Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Did I strawman the Right?
Yup.
Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
Unless Lore Chavez-DeRemer has put on an unprecedented amount of weight in the last 48 hours, no one should confuse her for the mass of tens of millions of people that could be considered 'the Right.' The volume of space alone would be magnitudes off.
As such, attempting to use her as a proxy of tens of millions of people is a strawman, absent compelling evidence the views of those tens of millions are accurately represented by her.
Dean
Flairless
7hr ago
I would like to first say I appreciate your contestation / elaboration. It was certainly a quip to move that can be contested on 'well, actually...' grounds. Kudos!
That's why I am only going to clarify my intent / dispute against two sub-elements.
They're cheap, good, and half the world's nations actively use them to wage war in some capacity. If that is not a good rifle I'm not sure what is.
The rifle the AR-15 is based on is better in part for the functions that differ it from the commercial AR-15. Which is to say- deliberate design access to to limited automatic as appropriate, as opposed to reliability-decreasing ad-hoc modification access to quasi-auto. Plus the additional attachments not used here, but that's getting into broader kitting options rather than potential.
The AR-15s the anti-ICE attackers used were modified AR-15s, nominally for that additional ability, but which may have compromised their reliability. Reliability (at least when maintained) being a key point of why half the world's nations actively use the M-16 and derivatives.
But that's not what I said in what you're responding to, so fair rejoinder.
But when we're actually fighting- we're shooting at targets that are actively trying to avoid being shot at, and trying not to be shot ourselves- and not just trying to score bullseyes on a static range, we want it to be as easy as possible for us to make hits.
My view is that this context, the Praireland Texas attack, is closer to the shooting range context than the 'actually fighting' context. And this probably the context anti-ICE facility attacks will have for any sort of anti-ICE insurgency.
Consider the attack at The ICE attack was done at range of 100-300 meters (or more), from cover / concealment, over a relatively brief amount of time. We know this by the criminal complaint report tying the shooters to nearby woods/treelines (100m and 300m away), and only 30-ish rounds being reported despite more-than-semiautomatic weapon fire rates. The only injury was implicitly in the initial salvo, before the defenders fell behind cover, and this salvo was the surprise/opening attack in terms of introducing gunfire. At which point, the officers at the scene were suppressed until the attackers withdrew, supported by the shooters in the forest, one of whom had enough concealment to remain hidden beyond the initial search response.
This is something that should be expected as a norm for anti-ICE attacks, in part due to the sort of government building design the Americans adopted after 9-11. The American federal government has been incorporating stand-off distance in new / security / detention facilities basically ubiquitous since 9-11, and in many contexts even before. Part of this is terrorism fears of truck bombs, part of this is security fears to prevent infiltration / unauthorized access, and part of it is wildfire management.
When- as is the government's preference- it has more freedom for standoff space, this creates longer sight lines, and thus requires longer weapons range which makes the post-opening cover movements more effective, and hasty counter-fire less effective. And when- as a matter of legacy- thick vegetation is far closer, so is the concealment advantage to the shooters from within the woods, who have to set up their own sight lines through the vegetation.
I recognize you and I may have different opinions, but I'd consider either of these dynamics more akin to (semi-)static rifle ranges than the close-in maneuver / counter-maneuver that I suspect you mean by 'actual combat.'
But this, too, is not exactly what I said in what you're responding to, so still a fair rejoinder.
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.)
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.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
I wonder where all the furries were in 1980s-1990s.
Being born in time for the Disney renaissance to influence their formative years.
Or gattsuru's account of the people who were already adults even then.
Again, you (and your cited paper) are running away from the issue of scale, and comparing proposal requirements versus production prospects. This is the shell game, and always will be the shell game, much as how calling renewable energy production 'cheap' is inevitably made apart from the subsidy costs and the opportunity cost impacts to other issues.
A very simple test to separate the renewable energy proposals that are solicitations for subsidies from serious engineering proposals is to check if they address issues of 'where.' Your Masterplan 3 (producer: Tesla), for example, has a section titled 'Land Area Required.' Tell me if you can spot the issue in one of its only paragraphs.
Solar land area requirement is estimated based on a US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) empirical assessment of actual US projects, which found that the median power density for fixed-tilt systems installed from 2011-2019 was 2.8 acres/MWdc57. Converting MWdc to MWac using a 1.4 conversion ratio yields roughly 3.9 acres/MWac. Therefore, the global solar panel fleet of 18.3TW will require roughly 71.4 million acres, or 0.19% of the total 36.8 billion acres global land area.
If someone cannot, this product was aimed at them. But for electrical engineering considerations, this is making a global production requirement estimate based on where already-existing projects are- not where future projects would need to be be.
Existing solar generation projects in the US are, by the nature, where it is most economical in the US to build the systems for the people they would support. A lot of that is in or near US deserts. Most of the global population does not live near within US deserts, or even within the US. Nor does most of the US population. Nor it is economical for even the US to transmit electricity 'merely' from the productive deserts to cities far away. It is considerably less economical to charge batteries on site and then physically ship them by truck or train to distant destinations, only to bring them back once drained for a recharge. Moreover, these are already occupied good sites. Additional solar panels farms will be, on average, less cost-efficient as the most cost-efficient locations are farmed first, and subsequent farms are added elsewhere.
