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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Species of Tyranny and their Hallmarks (Part I: The Theory)

(c) Feb 3, 2025, by J. Nelson Rushton

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.
[Matthew 7: 15-16, KJV]

Webster's dictionary defines "woke" as being aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice. Notice that this definition doesn't mention identity politics, or censorship, or cancel culture, or radical progressivism. Indeed, it does not mention anything that is associated with wokeness in the commonsense understanding of the word. That is because today, even the dictionary is woke.

To be woke in the Webster's sense is a noble thing indeed; it is to be a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the defining characteristic of a storybook hero -- like Superman, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the Big Bad Wolf and rescues Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old, grandma. Not coincidentally, and probably because it is sine qua non of a storybook hero, "defending the oppressed" has also been the stated agenda of some of the most murderous demagogues in modern history. Practically every murderer is also a shameless liar; thus, not being constrained by the facts, they naturally toward the loftiest possible story about their motives.

A tyrant's rise to power is often paved with woke-sounding platitudes. For example,

  • [Our] aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that hitherto were denied such rights.
  • Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others.
  • There must be a revolutionary party because the world contains enemies who oppress the people.

These are the words of Hiter, Stalin, and Mao Zedong-- who, between them, murdered tens of millions of their own people, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance, all in the name of "social justice". When you see a political leader rising to power on a fanatical message of standing up for the little guy, it's best to keep your rifle clean.

And how do such wolves rise to power? In many cases they are propelled by the will of the people. It is often believed that tyranny and democracy are opposites -- but the fact is that some of the most brutal dictators have risen to power on waves of broad popular support, in some cases through legal democratic processes, as was the case with Adolf Hitler. For this to happen, the tyrant must be shiny and slick enough to fool many people into complicity, and far more into complacency -- and they must keep their predatory intent in the realm of plausible deniability until it is too late for them to be stopped. It might be hard to believe this could happen, if it hadn't happened so many times.

So, how do we avoid being fooled, by leaders of our own party or those of another party? Are there signs that can be used to spot a rising tyranny in its formative stages, while it is still in its sheep's clothing? If so, those signs must be subtle -- or else it would not have been possible for so many intelligent, well-meaning people to be taken in by tyrannical movements through history.

Nonetheless, while they may be subtle, I believe there are certain hallmarks, or "tells", that tyrannical movements tend to exhibit even early in their stages --before they have gathered power, risen up, and bared their fangs. I hold that these hallmarks include, for example, the following:

  • identity politics: as a caste system based on moral double-standards, often founded on a narrative of historical class exploitation
  • authoritarianism: a sense of being entitled to control other people -- which engenders censorship, lawlessness, militancy, and arbitrary, intrusive governance
  • extremism: policies and moral positions that flagrantly defy reason and common sense

So, my first claim will be that these characteristics are hallmarks of tyranny -- that is, identifying traits that can be used to known one when you see one.

However, not all forms of tyranny have the same character. There are fundamental differences between, for example, communism and Nazism, or between the rise and rule of Ayatollah Khomeini on the one hand, and Ivan the Terrible on the other. To borrow a phrase from author James Lindsay, there is more than one species of tyranny -- and each species, in addition to the general traits of tyranny, has its own characteristic markers that distinguish it from other species. This chapter will touch on two particular classes of tyrannical ideologies -- populist tyranny and its subclass of leftist tyranny -- and describe what I believe to be their identifying characteristics as well.

The subsequent chapter will illustrate how these hallmarks were evident in the early stages of the most murderous tyrannical movements of the 20th century -- Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism -- even before their true nature became obvious to their victims and to the world, and how they played out as these ideologies consolidated their power. I will also discuss how they are manifest in the woke movement today in the West.


Species of Tyranny

Tyranny can be defined as oppressive government rule. As I have discussed in a previously post, Plato wrote about the forms of tyranny that he and his forebears had observed in Classical Greece, but today we have more history to look back on. From our perspective, we can see that while many of Plato's observations are timeless, not all forms of oppressive government conform to the same model. It seems, author James Lindsay has put it, that there is more than one species of tyranny.

The tyrannical movement described by Plato is populist in nature. That is, in its rise to power, the tyrannical regime of The Republic derives its strength from broad public support. Generally speaking, this support need not come from an absolute majority of the population -- but it must come from a vocal and militant minority, that is large enough, and has enough allies, in the presence of enough passive bystanders, to seize power on the impulse of a "people's movement". Thus, Plato's tyrant is a demagogue: one who rises to power by stirring up and appealing to rash, angry sentiments that are festering among the population.

A demagogue can take office through a legal election or appointment (as with Hitler), through a revolution (as with Mao Zedong), or through a popular coup d'etat (as with Lenin). But not all tyrants are demagogues. A hereditary monarch, such as Mary I ("Bloody Mary") of England or Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible") of Russia, might indeed lead a cruel and oppressive regime, but their ascension to power does not rest chiefly on popular support, either of themselves or of their agenda. So, typically, a monarch's path to power does not resemble that of Plato's archetypal tyrant, even if they are, in fact, a tyrant.

