ascent. Even his message on primarying out the old, infirm, and insufficiently progressive resonated- something like 60% of the Democratic party want the leadership who just replaced Hogg to be replaced.

Or perhaps not. James Carville may be one of the louder cranks to publicly claim the Progressive wing is detrimental to the Democratic Party, but he is not the only one by any means. And while Carville has suggested that the party should have an amicable split over pronoun politics with progressives going off their own way, he’s also accused progressive wing leaders like AOC and Bernie Sanders of being more interested in running against Democrats than the Republicans. While Carville makes the motions of a good party man who would come behind the party regardless who wins, there is an awareness that not everyone is interested in the party winning as much as winning the party.

The point of this segment is not (just) to give some context to an American political drama you’d rarely hear about (and probably didn’t given the events of last week). The point is that an institutional power struggle is already underway between the progressive (and often younger) wing of the Democratic Party, and the (older) establishment.

David Hogg was just an iteration of more direct party-on-party fighting. He lost the institutional battle, and his supporters were not influential enough to protect him. At the same time, David Hogg would like you to know he’s not going anywhere. He still intends to primary, or at least threaten to primary, sitting Democrats. Since Trump bombed the Iranian nuclear program over the weekend, Hogg has argued any Democrat who supports Trump on the conflict should be primaried. Now that he is free of the expectation of DNC neutrality, he is free to pick fights with fellow, though rarely progressive, democrats.

For now, though, inter-Democratic competition for influence and future electoral prospects is taking a more amicable, or at least acceptable, turn of targets- who can turn out support for anti-Trump efforts.

Or, to put it another way- the acceptable form of inter-Democrat competition is, for the moment, orienting to who can oppose Trump the best.

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Part 3: Trump Protest Power

Not to blow anyone’s mind, but Trump is kind of unpopular with Democrats, and they’d really like their elites to fight back.

After a dispirited and divided start to the new administration, where Trump’s 100 Days agenda was dominated by DOGE tearing through the bureaucracy and Senate Minority Leader Schumer avoided a government shutdown to partisan discontent, despite his belief that doing so would have empowered Trump more, early Democratic party polling suggested a desire to on the base for more and more active resistance.

How to fight was up for debate, and rather than a comprehensive strategy something of a spaghetti strategy of ‘throw everything at the wall and see what works’ was pursued. Many of these have been covered in the Motte over the past weeks, from the record-breaking national injunctions, to the media campaigns over the ICE deportations trying to equivocate migrant deportations with citizen exile, to the efforts to stall DOGE and administrative personnel actions. The recent Ivy League struggles by the likes of Yale and Harvard against Trump are also emblematic, as (university) administration have risen and fallen depending on if they are seen as weak against Trump. That’s not to say all these actions have been successful- for every ‘Trump suffers major blow in effort to [X]’ there is often a partially or mostly reversed decision later- but it is popular, and clearly so.

In the last weeks, this has organized to the point where various Democratic media organs are explicitly re-raising the #Resistance moniker, trying to re-build the sort of mass-mobilization efforts that fortified democracy to save the 2020 election. This recently culminated with the mid-June No Kings protest, where various DNC-aligned organizations including MoveOn, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America organized nation-wide protests. These protests were meant to eclipse the military parade in D.C. for the 250th anniversary of the US Army (or Trump’s birthday, if you prefer), and called to mind the various early anti-Trump protests of the first administration. These protests demonstrate organizational capacity, coordination efforts, influence with the sort of people to show up, and of course the supporting media coverage to get their message out.

There was just one slight problem for the stage-managed revival of the #Resistance- rioters waving the Mexican Flag over burning cars in Los Angeles, California, beat them to the punch.

While the actual photo was almost certainly one of those naturally occurring protest images, the California protests weren’t (quite). On 6 June, about a week and a half before the No Kings protests for the 14th, hundreds of protestors rallied in downtown Los Angeles to protest various ICE raids that had occurred across the city earlier that day. By the 7th, local riot police and teargas were being used On the 8th, Trump federalized California National Guard over California Governor Newsom’s objection to protect federal property and personnel.

This was an unusual, arguably provocative, decision. In US law, national guard operate under the state governor’s control and are not legally under Presidential or federal control unless done under certain legal authorities. Failure to do so is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a post-civil-war-reconstruction act making it a crime to use federal forces in law enforcement roles except where authorized by Congress. Trump invoking these authorities- which provide the Congressional authorization criteria- has been the subject of litigation by Governor Newsom, who opposed activation at the time, allegedly on grounds it would inflame the protests- which it arguably did.

Why did Trump do it, besides malicious disregard for the governor? Trump’s decision to do so anyways was likely influenced by the acting ICE director alleging that the LAPD took 2 hours to respond to requests for law enforcement assistance on 6 June despite multiple calls when ICE agents were swarmed by objectors during the 6 June enforcement raids that kickstarted the protests-turned-riots. The LA Police Chief has disputed this, claiming police responded in 38 minutes, citing traffic. (There is a joke to be made about LA traffic and how this is plausible.) The Police Chief also claimed they weren’t informed ahead of time, which is… also quite plausible.

Naturally / inevitably, however, the California protests became at least a short term win for Governor Newsom, whose post-protest Presidential prospects for 2026 seem stronger for having stood up to / opposed Trump. Resistance in this contexts has been more about verbal sparring and legal objections than something more concrete. Less assembling a platoon of people and buying the biggest fireworks possible to attack police, and more name calling, daring the administration to arrest him, and general ‘Trump is acting like a dictator’ themes. You know, the usual things political opponents in dictatorships do. At the same time, Newsom is playing the role of the moderate, and while it’s not like he can take full credit for the work of District Attorneys and such, California is publicizing charging some of the worst protestors in ways that weren’t really publicized during the Trump 1 era left-coded protests.

Except… Newsom isn’t the only winner here. Or necessarily the biggest Democratic power player. That may yet go to another, David Huerta.

If you don’t know who David Heurta is, you are not alone. He is not an elected politician, a party strategist, or elder statesman. He is a union leader. To quote his Biden-era White House bio when he was an honored guest-

David Huerta is President of the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW) whose members are service workers predominately from the commercial real estate industry. As a labor leader, David has worked to build an immigrant integration program that includes English classes for union members. Under his leadership, hundreds of SEIU-USWW members have become U.S. citizens. In addition, he has advocated for comprehensive immigration reform by empowering SEIU-USWW members to become their own advocates for change.

Or to put it another way- David Huerta is part of the labor union wing of the Democratic party, except his labor union is of the totally-not-illegal-immigrant sort of organized labor. And his role in the party is totally not as part of the labor union mobilization to party member pipeline that organized labor has served in the past.

Mr. Huerta was arrested Friday the 6th of June, which is to say when the protests started, for interfering with ICE operations. His protest seems to have been both non-violent and directly intended to obstruct ICE activities.

According to a Homeland Security Investigation officer's sworn affidavit, Huerta sat down in front of a vehicular gate to a staging ground for ICE operations that were ongoing nearby.

The complaint alleges he yelled to the protestors "stop the vehicles," and "it's a public sidewalk, they can't stop us."

The officer then says he asked Huerta to move from the gate so that cars could get in and out of the facility, and Huerta replied, "What are you going to do? You can't arrest all of us."

Mr. Huerta may well have been correct. Instead of everyone being arrested, Mr. Huerta was arrested. And within 12 hours hundreds of protestors were in downtown LA. Within 36 hours, hundreds grew to thousands and cars had been burned in the streets. Within 48 hours Trump sent in the national guard, clearly taking it seriously.

One on hand, this can be (as the sympathetic media seek to characterize it), a case of a peaceful labor leader being unjustly suppressed, leading to a cycle of provocation due to reckless escalation.

On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?

To my knowledge, no. And that’s why I would suggest that Mr. Huerta, not Governor Newsome, may end up being the bigger winner from these protests. A $50,000 bail fee is one of those things that is not exactly going to cripple not only a labor union leader with friends in high places, but someone who has- probably- gotten far, far more popular with the would-be resistance. Willing to fight ICE, protest Trump, and a labor leader?

Mr. Huerta may not be challenging Governor Newsom for the governorship or Presidency any time ever, but Mr. Huerta probably has a good future ahead of himself in the Democratic party… if the glowing editorial linked in that first mention of him wasn’t clue enough that he’s already a significant local power player.

But remember- it’s not just Mr. Huerta.

Mr. Huerta’s glory comes, somewhat, at the expense of Governor Newsom. Media coverage, and public attention, is a 0-sum game. Some elements can reinforce each other, and in this case arguably did, but other elements work against each other.

After all, their glory/prestige/anti-Trump cred comes from the protests that came at the expense of the No King’s protests. Their exposure / attention grabbing was zero-sum between ‘polite, professional’ #Resistance, and a far more immediate, visceral ‘snap’ protests.

And the California protests- where both Huerta and Newsom had their political interest incentives be firmly in the ‘maximally oppose Trump’ side of things- have given Trump and the Republicans the sort of made-for-campaign-add images that only a Mexican flag over burned cars in American cities can.

And this doesn’t count the other people involved, initially or later, and who tried to get in on the action / influence. One man has been charged with trying buy the biggest fireworks he could to arm his ‘platoon’ and shoot at police in the later LA protests. When political fireworks- figurative or literal- are prestigious, bigger demonstrations of ability garner more prestige for more influence for bigger groups.

The LA Protests and the No Kings Protests weren’t formally or even directly at odds. But they were competing in various ways. For public attention, yes, but also for Democrat consideration. The #Resistance revival has, for the moment, failed to take off. Maybe it already would have, but the LA riots stole wind from the sail, to speak. And in turn, the LA riots- despite being vehemently anti-Trump and anti-ICE, two very popular things with the Democratic base- are likely to undercut the Democrat position going into the next election cycle. Now any future No Kings-style mass protests has to either take better care to distance from the more combative, or be tarred with the politically unpalatable for the non-democrats in the electorate.

Which lowers the value (and ability) of a combined effort… but does encourage partisans to do what they can for their own interest, regardless of how it affects the rest of the party. The nature of such publicity-driven contests creates natural incentives for speed (to pre-empt others), high-visibility (to dominate attention), and excess (the rawest form of proof-of-sincerity).

This creates something of a prisoners dilemma where everyone has an incentive to ‘defect’ first by going for their own public display, rather than coordinating. Even if the party, collectively, would perform better if everyone sang from the same sheet of music, any ambitious leader is incentivized to not be part of the choir.

The point here isn’t that these contemporary protests are adversaries. It is that these contemporary incentives are occurring at the same time as the inter-party conflict, where the David Hogg and progressives of the party want more combative responses at the expense of other party members. And if they can do so- and win party acclaim- by pushing protest actions as aggressively as possible against Trump, the acceptable target, rather than against other Democrats…

That’s a risky mix, even before you consider that another key actor has his own agency in this brewing inner-party struggle.

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Part 4: Trump Can Strike Back (Lawfully)

I’m torn between introducing this section as ‘Trump’s White House is more competent than you may want to believe’ and ‘it’s not legal just because it’s anti-Trump,’ and ‘don’t count on departed friends to protect you.’ All are applicable.

The first is a reminder / warning against those who want to dismiss the Trump administration’s ability for deliberate, even clever, action. Whatever your opinion on Trump himself, he is not an incompetent at everything he does. Nor, more importantly, are the people he’s brought into this administration. There are implications of some exceptionally competent people who understand how the government works at a mechanical level, as demonstrated from the takedown of USAID through dual-hatting, the ongoing efforts to move Executive branch agencies outside of the National Capital Region, and the budget/shutdown politics. I’ve even gone so far as to argue that various policy rollouts like DOGE have been done with the intent of shaping later / future policy efforts. The Project 2025 wishlist may not have been a formal Trump policy plan of everything he’d agreed to, but there are a lot of discrete, actionable items there that have been pursued as able by those willing to work with/for Trump.