Metaphorically, this is analogous to taking an average of output of some group of exceptionally bright students at a highly selective university producing Y amount of quality players, and then claiming that if only you only expanded the class by X, then you would have XxY output of quality papers from the university. It ignores the screening that went into the initial group selection.
What does this mean? Well, it means Masterplan 3 is deliberately underselling the solar panel production requirements- and possibly by quite a bit. Not some mere 5-10% margin, but potentially magnitudes more, depending on where the solar panels will be installed and under what policies. Germany's energiewende policy is an example of, well, extremely bad solar panel policy, not least because it chose bad places for solar generation potential. (Namely- Germany. Energiewende was a policy that started with the conclusion- build solar energy in Germany, then figure out where in Germany- rather than whether the policy should be.)
Similarly, look at where Masterplan 3 expects the increased mineral extraction to come from. These are, after all, the critical inputs for those refining investments.
If you are still looking, or haven't started looking yet, save yourself time and stop. It doesn't.
You can CTFL-F all the most relevant global producers of minerals, and none of them will show in the report, let alone an assessment of how much they can feasibly increase production. In fact, you won't even find the word 'country' in the entire report. National polities do not exist in this report, any more than funding sources, backers, or second-order effects of driving production to this proposal to the measurable detriment of others.
Heck, it doesn't even raise the issue of transmission loss between countries. It vaguely handwaves the issue on the US (the only country it addresses to any depth), and when it actually does...
For purposes of estimating material requirements, 90% of the 60 million circuit miles will be reconductoring of existing low-voltage distribution systems and 10% will be new circuit-miles from high-voltage transmission, which is the current ratio of US circuit miles between high-voltage transmission and low-voltage distribution.
Translated into plainer english- while assuming all the new power generation will be produced in places comparable to the highest cost-benefit solar generation potential, where it already does not make economic sense to transmit the generated solar power long distances, fractionally few new power lines will be created to transmit (via high voltage) the new generation to the (often distant from the high-potential areas) population centers to use it.
Translated into even plainer english- this proposal is not so much about building a new and far more capable power transmission network than already exists, but ripping out the existing one and replacing it with Something Better.
This is not a serious proposal. It does not address actual engineering problems it raises. It doesn't even have the virtue of existing to justify handing people money to try. It's primary purpose is to convince people that renewable energy in mass is cheap and affordable, and as proxy there will be increased demand for Tesla.
This is advertising to justify subsidies, not a master plan.
Dean
Flairless
2d 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.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
'The entire rotten edifice will go down with one good kick' ranks up there with 'and then the enemy will lose the will to fight' in my personal list of 'big indicators of really bad strategy.' There are historical examples of it happening, and you can even identify trends that make it more likely to happen, but strategies that bet on it happening, as opposed to factor in the possiblity, tend to be poor strategies.
The one thing that really baffles me is whether Hezbollah also failed to reign in its own militants itching for action given their lack of full greenlight from Tehran or likely Nasrallah himself. For all its failures and cosplaying at being a fighting force (uniforms for nasheed tiktoks, journalist vest for publishing in reuters, the senior Hezbollah leadership must have known that keeping its cards in reserve for any Israeli incursion was the right play no matter what Hamas did.
This presupposes that they didn't have as much of a greenlight as could be expected, with the patron parties distancing themselves from Hamas's decision after it became clear it wasn't going to spark the regional bonfire. Which, from my memory of those first few weeks, was pretty apparent in the first day(s). Hezbollah in particular had a pretty big anticlimatic drawdown in which they spun up the media organs like they were going to directly enter the conflict, demurred, and then 'quietly' began the artillery campaign after a bit later.
Though to be fair to past considerations, I am on record as believing that Iran has kind of lost the plot on managing its proxy warfare strategy. The curse of the deep state / cult of the offense strikes again, conflating strategic means with strategic ends and over-leveraging a strategic asset (the proxy network) beyond diminishing returns and into outright counter-productive tendencies.
Dean
Flairless
6d 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.
Dean
Flairless
17d 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?’
Dean
Flairless
17d ago
There is also a point of comparing Gaza to other cases of dense urban warfighting where the millions-scale civilian population is stuck in the dense urban area. There aren't many other examples, but in the closest analogs (such as the fall of the ISIS caliphate), the casualties are pretty analogous when controlled for time.
Turns out, urban fighting is dangerous for attacker, defender, and bystander alike. Who would have guessed?
Dean
Flairless
17d ago
Yes, but if the processing system uses dollars and US banks (or banks that eventually connect to US banks) then US can control it. Dealing with a ton of different currency without having an intermediary one where you can align everything to the single common measure could be challenging...
The other point is that if the actors using the system also want to use dollars and US banks separately, the US can still influence it. This is why the attempted Iran-EU exchange program died after the JCPOA fell apart. The Europeans mooted building what would basically have been shell companies to serve as intermediaries who would never touch dollars for Iran-EU trade, and the US simply moved the threat of secondary sanctions to any European companies that did work with the shell companies doing work with Iran.