On the other hand, despotic hereditary monarchs are not the sort of tyrant we need to worry about much in the West these days. From this point forward I will focus on populist forms of tyranny: those in which the tyrants take office on the strength of their public support, whether by legal means, illegal means, or a combination of the two as in Plato's Republic.

Even after restricting focus to populist forms of tyranny, not all of these have the same character. On top of being populist in nature, the tyranny described in The Republic is marked by radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and values. But not all populist tyrannies are radically progressive, or even progressive at all. For example, the path from democracy to tyranny in The Republic begins with weakening household patriarchy, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia took steps in the same direction -- but the Ayatollahs have not weakened the patriarchy in Iran (au contraire!). For another example, Plato’s tyrannical regime advocates open borders and a liberal immigration policy, much as the woke left has in recent times -- but such a program would not characterize the Nazis, to say the least.

On the other hand, while not all populist tyrannies are left-leaning in nature, it does seem that practically all, if not all, left-leaning tyrannies are populist in nature. This is empirically observable as well as naturally logical: if a tyrant, as such, has the power to impose his will upon the people without their consent, one doctrine he is not likely to impose is that of egalitarianism. He is more likely to impose a pitiless, top-down pecking order, with himself at the apex.

In light of all this, I submit the following:

  • Tyranny is defined as oppressive government rule.
  • Populist tyranny -- or what might be called "grass roots" tyranny -- is a form of tyranny that draws its power from broad-based popular support, at least in its formative stages.
  • Leftist tyranny, of roughly the character described in Plato's Republic, is one form of populist tyranny -- though there are other forms of populist tyranny that are not leftist in character.

In summary, populist tyranny is a species of tyranny, and leftist tyranny is a sub-species of populist tyranny. What follows from that?


Populist Tyranny

The first consequence of the claim that populist tyranny is a species of tyranny is something that is obvious to any student of history, but evidently not obvious to many people: that populist tyranny is a thing in the first place. It seems to be widely believed that democracy and tyranny are opposites, and that tyranny can only take hold by being ruthlessly imposed from the top down. In fact, Webster's (now woke) dictionary lists democracy and tyranny as antonyms. But on the view I propose here, de facto democracy is not the opposite of tyranny at all. On the contrary, it is an essential prerequisite for the very kinds of tyranny we need fear most, viz., tyranny of a populist variety.

At a minimum, there is nothing logically contradictory about democracy and tyranny. The will of the people as a whole, at least in principle, could be to welcome over them a cruel and oppressive dictator -- so long as he is cruel and oppressive chiefly to a well-defined minority. So a democratic tyranny is possible in theory; the question is whether it could happen in real life. Philosopher Jean Jaques Rousseau -- a key figure of the Enlightenment -- seemed to think not. Rousseau wrote that democracy is practically infallible, so long as it truly reflects the will of the people:

*As long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a single body, they have only one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well-being. Then, all the animating forces of the state are vigorous and simple, and its principles are clear and luminous; it has no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is needed to discern it.

However, when the social tie begins to slacken and the state to weaken, when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and sectional societies begin to exert an influence over the greater society, the common interest then becomes corrupted and meets opposition, voting is no longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all; contradictions and disputes arise.*
[Rousseau: Of the Social Contract, Book IV]

I wonder what Socrates would have to say about that.

The plain fact of history is that the population as a whole often supports leaders who cruelly oppress certain individuals or demographic groups -- and, in many cases, supports those leaders because they promise to oppress those people or groups. It might be difficult to know what the majority silently felt about, say, Lenin, or Hitler, or Ayatollah Khomeini -- but what the majority silently feels is not worth spit. In the real world, it is what a majority of active and vocal citizens feel that makes the will of the people -- in proportion to how active and vocal they are, and regardless of whether they assert their will by counting heads or by cracking heads. Formal democracy can soften the effect of this law of realpolitik, but democracy just-on-paper cannot soften anything much when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity [cf. Yeats: "The Second Coming"]. Germany was a formal democracy as Hitler was rising to power, as was Russia during the rise of Lenin. Yet, in the practical sense of rule by the people, Germany welcomed Hitler over them, as Russia welcomed Lenin -- in substantially the same way that Iran welcomed in the Ayatollahs, even though Iran was not a formal democracy at the time. Each of these leaders rose to power by winning a contest for popular support, one way or another, Rousseau's pipe dream bedamned.


Hallmarks of Tyranny

So, how do we recognize rising tyrannical movements before they reach full bloom?

To draw an analogy in zoological terms, consider, for example, how usually know a mammal when we see one. A mammal is defined as an animal that nurses its young with milk. But when you see a mammal in the wild, even of a species you have never seen before, you usually don't have to wait until you see it reproduce and feed its young to recognize it as a mammal. This is because mammals have a certain cluster of diagnostic traits -- that is, features that co-occur together in most mammals, and co-occur for the most part only in mammals. The diagnostic traits of mammals include having hair rather than scales or feathers, and being warm blooded -- as well as certain hidden anatomical features such as having three middle ear bones, a diaphragm for breathing, and a neocortex brain structure.

