TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
7d ago
The money is being redirected from working parents.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
7d ago
Available data suggests that ICE is probably our best federal agency in terms of not making overzealous fuckups.
Citation needed. ICE had an enormous surge of agents to hire to hit Trump's goals in an arbitrarily short amount of time. It'd be almost impossible for any agency to hit targets like that without slackening standards to some degree. And that's exactly what happened, though I wouldn't claim the Pretti shooting was responsible for this, it just generally added gas to a combustible situation.
MN was not a unique target, they went to tons of states.
I never said they didn't go to other states, it's that Minnesota was particularly targeted as defacto retaliation for displeasing Trump. MN wasn't "flaunting federal law", they just weren't actively cooperating, so the George Wallace comparison doesn't work here. Part of Trump's ire against MN was for not cooperating, but it was also a target before that too, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. So part of this is potentially understandable (send agents where there's less cooperation), while much of it was tangled in Trump's preexisting grudge with claims that he actually "won the election!" in MN, his personal hatred for Tim Walz, and the Somali welfare fraud stuff.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
7d ago
For your first paragraph, lab-leak is a potential explanation but I've never seen it proved to a high degree of certainty over a random mutation. Also, calling the CCP part of the "Blues" is more than a stretch. There are a few tankies like Hasan Piker that idolize Mao as part of their shock-jock routine, but little beyond that. The modern CCP is basically just Fascism with Chinese Characteristics anyways (lots of nationalism, free enterprise + state capitalism, jingoism).
hostile propaganda
Obviously the both groups will try to demonize the other side, and the quality of their propaganda has a big impact. But both sides are still easily able to score a bunch of own-goals on that front, giving their opponents easy ammo or acting like ghouls. That's quite common with the Right when it comes to immigration at this point.
if the choice is between pursuing good things at the risk of "alienating the normies" or accepting bad things indefinitely with the approval of normies
These are not the two choices. Political changes will generate a baseline backlash proportional to how substantial the changes are. But on top of that you can also have partisans being extra inflammatory to flex their ingroup credentials. It's personally beneficial to them since they gain advancement within the organization, but collectively detrimental as it hurts the movement's image. Trump is basically the king of this.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
7d ago
Biden's interpretation wasn't so egregious that a "reasonable" person would say it's completely unfounded based on the text alone. Usually we'd have courts decide these sorts of things, and they almost did! But then the court case got thrown out for lack of standing because, again, US immigration law is a trainwreck and badly in need of reform.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
7d ago
So this isn't really natalist at all then, it's just punishing working parents and telling them they should be stay-at-home welfare leeches instead.
Amazing.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
7d ago
The problem with housing benefits for the young is that it's part of the old "subsidize demand, restrict supply" schtick that populists love but which keeps failing over and over and over. If you subsidize demand, most of that subsidy just flows to incumbent landowners. If you actually want to help young people in that regard, you could do some federally-enforced YIMBY stuff, but there's just no appetite for that. In Trump's affordability push he explicitly said that he wouldn't try to lower people's property values, and MAGA's reaction was basically "this is fine".
Also, in Brazil housing affordability might be a real limiter, but in America most young people who want to get their own place can at least rent their own apartment. It's expensive as hell, but America is wealthy enough to mostly face-tank that.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
7d ago
Would you tell the Cherokee that?
Trump and Biden are not Andrew Jackson. They're largely not ignoring court orders. They both try to reinterpret the statutes in ways that help their sides, but when the courts tell them to stop it they listen for the most part.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
That's all well and good... until the next election rolls around and you've alienated all the normies.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
Competent at pushing forward political changes as I said. E.g. Obama had to have a certain level of competence to ram through Obamacare, even if it only ultimately survived in a somewhat mangled form. Trump has had comparatively little long-term change relative to the amount of political capital he entered with, especially in his second term.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
You're making a legalist argument for a society that has arguably abandoned it.
Society hasn't abandoned laws. Court cases end up being important or outright decisive in US immigration conflicts all the time.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
Enforcing immigration policy at all is maximally inflammatory to many Blues.
