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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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When we consider the lie that America is a nation of immigrants

Starting with this assumption, you really need to prove it. I find it hard to read the rest when you start with such an incorrect premise. Especially when you say things like:

To begin with, it’s important to note that immigrants have never been the dominant force in American society.

If you read your American history, you should know that all of the white folks here in the U.S. were immigrants. Immigrants were absolutely the dominant force in American society during the most pivotal period - when American society was actually being built. That's what people mean when they say we are a 'nation of immigrants.' On top of that, we have have multiple waves of immigration Throughout our history, in the early 19th century and around the turn of the 20th.

When you say immigrants do you really mean 'non-whites' or 'non-British?' If so you should just come out and say that, it would make much more sense based on the argument you seem to be making. The premises you are taking to start this argument right now makes me not very interested in reading past the first bit.

You have failed to engage on even a cursory level with the distinction the OP is drawing between settlers and immigrants. If you think this distinction is specious or lacks explanatory power and utility, that’s fine and you should make an argument for it, but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.

If OP is drawing a distinction between "settlers" and "immigrants" which is not immediately obvious, then it's on the OP to lead with that. As @TheDag said: OP needs to start by demonstrating that America is not in fact a nation of immigrants. Furthermore, OP has to demonstrate that it is in fact a lie (the term "lie" means it must be a deliberate falsehood, rather than an innocent misconception). OP doesn't do either of those things though, instead just hand waving them away. Well fine, but then the rest of his argument is built on quicksand and holds no water.

He establishes the “settlers vs. immigrants” dichotomy at the end of paragraph six. I don’t think expecting people to read six paragraphs is an unreasonable burden.

It absolutely is an unreasonable ask when the OP is leading with an unproven, apparently false, argument.

The entire essay is an exercise in proving the controversial thesis which he lays out in the early part of the essay. This is a bog-standard way to approach to political/philosophical writing. Honestly, it seems like his thesis struck an emotional chord of disgust or epistemic injury in you, which rendered you unable to invest even the five-ten minutes needed to read through his entire essay to determine whether or not he satisfactorily developed an argument in favor of his thesis. I certainly think he ably defended his thesis, but even if he didn’t, it’s not like this essay is a particularly long, difficult, or high-investment read.

I'm not in the habit of reading a long, hard to follow essay (because yes, it is both of those things contrary to your assertion otherwise) to see if OP is going to at any point defend the incorrect foundation of his argument stated in the first paragraph. You say that the entire thing is OP developing that thesis, but in no way is it clear that his thesis is the very claim "it's a lie that America is a nation of immigrants". To me, it read as though he was taking that claim for granted and building an argument based upon that very unproven claim as if we all accepted it.

Honestly, it seems like his thesis struck an emotional chord of disgust or epistemic injury in you, which rendered you unable to invest even the five-ten minutes needed to read through his entire essay to determine whether or not he satisfactorily developed an argument in favor of his thesis.

You can fuck right off with the smug statements like this. I am neither disgusted nor injured by OP's poorly written argument. I didn't even reply to OP, in fact. What I have taken exception to is you coming in here, arrogantly telling TheDag "well you obviously didn't bother to engage with the post" in response to his quite reasonable criticism of it.

The OP is a poorly written argument. Either it's poorly written because it attempts to take a controversial position as given, or it's poorly written because it fails to make clear that the controversial position is the thesis which will be addressed. It's not a question of reading comprehension, it's not a question of failure to engage, it is simply a badly written argument. Stop blaming the people pushing back on it as if it's somehow their fault.

I read the essay and was still disappointed, maybe even disgusted. “Epistemic injury” had nothing to do with it.

Can't speak for @SubstantialFrivolity but I certainly didn't have an emotional chord struck by this argument. I'm actually very interested in American history, and tend to be pretty anti-immigration at this point in time (at least immigration of mass low skilled people as the left tends to push.)

If anything based on this comment it seems like you are the one who has come in here with an epistemological bias, since you have already heard this person's argument in a podcast.

What are you? His publicist?

So now I'm feeling smug for seeing the first poorly written paragraph and then the monstrous wall of text and then skipping the post entirely.

Life is too short for shittily written monster posts.

Make your point clearly, and succinctly, meeting your readers where they are, and not clothing it in unnecessarily verbosity in an attempt to sound learned.

Or don't, but I'm not going to bother reading it otherwise, nor will most others.

[I know it's not your post, but I'm tired of poorly written posts]

Life is too short for shittily written monster posts.

lol I think you are on the wrong website. a lot of monster posts, some of which are shittily written

More comments

He's starting with his thesis.

Then he needs to make it clear that it's his thesis, and not something he is taking as given in his argument.

In defense of TheDag, OP does not make that distinction until the umpteenth paragraph.

And that is because at first we did not begin as a nation of immigrants. We began as a nation of settlers. And that’s, I think, a critically important distinction.

That’s the end of the sixth paragraph. If you couldn’t make it to paragraph six, that’s on you.

  • -10

Well, I did in fact get to the end of the 6th paragraph. But, if the OP buried the lede, that is actually on the OP.

but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.

OP starts by accusing a fairly large group of people to be lying, and does not give any indication that they're interested in arguing for their claim at all. Moreover, when they do get around to making something resembling an argument, it's largely a definitional dispute. Calling someone lying because they might have used a different definition of a word strikes me as less-than-charitable. If anything, it reminds me of radical trans activists who scream their lungs out if you suggest that "woman" is defined by, say, genetics.

He's not accusing anyone of lying, except in the Lies My Teacher Told Me way of reexamining or recontextualizing common misconceptions, trite phrases, just-so stories, and other assorted myths.

Saying "this is a lie" is in fact accusing people of lying. It cannot be otherwise. For there to be a lie, there must be a liar who initially put it out there.

"America is a nation of immigrants" is a thing that a lot of people explicitly say outside the context of a school history class. E.g. https://www.brookings.edu/product/our-nation-of-immigrants/ and https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/03/29/nation-immigrants and https://iamla.org/docs/Nation_of_Immigrants.pdf and you can find lots more examples by Googling. I agree that it's ambiguous and somewhat cliched, but that doesn't make it a lie. It's at least arguably true, I think most of the people saying it believe it to be true, and, in my opinion, it points at something important.

I felt I argued my point well. I do think the distinction is spurious enough that he needs to lead with it. Especially when using such inflammatory statements as calling it a lie, he should clarify that he's using a specific definition of the word up front, not 3-5k characters into his argument.

I don't see any need to argue minor details of architecture when the foundation of the structure is so clearly unsound.

Other users have already pointed out the obvious ahistorocity of your central premise, no one with the possible exception of some eskimos in Alaska and Northern Canada and some uncontacted tribesman in the south American jungle is really a "native" of this hemisphere, least of all anyone who would plausibly be identified as white.

Accordingly I'm going to approach your question from the opposite direction. Who does the lie "that the US is not a nation of settlers" serve? and I suspect I have an answer.

The US is somewhat unique among nations in that it was not only explicitly founded, but that it was founded on a set of intellectual principles rather than notions of blood or territory. We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident... and all that. The United States as a nation has, from it's inception, been a cultural alliance first and everything else second. This is what Teddy Roosevelt was describing when he decried "hyphenated Americans".

I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere convenience, although personally, I like to avoid its use even in such manner. I speak and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.

Americanism is not a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent, but of the soul and of the spirit.

...and this has always stuck in the craw of a certain tribe of European intellectuals and rootless cosmopolitans because that spirit and soul, while not explicitly Christian, is heavily influenced by Christian ideals, and stands in direct repudiation of all their grand social theories. The US's wealth and success through the 19th and 20th centuries where their own projects (the Cult of Reason, Leninsm, Hitlerism, etc...) failed is the elephant in the sitting room that the intellectual class is desperate to ignore and that is why, for the last 100 years or so, academia has dedicated itself to undermining and eliminating any notion of American Exceptionalism. AkChtUaLLY judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is the real racism and other such nonsense.

I say to Hell with that, and to Hell with the entire psuedo-Marxist, post-modern, quibbling about definitions intellectual masturbation upon which your entire post is built. It's bullshit, all of it, and has no place here in the new world.

Wait, what’s the certain tribe?

Given the OP’s context, I’d assume “Jews.” That doesn’t strike me as your style.

I was thinking of the Young Hegelians and their disciples.

Though the irony is that there is a fair bit of overlap there.

“Say what you like about national socialism; at least it’s an ethos.”

*muttering* fucking nihilists man

Indeed, the name of the Statue of Liberty is “liberty enlightening the world”, and faces outward, to teach other nations the values of America. Lazarus was a Zionist whose family owned slaves, and also a bad poet, so she really should not have a privileged position in dictating American sentiments about immigrants. What’s more, in the inauguration ceremony of the statue, it is repeatedly mentioned that immigrants ought to be of high moral character to be allowed in.

As you write, America was a country of Europeans founding their own European societies within America. This is not what is commonly understood as immigration, but colonizing. Japan did not emigrate to Okinawa, they colonized it. When there is a direct continuation from your homeland to your new home, and you divide almost completely your life from the natives, that is obviously settler colonialism. We talk about Greek colonies and settlements in history, not Greek “immigration”.

The statue faces southeast, in order not to look at New Jersey.

No, seriously, the statue faces the entrance to New York Harbor. It can't really face outwards, because Long Island is in the way.

One of the most interesting things about de Tocqueville, for instance, is that he does not mention immigrants or immigration at all in Democracy in America, written in 1830. The word immigrant or immigration does not appear even once.