Each category of tyranny -- if we have chosen our categories in a way that reflects nature (or in this case human nature) -- should also have certain collections of diagnostic traits. I will refer to the diagnostic traits of each species of tyranny as its hallmarks. Below I will list what I believe are some hallmarks of tyranny, followed by additional hallmarks of populist tyranny, and the further hallmarks left-leaning populist tyranny. For readers familiar with the history of Communism and Nazism in the 20th century, these hallmarks may strike a chord of familiarity.

The hallmarks of tyrannical government of all sorts include identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:

  • Identity politics is the stance of advocating moral double-standards, in which people are viewed as having different moral status, eventually leading to differing rights or obligations, based on demographic characteristics such as race, class, sex, religion, and ethnicity.
  • Authoritarianism is a sense of being entitled to control other people. It manifests as highly centralized government authority, lawlessness, suppression of dissenting voices, and arbitrary, intrusive governance -- particularly including widespread and vicious use of government authority against political rivals.
  • Extremism is the embrace of policies and principles that flagrantly defy reason and common sense. In particular, it tends to include utopian "final solutions" to problems that are endemic to the human condition.

Populist tyrannical ideologies -- from that of Plato's Republic, to Soviet and Chinese communism, to Nazism -- exhibit the hallmarks of tyranny in general, with two modifications. First, the identity politics of populist forms of tyranny tend to be based on a narrative of historical class exploitation (e.g., by the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", or straight white males). Second, in populist tyrannical movements, the characteristics of authoritarianism, identity politics, and extremism emerge in a decentralized form, imposed by partisans of the ideology in any spaces, institutions, and jurisdictions where they hold sway. This process begins long before the movement consolidates central power, as we have seen happen with the woke movement in recent years.

Leftist tyrannical movements -- including all of the above except Nazism -- share all of the hallmarks as populist tyranny, with the stipulation that their extremism takes the form of radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and longstanding laws. Elements of radical progressivism (common to the Communist movements in the Soviet Union and China, to Plato's archetypal tyrant, and to the woke movement) include things such as negating gender differences, rejection of traditional religion, aggressive wealth redistribution, disarming private citizens, gutting the pre-existing legal system (e.g. legacy police departments), negating meritocracy, and denigrating traditional culture and cultural icons.

My next few posts will illustrate how these hallmarks were visible in the early stages of the three most murderous regimes of the twentieth century -- Russian and Chinese Communism, and German Nazism -- and how they played out as those movements consolidated and then abused their power. At the same time, I will discuss how these hallmarks of tyranny are visible in the woke movement in the West today, in case you haven't noticed. In fact, I believe the hallmarks of tyranny are exactly what differentiates the woke "social justice warriors" from good-faith progressives. What is alike between the two is a message of compassion -- that is, a call for each of us to do what we can to aid the visible, present suffering of our fellow men and women in need. What is different is that, with wokeness, this call for compassion is warped into a pretext for identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism. Tyranny to a tee.

I hate that every long form essay now comes under suspicion of being generated by AI. But this looks very much like you used AI to generate much of it, with perhaps some edits. The amount of effort to write multipage screeds like this, just to farm AAQCs from fellow woke-haters on the Motte, is characteristic of either a monomaniacal obsession not displayed by even our most dedicated and prolific polemicists, or someone who's testing his prompt engineering skills.

So, really man, did you write all this?

Haha. Yes I really wrote it.

My goal is not to farm AAQC's. I am writing a book and serializing it on TheMotte to get feedback. The AAQC's are nice, but the feedback is invaluable. The working title of the book is They See Not [cf. Proverbs 135:16].

But this looks very much like you used AI to generate much of it, with perhaps some edits.

I do not believe it looks like it was written by AI. But, if you know of an LLM that will generate sourced evidence for the malignancy of the woke mind virus without being hacked, please do let me know.

I have a suggestion: when you post parts of your work-in-progress and want feedback, start with a personal note that says so. I've been skipping these posts (sorry, by now something that looks like LLM doesn't get my attention), but I won't if I know that there's a human who is developing thoughts and welcomes feedback. Best of luck on the book!

Noted

For what it is worth, the diction and grammar makes this seem less likely to be AI to me.

I hate that every long form essay now comes under suspicion of being generated by AI.

I don't see this as such a bad thing. Maybe it'll make people to actually get to the point faster instead of doing a Scott and spending pages and pages of pointlessly waffling around the periphery.

You need to reference more past work here. Since the 1940s, countless thinkers have drawn parallels between Communism and Fascism, trying to identify a common element that causes societies to descend into tyrannies, usually with the idea that it might pre-emptively prevent such an outcome. Here are some examples:

Karl Popper and "The Open Society and Its Enemies", where Popper traces tyranny back to Plato, Hegel and Marx. He identifies historicism, a belief in a predetermined historic destiny, as one similarity. Fascism has the inevitability of racial struggle, while Communism had stages of history where society was destined to progress through capitalism, socialism, and then to communism.