This is part of the classic misunderstanding of the influence of the dollar in the international system. It doesn't actually matter if you use dollars in the transaction. Dollars are just a lower transaction cost medium of exchange, but everyone already had the ability to pay a higher transaction cost if they wanted to do currency swaps and such. What matters if you also, elsewhere, want to do business with the dollar system.
Dean
Flairless
17d 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.
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Imagine the sci-fi plot hooks for aliens who only know groups by reputation.
Setting up a nation-wide panopticon is only as hard as is forcing the population, at gunpoint, to install the right brand of spyware app onto their phone.
And if we ignore all the other requirements, it's only as hard as the exceedingly hard and expensive part that will take a substantial period of time and be subject to all sorts of expensive disruptions.
Which returns to assuming the conclusion, or rather assuming you have the police state in place to pre-empt the problem that could prevent the establishment of the police state following an invasion.
Dean
Flairless
19d 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.
Dean
Flairless
19d 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.
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Individuals also tend to consider it to be very different in terms of moral responsibility, and culpability, when helping other people do things they want to do versus when you do something yourself. Individuals have agency and individual responsibility for the actions they choose to do.
Of course, that there is the rub. A common stumbling block in characterizing international affairs is the hyperagency versus hypoagency bias, where the a country's agency is inflated and anyone else's agency and responsibility is diminished / ignored.
Maybe in the sense that as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps becomes ever more entrenched as a state-within-a-state, the corruptive influence of all that money and administrative self-interest will secularize it like the Egyptian Army?
Of course, then you get dynamics where the IRGC's perks and privileges derive from a permanent proxy-war footing, which merely means they'd increasingly rationalize sustained proxy conflicts on increasingly secular grounds, as Pakistan does.
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.
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Pretty much. People radically overestimate how hard it would have been for the Ukrainians to disassemble the Soviet nukes and make their own triggering device.
Which is what most of nuclear arms security comes down to. When nuclear munitions have unlock codes in the first place, the 'failsafe' mechanisms are failsafes in the sense of 'this trigger device will be borked.' They are not failsafes in terms of rendering the underlying material unable to be used, only unable to be used by the specific device.
Replace the device, and you have a possibly less efficient, but still effective, nuclear device. Which is among the less challenging parts of the nuclear problem.
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Specifically, North Korea had enough artillery in range that the casualty estimates for the first day of shelling were on the scale of a Hiroshima/Nagasaki, i.e. a nuclear weapon.
Dean
Flairless
19d 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.
Building on this- the problem is what the nature of that debt, and the collapse of housing investments for future returns, implies for future economic development.
For example, the implication of the private household debt is how it shapes China's ambitions of escaping the archetypical middle income trap. The classical understanding of the cause is that a country makes good money as an export nation working the lower value chain, tries to work its way up the value chain, but the main basis of national growth (a productive low-cost but also low-income manufacturing worker class that produces exports) goes away before the worker class is able to transitions to a higher-income level of productivity that corresponds with the higher value chain. Some of the country does, but not enough (proportionally), resulting in more stagnant growth, both in terms of national economy and average wages. It's not 'bad,' but it's, well, middling. No longer economically viable for the thing that made it good.
The classical theory of how the higher income countries escaped this is that they transitioned from a manufacturing-export economic model to an internal-consumption model. The internal economics for wages and such are driven more by how the country spends and consumes within its own market, rather than how it exports to foreign spenders and consumers. Ideally, it's to some respects self-reinforcing, for the typical economic multiplication effects that let commerce grow the economy.
This was the basis of the economic question of if China would get old before it got rich. It was referring not to the country GDP as a whole, but to the wealth of the population and its ability to power a consumption-economy model. Could the Chinese public get rich enough in their economically productive years to power a transition to a consumption-based economy, before they grew so old that their savings were instead consumed in end-of-life support?
Well, that's a great deal harder for a family to contribute to if a family's lifetime of savings and investments no longer exists. Like, say, because it was invested in buying an apartment that never was built, or was built and torn down before it could be sold, or which lost its value due to the property crash.
China may yet escape that. It's unclear if the middle income trap is an issue of proportion or absolute number, in which case a proportionally small core of rich-enough Chinese could maybe drive a system. But the middle-income trap would be a lot less likely if a lot more Chinese had a lot more of their lifetime investments have a lot more value.
And, of course, if losing investments didn't contribute to the vicious cycle of ongoing deflation. Which is generally agreed to be bad, but makes individual actor sense if you recently lost much of your money but now find yourself in a position where things look like they will get cheaper the longer you refrain from buying them.
The Chinese local government debts, by contrast, are a bit 'simpler.' These are debts by lower governments, or government enterprises, that the Chinese national government is ultimately likely on the hook for. That's not a macro-economic-structure crisis, 'just' the official debt numbers being radically off and at risk of a liquidity crisis if ill-structured debts create bank runs. Which, technically, might be solved by simply printing more money and forcing the mostly Chinese holders of the debt to accept it, but...
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