The point here isn’t to praise, but to make a point about institutional competence. There are people in the administration who know what they are doing, know what they want, and know how to go about turning that desire into policy. And when they know to expect resistance, they loosely know who and what they need to act against- not least because various parts of the #Resistance wrote extensive tell-all articles last time to take credit for how they worked together to link elected politicians, media, labor organizers, and business interests worked together to manage anti-Trump protests.

When political opponents write a brag sheet of dubiously legal measures they took to defeat you, it doesn’t take the most capable political actor to plan to mitigate it on round two.

It’s not even something that necessarily only started this year. Reaching way back to 2017, you may (not) remember the Dakota Pipeline Protests, which were one of the anti-Trump-coded protests in the early first trump administration. In short, American tribal / environmentalist protests over a pipeline escalated after Trump voiced support, including occupations of work sites, blockades against ground routes to resupply them, and so on. It was framed as ‘Trump against native Americans and environmentalists,’ and the protestors received significant public media support at the time.

Well, after over half a decade in court, Greenpeace has been $660 million in damages for defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts. This may threaten to bankrupt the organization, though it will be years more before it works through the system. The crux of the verdict derives from the tens of thousands of dollars raised to train and send thousands of protestors, along with logistical support, with awareness and sanction at the highest levels of the organization.

Parallels to other mass protest organizers should hopefully be obvious.

This Time Would Be Different even if Trump were not Actually a Dictator this term, but because various factors that the Democratic party and partisans have taken for granted in the past two decades are changing. Various dynamics that let the election fortification of 2020 succeed were based variously on low awareness by the Trump administration of what was going on, having the right friends in the right places to make it work, and reluctance by the government(s) to go after coordinating elements.

As elements of this change, the system gears grind against rather than with each other. And in the sort of decentralized, every-Dem-is-pursuing-their-own-interest protest environment that the No Kings vs. Newsom vs. Huerte anti-Trump protests have been showing, there are probably going to be far more loose threads, and far more willingness to pursue them, going forward.

Take the Justice Department. A good deal of prosecution by any government is discretionary. You only have so many investigators, only so many prosecutors, and more potential crimes than you can handle. You prioritize what to pursue, and drop what you don’t want to. This is how something like 90% to 95% of the 2020 Floyd protest charges were dropped or never pursued in various jurisdictions.

But at the same time, non-prosecution is a choice, not a natural state of a just world. And it is a choice that can be made otherwise if someone wants to. Or if the people who wouldn’t want to depart and are replaced.

For example, the DOJ Civil Rights Division had a reputation for seeking certain types of civil rights cases, and not being as interested in others, such as university admissions discrimination. I say ‘had’ because something like 70% of the DOJ Civil Rights Division has departed since Trump took office. Whatever reputation / expectation you have of the Civil Rights Division, it’s probably not quite what the new DOJ CRD priorities are.

The “Civil Division Enforcement Priorities” memorandum identifies five priorities: (1) combatting discriminatory practices and policies, (2) ending antisemitism, (3) protecting women and children, (4) ending “sanctuary” jurisdictions, and (5) prioritizing denaturalization of naturalized U.S. citizens.

But this is the new institutional direction of the CRD. It still has the legal authorities Congress gave to the ‘old’ CRD. But as the saying goes, “people are policy,” and the people in the CRD have changed. Other people’s expectations just haven’t caught up to, say, the DOJ opening a civil rights case against any state or local officials involved sanctuary city politics that also just-so-happen to overlaps with, say, anti-federal riots.

I raised the fireworks platoon guy earlier, but that is far from the only case that can be pursued. About a week into the protests, a crowd broke into an ICE detention facility, overpowered national guard soldiers, and tried to release the detainees before about 100 law enforcement officers responded. That’s various charges on its own. The FBI is reportedly considering a criminal conspiracy line of effort for any groups involved in organizing the violent protests. The IRS is reportedly reviewing into non-profit and other organizational funding as part of the money flow investigation. Parallel to those parallels, House Republicans are investigating a US billionaire with possible ties to the protests, and the Chinese Communist Party… and Code Pink,an anti-war/social-justice organization.

And this doesn’t include other possible things that could be pursued. Doxing can be a crime… but what if its a municipal mayor who decides to dox ICE agents? When mostly peaceful protests are held outside of hotels suspected of hosting ICE agents, what if / when a not-entirely-peaceful protest occurs outside of a hotel that isn’t? When left-coded social media encourages eachother to follow and record ICE agents at work, what happens if someone ignores the ACLU’s carefully worded advice on dealing with law enforcement, particularly what the agents areallowed to do?

Would arrests and prosecutions be politically motivated? Sure, if you want. When any prosecution is discretionary, all high-profile investigations and prosecutions are arguably motivated. Similarly, a refusal to do so can also be motivated.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that could be found. It won’t even require ‘three felonies a day’ over-criminalization of anything.

The point I am trying to make here is that there is a greater risk of legal risk to anti-Trump partisans this administration than in the last two, and this is matched by a greater interest in the Trump administration to do so.

This is going to challenge people’s expectations / understanding of what ‘should’ be tolerated / not challenged as illegal, but will be viewed as suspect now. I want to emphasize this even further, since this isn’t ‘merely’ corruption of justice, but an element of generational norms being overturned.

12 of the last 16 years have seen the American federal government under the control of the Democratic party. The Obama and Biden administrations would generally sympathize with, and not be interested in aggressively pursuing, Democrat-coded protestors. Four of the other last 16 years were the resistance phase, where significant parts of the government bureaucracy deliberately stonewalled Trump efforts- and in some cases, in active collusion with protest organizers. Four years before that, the last four years of the Bush administration, were also a period of large-scale and sustained political protest environments as part of the Democratic party apparatus, when the Bush Administration was sensitive to how it could respond due to falling political legitimacy and political norms of the era.

20+ years of established expectations on ‘what you can get away with at a protest’ is a generation. Younger partisans like David Hogg have spent their entire adult / politically-aware lives in that environment. It is a norm to them, the way things have ‘always’ been.

But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.

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Part 5: When a Resistance Devours Itself

This is the final section, and an effort to bring the points above together into a hopefully coherent but non-obvious synthesis.

My forecast prediction is that over the next year, inter-Democrat competition is going to revolve around who can ‘stand up to’ / fight Trump by pressing the limit of the law, but attempts to toe the line are going to overstep changes in enforcement practices. This will fuel anti-Trump sentiment amongst Democrats and accusations of tyranny, but also influence the unfolding of the Democratic internal struggle not only going into 2026, but even into the 2028 election. This will be because the Trump administration will likely go after the ‘connective tissue’ of the Democratic protest-mobilization apparatus where it detects legal risk. This, in turn, can become a tool in the Democratic internal conflict that sub-factions can utilize against each other, because those same mobilization organizations are factional players in the Democratic internal conflict.

In part one, we made a case for why the Senate will be a rough bet for the Democrats at all. While coherent parties can spin a partial failure into a partial success, this will likely hinder the institutional ability of the Democrats to do major limits on the Republican party. This is liable to frustrate partisans, and lead to highly symbolic protests in the institutions, and other actions outside of institutions.

In part two, we raised the ongoing internal conflict within the Democratic party. Significant parts of the Progressive wing have and are making efforts to actively displace non-progressive rivals for control and even composition of the Democratic Party establishment. The non-progressive institutionalists won, but they are facing the challenge of the upcoming mid-terms, even as the progressives are trying to take the mantle of ‘actually fighting Trump.’ Democratic institutions are already being used against each other.

In part three, we raised how ‘actually fighting’ is something of a zero-sum game on the ability of leaders to mobilize protests and take the spotlight. Would-be leaders trying to organize great protests can be pre-empted and upstaged even accidentally by those doing their own thing with more modest means. When paired with the internal party struggle in part two, this creates incentives for would-be leaders of the party to push aggressive protests to the limits of the law.

In part four, we make the point is that the limit of the law is changing, and that this implication is not widely recognized. Between changes in institutional composition that have changed out more sympathetic actors who could have turned a blind eye, increased awareness of how the Democratic protest mobilization structure works, and the improved institutional understanding of the Trump administration on how to shape and act through the bureaucracy, the legal-enforcement environment has changed. When it is noticed, it will be probably be decried as tyranny, but there are non-tyrannical causes.

In part five, I want to make a point that these are not just individual facets that might each be an interesting observation of their own but part of a feedback loop. How the Trump Administration chooses to prosecute law-pressing protests is itself going to be a factor in the internal democratic power struggle in both future elections and the outcome of the Democratic power struggle.

The 2026 election argument is reasoning from (future) public polling. Will Trump and the Republicans be more or less popular if they crack down on lawbreakers involved in protests? If the public supports anti-ICE protestors over Trump, then the more anti-ICE protests, the better the midterm results. As a consequence, internal democratic party logic might be to maximize protests, even if it involves lawbreaking, for a net gain. Especially if/when anger at Trump administration arrest and prosecutions might turn out the base.

But this is an assumption, not a conclusion. While there are parts of the Trump migration policies that are unpopular, there are parts that remain popular. Moreover, prosecutions of protest elements can motivate the Trump base as well, and voter apathy/antipathy could deter Democrat support. It could well be a negative effect. We’ll see which proves right in the midterms.

What is arguably more important, however, is if the organizations that organize and execute start to being targeted, and what that might mean going into 2028.

Organizations that engage in mass protest politics, like Greenpeace, don’t only organize protests against Red Tribe-coded efforts. That money and manpower is put to use in other ways in other contexts. For Democratic party organizations, that includes things like voter mobilization, organizing fundraising, and coordinating communications. These take money and manpower, and when you lack the resources and the unified efforts, you end up like the Florida Democratic Party, which has practically collapsed in the third largest US state.

That is the larger 2028 election implication, if aggressive protest mobilizers in 2025-2026 lead to investigations/prosecutions in 2027-2028 due to the increased willingness to enforce against grey zone activities. The generational expectations of what could/would be prosecuted are shifted, so there’s the risk, and the consequence could be a partial paralysis of the Democratic Party mobilization/organization infrastructure in the next presidential election. Organizations frozen, donors uncertain/afraid to give to who, and so on.

This will obviously, understandably, and predictably alarm Democratic partisans. Condemnations will be demanded and almost certainly provided. However… it will also shape the inter-Democratic conflict as which organizations are affected/investigated first and most will matter.

After all, Democratic organizations don’t only try to help all Democrats get elected. Some, like Leaders We Deserve, would rather some Democrats lose so that a personal faction can get in place instead.

And if, hypothetically, some process error or rules violation were to expose that faction to legal risk- where the big bad Trump administration might act and convenient clear the field…

Well, the surviving winners would certainly happily condemn the Trump administration for doing so. And get the perks with the party base for doing so. But it sure would be convenient, wouldn’t it?

This is the risk of the Democratic civil war quote-unquote “escalating” in the midst of the Trump administration’s willingness to crack down where it can. It’s not just that Democrats are fighting each other, or that Democrats fight Trump. It can be that Democrats use Trump to fight each other as a tool for their internal conflict.