That's not true (emphasis mine):

In the North, as I have already remarked, a twofold migration ensues upon the abolition of slavery, or even precedes that event when circumstances have rendered it probable: the slaves quit the country to be transported southwards; and the whites of the Northern states, as well as the immigrants from Europe, hasten to fill their place. But these two causes cannot operate in the same manner in the Southern states. On the one hand, the mass of slaves is too great to allow any expectation of their being removed from the country; and on the other hand, the Europeans and Anglo-Americans of the North are afraid to come and inhabit a country in which labour has not been reinstated in its rightful honours."

(Volume 1, Chapter XVIII)

About fifty years ago Ireland began to pour a Catholic population into the United States; on the other hand, the Catholics of America made proselytes, and at the present moment more than a million of Christians professing the truths of the Church of Rome are to be met with in the Union. The Catholics are faithful to the observances of their religion; they are fervent and zealous in the support and belief of their doctrines. Nevertheless they constitute the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the United States; and although this fact may surprise the observer at first, the causes by which it is occasioned may easily be discovered upon reflection. I think that the Catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as the natural enemy of democracy. Amongst the various sects of Christians, Catholicism seems to me, on the contrary, to be one of those which are most favorable to the equality of conditions. . .

(Volume 1, Chapter XVII)

These are just two instances I remembered and knew to look for, I'm sure I could find more with a proper search.

There is a sense in which this supports your point, the Anglo-Americans are distinguished from the European immigrants and a parallel can be made with the settlers.

Good call! I have that book I thought I remembered him talking about immigrants but took the claim for granted. Thanks for the reminder to be skeptical.

Settlers vs immigrants seems like semantics, and if the author wants to accuse a large group of lying off that back of that semantic difference he probably needs to bring a lot more evidence to the game (and as you are posting it without comment, by extension that means you need to bring more evidence I think, or perhaps you are the author? More commentary needed to clarify there).

For a start your interpretation seems to suggest that if I emigrated to the United States with no intention of joining the existing society, then I am a settler and not an immigrant. So the more I don't want to assimilate the more I fit in with the founding ethos of the US? That seems somewhat suspect logically.

Legally of course it's a distinction without a difference. The US government is unlikely to accept my excuse that I am not immigrating but rather settling as I move in my extended Scottish clan. For your argument to hinge on there being a difference in some kind of moral way I think you need to do a lot more work on fleshing out that section. Other than wanting to assimilate vs keeping yourself apart what are the differences practically?

For another, let's say we accept your premise. The US is not a nation of immigrants it is a nation of settlers. Ok, so now your opponents nod sagely and say Ok, then let us allow more people to come in and settle. What does that actually change? Do you think it will change their argument outside of a simple word change? Or they symbolically gift a square foot of Montana to each person like buying a lairdship or a piece of the moon? Would you then tip your cap and say "Well I guess they are settlers now, my argument has been torpedoed!" Somehow I would doubt it. Which means the settlers vs immigrant dichotomy (real or not) is not the fundamental issue at stake.

The fundamental idea that the US was founded by groups of people who travelled to build new lives there from some other location. That is what people mean when they say a nation of immigrants. Whether they are semantically settlers or colonists or immigrants is really orthogonal to WHY people make that argument and what they are justifying (correctly or not).

Add that in with a whole bunch of leftist bashing (which is really irrelevant to the central logical claim that is trying to be proven (that settling is not the same as immigrating) and should probably have been excised for posting here). And it is a thumbs down from me I am afraid.

I'd suggest revisiting that central claim, cut out all the unrelated rhetorical attacks and try to build a logical structure as to whether settling and immigration are practically different and if so how. Try to buttress that argument because it is the central spine of the whole piece and it currently is not strong enough to support the weight. Repackage it for the Motte a little better perhaps as well with some commentary.

In addition to the problems others have pointed out regarding your failure to explain why the distinction between "settlers" and "immigrants" is relevant to anything anyone cares about, there seems to be an empirical problem: Let's look at 1890; you seem to say that, once the "frontier was closed," that subsequent arrivals were "immigrants," rather than "settlers."

But, what about people who arrived before 1890, but decided to live not on the frontier but in established communities? Weren't they "immigrants" rather than "settlers"? According to this report on the 1890 census at page , as of 1890 89 percent of foreign-born residents lived in the North Atlantic (ie, PA and above) or the Midwest, which were hardly the frontier. In 1850, 59 percent lived in the North Atlantic region. That seems to indicate that the US has been a country of, as you say, "immigrants," rather than "settlers" for much longer than you assume.

The pilgrims, when they showed up at Plymouth Rock, were not looking to join the existing Native American society. They were looking to build their own city upon a hill.

It seems that this analysis suggests that we should embrace "settlers" from Mexico who want to move into and stay within spanish seeking enclaves over any immigrant interested in integrating into US society.

Not really, Mexicans aren't founding cities in the wilderness, they're trying to join an existing society. The rest of the post goes into this.

So then the second group of anglos who came to join the settlements weren't settlers either.

Looks like the Supreme Court is finally getting around to challenging affirmative action. Of course we don't know what the ruling will be, but with the decisions so far I'm hopeful they strike down AA, or at least put a dent in it.

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger deal as I haven't heard much buzz about it from my liberal friends. According to the article, 74% of Americans don't believe in using race as a factor in college admissions (although that question and whether or not Affirmative Action should be struck down likely have far different approval rates.) It may be a Roe situation where they really don't care until one of the sacred cows is gored because they believe in their own invincibility. I'm curious if AA does get struck down, will we have the same reaction as Roe?

I'm sure some people will be upset, but do you think liberal states will start changing their constitutions to allow race filtering for college admissions? Or is the political will for AA just gone on both sides of the aisle?

The electoral problem for the pro-AA side is that this doesn’t cut neatly across two-party divisions. White and Asian-Americans are both over represented relative to the general population in college admissions, and don’t want their kids’ chances dinged because of their census categorization. A lot of Asian Americans who were Clinton/Biden voters strongly oppose any quotas that will impact their kids.

Are Asian-Americans a strong or divided voting bloc? According to this survey 44% of Asians are registered Democrat vs only 19%. I'd have to look at how the other demographic breakdowns compare but it seems like Asians are firmly in the democrat camp.

That’s what I’m pointing at. Asians are firmly in the Democrat camp, but many in that camp break orthodoxy on affirmative action. It’s an issue Republicans can use as a wedge.

If you break it down into subsets of Asians it seems that Indians and Japanese are the most Democrat, weighing in at around 57% Democratic. Vietnamese are mostly Independent and Republican, with only 23% Democratic. Interesting to go through the survey and see how it breaks down, I really wonder what 'Independent' actually means in this. Libertarian?

Image of demographic breakdown: https://imgur.com/a/jnsMKax

I think that Libertarian would come under "Other Party". Independent would be "no party affiliation".

White and Asian-Americans are both over represented relative to the general population in college admissions

IIRC non-legacy non-athletic non-jewish whites are a fair bit underrepresented relative to the general population at top colleges, but I don't have the exact numbers.

Could well be but that’s moot relative to the politics of this, in that there isn’t going to be a noticeable pro-affirmative action push for non-legacy, non-athletic, non-Jewish whites from any quarter.

I've certainly heard my leftist friends talking about and gearing up for the Supreme Court striking down AA. Though I doubt it'll have the same viceral-ity as Roe, since leftists have convinced themselves for decades that any touching of Roe is a literal attack on women's bodies.

Also, I think I remember a thread on the Motte a few weeks ago where someone indicated some evidence (I can't remember the exact evidence) that once AA is struck down, colleges will use other things as a proxy, which may even be worse for everyone. The proxy might be something like, far more preference is given to applicants who take part in DEI initiatives in high school, since that will heavily skew both towards non-whites, and towards leftists.

far more preference is given to applicants who take part in DEI initiatives in high school, since that will heavily skew both towards non-whites

Is this true? I feel like anecdotally a lot of minorities don't care about this type of thing, especially kids in high school.

But yeah, unfortunately the academic system is thoroughly captured by the woke BS. Personally I think an even bigger issue is grade inflation + fear of giving any non-whites a bad grade but that's a topic for another post I suppose.

I think you're right that minority kids mostly don't care. But if colleges start requiring this stuff, then they (and the non-minority students) will be forced to care. DEI initiatives will become the new sports and charity work to pad an application.

Of course, the question is then what will the colleges do this proves not to be a good way to indirectly implement AA. I don't know what it will be, but I'm sure they'll try. It's not as if AA was mandatory before, and yet all the big colleges did it by choice.

If you take a stroll over to the ChanceMe subreddit, you'll find that ambitious applicants, regardless of race, are already starting to pad their resumes with DEI initiatives. Youth ambassadors for mental illness, leaders of Social Justice, Equity, and Inequality clubs, clubs that work to promote inclusion of kids with disabilities, all of these and more abound in the resumes of the modern college applicant.

I think regardless of the Supreme Court decision, the racial makeup of colleges will stay the same.

You may be thinking of the Astral Codex Ten link roundup for October:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397

Ah, yep, that's right.

Changing state constitutions can't help if it's either the 14th Amendment or Federal Law that any decision is based on. And there probably are not the votes to change the Civil Rights Acts to specifically allow for this.

Instead, if the Court decides that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." and bans all racial discrimination in admissions including affirmative action (and no, Harvard, we're not fooled by your 'Asians have bad personalities' claims), the response will be just to ignore it. The administrative agencies will continue to allow it, or turn a blind eye. The lower courts will endorse this. Maybe in another 10 years another case will make it to SCOTUS, but in the meantime nothing changes.