Maybe to a tiny handful but it's not useful to collapse strategy down to the what the most hysterical Blues would think. The majority of normies want immigration laws "enforced" in some nebulous way, they just don't like seeing it done.
The one actually bad shoot from that scenario seemed like more of an accident than "trigger happy"
It was an accident because the ICE agent was trigger happy. To some extent it can be chalked up to bad luck but Trump did a number of things to make the bad luck more likely:
- Aggressive, rapid hiring for ICE that let jumpy agents in.
- Targeting Minnesota in the first place, which did not have an unusual number of illegals relative to its population, and which had an unfriendly state government.
- Trump heavily implying his action against Minnesota had a punitive bent rather than being specifically about immigration enforcement, energizing Blue resistance.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
Mostly dumb.
- The US needs to spend less money, not more, given the deficit. If this is offset by cuts to Boomer entitlements like Social Security or Medicare, then that would be another story, but we all know that's not going to happen. The median voter wants to bankrupt the US while blaming their outgroup "it was always the other guys who were spending recklessly, my side was just spending in retaliation!"
- Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.
- Flat payments like this, if they have any effect are usually dysgenic.
- Why payments for stay at home moms instead of simple baby bonuses? Having a parent take care of the childwork for the first few years is genuinely labor intensive, but after that kids mostly take care of themselves apart from occasional doctor's appointments and helicopter parent stuff. Society likes to lionize parents that stay home for some reason, but once the kid is no longer a toddler the parent will spend their time either doing helicopter parent stuff or using their "stay at home mom" status as an excuse to bum around watching Netflix, neither of which should be incentivized by the government.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
if you could describe the more effective expenditures of political capital the Right has failed to exploit
If I had a magic wand to control Republicans on immigration, I would do the following:
- Continue wielding executive authority like Stephen Miller has done.
- Pass laws instead of not passing laws. Yes, laws matter because they inform courts, which have been a central player in immigration battles. Legal nihilism is not backed up by recent history. Nobody said laws are foolproof. Absolutist legal nihilism serves primarily as a grandstanding podium to declare how much an individual loathes their outgroup with every fiber of their being -- how EVIL that person thinks they are, and how they never EVER follow any rules EVER so they must be opposed with the fury of trillion suns .
- Be as minimally inflammatory as possible when enforcing your immigration policies, while not actually changing the substance of the policies. If two actions lead to the same result, but one excites Catturd while freaking out the normies, do the other thing. Don't send in trigger-happy ICE agents to Minnesota with tweets implying it's "punishment" for other offenses.
- Hold Trump's feet to the fire when he doesn't deliver, or delivers below expectation, or he acts like an inflammatory idiot for no reason. Better yet, dump Trump entirely and get someone like Desantis who would presumably deliver on immigration without the buffoonery and baggage of corruption.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
Trump plus no bill is better than Harris plus bill.
Agree-ish, at least on the topic of immigration. Though I'd pretty strongly claim that the two were not mutually exclusive! It might have been a bit awkward for Trump when the Dems started implementing small chunks of his immigration-restriction agenda, but the Dems had already started their own crackdown on immigration by this point. The bill itself was mostly closing loopholes and getting funding for border enforcement, which I doubt would have moved public opinion much.
the fillibuster
Too convenient of an omni-excuse for purple state legislators to never have to vote on anything controversial. Obviously it should be abolished -- by either side.
If it was a serious obstacle to immigration reform at the start of Trump's term, Trump almost certainly could have obliterated it.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
The problem with many of the immigration laws is things like they say "may" instead of "shall" so they can be turned off whenever a D executive decides not to enforce them. Then another issue crops up when states sue saying "hey well you have to enforce at least enforce the laws that say shall" and then they get thrown out of court for lack of standing.
Congress is hard to work with because there are enough crypto-democrats
Funny you say that since the 2024 bill was actually supported by many Democrats! Then Trump had an overwhelming amount of political capital to spend at the start of his term to force something even harsher through Congress, but he never even bothered trying.
The courts are also nigh-impossible to fix. There are nearly 700 judges who can issue an injunction against an executive order.