If anyone has studied (or, worse, lived in/through) a country going through a civil war, especially one with a resistance with little formal power but motivated by performative acts of defiance, this should not be surprising. This has been a common / well recorded dynamic where rival insurgent groups are nominally on the same side, but competing with each other, and leverage the hated oppressor as a tool in their conflict.

Sometimes it’s as direct as an anonymous informant dropping a tip, so that a raid can go after a rival. Perhaps that old, establishment incumbent is in the way, but wouldn't be if evidence of patronage-network corruption were passed on to a hostile FBI. Or maybe that young, reckless progressive who didn't learn how to play the limits of the protests of the 70s makes a mistake that could leave them out and unprotected. Action, or inaction, could have similar effects when a hostile administration is looking for something to act on.

Does such feuding it hurt the combined potential of the resistance overall? Sure. Does it improve the hated authority’s position to have one less threat? Also sure. But does it position you better for influence / control of the local resistance networks, i.e. the democratic party?

This is why David Hogg was called a jackass for trying to primary fellow democrats as DNC chair. It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere. The value of a reputation of neutrality is that people don’t expect neutral actors to be that sort of backstabber, and they don't make plans to backstab the neutral actors either. It reduces internal coalition tensions.

But in making that power play, and then the institutionalist purge of Hogg through totally-not-pretextual means, the Hogg struggle helped reframe the nature of the competition. It is not merely ‘how do the Democrats struggle against Trump?’ It is now, increasingly, ‘how do the Democrats use existing institutions in the struggle against each other?’

And since Trump is still a relevant actor, both as a foil and as an agent in his own right, the emerging Democratic infighting paradigm may well become ‘how do we use Trump in our struggle against each other?’

57

Context

Dean Flairless 27d ago · Edited 27d ago

Dean Highlights The Reuters' 2025 Digital News Report So You Don't Have To

Consider this your invitation to get a drink, pop your feet up, and think about how the state of the world is conveyed to you rather than what the bad news of the week actually is.

(Is this escapism? Unrepentantly so. Also, a nerd out on the evolution of the media industry over the last few years. What else are you on the Motte for?)

This Monday the 2025 Digital News Report was published. This is a review of global media trends, such as how media consumption, habits, preferences, and audience composition have changed over the last years. It reflects on how various audiences consume and have been shaped by elements of the culture war, such as Musk's management of X, the rise of Tiktok, AI, and so on.

Given how much of the discourse here covers the coverage of these topics, this study seems salient. Especially since it is billed as the most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.

This is not an empty media boast. This probably is the most comprehensive, and global-spanning, media industry analysis I've read in some time, and while it's not without its blemishes. It's not without blemishes, but when the executive summary is 25 pages long (admittedly with many graphics), there's a lot to unpack. But since expecting anyone to read a 171 page report is a bit much, why not break it down a ~~bit~~ lot?

This post is going to be taking highlights, key points, and so on from the study executive summary. Much, but not all, will be quoted. I will make comments of my own where I feel most interested, but will try to keep my thoughts distinct from the article. Due to how it's formatted, it does not copy-paste neatly. Forgive the jank that slips through.

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Who is this by for whom and why should you believe a word of it?

This is Ivy League level academic research made with significant assistance by corporate media clearly hoping for actionable insights at a global level. Given the monetary incentives at stake, this is a case where commercial interests, including those well outside western progressive circles, are a mitigating influence to personal preferences.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is a part of Oxford University in England. This is an academic-journalism nexus by, of, and for industry professionals. This level of academia has a lot of cross-pollination with the US, but this isn't 'merely' an advocacy section, but a professional interest institution.

The key sponsors and supporters of this report are identified on page 3 of the PDF. The 'main sponsor' is Google News Initiative, but the 'supported by' includes a whose-who of major western media companies. Not just newspaper companies like Reuters either, but groups like Youtube, BBC, Korea Press Foundation, Ofcom, CodeAfrica, and other media actors. This is Media as a Business, not media as a political faction, and the target audiences are global, not American-European specifically.

This sponsorship is key for understanding the article's focus on consumer demographics, preference changes, and so on. This is a report on 'how people consume digital news' paid by the types of groups that provide digital media. When it addresses topics of 'people are tuning out,' this is not (primarily) in the sense of an ideological 'people are ignoring us,' but in the context of 'consumers are not consuming your product for these reasons.'

This corporate motive is a basis to give credence to the data-driven observations here. This is a product paid for with money to generate more money, and so accuracy is an interest more than ideological performance. When the study talks about media market trends, it's for the sake of people who want a more accurate understanding of the media market.

That said... (Bias Warning)

Yes, there is bias, of a predictable pro-media-establishment sort. Oxford is still a prestige university, and the Reuters Institute being a professional interest institution is still both for, by, and once again for journalists. Unsurprisingly, they have a good impression of themselves, and bad impression of others who doubt their conduct or character. The dislike of Trump is palpable in the way that only 'we will use studiously neutral language except for our word choice framing unfavored actors' can be, and gets a bit more blatant in country-by-country breakdowns deep in.

That said- it's still worth reading. This is what it looks like when people try to mitigate their biases and take an objective look at the situation. Whatever the authors of a specific section may feel people should feel about themselves, they are not adverse to directly recognizing things like low reputational trust.

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The Methodology

This is a 'good enough to be useful' YouGov online questionnaire between January and February 2025, not a 'gold standard' method. Page 6 has the disclaimers and caveats for how strongly, or not strongly, to take certain elements. Statistics given should be understood to be ballpark estimates.

• Samples were assembled using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region in every market. Education quotas were also applied in all markets except Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Peru, and Thailand. We also applied political quotas based on vote choice in the most recent national election in around a third of our markets including the United States, Australia, and much of Western Europe. The data in all markets were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data.

Note that 2024 was a year of many major elections in the US and Europe. As a result, this (should) reflect a fair deal of European political distribution.

• Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population, because it is not possible to reach other groups in a representative way using an online survey. The survey was fielded mostly in English in these markets,1 and restricted to ages 18 to 50 in Kenya and Nigeria. Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.

The survey was not done in English in most markets, however, giving substantial insight potential.

• More generally, online samples will tend to under-represent the news consumption habits of people who are older and less affluent, meaning online use is typically over-represented and traditional offline use under-represented. In this sense, it is better to think of results as representative of the online population.

This is the key caveat. This is not a full study of all media consumers, but specifically online media consumers, i.e. the generation of today and the trends to expect to grow tomorrow as old people die and younger people replace them.

• The use of a non-probability sampling approach means that it is not possible to compute a conventional ‘margin of error’ for individual data points. However, differences of +/- 2 percentage points (pp) or less are very unlikely to be statistically significant and should be interpreted with a very high degree of caution. We typically do not regard differences of +/- 2pp as meaningful, and as a general rule we do not refer to them in the text. The same applies to small changes over time.

Don't put too much faith on the exact numbers, but do value the magnitude and general direction.

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Opening Narrative

This executive summary opens with this narrative, before many sub-sections. This section is quoted in full.

This year’s report comes at a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, not to mention climate breakdown and continuing destructive conflicts around the world. Against that background, evidence-based and analytical journalism should be thriving, with newspapers flying off shelves, broadcast media and web traffic booming. But as our report shows, the reality is very different. In most countries we find traditional news media struggling to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions.

An accelerating shift towards consumption via social media and video platforms is further diminishing the influence of ‘institutional journalism’ and supercharging a fragmented alternative media environment containing an array of podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers. Populist politicians around the world are increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse.

These trends are increasingly pronounced in the United States under Donald Trump, as well as parts of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, but are moving more slowly elsewhere, especially where news brands maintain a strong connection with audiences. In countries where press freedom is under threat, alternative ecosystems also offer opportunities, at their best, to bring fresh perspectives and challenge repressive governments. But at the same time these changes may be contributing to rising political polarisation and a coarsening debate online. In this context, our report uncovers a deep divide between the US and Europe, as well as between conservatives and progressives everywhere, over where the limits of free speech should lie – with battle lines drawn over the role of content moderation and fact-checking in social media spaces.

This year’s survey also highlights emerging challenges in the form of AI platforms and chatbots, which we have asked about for the first time. As the largest tech platforms integrate AI summaries and other news-related features, publishers worry that these could further reduce traffic flows to websites and apps. But we also show that in a world increasingly populated by synthetic content and misinformation, all generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don’t use them as often as they once did.

With growing numbers of people selectively (and in some cases consistently) avoiding the news, we look into the potential benefits of using new generative AI technologies to personalise content and make it feel more engaging for younger people. Our report, which is supported by qualitative research in three markets (the UK, US, and Norway), also includes a chapter on the changing state of podcasting as the lines blur with video talk shows and explores the prospects for charging for audio content. We also investigate where the value lies in local news and what appetite there might be towards more flexible ways of paying for online content, including ‘news bundles’.

This fourteenth edition of our Digital News Report, which is based on data from six continents and 48 markets, including Serbia for the first time, reminds us that these changes are not always evenly distributed. While there are common challenges around the pace of change and the disruptive role of platforms, other details are playing out differently depending on the size of the market, long-standing habits and culture, and the relationship between media and politics. The overall story is captured in this Executive Summary, followed by Section 2 with chapters containing additional analysis, and then individual country and market pages in Section 3.

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Key Findings

This section is provided in full. Following sections will be selective extracts.

• Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States where polling overlapped with the first few weeks of the new Trump administration. Social media news use was sharply up (+6pp) but there was no ‘Trump bump’ for traditional sources.

One of the (not explicit) trends in the survey is that alternative-media news consumption increases as the engagement, and trust, in traditional media falls. There is more explicit recognitition of alternative media environments later.

• Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates. One-fifth (22%) of our United States sample says they came across news or commentary from popular podcaster Joe Rogan in the week after the inauguration, including a disproportionate number of young men. In France, young news creator Hugo Travers (HugoDécrypte) reaches 22% of under-35s with content distributed mainly via YouTube and TikTok. **Young influencers also play a significant role in many Asian countries, including Thailand. **

One of the (non-explicit) parallels/trends in this study is that the US media market is diverging in style from Europe, and more towards Asia. This correlates with relative trust in establishment media and political polarization, which is characterized here as having been higher in Asia than in Europe for some time.

• News use across online platforms continues to fragment, with six online networks now reaching more than 10% weekly with news content, compared with just two a decade ago. Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.

Remember the selection bias for the yougov poll, but later points indicate that the increase in social media news-sourcing being done by younger demographics, i.e. the long-term future.

• Data show that usage of X for news is stable or increasing across many markets, with the biggest uplift in the United States (+8pp), Australia (+6pp), and Poland (+6pp). Since Elon Musk took over the network in 2023 many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently. Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news.

This surprised me a bit since there was a dedicated effort to undercut / subvert X due to Musk. Later data indicates this is more because more right-leaning people joined than left-leaning people left, which isn't surprising, but the failure of the rivals to scale upwards is notable as a long-term influence vector.

• Changing platform strategies mean that video continues to grow in importance as a source of news. Across all markets the proportion consuming social video has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. In the Philippines, Thailand, Kenya, and India more people now say they prefer to watch the news rather than read it, further encouraging the shift to personality-led news creators.

This is an interesting trend / potential causal loop where low trust in establishment media feeds social media sources, social media sources leading to more trusted personalities, and those personality-led creators being more successful with video, not just audio or text, as the way to establish their personality for the personal relationship trust.

• Our survey also shows the importance of news podcasting in reaching younger, better-educated audiences. The United States has among the highest proportion (15%) accessing one or more podcasts in the last week, with many of these now filmed and distributed via video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. By contrast, many northern European podcast markets remain dominated by public broadcasters or big legacy media companies and have been slower to adopt video versions.