The US court system's "binding precedents" work mainly through respect for the institution by those below; courts and agencies are expected to follow precedent even when they'd rather not. But the people pushing these policies see them as the highest moral imperative and will put their desires above any such institutional controls.

Do you think federal institutions outright ignoring a SC decision is more likely than just using other factors to get to a similar outcome, as proposed below?

To me it seems far to risky for these universities to continue to do AA as-is if it gets struck down, but I wouldn't be surprised if they shift to overwhelmingly accepting students that signal woke/leftist ideology in their applications.

They'll use 'other factors' which largely proxy for race (or are entirely proxies for race, in the case of the 'other factors' being subjective). And the (lower) courts will take a blind eye to this. They'll probably also try accept wokies only, but that signal is too easy for white true-believers to display and too easy for the unscrupulous of any race to fake.

RBG..the gift that keeps on giving . The problem is, how do you prove affirmative action? It's harder to prove it compared to abortions. It took decades for evidence of Harvard discrimination against Asians to surface.

It won’t have the same reaction because progressives can’t convince themselves it’s a vote winner.

I think the system of racial quotas at US universities will remain, no matter what.

The dilemma for the establishment is the vexing problem of both ever-greater share of Asians in the US population combined with Asians pulling away from everyone on the SAT college exam, which Steve Sailer [wrote]](https://www.takimag.com/article/asian-supremacy/) about recently.

One possible exit route could to be declare racial discrimination illegal but open the door for everyone within the top 10% of their high-school graduating class to get a spot, which would invariably hit against Asians as many high-schools in the US are overwhelmingly Latinx and/or black. Or universities could just ditch the test. Can't break the rules on something you can't measure.

It's depressing to ponder, but it appears that Asians in particular will simply have to get used to doing their undergrad at places like University of Pittsburgh or Boston University rather than the very elite universities, and then move up one step for grad school. To truly do away with racial quotas would mean that black enrollment in many top universities would collapse by 80% or even more. The amount of hysteria that would generate would be very hard for the system to manage. Asians and whites, for better or worse, are more passive and thus easier to steamroll.

Consider that wherever those students go will become elite over time.

Is this true though? I don’t know if the eliteness of schools is extremely correlated to raw intelligence or aptitude. Sure students from ivy leagues succeed but that could be due to networking opportunities and status signaling.

Well, eliteness is clearly extremely correlated to raw intelligence and aptitude, that just doesn't mean that those are sufficient factors alone to explain the eliteness.

status signaling

If this was the major factor, though, that would in itself make "become elite over time" come to pass. If suddenly all the smart graduates are coming out of Podunk U, eventually the people who make hiring decisions will figure out to headhunt smart candidates there or to put branch offices in the Podunk Corridor.

networking opportunities

This, on the other hand, might make things a bit more sticky. Suppose "eliteness" is a nonlinear effect, a consequence of the things you see accomplished in places where you get all the smartest people and all the richest people and all the most well-connected people to mingle. Intelligence benefits from network effects with more intelligence, but to a lesser extent than money and pull. Lose all the smartest people to Podunk, but don't lose the venture capital and the clout along with them, and it's not clear that the smartest are going to be harmed the least by the separation, at least not for a few generations.

Similar effects concern me when I'm tempted to join in on the schadenfreude upthread about potentially getting rid of "legacy" admissions. "He needs help with his homework" might be annoying, but combine it with "I need help with my job-hunt/startup/etc" and it looks like a win/win. Like the old saying goes: It's not what you know, it's not who you know, it's who knows what you know.

The political will for AA exists in the universities and bureaucracies, and will be abetted by ideological fellow-travelers in law, politics, and journalism. If this iteration of AA is struck down in these particular places, colleges and universities will simply change their methodology and bury the decisional factors even further under layers of committees, unrecorded exercises of discretion by low-level admissions staff, and student advocacy. They will stop collecting, and attack as racist, the metrics which would reveal their actions to be discriminatory (e.g. standardized testing). They will bog down litigation in years of lawyering, backed up either by billion-dollar endowments, or blue state's public fisc. One or two red tribe suits might win, but on the whole, the system will remain.

Prediction market thinks there is very good chance AA is struck down.

https://kalshi.com/events/SFFA/markets/SFFA-COMPLETE

I'm sure some people will be upset, but do you think liberal states will start changing their constitutions to allow race filtering for college admissions?

There will certainly be some response. but if they persist in racial discrimination I would wonder how they will deal with the likely outcome of lots of talented applicants being siphoned off to colleges in other states? Will there be some kind of additional certification or requirement that a school has to meet to be listed as a 'truly' accredited institution? Maybe federal funding is tied to some other metric that is loosely tied to racial diversity.

An interesting tactic that I might expect to see is simply raising tuition prices across the board WHILE offering special scholarships to cover all or most of the price to eligible students based on race, so at least you can get applicants to self-select for which schools they go to, and can say "well we are not using race-based admissions standards!"

Although the ultimate decision striking down AA might be broad enough that even THAT form of discrimination would be suspect.

I'm curious if AA does get struck down, will we have the same reaction as Roe?

I can't imagine it will be as severe as all that, and yet Universities as a class have a LOT of political sway so I'm thinking we will definitely see some fits pitched.

Due to increasing education polarization and affinity of liberals for AA, I actually wonder if, somewhat perversely, states that don't implement AA would have to worry about talented students and workers leaving to go to other states.

I didn’t feel like the reaction to Row was severe

No riots, but someone allegedly tried to kill Brett Kavanaugh over that decision.

I do not expect an assassination attempt to occur if AA is overturned.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if affirmative action, in practice, increased. I could see universities and states like California amd New York doubling down on AA out of spite, using the court case as a flag to rally around.

Maybe packaged with a larger 'reparations' policy or otherwise making it clear that they're going to spend EVEN MORE money trying to achieve racial parity, even if it isn't allowed in Admissions.

The reality is that striking down AA won't change much. There are a thousand things that colleges can select for that are, in intent, proxies for race but ostensibly for some other nonracial aim. Depending on what they are, they'll be struck down, but for every approach struck down there'll be ten being trialed on the ground.

It's unclear how a ban an affirmative action would even be enforced. Today even Harvard implausibly claims that it doesn't take race into account. University admissions policies have enough opacity that even if it's obvious from the outside that they're based on race, when it comes down to brass tacks it will be hard to prove.

It's unclear how a ban an affirmative action would even be enforced.

It won't. But it could, the same way the ban on discrimination against black people was enforced. It requires buy-in from the lower courts and administrative agencies, so they turn a critical eye on the sorts of nonsense would-be violators would pull. Do you think old-fashioned racists couldn't come up with crap like "them n-words just have bad personalities"? They could and they did, they just got slapped down and their institutions put under court supervision. That won't happen here, because nobody in the system except maybe a few members of the Supreme Court really wants affirmative action to go away.

Prediction: if AA is struck down, we will not see any decrease of URM students at elite universities (say, top 10).

I do think we'll see a marginal shift toward more Asians and fewer whites.

I disagree with you. Based on historical precedent, it seems relatively likely that enrollment of URM students at elite universities will fall, at least in the short term. For example, as you can see here, when prop 209 passed in California, the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% (from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%). The social atmosphere is of course substantially different now than it was then and perhaps the UC system's experience with Prop 209 will give other universities a leg up on circumventing a possible AA ban, but I think the default hypothesis here should be that it will effect enrollment somewhat.

By the way, according to the numbers I linked to above, when Prop 209 passed, the number of black and hispanic students at Berkeley fell a lot but the number of white and asian students rose only slightly (at least in percentage terms). One reason is that there were many more white and asian students than hispanic and black students to begin with, so the same change in absolute terms looks much smaller in relative terms. Another reason seems to be an increase in percentage of "not given" as a response to demographic questions. It's not clear to me why this is and what the demographic breakdown of "not given" was at the time. I doubt that it was mostly black and hispanic students, but I'm not sure.

Prop 209 passed in 1996. Are you really arguing that a one year increase, 25 years later, is evidence that they are cheating somehow? What took them so long?

And, btw, the easiest way to increase black student admissions at Berkeley is to encourage them to apply to the College of Letters and Sciences, rather than to one of the more competitive colleges

I would say that's evidence, yes, but far from the best evidence. It's easily dwarfed by the absolute mountain of evidence uncovered by Prof. Sander at UCLA that the UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed, and that evidence was covered up by UC Admissions while the UC Administrations told massive straight-face lies for the next decade or two.

One of the methods was using multi-pass evaluation of admissions packets where the first pass sorted into "admit/marginal/no admit." For some odd reason, when the second pass went through the "marginal" category, 75%+ of black applicants got an admissions offer, and approximately 0% of white and Asian students were accepted.

I knew some black students in the UCs that went there well after Prop 209, but before Prof. Sander's discoveries. They expressed bitterness that they were seen as affirmative-action students, despite Prop 209 clearly making racial preferences illegal. "Unjustified racism," they called it. And yet they'd been betrayed, and the suspicions of the "racists" were actually correct. They did get in under lower admission standards.

I think you are overstating your case here. It is clear that Prop 209 did have a major effect on admissions in the UC system. For example, you can see here that the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% from 1997 to 1998 (the first year the new rules were in effect) from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%. I believe that the UC system did try to circumvent Prop 209 in various ways and may have become more effective at this over time, but claiming that "UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed" doesn't seem correct.