Hannah Arendt and "The Origins of Totalitarianism". More or less the foundational text of the entire idea of "totalitarian studies". Blames mass society, pan-nationalism, racism, and the collapse of traditional sources of authority in the Kaiser and Tsar as the key similarities that enabled the rise of Fascism and Communism.

Even Ayn Rand, who identifies "altruism" as the cause, can fit here. Specifically, her criticism that Auguste Comte's version of Altrusim, which demands that individuals should live not for themselves, but for others, leads to tyrany. Whether that other be the proletariat, the state, the nation, or the race.

As for the idea that you need to look for the precursors of Nazism/Communism, and that by drawing parallels between this and Woke, you can also identify Woke as being tyrannical, is nonsense. Because you don't even need to look there. Whatever you want to call the current ideology, it already has totalitarian outcomes. To beat my usual drum, it was the lockdowns. No need to fret about what they might do in the future when the past already has an example.

It seems to me that what Trump is doing has worked; both Panama and Canada have, for now, capitulated to his demands. In spite of all the smoke and confusion, I'm optimistic. If leftists hate Musk and Trump as much as Reddit indicates, then it's a safe bet that the Left is in for a bad time.

Please, someone check my apparent ignorance of the nuances of trade wars, and of economics more broadly. Suppose that Trump 'is successful in annexing Canada and Panama. What material benefit does this provide to the U.S.? I'm optimistic because young and smart people are eager to build the new world which has been promised. And what more American an expression of hope and opportunity than in the conquering of new land?

This doesn't meet the effort standard for a toplevel post imo. No links, no analysis.

As far as I can tell nothing Canada or Mexico have agreed to is particularly meaningful. Mexico seems to have already had 10k troops on the border. And Canada's fentanyl czar isn't a win because we don't have a Canadian fentanyl problem. I thought the fentanyl stuff was supposed to be a pretext to renegotiate the trade agreements Canada and Mexico are supposedly screwing us on. That hasn't happened yet.

It's not meaningful because it's a demonstration intended to convey capability, with that capability to be used in a future round. It's no difference than a gorilla demonstrating its strength by jumping up and down and beating its chest or an impala leaping up in the air -- what does it meaningfully accomplish?

So what happened is that Trump proven that he has the domestic support to impose tariffs on a flimsy pretext and that no one in Congress will/can talk him out of it. He's proven that he that capability.

I think if anything it conveys he'll back down in exchange for small concessions to avoid hurting markets? Like he could have just said 'hey, commit to doing this trade deal or tariffs go on in a month'. Instead we got this.

It does create credibility. He's willing to eat the criticism and the bad press and enact the consequences, so it is known that he is not bluffing. In game terms, it's like showing up to a game of chicken with a 5-point restraint and a bashed-up car.

But he undid the canada+mexico tariffs before they went into effect! I don't see how that's showing he's willing to eat the consequences.

No because he’s been extremely public that the markets are what he cares about. This is why traders didn’t believe the tariffs would happen and if they did they wouldn’t last long. The Dow down 10% (and with Trump it really would be the Dow lol) and it’s all being reversed.

To further support your point, minus the Fentanyl Czar position, the agreement is an identical one to the $1.3B agreement Trudeau had with the Biden administration in December.

Its all smoke and mirrors and red meat for Trump's base.

There was never going to be a tariff. Trump just needed Mexico and Canada to cooperate on migration and drugs. They’ve done so and will be more willing partners on other issues going forward as well.

Same for Colombia. Same for Panama.

And, sorry, but there won’t be any conquering of new lands either.

Canada didn't capitulate. They reannounced the same $1.3 billion border security package they already announced in December, allowing Trump to declare victory.

Trump got the same deal by going full psycho that he already got by speaking quietly and carrying a big stick, except that some of the backchat from the noise he was making cost his pal Elon a $100 million Ontario government contract.

On a scale of kayfabe where SpaceX is 0 and WWE is 100, the Canada/Mexico tariff rows have been about 80, and the Colombia row north of 90.

I mean, going off Trudeau

I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border.

In addition, Canada is making new commitments to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, we will list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering. I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million.

Proposed tariffs will be paused for at least 30 days while we work together.

Emphasis mine. Yes, the $1.3B border plan is old(ish) news. There are additional commitments.

It's a cold and dreary Monday afternoon in Ottawa. The nation is awash in a newfound wave of pride and determination, yet there is an unmistakable fear in the eyes of every citizen. Lame duck prime minister Justin Trudeau enters the situation room with his closest aides and allies. The prime minister takes a deep breath as he awaits the call. The prosperity of his people hangs in the balance. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs could vanish by the end of the week. The phone rings. The unmistakable voice of the orange man in the White House booms out of the speaker. Will he demand an anschluss?

"Mr. President, these tariffs will lead to needless suffering and destruction. Is there any way we can set this aside for the moment?"

"Fentanyl is a big problem Justin. Hire someone to work on that and you've got a deal."

You know, this is the sort of sneering nonsense post that drives me up a wall.