This particular issue was basically fixed in 2025.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
I never claimed well-written laws will be a silver bullet that will work 100% of the time. But yes, they do help quite a lot. The last 10 years has seen a parade of executive orders from both sides trying something egregiously illegal, and then the courts shredding it. Then they try again, but it's with a watered-down version that sort-of survives.
This ideology of legal nihilism, that laws are all fake and have 0% influence on anything is not backed by recent history.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
Biden didn't really ignore the law on immigration. One could make the argument (which I would agree with) that he ignored the spirit of what the law intended, but his parole abuse followed the letter since every applicant technically received an individual decision, and the DHS asserted individualized "significant public benefit" findings. The definitions of those things were so wishy washy that it could mean almost anything. Republican states tried to sue, then fell victim to another way in which immigration law was busted: technicalities around standing. They actually did fix that issue in 2025 though with the Laken Riley Act.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
Disagree. The Right's problem on immigration really isn't that it lacks viciousness that the Left supposedly has. It's that it's bad at harnessing popular anger against immigration mismanagement under Biden into durable political change. Part of that problem is Trump Cultism. Another part is valuing the optics of dunking on the Left over long-lasting results. The Right had plenty of political capital to do this, it just spent it ineffectively.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
Maybe you don't get everything right on the first pass, but well-crafted legislation will have far fewer loopholes than slapdash laws, and then you can patch things if/when problems arise. Trump just isn't really bothering.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
Which ones?
Immigration law is a trainwreck in general, so there are tons. One particularly noteworthy issue that Biden abused was the parole authority. This is something the 2024 bill would have ameliorated somewhat. Then Trump cynically torpedoed that bill with MAGA promising he'd deliver a much stronger bill if he became President. Then he did almost nothing statutorily.
Then another issue is Trump's border policies are constantly getting shredded by the courts, usually because he's trying to do something with an executive order when there's laws on the books from decades ago that say differently, so the courts rule against him. Instead of trying to fix the law he just looks for a different loophole for enforcement. It's a strategy with more wins than he had in his first term, mostly because he spent his first term losing hard over and over, and a few effective strategies bubbled to the top. But it's still wobbly in lots of places, and it's a very fixable issue.
Stephen Miller
Miller is great but is more like a local maximum -- Trump has given him broad leeway to do stuff with EOs and enforcement agencies but gives him little leverage beyond that.
The foreign born population has fallen by something like 3 million since he's taken office
This number is almost certainly wrong.
Trump has been decent on the flow of immigration, but much less on the stock of immigration. Even if we accept the 3M number, that puts Trump still somewhat behind Biden that let in about 10M over his 4 years. And I expect the pace to decrease overall since Trump is likely to lose at least the House, and much of the decline is from self-deportations which will probably taper off.
The bigger issue is that there's a number of well-known loopholes in the immigration statutes that Dems have used that Trump just... isn't bothering to fix. I don't really blame Trump for not winning on the birthright citizenship issue since that's more of the SCOTUS acting like philosopher kings, which is outside of Trump's control.
Trump came in with the biggest momentum for immigration crackdown of any president that I've seen in my life, and at best he might be able to undo Biden's damage while still leaving the overall system just as prone to loopholes when a D takes over.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
I seriously doubt how much the private sector could enforce immigration restrictions. Many of the loopholes that get abused when D's are in power are explicitly written into the legal code as statutes. The solution is to overwrite them!
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
If there is a retrial then the defendant is just kicked back to their status before the trial. They might be free on bail, or they could still be held in jail pending the retrial.
I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves
Trump has made me very fatalistic about this. The two options seem to be the following:
- Elect politicians who are competent at pushing forward political changes, but then they tend to be liberals at heart or at least very concerned about getting re-elected, so they do nothingburger changes.
- Elect politicians who are aggressively anti-immigration, but these are almost always scoundrels who put the optics of satisfying their base over actual productive changes, like Trump sending ICE goon squads to Minnesota where the story quickly became that they were gunning down random civilians. Then the national mood swings against aggressive immigration enforcement as the anti-immigration side pisses away their political capital.
This wasn't a problem for the vast majority of America's history. It's been an issue in modern times. The Left was fine up until either FDR or Great Society. The Right was fine until Trump.
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