That could still be consistent - if the "true" percentage with no preference was 1-2%, then there could have still be a thumb on the scale which was not pressed quite as firmly in 1998.

I objected to the phrase "comprehensively violating" which to me seems to imply that Prop 209 had little to no effect on admissions numbers. I was simply pointing out that it did have a large effect on admissions even if this effect may not have been as large as in a scenario with no attempts to circumvent Prop 209.

Before Prop 209, the UCs used particular metrics and methods to preferentially boost black admissions to UCs. Then Prop 209 mandated an end to racial preferences, and decreed that admissions should be race-blind. After Prop 209, the UCs covertly used different methods some of which I specifically described to boost black admissions, in violation of Prop 209, and conducted a massive coverup of their illegal behavior. I'm not evaluating the post-Prop 209 behavior on the basis of statistical analysis; I'm talking about the actual behavior that Prof. Sander uncovered.

That the post-Prop 209 methods produced fewer black admissions to the UCs than the pre-Prop 209 methods is an interesting point in itself, but it's not a counter to what I wrote.

I didn't claim that the UC system made no attempts to circumvent Prop 209, only that these attempts, at least for the first decade after Prop 209, did not manage to bring admissions numbers close to where they were before Prop 209. That seemed to contradict the phrase "comprehensively violating Prop 209" but perhaps we interpret the word "comprehensively" differently.

In my opinion it is valid evidence. "What took them so long?" In 2020, many major institutions suddenly became much more concerned about avoiding the appearance of discriminating against black people. This gave universities like Berkeley the motivation to try to admit more black students. The fact that they were able to do so in such a short time shows that they do have some ability to change admission decisions based on the race of applicants (either they were previously discriminating against black students or they started discriminating in favor of black students or both). If admissions were truly race-blind this would very likely have been impossible. Admittedly, university admissions in 2021 were also effected by covid (e.g. that was part of the justification for many universities to drop SAT requirements) and this makes the argument weaker than it would be otherwise. However, it seems obvious to me that 2rafa's point is evidence in favor of "covert AA" at schools like Berkeley and that "what took them so long" is not a convincing rebuttal.

It was not meant to be a rebuttal; the OP's conclusion might well be true. It certainly would not surprise me, esp given the low enrollment of African Americans freshmen at Berkeley the year before (see data discussed below). It was meant to be a commentary on OP's poor use of evidence, or really their laziness. As you and others have noted, there is much better evidence on both sides, and one would think that, having seen one very weak data point, OP would at least have wondered what the data looked like in the intervening years before posting with such confidence in his conclusion.

Re institutions being more concerned about the appearance of discriminating against black people, the timing is not right. Despite the OP's statement that the increase was in 2021, if you look at the article and the links, the increase was for Fall of 2020 (note the article's reference to admissions "this past fall", and see link below). Admissions decisions are announced in March, which was before the George Flloyd incident.

BTW I don't know why you claim that the outcome would be impossible if admissions were race-blind. First of all, the 40% is overstated, because overall numbers of admittees increased. The pct of total freshman admittees who are black went from 3.57 pct to 4.76 pct, an increase of 33%. Second, as I implied in my original post, admissions decisions at Berkeley are made at the college level, not the university level. So, while overall acceptance rate at Berkeley is 14%, at the College of Engineering it is 7%. Given Simpson's paradox (ironically first identified re Berkeley grad admissions), we need to see those numbers in order to make valid inferences; if more black students started applying to less selective colleges (eg Letters and Sciences), then the increase could easily be possible.

PS: Another possible explanation: Some of this might be PR; the acceptance rates include wait listed students and students offered Spring admission. The actual enrollment at Berkeley went from 178 students to 229 students out of 6000 total (and that 178 figure is an unusually low base, esp as a pct of total enrollees).

First, I don't think it's a poor use of evidence. Prop 209 is supposed to mean that public universities cannot decide admissions based on race. The fact that when the school has an incentive to suddenly admit more people of a certain race it is able to quickly do so shows that they likely do have the ability to at least let race have some influence on admission. The fact that this happened 25 years after Prop 209 passed doesn't matter much since the relevant change in incentives happened in 2020 and the change in admissions happened in 2021.

Second, I agree that it is a problem for 2rafa's argument if the change took place in 2020. Looking at the links you sent, it looks like there was a change in 2021, but you are also right that, especially for Berkeley in particular, there was a bigger change in 2020.

Third, saying "impossible" was too strong on my part and I apologize. Also it is reasonable to critique 2rafa for overstating the magnitude of the change. However, I don't buy your second argument here. If you want to explain a change in overall admission rate using the fact that different colleges have different admission rates, you have to explain why black people suddenly started applying to the various colleges at different rates than they had previously. Of course there are many possible explanations for a sudden change in admission rate but the one you propose does not seem plausible on the time scale of one year. A better counterargument, in my opinion, would be to cite changes in admissions policies (such as waiving SAT requirements) brought on by covid. Although this counterargument no longer works if the change happened in 2020 rather than 2021. Your argument about massaging public statistics by including waitlisted students is reasonable too, although again there is the question of why the university wouldn't have done this in previous years (more relevant if the change was in 2020 than in 2021).

EDIT: I should clarify that when I say "I don't think it's a poor use of evidence" I mean when 2rafa's claims are taken at face value. If 2rafa had the year of change or magnitude of change wrong then it may be poor evidence.

Yes, the increase in 2021 seems to be a function of the increase in applicants; admission of black applicants admitted actually declined in 2021: It was 850/6587 (13 pct) in 2021 versus 733/4454 (16 pct) in 2020.

However, I don't buy your second argument here. If you want to explain a change in overall admission rate using the fact that different colleges have different admission rates, you have to explain why black people suddenly started applying to the various colleges at different rates than they had previously.

Well, an obvious hypothesis would be that the university encouraged them to do so. See the links in OP's post, where university reps explicitly talk about efforts to increase enrollment. But, regardless, I want to emphasize that my point is not that no chicanery is happening, but rather that the data presented is insufficient to conclude one way or the other. I taught high school in Oakland for many years and had a lot of students apply to Berkeley, and the Asian-American students (who were a majority of the students, or a large plurality) overwhelming applied to the colleges of engineering, or chemistry, etc. I assume that is true statewide. Yet, the pct of Asian-American students admitted in 2021 (6113/36827) is greater than the pct of black students, as was the case in 2020. Whites were 16% in 2020 and 14% in 2021, which is the same or higher than black applicants. From the campus-level data alone, it is hard to make a claim of racial preferences, but data at the college level might imply that (since college of application is a [very] rough proxy for quality of student.

Liberal states will trust in liberal admissions offices to ignore court rulings and find a way to keep admitting underperforming minorities. The only real way to fight affirmative action would be to adopt a Kendiesque policy of assuming discrimination as the default whenever student demographics don't match up to the racial distribution of test scores, and/or to ban interviews and institute blind admissions.

There's another easy solution: Ban admission based on anything other than test scores (like in most of Europe).

Europe does have surprisingly balanced laws around abortion and college admissions. Their governance is weak in other areas I suppose.

Grandes écoles still base the admission on nationally ranked exams similar to rest of Continental Europe. There is a fundamental difference in the mindset when it comes to admissions. Anything as subjective as admissions scoring based on application essays and "personality" is considered fundamentally inequal (mostly in a socioeconomic sense, although it happens to also act as a guard against wokism in this case) and can be outright illegal depending on the country.

Oh properly blind admissions would be great. Not only would they kill AA but also kill legacy and donor admissions (an even bigger travesty, at least AA has noble though misguided goals). The schadenfreude when Daddy finds out his $2 million donation led to zilch since anything on his children's applications that connected them to him got scrubbed out by a minimum wage worker before they even got delivered to the admissions officers is so great even imagining it fills my heart with warmth, pride and childlike joy.

Agreed. I keep seeing people try to buttress AA by crying "What about legacy admits? If we're banning AA, why not that first/too?!", and I'm just like "Your terms are acceptable even better."

Yep. Race-conscious admissions have technically been unconstitutional in California for decades, and the universities don't even try to pretend that they're complying.

I think a lot of discussions about AA focus on the effect on black enrollment and try to depict it as a kind of "black vs. asian" conflict. Perhaps this is partly because those are the racial groups for whom the differences between standardized test scores and admission chances are most dramatic, but I think it somewhat misreads the issue. Black people are a relatively small percent of the US population (~13%) and are not increasing especially fast. Hispanic people, on the other hand, are an increasingly large share of the population because of immigration, high birth rate and changing fashion in racial identification among people of mixed race or ambiguous race (e.g. an ethnic white person who was born in Mexico). Even if no black people were admitted to elite universities (an unlikely outcome even if admissions were based entirely on test scores), this would only allow an increase of about 12% in asian admission. However, to some extent now and perhaps much more in the future, the rate at which hispanic people are admitted to elite universities could have a large impact on asian admission rates (as could white admission rates, of course).

Since I don't see a thread about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, what the hell, I guess I'll make one.

I'll probably do a poor job of cataloguing the current state of known facts, but as best I can...

Paul Pelosi's attacker was a guy name David DePape, he appears to have a fairly checkered mental health history, if not homeless, appears to have lived on the edge of homelessness, appears to have social media history that doesn't have zero overlap various right wing issues (apparently concerning Covid), but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts? I hope so, if not, my apologies).

Anyway, more interesting from my viewpoint, Hillary Clinton and Elon Musk exchanged tweets over various theories of the case. With Clinton basically saying this is Trump fault, and Elon linking to an article hypothesizing that DePape might have been a gay escort. Which the NY Times quickly declared misinformation (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweets-hillary-clinton-pelosi-husband.html), Musk deleted his tweet.