Redditor A: Trump is just taking an existing agreement and pretending it's new to declare victory, while causing a huge mess along the way

Redditor B: No he's not, here are the additional things he got

Redditor C: (Fan fictions implying those things don't count) Bask me in your upvotes!

If you're going to write sneering fan fiction, at least put in some guns or tits. Maybe a joke or two. Some giant robots wouldn't hurt.

tits

Is there a motte policy on this?

There might be, just to slap another ban on me, now that you've asked.

IIRC, we have in fact requested that people refrain from using this forum to post erotic fanfiction about political or culture war figures. It came up during the Sam Bankman Fried fracas.

Wait, what.

More comments

Listing cartels as terrorist organizations is actually a big deal. It enables the government to aggressively track money.

It's widely suspected that payments from the cartels to Chinese chemical companies are being laundered through Canadian real estate.

I don't think Canadian government policy towards drug cartels depends on whether it calls them terrorists or not. The way you deal with a sophisticated, wealthy, armed criminal organisation that you actually care about stopping is the same way you deal with a sophisticated, wealthy terrorist organisation that you actually care about stopping.

But the terrorist designation activates specific regulations in the financial system. Sure, they could pass new laws and regulations to do the same thing. But this does have an impact on it's own.

I highly doubt there was any part of the Canadian financial system to which US authorities did not have access.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't terrorism strictly about using violence to cause political change? There's no way fentanyl selling can count as terrorism, can Trudeau just decide that any organisation he wants is terrorist?

I donno man. In so far as it's a useful political designation to apply maximum state violence to a group, applying it to organized crime poisoning a nation with deadly drugs doesn't seem a bad use for it. And I'm not sure the usual arguments about why the war on drugs failed really apply here. How many drug users are hungry for fentanyl? I mostly hear about drug users accidentally overdosing when they meant to be getting fucked up on heroine, or coke, or other pills. Somehow the drugs they actually want keep getting contaminated with fentanyl and killing them.

I guess I don't really know though. The zombie scape you see in most major American cities seems inexplicable, and the prevalence of Narcan being administered by first responders might put to lie my assumption.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't terrorism strictly about using violence to cause political change?

List of politicians killed during the 2024 Mexican elections. And that's just the politicians killed. You can murder normal people to cause political change too, and they do with some regularity.

What material benefit does this provide to the U.S.?

Let me ask you this: what material benefits do you expect the US to obtain from having ~45m disenfranchised imperial subjects that we couldn't already obtain through normal trade and treaty arrangements?

What substantial benefits does US currently get from ruling over Puerto Rico, American Samoa and Guam? I would guess none.

The main strategic advantage is that those areas aren't Russian or Chinese bases. The pacific territories I think also help with power projection into the Pacific Ocean.

The same reasoning I think is behind the Greenland talk. Where Greenland sits is too strategic if the arctic becomes a widely used shipping corridor. Even if Denmark keeps it but more seriously considers its defense to me that is also a win. A parallel to me is when Iceland was occupied by the British and then Canadians and Americans, to make sure the Germans didn't occupy it.

OK, how does average US citizen benefit? I get that it looks good on some general's map.

In a hypothetical universe where those territories weren't already part of the US, I would be asking the same question of someone who suggested conquering them in 2025. Guam and American Samoa are at least strategic. More significantly, they are already part of the United States, so it's about as relevant as asking what benefits the US currently gets from ruling over West Virginia.

But to go beyond that and make explicit the implied point of my question: annexing Canada and Panama are extremely costly actions with very little upside. Canada and Panama are allied nations (though Trump seems to be working on that) with which the US enjoys generally favorable economic relations. We already get most of the benefits we'd get from them being part of the US. Coercing your allies into accepting your direct rulership is going to immediately resolve any broader question of who it is preferable to partner with in favor of China.

Guam is a huge strategic asset that China basically had to develop a custom missile for so it could potentially hit it in any Taiwan invasion. Google "Guam Killer".

Official US position is that Taiwan is part of China, "One China policy".

How is this relevant in any way? Of course that is what the official policy has to be. At the same time, Taiwan invasion is the number one strategic concern of DoD, ahead of Russian war in Ukraine. Talk to anyone with DoD relationship, in either public or private sector.

If it's all China then it's none of America's business. Imagine if China stepped to protect Alaskan independence from the lower 48 - madness!

Well, yes, if the US didn’t care about Taiwan’s independence, or strategic presence in the Pacific, then yeah, Guam would be useless. However, for better or worse, it does, and so Guam is a valuable asset. In any case, your comment about official US Taiwan policy is completely irrelevant to the issue.

Do people prefer more Sunday top-level-comments, or more Monday-morning top-level-comments?

Anyway, Richard Hanania writes, Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise:

As JD Vance said in a recent interview, representing the nationalist perspective,

You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Huge if true. We might ask what evidence there is that the left, or the “far left,” whoever that is, prioritizes foreigners over American citizens. The US spends about 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid. States and localities spend practically nothing on non-Americans, except in cases where there is a large number of immigrants, though they also pay taxes. Democrats feel pressure from the far left on trans, climate, and other issues, but raising the amount spent on foreign aid or otherwise expanding our circle of empathy seems to be a very low priority.