Video-podcasts are rising / eclipsing purely audio-podcasting, which may factor in the personal-relationship-trust alternative model raised above.

• TikTok is the fastest growing social and video network, adding a further 4pp across markets for news and reaching 49% of our online sample in Thailand (+10pp) and 40% in Malaysia (+9pp). But at the same time people in those markets see the network as one of the biggest threats when it comes to false or misleading information, along with Facebook.

Growth of tiktok is not surprising. Credibility might be noteworthy later. One of the information-conflict concerns over Tiktok is that Chinese control over the alorithm shapes what people will see, and thus believe. I've my doubts on the efficacy of that level of influence, and this point on platform-prevalence also corresponding with platform-skepticism suggest that the personality-led model will matter more, which mitigates/reduces the impact of algorithmic bias efforts.

• Overall, over half our sample (58%) say they remain concerned about their ability to tell what is true from what is false when it comes to news online, a similar proportion to last year. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) and the United States (73%), with lowest levels in Western Europe (46%).

Note that Western Europe is a major outlier in the media-skeptic trends, but even here it is a nearly 50-50 concern split. This will be relevant two items down.

• When it comes to underlying sources of false or misleading information, online influencers and personalities are seen as the biggest threat worldwide (47%), along with national politicians (47%). Concern about influencers is highest in African countries such as Nigeria (58%) and Kenya (59%), while politicians are considered the biggest threat in the United States (57%), Spain (57%), and much of Eastern Europe.

I'll just note with some humor that the 'influencers' are raised as the biggest threat, despite the same % as 'national politicians.' This is what I meant earlier about elements of bias seeping in.

• Despite this, the public is divided over whether social media companies should be removing more or less content that may be false or harmful, but not illegal. Respondents in the UK and Germany are most likely to say too little is being removed, while those in the United States are split, with those on the right believing far too much is already taken down and those on the left saying the opposite.

When combined with the online truthiness statistic above, this may suggest that efforts on the European level for media fact checking are hinged on (decreasing) higher-trust / older demographic of the political-establishment-center who feels things might yet still be saved.

If those European efforts don't become policy sooner than later, then as political polarization / political-right normalization continues, European markets may hit the same sort of political tipping point where political pluralities view 'confidence-boosting fact checking' as 'politically motivated censorship against them,' facilitating the trust spiral. Thus, a limited political window of opportunity before establishment fatigue leads to the current establishments being able to implement these policies to (hopeful) success.

• We find AI chatbots and interfaces emerging as a source of news as search engines and other platforms integrate real-time news. The numbers are still relatively small overall (7% use for news each week) but much higher with under-25s (15%).

There's an unsurprising theme of the younger generation being both the most online, the most attuned to social media, and the most comfortable with AI products.

• With many publishers looking to use AI to better personalise news content, we find mixed views from audiences, some of whom worry about missing out on important stories. At the same time there is some enthusiasm for making the news more accessible or relevant, including summarisation (27%), translating stories into different languages (24%), better story recommendations (21%), and using chatbots to ask questions about news (18%).

• More generally, however, audiences in most countries remain sceptical about the use of AI in the news and are more comfortable with use cases where humans remain in the loop. Across countries they expect that AI will make the news cheaper to make (+29 net difference) and more-up-to-date (+16) but less transparent (-8), less accurate (-8), and less trustworthy (-18).

• These data may be of some comfort to news organisations hoping that AI might increase the value of human-generated news. To that end we find that trusted news brands, including public service news brands in many countries, are still the most frequently named place people say they go when they want to check whether something is true or false online, along with official (government) sources. This is true across age groups, though younger people are proportionately more likely than older groups to use social media to check information as well as AI chatbots.

Trusted News Brands is relevant in part because the personality-driven social media network is also a 'trust' relationship. The key point I'd take away / spread is that when people don't feel they can trust traditional media, they are increasingly comfortable / able to defect to the non-traditional media based on trust in a personality, since that's the next-best proximity.

This (loosely) aligns with a regular critique I've made regarding public legitimacy of officials during COVID, when institutional lying lost public trust. Trust / credibility is a resource that's not easily regained.

• One more relatively positive sign is that overall trust in the news (40%) has remained stable for the third year in a row, even if it is still four points lower overall than it was at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Remember that this study is by journalist professionals, for journalist professionals. Also remember the warning of bias earlier. 'We should consider it a good sign only 60% do not overall trust in our profession, only one-in-twenty less than during Covid' is damning with faint praise.

• As publishers look to diversify revenue streams, they are continuing to struggle to grow their digital subscription businesses. The proportion paying for any online news remains stable at 18% across a basket of 20 richer countries – with the majority still happy with free offerings. Norway (42%) and Sweden (31%) have the highest proportion paying, while a fifth (20%) pay in the United States. By contrast, 7% pay for online news in Greece and Serbia and just 6% in Croatia

This is business-actionable advice. Don't be surprised if some media corporation takes this as evidence that people need to be less happy with free offerings.

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The preceeding was just the first two pages of the Executive Summary, and this post is over 2/5ths of the word count. The rest of the EXSUM is section-by-section summaries, often elaborating on the key finding paragraphs posted above , so I will quote the major sections, and the most interesting bits by exception.

Please feel free to read the full thing. The executive summary is 25 pages, but it's one-paragraph bits like the above, and not terribly dense.

TRADITIONAL NEWS MEDIA LOSING INFLUENCE – UNITED STATES IN THE SPOTLIGHT

First, the proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up – overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time. Eight years ago, the so-called ‘Trump bump’ raised all boats (or temporarily stalled their sinking), including access to news websites, TV, and radio, but this time round only social and video networks (and most likely podcasts too) have grown, supporting a sense that traditional journalism media in the US are being eclipsed by a shift towards online personalities and creators.

These shifts are in large part driven by younger groups – so-called digital and social natives. Over half of under-35s in the United States – 54% of 18–24s and 50% of 25–34s – now say that social media/video networks are their main source (+13pp and +6pp respectively compared with last year). But all age groups are prioritising social media to a greater extent – at the expense of traditional channels such as websites and TV news

In culture-war terms, the red tribe seems to have succeeded in creating its alternative media ecosystem to survive (and thrive) in, and people are increasingly making the jump. X is not-quite-directly credited that elsewhere.

At the same time, we find a continued decline in audiences for traditional TV news, as audiences switch to online streaming for drama, sport, news, and more. TV news reach in France and Japan, for example, is down 4pp and 3pp to 59% and 50% respectively. Linear radio news, which had been relatively stable, is also on a downward trend, with younger audiences often preferring on-demand audio formats such as podcasting.

A non-culture-war explanation for part of the decline, however, is less about tribal politics, and more about technology and business models. As the internet streaming services have undercut cable TV, and internet aggregators undercut papers, traditional media consumption would be declining regardless of politics, just by medium-shift.

Taken together, these trends seem to be encouraging the growth of a personality-driven alternative media sector which often sets out its stall in opposition to traditional news organisations, even if, in practice, many of the leading figures are drawn from these. Prominent YouTubers outside the United States include Julian Reichelt, a former editor of Bild in Germany, and Piers Morgan, a former newspaper editor and TV presenter in the UK, but mostly name recognition in Europe for these news creators is much lower than the US.

Already hit the drum that, in the absence of trusted institutions, people will turn to trusted individuals.

A humorous culture swing at our (western) European members here is that the reason they have higher trust in their media institutions because they have more forgettable media influencers to steal them away.

PLATFORM RESETS AND THEIR IMPACT ON NEWS MEDIA

Last year we showed how changes to platform strategies for social media companies such as Meta – including a pulling back from news and investing in video and creator content – were making it even harder for publishers to reach specific audiences. Following Trump’s victory, Meta announced – in another sharp turn of direction – that they will show more political content, but the effects of this, and what it means for publishers in different countries, are yet to be seen.

This year’s data show continuing strengthening of video-based platforms and a further fragmentation of consumption. There are now six networks with weekly news reach of 10% or more compared with just two a decade ago, Facebook and YouTube. Although these networks remain the most important for news amongst the basket of 12 countries we have been tracking since 2014, they are increasingly challenged by Instagram and TikTok with younger demographics. But Messenger (5%), LinkedIn (4%), Telegram (4%,) Snapchat (3%), Reddit (3%), Threads (1%), and Bluesky (1%) are also an important part of the mix for specific audiences or for particular occasions

ELON MUSK’S X AUDIENCE SHIFTS RIGHTWARDS - NO LOSS OF OVERALL REACH

It is striking to see that X has not lost reach for news on aggregate across our 12 countries despite a widespread X-odus by liberals and journalists, including some prominent news organisations, some of whom have relocated to Threads or Bluesky. It may be that X’s reach is less affected than regular engagement, which industry research suggests had been declining before Trump’s return to the White House.

The italicized not was in the original, and is one of the very rare cases it was used. This is about as much of a professional shock as the authors can convey.

This may also shape media company / advertiser perceptions of dealing with X. Part of the X-odus was the (alleged) advertiser boycott. Industry data suggesting the X-audience has not dropped, but in some categories expanded to underserved markets, would support media-actor changes over time.

In the US, at least, the election and its aftermath seems to have re-energised the network. Our poll, which was conducted in the weeks after the inauguration, showed that the use of X for news was 8pp higher than the previous year, reaching almost a quarter (23%) of the adult population.

There is a good graphic in the document (pg 15) which shows X dropping about 5% from 20% to 15% by politically-left respondents after Musk's takeover and rebrand, before jumping to 24% after Trump's election. Over the same general time period, right-respondents when from 9% to 26% to using Twitter for news.

This- combined with the failure of the left-social-sphere like Bluesky- makes X an uncontested (but now bipartisan) public forum.

RISE OF VIDEO NETWORKS INCREASES PRESSURE ON NEWS MEDIA

For several years we have asked where people pay attention when using social networks and have found that mainstream media is at best challenged by – at worst losing out to – these online creators and personalities, even when it comes to news. This trend is evident again this time in data aggregated across all 48 markets. Creators now play a significant role in all the networks apart from Facebook, with traditional media gaining least attention on TikTok. This is not surprising as publishers have struggled to adapt journalistic content in a more informal space as well as worrying about cannibalising website traffic by posting in a network that is not set up for referral traffic.

The exception of TikTok is one of those actionable things for the corporate media funders/audience. This is an incentive to try and make deals with TikTok for greater access, and/or a basis to try and lawfare TikTok out of their domestic media markets.

UNDERLYING PREFERENCES ARE SHIFTING TOO

We’ve already explored the growing importance of online video news and news podcasts at a headline level but it is interesting to consider this in relation to text, which is still the dominant way in which most people access news. To what extent is this changing and with which demographics? Overall, we find that audiences on average across all markets still prefer text (55%), which provides both speed and control from a consumers’ perspective, but around a third (31%) say they prefer to watch the news online and more than one in ten (15%) say they prefer to listen. Country differences are particularly striking, with more people saying they prefer to watch rather than read or listen to the news in India, Mexico, and the Philippines. By contrast the vast majority still prefer to read online news in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

In the correlations with easier, the countries with higher establishment media trust, and the higher willingness to support media truth-corrections, are also the countries where most people still prefer to read rather than hear (or watch) their online news.