As best I can tell, the gay escort theory at this point is almost entirely based on conjecture.

Here's my question, if the conjecture turns out to be correct, will it come to light? What concatenation of events would keep it from coming to light?

Right now DePape is under arrest for attempted murder, its not apparent to me if he's lawyered up or not yet, I assume at some point he's going to have to go on record establishing a timeline for what he was doing in the 5 or so hours prior to the incident, if he met Paul Pelosi in a gay bar, that seems like something that would be fairly straight forward to corroborate with witnesses, if they arranged a meeting on an app, it would seem that digital corroboration would be pretty straight forward.

Not sure about Paul Pelosi's current ability to speak with police, but I presume they're going to establish a timeline for him as well.

If that is what happened, what would keep if from coming to light? (I anticipate some joke about DePape committing suicide, but, that would obviously drive a fair amount of theorizing were it to happen).

Follow up question, what are the consequences if either story pans out?

If it turns out that DePape was a gay escort hired by Paul Pelosi, that fact is going to be buried deeper than Vince Foster glued to Hunter Biden's laptop. But it seems to be entirely made up anyway.

There's some circumstantial stuff that suggests this isn't a standard B&E like glass being outside the french door in some photographs and why Paul was given permission to go to the bathroom where he called 911.

I don't think the glass means much. It appears the window is a "shatterproof" type (with a film intended for protection against flying objects, not B&E), so the guy probably broke it then pulled it outwards when the hole wasn't big enough.

Does it ultimately matter what ideology this particular crazy was latching onto? Does it matter if he demographically matches what you'd expect? That sort of crazy drinks whatever extremism is in the water.

I don't expect any real consequences. This story is another of the many hundreds of stories that garner 30,000+ upvotes on /r/politics and similar venues where blue tribers tell themselves they're right about the populist right being evil, while conspicuously ignoring similar stories that suggest the opposite.

A huge part of the leftist advantage in the culture war is their control of bully pulpit to choose which stories the public focuses on. How many people who aren't conservative know that the Wakeusha murderer was a BLM anti-cop radical who called for violence against whites? If they know, how many times have they been reminded of it?

So yeah, that thing where the left gets an unfair boost in political capital is happening yet another time.

EDIT: I didn't actually address the theory itself.... rant over. I see people bringing up his sexuality (among other things) as evidence against him being a MAGA type, which I find unconvincing. (One of the most famous 'white supremacists' is Nick Fuentes, a hispanic.) He doesn't seem like someone who be connected enough or hot enough to smash with someone as rich and prominent as a Pelosi. Feels like a stretch, but stranger things have happened.

One of the most famous 'white supremacists' is Nick Fuentes, a hispanic.

You mentioned that, and not the femboy thing?

While I agree that there is some strangeness about the entire story, I think the “gay escort” theory is highly unlikely, for the very simple reason: people like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.

Maybe he's a pathological penny pincher like Robert Kraft.

Maybe a long-standing relationship? IDK.

People like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.

So can Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy, and yet they were famously caught with Hollywood Boulevard hookers. There is a precedent for "slumming" for sex among the rich and famous. Probably moreso for San Francisco gays as the Castro District culture and history there is rich. I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat similar to how upper-or-middle-class Black celebrities will affect street dialect: faking authenticity is big in some subcultures.

The basis of the escort theory is, essentially: How did he get into the house? How does a house owned by one of the richest couples in America in one the most crime-ridden cities in America, not have a security system that can defend against a lone crazy person making a semi-spontaneous attack? And how is a lone crazy person disordered enough to think this crime is a worthwhile endeavor and yet ordered enough to find his way through the Pelosis' security apparatus?

This "fetish for hobos" theory does not sound entirely absurd and incoherent, especially considering the examples you give, but...

The basis of the escort theory is, essentially: How did he get into the house? How does a house owned by one of the richest couples in America in one the most crime-ridden cities in America, not have a security system that can defend against a lone crazy person making a semi-spontaneous attack?

I mean, does "Paul Pelosi has a fetish for gay hobos" is really the first thing that comes to your mind given this evidence? Is this really simplest theory filling available facts?

Look, I'll propose something much simpler: DePape ringed the bell, someone (maybe even mister Pelosi) answered the door, and DePape said something that was misinterpreted, resulting in the person letting him in, thinking that he was expected. It could have even been something as simple as him saying "hey, I have something for Nancy". Does that really sound less plausible than "Paul Pelosi has a secret fetish for gay hobos"? Or, check this out: DePape rings the bell, Pelosi answers the door, and DePape just shoves the octogenarian and barges in? I'm not saying that either of those is what actually happened, but that these are simply way more a priori plausible than the "fetish for gay hobos" theory, they depend on fewer assumptions and inferential steps.

Look, I'll propose something much simpler: DePape ringed the bell, someone (maybe even mister Pelosi) answered the door, and DePape said something that was misinterpreted, resulting in the person letting him in, thinking that he was expected.

Sure, but if it happened in the way you speculate, it's what would be reported. However, I doubt anyone can simply walk up and ring the Pelolsi's doorbell (in the middle of the night). Unless the Pelosi's themselves don't take seriously all of her public hand-wringing about right-wing violence, they surely have active measures in place to protect themselves from it, right?

Counter point: rest stops.

There are definitely gay guys who are more into crazy hobos than handsome escorts.

I've heard this said a lot and it doesn't make sense to me. I'm not at Pelosi's level, but I'm rich. I have no idea how to hire an escort. People think that when your net worth crosses some line, they send you a packet with ways to hire an escort, hire a hitman, not pay taxes, etc... The level of fantasy about wealth than exists in the minds of non-wealthy people is often absurd.

I can't help you with the other two, but Aella's happy to explain how escorting works.

Man, that was a wild ride. I don't think I will ever be able to use the knowledge, but I now know a ton about the business side of prostitution that I never really even considered.

I have no idea how to hire an escort.

I mean, if you were so inclined, it wouldn't be hard to find out. You can literally Google it

not pay taxes

This is code for reducing tax burden through generally legal means that some people may believe to be unfair, against the spirit of tax regimes. Everything from an H&R block tax preparer finding one weird trick deductions for you to a personal wealth manager doing all kinds of interesting work falls under this category. Quality of the services provided and what options are available scale relative to wealth. As does the general feeling of unfairness. Sticking with retail banking/investment/tax preparation with something on the order of 10m USD in assets may be a suboptimal life choice.

I heavily agree with this. It’s not as easy as people think. There’s also a serious vetting issue if you don’t have experience. Even a place like has Eros has as many scammers as real. It’s a lot of work to find escorts even if your willing to pay up. And men want variety so their likely to play a lot of hands which increases risks.

Even if I were to assume that Paul Pelosi likes having illicit affairs with seedy male prostitutes, I find it hard to believe he'd be stupid enough to use his real name or let the guy know where he lives.

I feel like there's a level of rich where you have a home office and someone who manages your staff, who probably has a career history of managing rich guys' household staff, and presumably they can field requests like that and discreetly figure out how to execute them. No? This probably isn't like $10M rich, though, it's probably like $150M+. Not that every rich person lives that way, but makes sense to hire people to handle all of the effort in managing your houses, your social schedule, your philanthropies, etc., and I assume that people who do that for a living end up either fielding weird requests like this themselves from time to time or at least developing a network that would help them figure it out.

You might not know to pay less taxes now, but if you actually cared to learn, you’d start out with some obvious steps, like, for example, asking people who you think might have better idea than you do. Rich people typically are good at figuring out how to get things done, as this is typically how they got rich in the first place. Your last line about “the level of fantasy” is bad, and you should be able to do better than that.

Perhaps the idea is that, as you approach the kind of wealth that allows you to sip ridiculously-expensive champagne in some restaurant, you'll gain the connections and networking that allow you to get a seat at said restaurant. Find-and-replace for any other rich-people thing.

The idea is wrong, then. More often it's the other way around; the social ability to get you those connections and a seat at that restaurant also get you the wealth/

Nt

people like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.

Come on man, if I win the lottery, I'm still gonna love 100$ footjobs.

what would keep if from coming to light?

Leftist media outlets will probably never mention this story again, regardless of what information becomes available.

I’m back to the usual refrain of every year since about 2015:

“How is this becoming partisan?”

Someone breaks in and makes a probably-political, certifiably-insane attack on a public figure. This is obviously bad. Stochastic terrorism is bad. Defending the actions is (or should be?) basically off the table.

That leaves deflection. First responses in last week’s thread: “gosh those wacky Green Party members” followed by a squabble over whether or not DePape’s emphatic support for QAnon and Trump meant he counted as Republican. Now: one of the most powerful men in America memeing about how the attacker might have been a gay escort, and thus...it’s a Democrat own-goal? What?

I’m reminded of any number of events in summer 2020 in which people tried to rationalize rioting. “Yeah, I get that XYZ was unjust, but I’d like to step back to the part where y’all decided to start burning stuff.” When the bad thing is indefensible, we are more likely to see deflection.

Presumably the motivation is getting out ahead of the Other Team abusing their actual, legitimate criticism. Even if Democrats somehow resisted the lure of equating DePape with mainstream Republicans—which he clearly was not—, there’s still hay to be made of the extremists. It’s the traditional setup for a little “something has to be done.” But is throwing out bullshit theories really the best way to counter it?