Sometimes you’ll hear “America First” types argue for restrictive immigration and trade policies, and maintain that in these areas our leaders have prioritized the interests of foreigners. Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans. When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.

This is what makes modern nationalism so incredibly bizarre. The world looks pretty much exactly as they want, which means they need to completely check out of reality in order to argue for their positions.

This... makes sense? It's too uncouth for many people to say "America should make x nominal sacrifice, because it's increases our soft power," but people rarely say "America should make x sacrifice, even though it's zero-sum, because altruism." That's not to say there's no international philanthropy lobby, but foreign policy seems to be mostly "mistake theory." So, in that sense, yes, nationalists already have the world they want. But do they need to pretend otherwise?

Nationalists claim to care about their own people, not to hate others. Yet such assertions are difficult to reconcile with their priorities. Whenever you hear someone is “America First,” it’s never that he wants to cure cancer or fix the housing supply issue. Instead, he talks about Ukraine or foreign aid. He’s relatively indifferent to most questions regarding how to make Americans’ lives better, but he’s certain that he doesn’t want to help outsiders.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds. It would be rational to conclude that when he complains about the dollar given to the homeless man, he’s driven by malice more than love of his family.

The final sentence in that quote reminded me of the down-thread discussion of sadism. The substack comments have more about tribalism.

they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans.

Citation needed.

But irregardless of the enemy's self-reported attitude towards helping Americans, nationalists believe that the enemy's values are actually anti-American.

When the enemy says "who will do the jobs??!!1!!" they're making a blatant bad faith argument. It's interesting how everyone who says that also believes all the billions living in shithole countries around the world should be imported into America and given access to as many handouts as they want

When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.

Maybe it's better to say that the Overton window is nationalistic, so when the antis control the levers of power they need to present their preferred policy from the lens of nationalism. On the other hand Chinese aren't black/brown/minority/dei so they hold no value in the enemy's value stack. I'm pretty sure when Trump was threatening tariffs on Colombia, there were a fair share of fake news articles crying about the poor Columbians about to lose their jobs.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds.

There is no such thing as a risk free investment, and that risk is priced in to the possible reward. What gives us the right to judge the man's risk preference as well as the value of his time in managing investments? Some people choose to keep hard currency at home to diversify the risk from the bank. While on the other hand the dollar given is a dollar lost for nothing in return. And how small are occasional donations really; it reminds me of this old tweet: https://x.com/CNBC/status/1076173906455810050

Anyways I think the idea the author is touching on is "penny wise, pound foolish." But nowhere is it implied that the penny-pinching miser hates the thing he's pinching pennies from.

Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans.

The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices. It ignores the fact that nationalists have a stake in their nation, and immigrants dilute and weaken that stake. Allowing immigrants is analogous to selling some shares in a corporation. If immigration is 3% per year, Americans are losing 3% of their stake in their country to foreigners every year. If the immigrants are like-minded (for civic nationalists) or co-ethnic (for ethno-nationalists) then it's not such a big deal; it's basically recruiting allies. But if the immigrants are opposed to Americans' culture or are of a different ethnicity then immigration is a hostile takeover.

You can’t be a nationalist and also stick to the facts, since even though most Americans are nationalists, few would think that 1% of the federal budget going abroad is worth worrying about.

What. That's a non-sequitur. To draw a crude analogy, if thieves are stealing your stuff at a rate of only 1% of your income every year, then security is not worth worrying about. Or if you only waste 1% of your time sitting in traffic or standing in line at the post office, then it's not worth making roads or post offices more efficient. Hanania has made a bad argument here.

The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices (…)

I think this is besides Hanania's point. He is gesturing at something like Scott's conflict theory vs mistake theory. His point is: nationalists criticize the mainstream left for advocating for policies intended to help foreigners more than Americans. But, in fact, when you look at their actual policies and the arguments behind them, the left's policy are intended to help Americans first. They have a factual disagreement with right-wingers about whether those policies would work, and they're hypocritical about how they phrase their goals, but making America better off (at the expense of the rest of the world if need be) is in fact also their terminal goal, whether they admit it or not; their revealed preferences, granted their (perhaps erroneous!) beliefs about how economics work, align with right-wingers'.

Saying that the economic studies are bad is neither here nor there. The salient point for Hanania is the existence and prevalence of those studies (however flawed), as opposed to studies actually embracing the left's supposed belief that it would be morally necessary to enact such policies even if they harmed Americans, so long as they benefited foreigners.

It also ignores that it is still a massive number that could be used to really help your allies both abroad and in the states which the Dems seem to be doing.

Also it is purely debt financed. Wouldn’t it be nice if for the last twenty years that number would’ve been zero? That would represent a material decrease in the national debt.