This very clear story about preferences is supported by data that show that consumption of online video has also jumped significantly in the last two years, after a period where it had remained relatively static. In the United States, for example, the proportion consuming any news video weekly has grown from just over half (55%) in 2021 to around three-quarters (72%) today. ***The majority of this consumption is accessed via third-party platforms (61%) such as Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok rather than via news websites or apps (29%), adding further evidence to the narrative about the diminishing influence of legacy media. ***

Across all markets the proportion consuming social video news has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. A big part of the change has been the shift of platform strategies which has seen networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X prioritising video more in their algorithms, while Google has added a short video tab to its search results. At the same time, publishers have been producing more videos of various duration and showcasing them more prominently within their websites and apps. The Economist is amongst publishers to have added a vertical video carousel on its home page, while the New York Times has incorporated short social media-inspired videos as a way of bringing out the personality of its reporters.

The change of audience intake is liable to accelerate even in Europe, as media corporations (the study founders) are in a feedback loop of providing more video to meet demands for video, which are accelerating demands for video.

This suggests a... not imminently, but already changing media relationship that will- through the European sharing of US online service providers like Google- bring Europe towards the global norm of personality-media (the winners of video-format), and its associations with lower trust in traditional institutions. Which feeds into the 'window of opportunity' point for any establishment efforts at information-regulation.

THE CHANGING SHAPE AND GROWING INFLUENCE OF NEWS PODCASTING

Our previous research shows that around a third of our global audience accesses some type of podcast monthly, including specialist, sport, entertainment, and a range of lifestyle content, but this year we have changed our approach, focusing more closely just on the news and current affairs category. By adding podcasts to our news consumption question we are able to compare weekly usage for the first time with radio, television, and print news, as well other digital sources.

This new question still shows significant differences across countries, with higher weekly usage of news podcasts in the United States (15%), reflecting strong investment by publishers, independent producers, and advertisers over the last few years. Our data suggest that in the US a similar proportion now consume news podcasts each week as read a printed newspaper or magazine (14%) or listen to news and current affairs on the radio (13%). Nordic markets such as Denmark (12%), Sweden (11%), and Norway (11%) also have well-developed news podcast markets, but traditional radio remains much more important there (33% average weekly news reach across Northern Europe). In other parts of the world such as Italy (6%), Argentina (4%), and Japan (3%) the podcast market is more nascent.

I wonder how much of the US podcast culture is because of how it aligns with American driving culture, where a podcast is something you can do on the commute to work.

In the United States we find a clear split between analysis-led shows from legacy brands – such as the Daily (New York Times) and Up First (NPR) – and personality-led podcasts that mostly deal in commentary or point of view. Much of the latter overlaps with the growth of the (mostly right-leaning) alternative media ecosystem that we described earlier. In many cases their primary output is not audio but video, with YouTube now the main channel for podcast distribution in the United States. By contrast, Spotify is the most popular podcast platform in the UK and Germany, along with public service media apps such as BBC Sounds and ARD Audiothek.

ONLINE MISINFORMATION AND NEWS LITERACY

This is one of the sections where the professional/personal biases of the presenters can probably be most easily inferred.

In our survey, more than half of our respondents worldwide (58%) agree that they are worried about what is real and fake online when it comes to news – a similar number to last year, but 4pp higher than in 2022. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) where social media are widely used for news across all demographics, as well as the United States (73%), and lowest in Europe (54%). But it is important to put expressed concern in perspective, given that research shows that this is often driven by narratives they disagree with or perceptions of bias, rather than information that is objectively ‘made up’ or false (Nielsen and Graves 2017).

In many countries, leading national politicians are considered by respondents to pose the biggest threat, especially in the United States where Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by a strategy of ‘flooding the zone’, often with misleading information or false statements (e.g. that Ukraine started the war with Russia8). He has long used the term ‘fake news’ to vilify media critical of his policies.

Buried further down...

At the same time a significant group (32%) believes that journalists are a big part of the problem. This is especially the case in countries where mainstream media are seen to be unduly influenced by powerful agendas (e.g. Greece and Hungary). In polarised markets such as the United States, those that identify on the right are also much more inclined to see news media as a major threat, with many believing that they deliberately misinform the public and work to a liberal agenda.

I doubt the term 'liberal agenda' was chosen entirely by accident after 'powerful agenda.' (Particularly since 'progressive' barely shows in the study- primarily in the Twitter/X exodus after Musk, and then a few times in the later country studies.)

NEWS LITERACY MAKES LESS DIFFERENCE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

This one is amusing.

We also asked in this year’s survey about whether people had received any education or training – formal or informal – on how to use news. **Across markets we find that only around a fifth (22%) of our global sample have done so but young people were roughly twice as likely to say they have had news literacy training compared with older groups (36% U35s compared with 17% 35+ globally). A number of Nordic markets, including Finland (34%), had the highest levels of news literacy training. France (11%), Japan (11%), and most of the countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans had the least.

Remember- the age demographic most likely to eschew traditional media for personality-driven social media is also the demographic more likely too have received literacy training.

So- how do you define success?

We do find that those who have engaged in news literacy training are slightly more trusting of news than those that have not, but this may just be a function of higher levels of education overall. When checking information, these groups tend to use more different approaches on average than those that have had no training – including visiting trusted sources, fact-checking websites, official sources, and politicians, but this exposure to different perspectives may also be making them more sceptical. Those that have had literacy training are more concerned about misinformation – and are more likely to see social and video networks as a major threat (83% compared with 74%).

There is an interesting potential future implication this might have when it comes to corporate lobbying for media regulation / truthiness. Remember that this study was founded by, among others, Google and Youtube. They don't like necessarily that literacy trainign people are concerned a bit more about social and video networks... but young people are also predominantly on those networks, and more importantly, so are the trusted personality-centric mediators.

As a result, increasing concerns about misinformation- both of social media but also traditional media- is more likely to drive audiences to the personalities on the networks that certain corporate strategies can aim to own the profit-streams of.

HOW AUDIENCES VIEW THE ISSUE OF CONTENT MODERATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Across our entire sample, people were almost twice as likely to say that platforms were removing too little rather than too much (32%/18%). This view is particularly strong in the United Kingdom where new rules are starting to be enforced requiring platforms to do more to counter harmful content and make them safer by design, as well as in Germany. But it is a very different story in the United States and Greece where opinion is more split.

This is your reminder that Oxford University, the university overseeing this research, is based in the UK.

These differences around where the limits of free speech should lie are shaped in part by Europe’s history on one side and the US commitment to the First Amendment on the other. But even within the United States we find striking divisions too between those that identify on the left and the right. Almost half of those on the right (48%) think too much is already being removed, whereas a similar proportion of those on the left (44%) think exactly the opposite.

The study does not address why non-westerners stand where they do on censorship responsibilities for the public good.

Across all 48 markets, those on the left also want more content moderation, but those on the right are much more evenly split. Younger people are also in favour of more content moderation in general, but are less likely to say that than older groups, perhaps because they have grown up seeing and managing a wider set of perspectives in social media.

I've mentioned before the prospect of a 'window of opportunity' for European center-left establishments to enforce moderation/censorship policies on media. There are definitely efforts that have been done in the past / are underway in thhe present, but this 'limited opportunity' is the stability/longevity of these dominant coalitions to do so before the ongoing political trends of European establishment delegitimization, the rise of the right, and the demographic turnover change many of the base conditions.

I won't make a position of what will or will not succeed in the next five years, especially with Donald Trump and US (social) media companies as a foil for European nativist efforts, but I wouldn't be surprised if moderation propositions run into consistently increased resistance beyond five years from now.

TRUST IN THE NEWS

Despite a clear decline over the last decade, we find that levels of trust in news across markets are currently stable at 40%. Indeed, they have been unchanged for the last three years. But we do find significant differences at a national level. Finland has amongst the highest levels of trust (67%), with Hungary (22%), Greece (22%), and other countries in Eastern Europe bumping along the bottom. Some African countries such as Nigeria (68%), and Kenya (65%) also have high trust scores, but it is important to bear in mind that these are more educated, English-speaking survey samples so are not directly comparable. In these countries, we also find that high trust levels often co-exist with lower levels of press freedom. In Nigeria, for example, RSF (Reporters Without Borders) says governmental interference in the news media is significant.

In examining changes over time, we find that some bigger European countries such as the UK and Germany have seen a significant decline in levels of trust around news (-16pp and -15pp respectively since 2015). In both countries, politics has become more divided, with the media often caught in the crossfire. There was a brief uptick at the beginning of the COVID pandemic as the value of news became heightened for many users, and trust levels have been largely stable since. In Finland and Norway trust levels were already high before the pandemic bump. Here, COVID also seems to have halted any declines, and trust has been maintained or improved since the pandemic.

Remember from earlier, that the 'stable ever since' was '4 points lower than during covid.'

WHAT THE MEDIA COULD DO TO INCREASE TRUST

This is the last section I'll cover due to post size, but I'll quote it in full due to salience.

Whilst recognising that some of the reasons for low trust lie outside the control of many newsrooms (e.g. politicians stoking distrust), we asked survey respondents to give their views on areas the news media itself could improve. The top four themes are consistent across countries and also with previous research.

Impartiality: The most frequently mentioned audience complaint relates to the perception that news media push their own agenda rather than presenting evidence in a balanced way. Many respondents say that journalists need to leave their personal feelings at the door. Avoiding loaded or sensationalist language was a repeated theme.

Accuracy and truth telling: Audiences would like journalists to focus on the facts, avoid speculation and hearsay, and to verify and fact-check stories before publishing. Fact-checking the false claims of others was another suggestion to improve the trust of a particular brand.

Transparency: Respondents would like to see more evidence for claims, including fuller disclosure of sources, and better transparency over funding and conflicts of interest. More prominent corrections when publications get things wrong would be appreciated, along with clearer and more distinct labelling around news and opinion.

Better reporting: Respondents wanted journalists to spend their time investigating powerful people and providing depth rather than chasing algorithms for clicks. Employing more beat reporters who were true specialists in their field was another suggestion for improving trust.

All in all, a good and refreshing bit of frankness of some of the challenges, and things that are in the study's audience (media corporations and journalists) to take away.

Which, of course, is why this section ends with this-

Impartiality, accuracy, transparency, and original reporting are what the public expects, even if many people think that the media continue to fall short. The good news is that these are things many journalists and news media would like to offer people.

I hear a 'but the bad news' coming on...

The challenge is that, especially in polarised societies, there is no clear common agreement on what these terms mean. Improving ‘truth telling’ for one group, for example, could end up alienating another. Adding ‘transparency’ features (see the example below) can end up providing more information for hostile groups to take out of context or weaponise.

Well, they can't annoy the wrong people with truth telling, or let hostile groups use transparency to take things out of context. Better to annoy the right people, and let no one else benefit from the transparency when hostile groups point and accuse.

Le sigh.

This break down ends here. There are ten more pages of the EXSUM, but this is already at 45k words and I doubt I'd get through the rest... and its already 45k words. Plus, what remains transitions more into the clearly business-model-focused stuff, albeit a lot of it dealing with AI.

Instead of carrying on, I'll leave with an endorsement. Despite how I feel about that end section, there is a lot of good data to go over here, and more topics of interest. Chances are if you've read this far, you'd be willing to do so further if any of the topics catch your eye. Do so! Here's the link to the study one last time, and I'll end on the remaining sections.

NEWS AVOIDANCE AND LOW INTEREST IN THE NEWS
PERSONALISATION AND THE ROLE OF AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE NEWS
AI-DRIVEN AGGREGATORS INCREASE THEIR REACH
THE SMARTPHONE DEEPENS ITS HOLD ON OUR TIME
PAYING FOR ONLINE NEWS AND THE ROLE OF BUNDLING
LOCAL NEWS UNDER PRESSURE

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Dean Flairless 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

If I were to try and make a fancy title for my opinion on the Texas anti-ICE attack, I'd call it 'How I Had To Figure My Way Out Of A False Flag Suspicion.'