I suspect that the answer is no, and that the mainstream GOP response is a more measured rejection. I don’t have evidence for this at the moment; if anyone has examples of GOP officials making public statements on the matter, I’d like to see them. But my theory is that when the official policy is silence, in the era of social media, that’s effectively handing a megaphone to the fringe.

When the bad thing is indefensible, we are more likely to see deflection.

But rioting isn't indefensible. Even the looting part. All one has to do is claim that the person whose store is getting looted owes his property to some widely denounced social force. Since one shouldn't be allowed gain from "crime" his title anulled to it, and anyone is free to take it. If the looters have excuse that they are victims of the very same force, well that just makes their looting a form of restitution.

One can quibble about the details, but looting as reparations is on solid logical grounds, assuming common legal principles and the progressive ideas regarding "white supremacy".

But defense of looting was multi-faceted: aforementioned "it happened, it was us, it was justified", the "it didn't happen" the "it happened, but it wasn't us".

There was some dissent, which admitted fault, but it was more about violent protests being ineffective/harmful for achieving their goals, than harms of violence itself. (This qualified denunciation of violence got the person who suggested twitter bachlash, but I forgot who it was.)

There was some dissent, which admitted fault, but it was more about violent protests being ineffective/harmful for achieving their goals, than harms of violence itself. (This qualified denounciation of violence got the person who suggested twitter bachlash, but I forgot who it was.)

You're thinking of David Shor.

No, it’s still not logical, and I don’t think that argument made much headway in the mainstream. I’m sure some people said it on Twitter; some of them were probably even serious. But the two options you linked were much more common.

For most people in the US, widespread violence is something that happens to other people. Defending on the facts is something reserved for people with skin in the game. Deflecting or denying is more likely for a bystander.

looting as reparations is on solid logical grounds

Yes, but there's established procedure to do that.

The fact that a partisan can't convince most of the country's power brokers to impose them is not an excuse to go levy that tax anyway; the concept that at the end of the day, that partisan is not allowed to deny you the ability to defend yourself against them if they try to do it anyway... is what the term "bearing arms" means.

if anyone has examples of GOP officials making public statements on the matter, I’d like to see them.

Senate Republicans have made the usual statements, e.g.

https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/1586081299076419586

https://www.sasse.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2022/10/sasse-statement-on-pelosi-attack

https://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell/status/1586017719912210440

On the other hand, as far as I can tell there have been no comments from Trump or prominent House Republicans like McCarthy or Jordan. And conservative media has been markedly less measured, where aside from the rumormongering there's the position that this is really the fault of Democrats for failing to control crime (see also: MTG in the House).

Thanks. This sort of quiet condemnation is pretty close to what I was expecting: polite solidarity. It’s decidedly not a mea culpa, which would be foolish, and it’s also not full-throated spin.

I’m not sure if the media response supports my theory. On one hand, it’s good sensationalism, especially reporting on meta-drama like Musk tweets. On the other, I expected more lockstep with the party.

Trump seems to have condemned the attack, but he couldn't avoid putting some spin on it.

Per The Hill:

Former President Trump in an interview Sunday called the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband in their San Francisco home a “terrible thing” as he railed against crime in Democrat-led cities. “With Paul Pelosi, that’s a terrible thing, with all of them it’s a terrible thing,” Trump said in an interview with Americano Media, a conservative Spanish language outlet. “Look at what’s happened to San Francisco generally. Look at what’s happening in Chicago. It was far worse than Afghanistan.”

It was far worse than Afghanistan

Per usual, Trump is god-damn right (insert Breaking Bad gif) ... death and decline in America is much worse than any other part of the world, but most especially the past of the world that for 2,000 years is unchanged - with all the negatives that entails. Sure, the almost 2,000 US deaths there is a shame, but the 175,000(ish) death of the Afghani are, I don't know, worth less than the weekend murders in Chicago. It's obviously a shame, it makes me hate America so much, I wish those Afghan's could be fat pieces of shit like me drinking IPA's on Halloween night while watching MNF and possibly ordering Mexican food (imagine an Afghani burrito? Bet that shit would be tight), but they're not. They're some kind of other that isn't me and it's a travesty. But fuck if we can't even make our own better, TF are we gonna do with the average Afghani? Let them live their lives? Ok - but that life is objectively terrible.

I'm pretty sure that your post is sarcastic, but I must note how easy it is to imagine an afghani burrito. I've more or less assembled such before, and it was great since chickpeas are way better than beans in my book.

I'm honestly not sure it's all that sarcastic. One thing I read into that was "Afghanistan and other parts of the world were never all that great, but we've had further to fall and we're getting there fast."

“How is this becoming partisan?”

Because we live in the era of hate hoaxes, lies, etc.

Jussie Smollett happened, basically every instance of feces-swasticas or n-words on college campuses, if solved, ends up being done by a black or jew. Kavanaugh.

Everyone notices these patterns. Being a victim is one of the greatest currencies in the modern media. If sympathy and prestige is granted for being hit with a hammer, the incentive to get hit is obvious. If we just called everyone who got assaulted by homeless schitzos losers, which is more accurate historically than what we do now, the incentive for hoaxes would go away, and people would stop suspecting hoaxes.

Defending the actions is (or should be?) basically off the table.

You may not like being compared to Stalin. You may not think you and Stalin have much in common politically. You might abhor Stalin and his politics. And yet, so long as comparing you to Stalin is an effective tactic, you have no choice but to defend yourself against it. So long as this action can be credibly linked to conservatives, they have no choice but to claim that beating up politician husbands is the gasp of the oppressed and the voice of the downtrodden.

Aye, that's what I was trying to include as getting out ahead. I'd rather Democrats not try to conflate this dude with the mainstream right, such that Republicans didn't reach for dumb justifications...but I'm not holding my breath for everyone to be reasonable. Given that Democrats are going to push hard on this, sitting around and doing nothing is no good. Saying "whoops, my bad" is worse, especially if you didn't do it.

But are outlandish accusations any more effective? Maybe I'm typical-minding, but my reflex to gay-escort or pizza-parlor conspiracies is "are you serious?" It loses credibility compared to quiet disapproval and disavowal.

I present, as evidence, the measured response from party officials. (This could also be down to branding, as no one would be impressed by Mitch McConnell trying to play firebrand.) I think that career politicians are content to quietly let the accusations smolder out, but outsiders and/or randos on Twitter have to use a different calculus. What's best for engagement isn't necessarily best in a general sense.

A shady member of a mildly-corrupt political dynasty based in San Francisco cavorting with an obviously off his rocker gay prostitute isn't totally implausible, especially given the dude was arrested in his underwear. And especially given that the political dynasty in question is extremely unpopular.

The hell?

No, bringing mentally ill hookers to your house is not normal. Neither for random citizens nor for politicians, unpopular or otherwise. Not even in California, har har.

It is not maximally implausible, just incredibly so. Literally incredibly: I wouldn't expect it, and believing it without a stitch of evidence is...unwise. I shouldn't have to point out that we have DePape, in his own words, talking about "punishment" for Nancy Pelosi, and how he was "fighting against tyranny." It's batshit crazy--but it is strictly less batshit crazy than saying all this, but lied to the police to cover for the man he just hospitalized with a hammer.

Stochastic terrorism is bad.

I believe I can safely say this about the past: I, and a few other dorks I know, would have cheered the death of any mayor that closed their town down and was seen eating lobster in a near by town.

So, maybe?

But my theory is that when the official policy is silence, in the era of social media, that’s effectively handing a megaphone to the fringe.

Yes, "silence is violence" has been the Progressive party line for a long time.

The trick is that, frequently, the yeschad.jpg response is the correct one; violence upon people who falsely accuse others of crimes for political gain rather than following the established law and procedure for that (on both sides) is generally called "justice".

I wouldn't place it completely outside the realm of possibility, after all he's not the first wealthy California democrat to have issues with gay prostitutes. But a lot of the evidence I see seems like wishcasting over the fog of war. People are suddenly experts about how glass breaks, or what irrational decisions crazy people do or do not make, or how people speak under duress.

To me the larger story is a wealthy democrat finally suffered the consequences of the policies they push on the rest of us. And it's been almost unanimously used to blood libel the opposing tribe.

A part of me also finds it incredibly rich that the leading "alt-right" characteristic this person has is that he believes is "covid conspiracies". Which conspiracy would that be? One of the ones that turned out to be true? Like the lab leak theory? Or that the vaccines aren't as effective as initially advertised? Or that the entire process which approved the vaccines and is now "recommending"/requiring shots for 6 month olds appears to be entirely captured by Pfizer's profit motive?

I gotta say the lab leak revisionism kills me. I remember arguing for it during the high points of covid with friends, and even though I was vaccinated masked etc, arguing for the lab leak was enough for some people to call me a 'covid denier.' Now when I bring up the studies to those same people, they just shrug and go 'what does it matter, covid is over now.'

Good lord, I am reasonably more accepting of the covid response than the median on this site, but the reaction to the lab leak really just baffles me. I can't believe more people don't see it as by far the biggest controversy in the last decade - China very plausibly released a virus, intentionally or unintentionally, that devastated most of the world economically if not biologically. And yet people just don't think it's a big deal or doesn't matter one way or another. Unreal.

Honestly, I think motivated cognition is at fault. The scale and scope of what would be required to even the scales is so massive, so disruptive, so far out of the ordinary run of "things that happen or seem feasible" that the only reasonable response is shrugging one's shoulders and declining to sink hope, emotional investment, and/or actual effort in something impossible.

It's important to forgive the people who made wrong calls regarding the pandemic, so says an essay in The Atlantic at least which has published some less forgiving essays in previous times.