I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not that America First has no plans, it’s that most of them run on the premise of lowering taxes and regulations and reducing government involvement. The reason they don’t have a government plan (which is what most commentators mean when they say “what’s the plan?) is that they don’t think government should be doing those things. They aren’t communists, and therefore their housing plan is “lower the tax burden so people have money, remove the zoning laws and the environmental regulations that prevent homes from being built, and let Americans do their thing.” That’s not going to show up as a plan, because the plan is to get out of the way.

A big part of this is of course not blowing trillions of dollars a year doing silly unproductive things for everyone else with taxpayers money. Funding Ukraine is a marginal case at best, it’s a billion dollars a month to prop up the Nebraska of Eastern Europe until they inevitably run out of people to kidnap for the front lines. Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad. Going down the list most of these “aid” programs are basically grifting— pay an NGO full of PMC kids to pretend they’re doing something important overseas, while doing nothing more than paddling their pockets from the three figure salary they get for pretending to help out. At this point, freeing up the public money wasted on these grifter programs and giving the money to average Americans who would build businesses and make things and cure diseases and so on.

Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad.

I've seen television in the middle east...hours of it. You know who the big star was? Oprah Winfrey. After that there were tons of music video stations for each of the different leading countries. Sexy lebanese videos, super sappy Saudi Orchestras with lame poets, Emirate gun twirling and cane dancing...and Iraq? It was all blue jeans in night club dancing shows, like a very tame American Bandstand. I would not be surprised at all if Iraqi Sesame Street was popular. that's one of the USAID expenditures I find least offensive--even admitting that modern Sesame Street is peak Wokoso.

Anyway, it's not all fundamentalism. That's what's on the radio...

At the same time, though, Hamas made their own Mickey Mouse ripoff.

Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans.

Yes, organs of the left have produced voluminous analyses saying "what we want is good for you too". On trade, this is credible (not in the least because not all free traders are on the left). On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners, and leftist NGOs are busy helping get the poor foreigners to the US by hook or by crook.

This is gaslighting.

On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners

Surely that's consistent with the hypocrisy running the other way. They've come to believe high immigration is in their selfish interest, and spend a lot of time pretending they support it out of a deep moral conviction to make themselves look good. It's bad psychology to suppose that "it's in our economic self-interest" is the face-saving cover story, and "it's the ethical thing to do, however painful" is the dirty secret: in leftist spaces the latter is clearly the higher-status thing to say, whether you believe it or not, while coming out and admitting "we need more immigration because it'll make us wealthier" makes you sound like a deeply uncool capitalist.

I want more immigration for selfish reasons. Because in the modern times, countries which import people will have more robust economies than those who just peter out and invert their demographic pyramids.

And as opposed to the increasingly common right wing concerns, I don't care about living in a diverse place, I actually enjoy it. I like to eat different foods and I'm a big language learning nerd, so its cool to practice people's languages with them. I believe in importing highly skilled people from all over the planet as the way to build a powerful country. (Although I'm fine with mid level immigrants too, small business owners, chefs, whatever!).

America has benefitted enormously from stealing the top percentile of almost every other country on the planet and these fools in government currently want to do everything to end that system and turn us into a declining backwater former power like the UK. Cutting funding for science, ceding our position in the world we built, and tearing up the good will that we have from other countries is the icing on the cake.

I'm going to steal right wingers framing here but I seriously think this is the case. What right wingers want to do is profoundly dysgenic, they want us to stop siphoning talent from the world and instead close ourselves off. So instead of being, idk, a bubbling cauldron of human potential like a New York City or a Cambridge Massachusetts, they want us to become more like Appalachia. Closed off, greying, clinging to dying industries, old modes of life, lacking in dynamism in a competitive world, and with a bad reputation everywhere else.

It's not really in my interests, that one!

Hopefully more liberals learn to talk like me instead of only the bleeding heart thing, that would also be in our interest.

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I hate living in a diverse place. It often makes me feel like an alien living in my own land. And I don’t see it lasting (eg at a certain point ethnic strife often occurs in multicultural places especially when one race is blamed for societal ills)

Sorry it makes you feel that way.

I imagine there must have been people who felt the same in Rome at the height of its power. There were people from all over the empire living in the city. To me that’s just what comes from being the dominant country in the world and particularly one which formed by shouting “come migrate here, it’s great!” to the rest of the world.

Ethnic strife might happen but it’s not really new either. My grandpa grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Chicago, and as kids they would fight with the other kids from the Irish neighborhood and the Polish neighborhood. He hated Polacks as he would call them. Funny enough, he then married a half Polack girl and then his daughter married a full Polish dude and they now have the most Polish surname in existence. Now he just says the Polack thing as a joke, but he gets along really well with my Polish as fuck uncle.

This was all quite recent. But in time these identities just blended into the background of America and stopped mattering. Now you just see “Chinese” and “Mexican” and “Italian” and “Korean” people, and meanwhile they’re just undeniably culturally American because they’ve been here for generations. They’ll say stuff like “I’m Italian!” or “I’m Mexican!” while actual Europeans or Mexicans roll their eyes and laugh to themselves saying, bro, no you’re not. They’re right, they just became Americans. Same BS as the rest of us.