I was hoping to do a writeup on this incident, since the Antifa attack has some ties to a post last month on how the Democratic civil war will give the Trump administration a lawful basis to go after parts of the background Democratic coalition. Antifa is a fringe part of that coalition, but still a part, and this certainly counts as a basis to go after a network. I was holding off because Ngo's article- while informative- had several 'weird flag' indicators that had me raising an eyebrow and waiting for information to dispel a possible false flag / misattribution.

One of the weird things was the mix of preparation and self-affiliation. Preparation is usually a sign of competence, but self-incrimination is usually incompetent, unless it's intended for a false-attribution, in which case incompetence can be explained by even greater competence.

On the preparation side, there was clear material preparation for first, second, and even third order consequences. From the Ngo article, the plan was to use fireworks and graffitti as a flashy / damaging, but low danger, way to bring out the ICE agents. Then the responders would be ambushed by the gunmen with, well, lethal guns, even as the team had personal radios for their own communication. At least a limited firefight was prepared for with body armor. An electromagnetic blocking device, i.e. a jammer, could then be used to frustrate the secondary response units, any ICE-Police coordinations, and otherwise help with the escape. The assailants appear to have fallen back and retreated through the immediately adjacent woods. They had a getaway car plan as well.

This is a multi-step plan that supports a level of sophistication and prior thought. This is competent, dangerous, and effective small-unit tactics that comes from training and deliberate preparation.

But then you have some of the incompetent aspects that suggest the planners were going for tacti-cool rather than tactical advantage. At least seven of the militants dressed in all black, as opposed to useful camouflage or even clothes to help blending in with normal people on the escape. Pure-black 'looks good,' but it's more a uniform for official police teams to distinguish or play to light contrasts in overt contexts- it makes as much sense in a guerilla force as thinking that historical ninjas actually dressed in all black, as opposed to the black uniform being the stage-show theater dress to make it obvious. They used AR-15s, which are not, despite years of anti-gun campaigning, particularly good rifles for waging war (or insurgency). They discarded their AR-15s, leaving evidence behind in literal walking distance of the target. Some of the discarded AR-15s were found jammed, suggesting poor weapon handling... or, reported later, weapon modification attempts to increase rate of fire. This theory of 'more bullets = better' is not actually better in general, since a good part of the value of a semi-automatic rifle for small teams is that the slower rate forces better shooting fundamentals for reliability per shot, rather than wasting ammo faster for less gain.

And then there's the backpack with antifa literature. Just... why?

This, more than anything, got my 'is this a trick?' allergy going, because this is the sort of thing someone could do to try an inflame political tensions for its own sake as a false-flag action.

Leave behind left-coded Antifa literature to feed the initial view of a blue tribe attack. The right-coded AR-15s as a symbol of red tribe means. The mix of high-competence (a group who knew what they were doing) and low-competence (a group who were making incredibly basic mistakes) that could in and of itself be used to dismiss / deflect initial attributions. 'Of course it's Antifa- the literature matches the motive matches the target in attacking ICE!' could be deflected with 'Of course it's not Antifa- Antifa would be more competent, it's obviously a fake by a red tribe domestic extremist. Right wing extremists are obviously military competent, and look- they used the scary AR-15!'

This is the sort of narrative motivation that could support a broader variety of 'true' actors. Anyone with a 'maximize for heat, not light' could want that sort of recrimination spiral. It could be right-wing accelerationists. It could be the Antifa actors seeking to maximize (in)famy while invoking a circle-the-wagons effect of their left-tribe brethren. It could even be foreign agitators. If you want to accelerate a conflict in another country, the ideal false flag is to do something that elements in the target country would plausible want to or even try to do. It's not like this would be the first Antifa attack on a ICE facility.

To be clear, a false flag is not the assessment I would make from the initial information. But it's not a scenario I would rule out either. One of the most effective ways to do a false flag attack is to do something that non-trivial parts of an existing political coalition's fringes wishes (someone else) would do. And with the recent Democratic politician accounts in the (increasingly visible) Axios "Democrats told to "get shot" for the anti-Trump resistance" article, there are certainly people who think fighting ICE and Trump is the good fight.

Which is why another of the really weird things about Ngo's initial big post was how it didn't support that this was an actual Antifa cell in the first place, particularly when the initial government accounts didn't make that claim.

Ngo didn't actually provide evidence that these people were Antifa in the original article. Ngo makes the claim, but his supporting evidence in his post is that there was Antifa literature in a backpack of one of the caught shooters- aka, the sort of very easy thing to do if one wanted to insinuate Antifa. Ngo also cites fundraising by Antifa-linked people in support of the shooters... but the political tribal sympathy nature of tribal fundraising is also well established, and doesn't rely on prior association. Ngo does not actually cite any Antifa organization / social media / group that claimed the shooters as their own, or cite any of the shooters self-identifying as Antifa.

One reason I'd been holding off posting on this was hoping that follow-on media reporting would clarify the affiliation. It largely did not. The Washington Examiner released an article repeating the claim, but they did not really justify it either. The WE article did include a reachout to the FBI, but didn't attribute any Antifa attribution to the FBI. Then again, the FBI is often mum with ongoing investigations. The New York Times article does not make the antifa attribution... but this could be explained on partisan grounds of omitting politically unfavorable context. (Another weird(?) thing of the NYT article- no comment section. Not all NYT online articles get to have comment sections, but enough do that sometimes it can be seen as a choice not to.)

So I was waiting for yesterday's Department of Justice charging statement. I would imagine that at least some in the Trump DOJ would like to emphasize an antifa connection if they could. But there is no mention of Antifa in the DOJ statement.

So, not Antifa?

Well, not quite. Not only has there not been the sort of firm denunciation/separation that would be expected if a group was not affiliated with the broader political spectrum (as with other politically-sympathetic but unaffiliated political violence attempts over the years), but there's also Benjamin Song.

If you don't recognize his name from the OP article, that's because he was not one of the ten identified in Ngo's initial article, or the NYT article of the incident, or in the initial DOJ statement of charges.

The Dallas Express has published a much more extensive look at a specific (but still at large) suspect, which gives more compelling evidence of a specific connection via one (still wanted) suspect: Benjamin Song.

The Dallas Express writer is not entirely neutral- the left-skeptical political bias of which was probably why they got the presumably FBI-supported information for the article- but it provides a bit more specific claims that are contestable by others. So far none seriously have been, but these are at least falsifiable. To quote-

Song was a member of the militant Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, and he had a history of left-wing radicalism.

This, at least, is falsifiable. And elaborated upon, with a history that suggests a clear pattern of 'helping others with violence.'

He was a member of the violent Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, known for intimidating people outside drag shows. Song faced a lawsuit for “battery, assault, stalking, and conspiracy” after a confrontation at a 2023 drag show, as The Dallas Express reported. During the event, Fort Worth Police busted violent members of Song’s group.

Song was also reportedly a member of the Socialist Rifle Association. A transgender suspect, accused of shooting and bombing a Tesla dealership, was part of the same organization.

He trained Antifa in firearms and combat in 2022, according to a video uncovered by journalist Andy Ngo.

The account that posted the video – “Anarcho-Airsoftist” – is an apparent Antifa training ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Notably, according to his alleged LinkedIn account, Song was formerly a martial arts instructor. The account* showed participants learning to fight.

Before he trained Antifa militants, Song was arrested for “aggravated assault” at a riot in Austin during 2020, according to KVUE.

And, of course, where he got his skill set-

Song was a member of the Marine Corps reserves from 2011 to 2016, when he was dismissed on an “other than honorable discharge,” as The Dallas Express reported. According to LinkedIn, he “managed up to 60 Marines” and “managed, organized, and accounted for inventory worth over $1 million” during his time with the service. His profile stops after this.

For those unfamiliar, 'other than honorable discharge' is the 'you are being kicked out for causes that don't necessarily raise to the level of a felony' that typically accompanies the dishonorable discharge. 'Up to 60 marines' in turn scales to between a larger-than-normal platoon or a smaller-than-normal company. 'Managed' insinuates, but does not imply, a platoon leadership position- rather, when mixed with the inventory metric, suggests an administrative role. This does not imply he was not also tactically proficient, but would explain additional skill sets in organization.

And with this, some of the earlier discrepancy falls into place. We are not talking about a group of an average consistent quality that must be competent or incompetent. We can be looking at a cell with a more-competent organizer, a former Marine who taught tactical skills, and less-competent line members.

Which also helps explain another weird flag in the initial report, of how 10 suspects were arrested... but 12 sets of body armor were recovered.

And why Song is still at large.

From the Dallas Express-

[Song] allegedly bought four guns used in the ICE facility ambush on July 4, which wounded an Alvarado police officer, as The Dallas Express reported. He reportedly hid in the woods near the scene for a day after the shooting, then fled.

This, if true, could be a result of a particularly competent technique. Two, possibly. One way to hide something valuable is to hide it in relation to something extremely visible and attention-grabbing, so that to observer's attention is drawn away. Another is to use a sacrifice play, so that the person who searches finds a first, and expendable, asset, but doesn't know to keep looking for the more valuable, and better hidden, asset.

If immediate police response finds 10 suspects fleeing a scene... what are the odds there is another still hiding for the attention to drift further away, to depart under better conditions once the initial surge of attention starts drifting and looking further away?

Of course, there are limits to this level of competence- limits that are explainable by the limits of Song and of chance. If he was a small-unit-tactics focused Marine for only 6 years, that would suggest limited exposure to the sort of investigation/exploitation awareness that might have led him to plan better on the evidence disposal. He didn't know what he didn't know, and thus didn't prepare for them, which is how investigators could unravel things relatively quickly afterwards. He might have typically-minded his Antifa cell members and not overseen them.

And, of course, the rapid capture of specific members- especially the get-away driver- allowed a rapid exploitation of evidence / safe house / etc. while he was still in his hide-and-escape phase. This was not part of the plan, and was an issue of chance, probably. If that getaway driver hadn't been caught, then the members might not have been captured, the staging base might not have been identified, and so on until Song could get back, clear out, and cover his tracks before the police found it.

Or maybe those preparations wouldn't have been enough either. Point is- the police response that found the getaway driver, something that might have been pre-empted by the jammer or if the police car had taken a different route or any number of things, created a vulnerability in the getaway plan. That's not necessarily incompetence on his part.

Song specifically has since appeared in more reputable, mainstream, and Democratic-Party-respected media like ABC, Newsweek, and CBS. This is consistent with standard media industry practice to support government requests to publicize criminals to increase their profile and make it easier to solicit tips to lead to their capture.

None of the above media sources mention Song's antifa affiliation.

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Dean Flairless 5d ago

I'm pretty optimistic that much of that is going to resolve itself in the short/mid-term. They're just a little behind on the battery front, but those are getting so absurdly cheap, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and connect them.

Well, they also have to pull the mountains of lithium and other rare earths out of their asses as well, if not the ground. Which is already hard enough without casually asking China for a few more mountains as well.

There's a reason the article you listed tried to frame impressive growth in terms of ratios of batteries produced (battery storage increased by a factor of 100 in a decade, 16 nuclear power plants) and not in terms of absolute volume of storage needed (storage capacity produced versus storage capacity needed) or grid scale (16 nuclear power plants versus the 54 US nuclear power plants in service, when nuclear power is only about 1/5th of US energy production anyway). The former works from starting from a very small number, and the later would put the battery capacity projections in contrast to much, much bigger numbers.