Funny how the right is now in the position the left was wrt color blind meritocratic liberal centrism. "Oh, NOW you want to wipe the slate clean, after everything was in white people's/covidians' favor that whole time?"

I don't think holding politicians accountable for something they did last year is comparable to punishing an entire race for something that happened 150 years ago.

Well they want to hold the Atlantic writer accountable, not a politician. And even if she is on record having been on the wrong side before, people like her must never be allowed to forget. There is no moving on.

Never. Forget.

A lab in China, most likely with funding from the United States.

The geopolitics on lab leak are a wash.

Yeah that makes more sense. Alas.

Ecohealth was led by Americans and asked the US to fund the whole 'inserting furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses' program, though there were a bunch of Chinese scientists also working there and the Chinese probably ended up funding this circus since the US declined.

This was a crisis of the international medical researcher class. But it absolutely is a gigantic crisis that should see executions. War crimes and such were retroactively invented and applied at Nuremberg. 'Negligence leading to megadeaths' can also be retroactively applied.

Okay yeah the fact that the US is implicated explains a lot. Still, viral researchers need to learn I agree. I’d rather we get rid of them all than keep risking more pandemics that could’ve easily been avoided.

Okay yeah the fact that the US is implicated explains a lot.

Yeah, it explains why China wants to push the lab theory as opposed to the market theory which implies China is unwilling or unable to enforce its own laws that they knew existed to prevent pandemics.

Trump mentioned lab leak which made it red tribe coded. Any admittance of lab leak by the left at the time would be admitting Trump was right.

China very plausibly released a virus, intentionally or unintentionally, that devastated most of the world economically if not biologically.

1950's America would haven rightly not stood so silently for this kind of shit - we would have gotten out (several) pounds of flesh; and it would have been worth it.

The pussification of our world can be seen in every single corner of our country. Kids barely even say Trick r Treat anymore, they just kind of vaguely stand there expecting candy that is worse by every qualifying measure compared to 20 years ago.

In a meta sense this is for the best; killing several million more people may not be the best thing to do. Buuuuuut, is it really better that a billion of us live in a complete untruth?

as /u/NewCharlesInCharge states ' A lab in China, most likely with funding from the United States. The geopolitics on lab leak are a wash. ' The issue is we aren't hanging our own at a near fast enough rate, or at all.

I’m generally pretty anti violence, but this is one area I’d like to see heads roll. The deaths and destruction from their negligence far outweigh the deaths even if we kill every virologist on the planet. Not that I’d recommend that, just putting it in perspective. Again I can’t understand how more people aren’t outraged.

I’m generally pretty anti violence, but this is one area I’d like to see heads roll. The deaths and destruction from their negligence far outweigh the deaths even if we kill every virologist on the planet. Not that I’d recommend that, just putting it in perspective. Again I can’t understand how more people aren’t outraged.

Yes, this is the most blackpilling thing about the whole COVID episode.

Scientists are playing russian roulette with the whole world, so they can publish some journal articles no one will ever read to burnish their metrics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientometrics

And the world is just fine with it.

Including powerful and influential people who can nevertheless die with the billions of ordinary peons when some bigger oops happens in the future.

Being violently attacked should not be "the consequences" of making unpopular policy, or of being the family of someone who has made policies that some people do not like. If you're worried about being smeared as supporting this kind of violent attack, then don't talk as if the attack was justified.

When your policy is let your city become a lawless open drug market, and a lawless druggie somehow makes it into your gated community, its hard not to see some natural law at work.

The last I checked Nancy Pelosi wasn't involved in local politics.

The last I checked Nancy Pelosi wasn't involved in local politics.

How much did you check?

Endorsing a candidate on the other end of the state hardly counts as "involved in local politics" to the extent that she'd somehow be responsible for local government in San Francisco. It's not like she's on city council or anything.

how concerned should we really be about schizos who latch on to politics versus the far more common variant which, say, pushes a commuter onto subway tracks, or stabs someone walking past a street homeless encampment?

Depends on whether you're a politician or not, I suppose.

More concerned. The schizo who tries to murder politicians could potentially be used as a weapon by malicious interests in a way the subway bum can't

if you really want a politician dead you hire a professional. 'stochastic terrorism' is at worst really rare, highly random, and surprisingly ineffective considering the people who 'answer the call' are generally loonies like this guy

Paul Pelosi's attacker was a guy name David DePape, he appears to have a fairly checkered mental health history, if not homeless, appears to have lived on the edge of homelessness, appears to have social media history that doesn't have zero overlap various right wing issues (apparently concerning Covid), but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts? I hope so, if not, my apologies).

Shows how weird and varied people are, especially on the right, maybe even more so than the left. One thing I have observed about many of Trumps young online supporters and the alt-right in 2016-2018 is how few of them fit the traditional conservative mold. They were much more diverse in almost every respect outside of supporting trump. Gavin McInnes, Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes, it's hard to come up with a more eclectic group of people than that. The idea that your typical anti-vax, conspiratorially-minded, or pro-Trump person is going to be some middle-aged guy with a pickup truck and listens to country music, is an way over-generalization. It may be who you would least expect.

I'm not saying anything more than we know about the facts of the case, but I continue to be flabbergasted by the way the "look at how weird this guy is, he could possibly not be a far-righter!" argument is used! It's perfectly plausible these days (typical? No, but plausible) that one might have a guy going from hippie new age Green Party type to far-right within a short period - I've witnessed numerous similar types doing the same thing because of Covid here in Finland, and there's an entire microparty - "Kristallipuolue", "Crystal Party" - which consists of alternative medicine / new age hippie types who went hardcore antivaxx and anti-measures during the pandemic, started picking up things like anti-immigration thought, and are now in an electoral alliance with a couple of far right parties.

The pipelines from new age to right-wing are often quite clear. Left-wing conspiracy theory gives way to right-wing conspiracy thinking (QAnon and so on). Localist preference to local products can be expanded to general anti-internationalist thinking (opposition to UN and EU, and so on). "Get your vaccines out of my body!" is expanded to more generic libertarianish thinking. "Male and female energies" earth-mother-type thinking can become advocation for traditional gender roles. And so on.

There are plenty of right-wingers who are generally able to conceptualize the fact that left-wingers can take sharp turns to the right, even suddenly, who have done the same themselves, but who then instantly start feigning ignorance of such potential mechanisms when it looks like one of those recent converts might have done something, you know, crazy. Something with bad optics. Then you can only be counted among the right wing if you've been a stable and solid normie law-abiding middle-class whitebread person for your entire life.

Woo always drifts right. And in the American context(not sure about Finland) there are reasons for that.

Would you mind elaborating on that thought? It’s not immediately obvious to me why that should be the case.

Not OP, but considering the educational polarization happening in America (where the less educated are more likely to be on the right), it seems reasonable to think that superstitious beliefs will cluster on the right.

This is of course not universally true. There are plenty of nonscientific beliefs cherished by the left. But in my anecdotal experience living in red states, you're going to see a lot more distrust of "mainstream" science and medicine on the right. These people love their CBD oils and naturopaths.

Lmao, I know half a dozen Reed graduates who run the local homeopathy ring. Education doesn't have much effect on believing silly things, only ensuring that people believe the correct high status silly things.

The simplest and most accurate explanation is that "many of Trumps young online supporters and the alt-right in 2016-2018" weren't conservatives. Trump is first and foremost a populist who found the biggest issue that was unrepresented by the elites--systemic non-enforcement of immigration laws--and then broadened his base of support by promising to faithfully represent the interests of traditional conservatives as well (who also had reasons to dislike and distrust the R establishment).

In very general terms, most traditional conservatives are Republicans. The fit is far from perfect, and you can find exceptions near every boundary, but the overlap is substantial and central. You also have the loose group of "Republican-leaning independents" who 1) aren't Republicans, but 2) prefer Republicans to Democrats. Bits of this loose group can be found among centrists, libertarians, far-right fringes, etc.

There were people in 2016 whose top two choices were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, in either order. From a left vs. right perspective, this makes no sense, but from a populist vs. establishment perspective, it captures rather neatly a broad, eclectic, extremely diverse "group" that felt unrepresented by the elites of both parties, and wanted a disruptive outsider who would shake things up. The populist sentiment won resoundingly in the Republican party primary--the top establishment candidate came in third--and lost in the Democratic party primary.

Well said.

The biggest draw for Trump wasn’t that he was a successful businessman or a social conservative. It was that he actually bothered to promise anything to 40% of the population. The rest of his positions and popularity coalesced around that image.

...this has got me thinking about what’s it would have taken for Trump to run as a Democrat. “Make America Great Again” is an equal-opportunity slogan, and he’d have demolished any of his primary opponents in a general. I suppose all the actors which pushed against Bernie might have found better leverage against Trump, though.

I think Trump has some policy preferences of his own, and they are likely a mix of "more-right" and "more-left" opinions. My guess is that there's a bit of a bias to the right, but not to a great degree--in fact, in terms of personal policy preferences, I suspect that Trump averages out to a right-leaning centrist in an American context, even though that probably sounds crazy to most people.

Also, Trump was always going to present himself as populist/anti-establishment. From that angle, his first hurdle would have been the establishment candidate of the respective parties. As much as many people love to hate Hillary Clinton, she was wildly popular compared to Jeb Bush.

i can agree with the idea of trump being somewhat centrist in his own political leanings but only for social policies. His personal preferences for economic policy and especially taxation are way out of line with the leftist overton window. I can't imagine the guy standing for anything that would mess with his bottom line in any substantial way.

That said, i wouldn't mind if trump had run as a dem, he's good at riling people up and i think he is unprincipled (flexible? creative? choose how charitable this adjective should be) enough to say most stuff democrats would like to hear if that was the most realistic path to power for him. Like you say though, i think clinton vs trump in a dem primary is a way worse matchup than jeb, who trump basically ridiculed off stage.

even though that probably sounds crazy to most people.

The crazy thing is that it's not crazy. As was pointed out a number of times during the 2016 election Trump was effectively a 90-era moderate in terms of policy. The fact that this was now seen as "beyond the pale" was held up as of evidence of just how out of touch the media had become from the regular population.

I'm not sure conflating 'the populist base' and 'the alt-right' makes sense though. The latter talk about jews and retvrning and hierarchy and anime on the internet, the former are - as far as i can tell - mostly normal american christian republicans who, if politically active, were conservative ten years ago.

I'd like to point out what a civilized equilibrium we seem to be in, borne out by what I see seems to be a fairly common reaction to hearing some story of atrocity. You look at the news and you see some horrible massacre has been committed by a lunatic (with nobody you personally know remotely involved) and what do you hope? Not that one of Your Tribe slaughtered members of the Enemy Tribe, but the exact opposite.

From the brutal self-interested outlook, that would seem to be topsy-turvy, but so strong is the edifice of civilization we live in that the lives of our tribesmen - probably by the thousands - are less valuable than moral standing and a grievance to cash in, given that they're strangers. (Well, for most of us. If there's a place where I'd find people who'd unironically ask why Ross, the largest friend, does not simply eat the other five, it would be here.)

What this says to me is that, so long as we're playing this "please let the blood be on their hands" game, we're not nearly as close to civil war as some might fear. I'd worry more about that if I were hearing more of the opposite.

Well, for most of us. If there's a place where I'd find people who'd unironically ask why Ross, the largest friend, does not simply eat the other five, it would be here

The men having bonded through an ancient dance ritual removed the need for zero sum status games/rival elimination, obviously.

…we're playing this "please let the blood be on their hands" game, we're not nearly as close to civil war as some might fear. I'd worry more about that if I were hearing more of the opposite.

The ‘Radio War Nerd’ hosts have talked about this in relation to Charlottesville and street clashes in Portland. If you have a nation where firearms are prevalent and people are fighting with improvised melee weapons, what you are witnessing is political theater.

I’ll start taking Blue-Anon scaremongering over the rise of fascism in America seriously when we start seeing Weimar-era daily death counts from street violence.

In the Charlottesville case, an incel wasn’t bright enough to grok this and inspired a backlash by crossing the line to premeditated lethality.

In the latter, Proud Boy/Patriot Prayer type groups are bussing people in to Portland because that’s where they can get video squaring off with the Black Bloc folks, while the Black Bloc types hilariously claim their street violence deters the former from gathering in public.

It's also why the black bloc folks don't operate outside cities where the local government isn't already firmly on thier side.

I suspect that one of the reasons January 6th seemed to have progressives so shaken, was that they didn't think a protest could happen in territory that they controlled.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1548106/download

15. In a Mirandized and recorded interview of DEPAPE by San Francisco Police

Department Officers, DEPAPE provided the following information:

a. DEPAPE stated that he was going to hold Nancy hostage and talk to her. If

Nancy were to tell DEPAPE the “truth,” he would let her go, and if she “lied,” he

was going to break “her kneecaps.” DEPAPE was certain that Nancy would not

have told the “truth.” In the course of the interview, DEPAPE articulated he

viewed Nancy as the “leader of the pack” of lies told by the Democratic Party.

DEPAPE also later explained that by breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then

have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other Members of Congress

there were consequences to actions. DEPAPE also explained generally that he

wanted to use Nancy to lure another individual to DEPAPE.

b. DEPAPE stated that he broke into the house through a glass door, which was a

difficult task that required the use of a hammer. DEPAPE stated that Pelosi was in

bed and appeared surprised by DEPAPE. DEPAPE told Pelosi to wake up.

DEPAPE told Pelosi that he was looking for Nancy. Pelosi responded that she

was not present. Pelosi asked how they could resolve the situation, and what

DEPAPE wanted to do. DEPAPE stated he wanted to tie Pelosi up so that

DEPAPE could go to sleep as he was tired from having had to carry a backpack to

the Pelosi residence. Around this time, according to DEPAPE, DEPAPE started

taking out twist ties from his pocket so that he could restrain Pelosi. Pelosi

moved towards another part of the house, but DEPAPE stopped him and together

they went back into the bedroom.

c. While talking with each other, Pelosi went into a bathroom, where Pelosi grabbed

a phone to call 9-1-1. DEPAPE stated he felt like Pelosi’s actions compelled him

to respond.

d. DEPAPE remembered thinking that there was no way the police were going to

forget about the phone call. DEPAPE explained that he did not leave after

Pelosi’s call to 9-1-1 because, much like the American founding fathers with the

British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender. DEPAPE

reiterated this sentiment elsewhere in the interview.

e. DEPAPE stated that they went downstairs to the front door. The police arrived

and knocked on the door, and Pelosi ran over and opened it. Pelosi grabbed onto

DEPAPE’s hammer, which was in DEPAPE’s hand. At this point in the

interview, DEPAPE repeated that DEPAPE did not plan to surrender and that he

would go “through” Pelosi.

f. DEPAPE stated that he pulled the hammer away from Pelosi and swung the

hammer towards Pelosi. DEPAPE explained that Pelosi’s actions resulted in

Pelosi “taking the punishment instead.”

e. DEPAPE stated that they went downstairs to the front door. The police arrived

and knocked on the door, and Pelosi ran over and opened it. Pelosi grabbed onto

DEPAPE’s hammer, which was in DEPAPE’s hand.

Does this course of action sound like something that happened in the real world? Pelosi is far enough away from Depape that he can run to the door to open it for the police. AFTER opening the door -- at which point police are inside the house with Pelosi and Depape -- Pelosi re-engages with Depape to grab the hammer (very spry for an 80+ year old, why not let the police take it?), and Depape pulls the hammer away and hits Pelosi (even though the Police must be literally on top of them at this moment).

It honestly reads like fan fiction.

However, I have met enough absolutely bonkers folk in my life that it also isn't that far fetched of a possibility - but this updates my priors to believing he's a gay hooker / lover, not some wacko Trump supporter.

this is coming from a guy who broke into a home and wanted to tie up the occupant so he could take a nap

Does this course of action sound like something that happened in the real world?

I recommend watching some videos from this channel, which contain mostly body or dashcam videos of police officers interacting with criminals. You'll find that the criminals often behave completely bizarrely, making completely absurd decisions and incoherent actions, and cops just chilling, seconds before events turn violent.

For example, in this video, you get to observe an actual hammer attack. You see some people chatting with the driver, then they come up to the arriving officer, telling him that they guy is likely drunk. The cop engages the driver, cheerily asking him for papers, when the guy bizarrely, for no reason at all, pulls out a hammer and brings it to a gunfight.

I recommend watching more videos from this channel. Behaviors of the criminal underclass are often completely bizarre and strategically idiotic. You are assuming much more rationality than the drunks, crazies and morons actually can scrape together in the moment. The argument that "it doesn't make sense to do it" simply does not carry much weight.

The modal reaction I have to when I get a new case is "Why in the fuck did you do this? What the fuck were you thinking?" and I only represent the people that survive.

I mean, I feel pretty vindicated from the previous thread that this is just a totally off his rocker dude.

Thanks,

That's basically enough to put the gay prostitute theory to bed, at least in my mind.

Pelosi asked how they could resolve the situation, and what DEPAPE wanted to do. DEPAPE stated he wanted to tie Pelosi up so that DEPAPE could go to sleep as he was tired from having had to carry a backpack to the Pelosi residence.

This part is cracking me up, like he's complaining about how inconveniently located the Pelosis' house is for violent nutjobs.

Whenever something violent happens to a congressperson, or even when there's a newsworthy bomb threat or police shooting, there's always a few thousand people who intuit that it was a false flag or a crazy soap opera event. They read a few dozen paragraphs in news stories, note perceived inconsistencies, and start posting. Some do it on discord, some write for 'fake news' websites. A few are making stuff up for clicks, but afaict most genuinely believe it. Almost always this ends up being completely made up, and when it isn't it's usually coincidental. (this guy was a FBI PLANT! [two weeks later] yeah, I called that he was a generic schizo instead of being politically motivated, the libs overreacted so hard lmao). It's really uninteresting to ask 'what are the consequences if it really was a gay lover' - it's like asking 'what if steve bannon and the russians really did personally fund republican stochastic terrorism'

but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts

This doesn't mean he wasn't a trump supporter, though, there are plenty of violent and insane members of both parties, given each is ~ 1/3 of the us population. Obviously this doesn't mean any republican beliefs or policies are wrong either.

I think it's entirely possible that all of the rumours are true and this guy is insane in every way. I would have to imagine that drug addicted nudist gay hookers who live in schoolbuses are strongly overrepresented among the category of people insane enough to break into someone's house and then try to tie up the occupant for the purposes of taking a nap. Just crazy, no matter what the stated motivation, and he's better viewed as a random lunatic of the sort who targets anyone sufficiently prominent, along the lines of that guy who sued Kim Kardashian for making an Al Qaeda sponsored sex tape, or the guy who shot Gabby Giffords, or John Mcaffee.