Which is the usual statistical smuggling, as is the ignored opportunity costs obligated by solving the green energy solution that requires the battery storage at scale.

One form is that all the batteries being used for power system load storage are, by mutual exclusion, not being used for any other battery purpose. Given that the fundamental advantage of the technology of a battery in the first place is that it is for things that cannot / should not / you don't want to be connected to a power grid in the first place, massive battery investments to sit connected to the grid and useless for things that only batteries can do is a major cut against the cost-efficiency off all alternative battery uses of the batteries that could have been made for off-grid use. This is just a matter of supply and demand meeting with the absolute rather than relative scale referenced above. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs then fuel power plants, they certainly are not factoring in the higher marginal costs for all other batteries, and battery applications, the load-storage batteries are increasing the costs of by demanding the battery materials.

The second form of opportunity cost is that a battery-premised grid balance plan has to plan for significant overproduction of energy generation to work 'well.' By necessity, the batteries are only storing / being charged with the energy generated that is excess to current demand in the windows where the renewables are sufficient. A renewable-battery strategy requires enough excess renewable generation in the good periods to cover the renewable deficits in the bad times... but this is literally planning to increase your fallow generation potential (100 vs 50 units of idle panels / turbines) in order to to charge the batteries for the time that 50 units of generation are offline. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs than fuel power plants, they are also not factoring in that they have to build considerably more generation capacity to feed the batteries. (And compensate for the energy storage loss to, during, or from the storage process.)

Add to this that both the green generation systems and the battery storage are competing with each other for the same chokepoint- processed rare earth minerals. They don't use the exact same amount for the exact same thing, but they are competing for many of the same inputs. If you order X units of rare earths for storage capacity, that makes the X units of rare earths for generation capacity that much more expensive because you are increasing complimentary demand for the same non-substitutable good. A renewable-battery solution at scale is increasing the cost-pressure of a limited resource, not just for other uses of the rare earths but with eachother.

And all of that runs into the geopolitical reality that the country that has cornered the rare earths extraction/processing market as the input to these renewable-battery strategies is... China. Which absolutely has used cut-offs as a geopolitical dispute tool with countries with policies it finds disagreeable. While I am sure they would happily sell a few more mountains of processed rare earths for mountains more of money, it would be a, ahem, risk-exposed investment.

Risks, costs, and limitations that could largely be avoided if you did not invent a problem by over-investing in renewables in the first place. Batteries are a solution for the costs of renewables, but renewable generation weren't the solution to an energy challenge either. They were a political patronage preference to the already-engineered solution of nuclear power, which would free up massive amounts of rare earths for more useful (and less ecologically harmful applications) than renewable energy schemes.

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Dean Flairless 22d ago

Whose bombers?

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Dean Flairless 22d ago

The world is in a similar state today

Not really.

There were two main dynamics to the state of geopolitical affairs that let WW1 be WW1. One was the treaty situation, in which most involved states on both sides had staked their security policies / international prestige / credibility that they also needed for other interests into the alliance system. The second was the fact that four great powers (France, UK, Germany, Russia) were competing for influence in a very constrained geopolitical area (peninsular Europe) that they could all project power into. The later is what led to the former is what led to the domino effect.

There is no equivalent concentration of competition or overlap of treaties. As much as the Russians have tried to style a [insert term of choice for grouping] of resistance to the US amongst Iran, Russia, NK, and China, the relationship between them has been fundamentally transactional, not alliance based, and the last few years have emphasized that. The US alliance network similarly does have overlapping effects- there are very few obligations (by design) for out-of-regional issues. Relatedly, most of the non-US actors in the modern system cannot project power to each other if they wanted to, and most US allies in different regions cannot and would not project power to the other as a 'we will fight together' sort of way.

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Dean Flairless 26d ago · Edited 26d ago

The Economist isn't particularly highbrow either. Kind of mid-wit for just recycling consensus takes with branding. Very much in the middle of the low-mid-high IQ meme.

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Dean Flairless 22d ago · Edited 22d ago

Excellent addition. Especially as not only have the costs of war risen since then, but so have the costs of occupation post-'victory.'

AKs and RPGs were enough to break the cost-benefit logic of emperial economies, and IEDs and manpads could make even 'less total' occupations prohibitively expensive. The modern development of drones are an even greater obstacle to projecting power at a, well, global scale.

This doesn't mean a 'world war' is impossible, but it really does beg the question of who is going to be fighting where how. The US ability at power projection is absolutely going to be hemmed in in the weeks/months/years/decades to come, but so is everyone else.

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Dean Flairless 1d ago

And rightly so. Please keep that link and reminder on hand. It is certainly a good example of AlexanderTurok's bad faith characterizations of past arguments.

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Dean Flairless 26d ago · Edited 26d ago

Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?

Main answer: None of the above. The ICE tactics you describe are not blackbagging by standards that would have been applied outside of Trump.

Ending query: Assuming (for the sake of this question) that the end goal of this administration is to establish a type of authoritarianism where people are kidnapped and disappeared because of vocal opposition to the regime, what should be the response by the opposition that would want to prevent that?

Touching grass and recognizing that if you have to assume for the sake of argument that the outgroup is uber-boo, then you are admitting that the outgroup is not, in fact, uber-boo.

If the outgroup was uber-boo, you would not need to assume the conclusion for the sake of the argument, nor would you need to change standards to invoke pejoratives. Instead, there are years of precedent in of people not being disappeared for vocal opposition to the regime.

Conversely, acting on a false consensus that the outgroup is uber-boo, and then taking actions that merit a corresponding response in even a non-boo context, will instead be viewed as confirmation bias that the outgroup is uber-boo. Thus self-justifying more actions that do warrant detention from even non-boo actors.

These detentions, in turn, would be prevented by not perpetuating false perceptions that the outgroup is uber-boo meriting detention-worthy opposition.

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Dean Flairless 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

The problem with false flag theory of this size is that the ten people arrested would have to be genuine. You can't find ten people willing to do a decade in prison over a false-flag attack.

As opposed to the 10 people who demonstratable were willing to do a decade in prison over a non-false-flag attack?

Present culprits aside, you should probably update your sense of scale of people willing to accept severe consequences to act against their enemies. There were more than 1000 suicide bombings, which is to say more than 1000 suicide bombers, in Iraq alone between 2003 and 2011. Iraq during that period was about 1/10th of the population of the US, and hardly had a monopoly on whatever virtue/vice you think it takes to accept guaranteed death for a chance to kill the target of your animosity. Whatever your view of the relative hardiness of the average radicalized American versus the average radicalized Iraqi, finding 10 people to take much lower risks for much lower costs is not the bottle neck.

In fact, we can find far more than ten Americans willing to risk a decade in prison merely by going to the prisons where people are serving sentences of ten or more years. These prisoners are a group who are, by necessity, a smaller subset of the group of people who take risks that could result in a decade or more of prison, since the people who did the same but were not caught/convicted will obviously not be there. And the people who are actually did take the risk is a smaller subset of the people willing to take the risk, and so on.

If your formulation was meant to specify people intending to go to jail as part of the plan would be impossible to find, that would indeed be a lot harder... but it would also be unnecessary. Getting caught isn't required for a false flag any more than it would be for a non-false flag.

Well, they didn't seem to have practiced or thought this out. A competent cell could have modified rifles for fully automatic, controllable fire. I'm sure if you do a bit of research you can find accurate blueprints on how to modify the receiver to allow full auto..

They could, but this would be the sort of tacti-cool that serves as an even greater indicator of cell incompetence that works against a false flag from a competent group hypothesis. It's not that modifying for full auto is something a competent could do and this group failed to do it right, but rather that modifying for full auto for the purpose of this attack is something the competent would not do, and this group thought it would be good to pursue.

Part of this is because 'fully automatic, controllable fire' is more of a video game hollywoodism than a practical advantage for this sort of attack. The physics of recoil are why the sort of squad automatic rifles that use the AR-15's 5.56mm ammo, and larger caliber automatic weapons, are braced against the ground with bipods for full auto. It's also why shoulder-braced SMGs use correspondingly smaller ammo with less kickback, so the body can more easily absorb recoil. Recoil is why militaries train both in terms of small bursts rather than, well, 'full auto.' Unlike video games, where automatic rifles put out more shots on target for more damage, in reality the role of automatic fire is far more for suppressing the enemy for movement and maneuver. You don't control fully automatic fire onto a meatbag target unless that target is particularly numerous, like a WW1 wave attack, particularly close, or both.

And part of this is that this is the google maps image of Prairieland Detention Center. This sort of image is the bare minimum you should expect the weapon-modifiers to have for their planning purposes.

Note that the closest treeline is 100m away from the parking lot. Note that the other woods- the ones large enough to be where Song hid- are closer to 300m. These are not 'close' targets for automatic weapons to effectively hit the target.

And then there's combining the role of an automatic weapon, suppressing for maneuver, to the terrain and how the attack initiated.

From the initial criminal complaint describing the attack in the original Ngo post-

…around 10:59 p.m., an Alvarado Police Department ("APD") officer arrived in the parking lot at the Prairieland Detention Center in response to the 911 call by the Correctional Officers in order to assist the Correctional Officers in their official duties. Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area. The assailant in the green mask, standing near the woods on Sunflower Lane, then also opened fire at the unarmed DI-IS correctional officers. In total, the assailants shot approximately 20 to 30 rounds at the Correctional Officers. Police later recovered spent 5.56 caliber casings at the locations of both of the shooters.

An unmodified AR-15 in its purely semi-automatic function of a shot a squeeze could go through 30 rounds in about 30 seconds.

A M16 on full-auto, the military basis of the AR-15, would go through 30 rounds in about 3 seconds.

Even if you double or triple the shots fired if the weapons didn't jam- a jamming made more likely by the modification to fire faster- you still aren't having a maneuver element do a 100-meter flank assault in 7-to-12 seconds from the closer tree line. Even Usain Bolt took over 9 seconds for his world-record 100m dash, and he wasn't carrying a roughly 6 lb / 3 kg two-handed rifle while doing it.

Again- modifying for rate of fire here is tacti-cool, not tactical. It is anti-competence to expect or pursue, and this group's effort to do so is an indicator against the false flag hypothesis.

(Which is part of why I wish Ngo's article had mentioned it from the start. It would been a helpful balance against his weird flags. Ah well.)

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Dean Flairless 28d ago

Because not only are those slogans backed by authoritative position statements from senior members of the Iranian state, they are backed by decades of observed actions, including state sponsorship of terrorism and proxy-militia attacks on American civilian, military, and diplomatic efforts in other countries.

'You should not believe any given political slogan' is not the same as 'you should not believe any political slogan.' Many political slogans are, in fact, generally accurate indicators of policy direction. Nybbler made the appropriate calibration from taking a statement to the directionional.

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Dean Flairless 1d ago

If you ignore a few millennia of cultural understanding of duty-as-virtue ethics, perhaps.

Duty-based ethics, aka deontological ethics, are highly reciprocal. This is especially true in the western tradition, due to the derivation of why there is a duty and to who. Namely- because God. Hence why deontological ethics and religious ethics are so intertwined across history, since the fundamental question of any duty-based ethical system leads to 'according to who?' whenever a secular authority demands dutiful obedience.

A god isn't required to be that 'who,' but it is the moral authority higher than any king to make those demands for obedience something more than arbitrary human with thugs and clubs. In turn, religious deontologies are incredibly reciprocal- you do your duty unto God, which can entail more worldly obediences as well, and you go to heaven. Defy your duties, and you are separated from God / go to Hell / bad karma happens. God's love may be unconditional, but the state of grace of being close to god is not. Your reciprocal gain for doing the right thing is that your soul will go the right place, no matter the worldly harm you may suffer. This isn't exactly unique to Christianity either, as a brief review of any karmic system metastructure can show.

But the element of God isn't required for reciprocity either. One of the most successful non-theistic deontological ethic systems about duty, Confucianism, is explicitly reciprocal. It appeals to a 'natural' relationship rather than a deific basis, namely the relationship of fathers to sons, but this duty system is obligations on both parties, the failure of which on either part can justify action by the other. A son who lacks filial piety may be disciplined. A king who lacks virtue loses the mandate of heaven and may be replaced.

The non-abrahamic reciprocal duty also goes back from east to west to the foundational civilizing force of western antiquity, Rome. In Rome, the patron-client relationship wasn't a brief transactional relationship of bribes or business, but a fundamental social institution. Patrons provided support and benefits to their clients, from nepotistic favors to representing them in court or assisting in arranging marriages, and in turn the clients owed loyalty, respect, and support... so long as the Patron provided. But if the Patron didn't, then another, more worthy, Patron could be shifted too. This was a bedrock arrangement of not only rome itself, but everywhere Rome dominated, as this was the relationship deliberately pursued between Rome and its clients/allies/conquests/etc. And it was part of a broader mindset that didn't limit this to the secular, but the religious practices as well, where Roman polytheism was part of a reciprocal 'if we don't show piety we will be punished' leading to 'show piety for divine favor' paradigm.

All of these duty traditions far, far, far predate any contemporary notion of 'rights-based mindset.' The Jews were in covenant long before millennia before any enlightenment philosophers were quibling over human rights. The enlightenment built from the corpse of the Roman reciprocity. The Confusicians and the Hindus and more didn't need their example to figure out their own thing.

Duty-based ethic systems are highly reciprocal.

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Dean Flairless 2d ago

It is still weakmanning to insist that [someone] else speaks for [group X] because arbitrary-subjective sections of [group X] weren't sufficiently vocal in denouncing [someone].

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Dean Flairless 22d ago

Gaddafi did fall to a NATO air campaign stopping and then reversing the civil war's progress, which at the time of intervention he clearly had the momentum in. Had Gaddafi had a nuclear weapon, it's extremely doubtful the NATO air campaign would have occurred, and without that, he would have been doing the butchering.

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Dean Flairless 23d ago · Edited 23d ago

We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today.

?

The Iraq War coalition was framed as a pre-emptive war on the basis that Saddam did not yet have nukes (the only WMD to 'vaporize), but that he was trying to maintain the ability to create them in the future. The theory- propaganda, if you prefer- was that he was known to have pursued them in the past, there was reason to believe he was trying to maintain capabilities while actively circumventing sanctions, and that the consequences would be in the future if not acted upon now.

It was a casus belli premised on the argument that Saddam could not vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance.

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Dean Flairless 26d ago

Sounds like a not happy to, then.

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Dean Flairless 27d ago

Who posted it?

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Dean Flairless 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

You think you could find 10 right-wingers or just mercenary guys willing to do 10 year in federal prison, on a lie?

Laddie, you posted the incident where the American leftwing actors were willing to risk 10 years or more in federal prison for an attack on ICE agents. You have been provided a decade-long historical example of magnitudes more than 10 people were willing to suffer far worse than 10 years in jail. Are you really going to try and insist that not even 10 of their rightwing equivalents would cross the line at a lie?

Go to a serving infantry soldier and tell him LMGs are 'tacticool'

An AR-15 modified for an automatic rate of fire is not a LMG. People pretending they are the same would very much fall under the tacticool coolaid.

and 'not actually very useful'.

Spraying and praying beyond effective range not being very useful is why doing so is often teased / mocked as playing Rambo.

AR rifles are fairly controllable in full auto, and with a bipod they're probably extremely controllable.

If all you mean by 'fairly controllable' is 'in the general direction,' this would be missing the point, much like firing at full auto at the ranges of this incident.

Whoever they'd have been shooting at would have been dead. Swapping out mags isn't that hard either.

Unless they missed because they were playing with full auto beyond the effective range of auto. Like what happened in Texas.

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Dean Flairless 20d ago

Building on this, the 'more important' ceasefire for most of the world isn't even Israel-Iran, but US-Iran.

The US entry was limited to the bunker buster attack (which Israel could not get on its own). Iran responded with the telegraphed attack on the US base in Qatar. This was a basic tit-for-tat, and the 'cease fire' had neatly concluded that.

A lot of Iran's more major potential escalatory steps- shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, needing a nuke for regime survival- are assets more against the US than Israel. But they are also assets with higher global fallout for global energy markets / global proliferation than just the Israel-Iran conflict as is/was.

It's not that the Israel-Iran part isn't important, but even if it breaks down (and there were reportedly some late-fires already) it won't have the same implications of the US being directly involved.

I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.

This part I'll disagree with, however. Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.

As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes. That Iran has reached a point where its proxy strikes lead to direct retaliations is more of a measure of strategic misplay of proxy warfare* than an issue that can be resolved by gaining nukes.

*The first rule of proxy warfare is that plausible deniability requires the opponent to variously not know, or have enough doubt, such that they prefer to avoid the consequences of direct conflict and prefer to focus on the proxy regardless. If the proxy lacks plausible deniability, then there is no meaningful difference to the receiving state, and the proxy-using state has no higher authority to appeal to if the receiving state wishes to retaliate directly.

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Dean Flairless 22d ago

...until you get outside of the cities with the infrastructure to support a constant surveillance system. Which is to say, most of any given country, including China.

Smart city technologies are indeed a significant counter-insurgency technology. They are not, however, the end-all-be-all, particularly if you have to fight your way into a country to install your own. 'I won't have this problem if I set up a nation-wide panopticon' still requires you to set up a nation-wide panopticon, and those are expensive even without active local and regional resistance, let alone global support flows from cyber attacks / satellite communication support / sanctuary and safezone logistics / etc.

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Dean Flairless 28d ago

But do the observed actions of Iran indicate a burning irreconcilable hatred, or standard-issue hostility, the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history?

Setting aside that both degrees are the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history-

-and that distinction is largely irrelevant when you working within a single leadership generation, which Iran still is for the founding revolutionary leadership class whose personal vendettas still apply even if their successors in a few generations change their mind and shift category-

-either would suffice for what Nybbler said.

This is the position Nybbler made that you quoted to dispute-

When someone tells you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it makes sense to believe them.

-and no part of this position on the nature of animosity, which makes it a distinction without a difference. Whether the Iranians elites have a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred' or not doesn't challenge the premise.

If someone with 'standard-issue hostility,' where 'standard' includes decades of terrorism in foreign countries against US institutions and directly supporting attacks on US forces when the US and Iran are not at war, is telling you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it (still) makes sense to believe them.

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Dean Flairless 18hr ago

I agree that often duty based ethics is framed in terms of mutual duty. But @Clementine is still correct with the assertion that duty without reciprocity is virtue, not exploitation. You may not be required to discharge your duty towards someone who doesn't discharge theirs to you, but it's still praiseworthy to do so. For example, Judaism and Christianity both depict how God continuously acts benevolent towards humanity despite them not deserving it. This isn't framed as "God is a sucker", but rather as God being the exemplar of virtue whom we should strive to imitate. Not all religions frame things that way, of course, but when you have some 3000 years of one religious tradition which does, it seems fair to call that just as established as the reciprocal duty that you outlined.

This misses the argument previously made.

Religiously-derived deontological ethics aren't a duty towards the person you are doing the virtue towards, but the duty to the god who sets the paradigm of right and wrong action. Other people don't need to reciprocate your execution of virtue because the duty relationship isn't to them, but to god. The execution isn't praiseworthy because the recipients or human observers praise it, but because the worthiness is set by god regardless of the beneficiary.

In turn, the sucker being raised is the deontologist if god does not exist, not god if the deontologist fails. Being the root of deontological legitimacy challenges any premise of obligation to god by those without deontology-setting power, but people who do something on the grounds that derive from god are being suckers if that belief was always wrong, regardless of how socially commendable their niceness may be.

edit: forgot to mention that your explanation of Christianity is very much not how it works, and is in fact a heresy! Salvation is explicitly not something that God owes us because we upheld his law, but rather is a freely given gift. Thus our only choice is to say "yes, I accept" (out of which comes trying to uphold God's laws, again not out of obligation but out of love for him), or to reject his gift (because we would rather do our own thing). Salvation as a gift rather than earned by our conduct is a core tenet of Christianity.

Reciprocal relationships are not the same as obligation relationships, much as they are not synonymous with transactional relationships. The duty (deontological obligations) to god for freely given grace is still a reciprocal relationship, even though it is not a transactional relationship nor does is obligate god in return.

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Dean Flairless 9d ago

Hamas's actions were causal for Hezbollah's decision to open the northern front artillery campaign after Oct 7, which in turn led to foursignificant strategic setbacks for Iran that made their recent performance in the 12 day war possible.

First, it drove and culminated in the bushwhacking of Hezbollah's leadership via the pager and other campaigns, neutering Iran's premier proxy-ally-extension in the region. Hezbollah is a direct partner of Iran's IRGC, which is Iran's primary power-projection force, and this lost an ally whose reason for existing (from the Iranian backing perspective) is to help out in the kind of conflict that they just did not.

Second, because Hezbollah (and non-trivial amounts of its Syria-based infrastructure) were whacked by Israel, Iran lacked a proxy militia to stabilize Assad in Syria, allowing the momentum building that saw Iran's primary state-ally/client/main supply route into Lebanon cut while Iraqi-based militia groups were trying to drive over the desert. The loss of Syria was a loss of not just an ally, but a decade of significant investments in trying to establish and protect that interest.

Third, because Assad fell, the Syrian air corridor between Israel and Iran opened up. Israel was able to access previously denied airspace with vulnerable but capability-extending aircraft (like tankers and slower drones) that enabled the air war over Iran that led to Iran losing control of its own airspace. Israel would not have been able to generate as many air sorties over Iran as it did were Asad still in power.

Fourth, because the anti-Hezbollah campaign was being coordinated from an annex of the Iranian embassy in Syria, when Israel struck that in response, the Iranian response-response was the missile campaign between Israel and Iran. Not only did this deplete a considerable share of Iran's missile force, it also led to the Israel strikes on the Iranian air defense systems that also contributed to Iran's recent not-so-great showing.

As for Hamas's incompetence, that depends whose theory you want to subscribe to. Allegedly, Sinwar (the departed head of Hamas in Gaza who led the Oct 7 attack) was planning on reaching the West Bank and sparking a general uprising / Intifada. This not only did not happen, but the West Bank was so uninvolved that Hamas' only 'direct' allies in the conflict they wanted to make into a race war were... Hezbollah (who paid a high price) and the Houthis (who blockaded most of the Arab states from benefiting from of the primary Arab ethno-nationalist interests, the Suez Canal).

In so much that Sinwar's Plan B for the conflict was to have Gaza be pummeled in hopes the world would take the Palestinian's side, he certainly got Gaza pummeled, and the actual benefits for the Palestinians are sure to manifest any ~~day~~ ~~week~~ ~~month~~ year now.

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Dean Flairless 22d ago

It wasn't chuck Norris - you would only need 1 plane, not 6.

Well, clearly the other stealth bombers are diversions to disguise Chuck Norris's actual entry point for as long as possible.

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