I live in a community that is probably 50% Indian, 30% East Asian, and balance white. The Indians celebrate Indian holidays but don’t really celebrate American ones (eg July 4th). They are nice to others but really only associate with other Indians. It severely limits the ability to form a cohesive community.

So I’m not sure you are right.

I feel like their kids will be just as American as for example 20th century Chinese immigrants offspring became.

I used to have 2 Nepali roommates and they loved getting out and enjoying American culture, watching football, celebrating thanksgiving, etc. First gen immigrants there, grew up in Nepal but honestly pretty indistinguishable from an American to me just after a few years other than the fact that they cook (damn spicy) Nepali food.

I got to know a lot of south asians from their friend group. I think they do often stick together when they're first generation but its really only being somewhat hesitant and nervous in a new place IMO. I never noticed any extreme loyalty to their own traditions and norms that would make me think these things wont just easily slip away like they did for all the previous immigrant groups.

For the most part they seemed to just enjoy the US and even before coming here I think have already been pretty Americanized in ways that surprise me, like knowing more pop cultural American stuff than even I do at times.

Just to raise the obvious point, the UK's descent into decline pretty well matches our increase in immigration. Tony Blair's Labour and then the Conservatives made exactly the same argument as you and the effect has been catastrophic.

Now, you might be saying that you can just take the top percentile, but you don't know what will happen when all those millions and millions of foreigners you're welcoming decide they prefer the company of their countrymen and co-religionists to that of Americans, and vote accordingly. Do you think that a 40% muslim country is going to respect your liberal views?

I don't think the US would be in a position to have that many muslims, the world is a big place and most of the people in it aren't muslim.

I do dislike abrahamic religions that try to dominate politics so I see the rationale for being concerned about becoming eventually dominated by followers of one. However, that doesn't mean I want to close all immigration. Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.

And I think Europe has different problems regarding immigration than the US does, being right next to the middle east and in former colonial relationships with other muslim countries.

most of the people in it aren't muslim.

They're working on fixing that.

Good luck! Again the US isn't Europe, our immigration problems tend to be pretty different. Most immigration here seems to be from Latam and India. If the question instead was like, what if your country was 40% latino? I mean... I don't really care. I'm from the southwest that's already the case, lol. One of my favorite parts of the US is walking around Miami and you have an Argentinian bakery next to a pupusa joint next to a Colombian restaurant and a Jamaican place, and when you walk into a store they greet you with a buenos dias.

These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!

Man, I want to be on your side (or at least against the ones against you), but this is such a lazy dodge.

I think your interlocutor is trying to get you to envision a world where the fires of the Atheism Wars are needed once more.

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These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!

what is more probable to happen is that the Latin kings will close off their neighborhoods (like they did during the summer of love) when the islamists begin to act up and you will be one of the first to appear in the local newspaper.

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Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.

From my perspective, the mistake you're making is thinking that there is a continuous 'you' that makes decisions. Immigration is like steroids or heroin, it changes the decision-maker in ways that make their future decisions unforeseeable. It's also a ratchet, because once immigrants get citizenship and start having children you can't reverse the invitation.

In the UK we passed through about 70 years of post-war immigration policy, and the reasons given for doing it changed as they became obviously untenable:

  1. They're just here for a few years to make money and then they'll go home and live like kings
  2. Okay, they're staying, but there's only a few of them and anyway, they're all Commonwealth citizens, they look up to us, they're culturally British
  3. Okay, there's quite a lot of them now, and they all vote as a bloc for pro-immigration parties, but we need immigration for economic reasons and they're grateful to be here so it's basically fine
  4. Okay, they aren't integrated and are loudly hateful of Britain and British people, but maybe we deserve to be criticised! It's good for us! And besides, our economy will collapse without them.
  5. Huge numbers of low-wage immigrants are being brought in, at a significant net loss to the public purse. We have open ethnic warfare on the streets and ethnic political parties. The proportion of native British are dropping at an alarming rate. Services can't take the strain of the extra people, and neither can housing since they all want to live in the same areas. But talking about any of it would embolden the far-Right, and anyway we need low-wage immigration to care for the aging immigrants.
  6. ???

You can disregard all of this as scaremongering, or say that it will be different in America. It might! But it's like taking hard drugs - even if you think the risks are overblown, why would you mess with that stuff when you know how many people have wrecked their lives?

I can see the point in that changing the composition of a democracy will change change the composition of the decision making apparatus.

But there is one more difference I can say there is between the US and Europe. We are literally just definitionally immigrants. The country has always been a place that people immigrate to because it offers opportunities and advantages. I’d have to be convinced that there is some compelling reason that right now is the unique moment in time where it’s correct to stand up and yell stop.

And I don’t really see much unique about right now. People on this forum I suspect would be quick to jump out and say, but now they’re not Europeans that’s the problem! But that’s something that’s unique to now, we’ve had non-European immigration going on for many decades and they’ve integrated just fine. We have chinatowns and neighborhoods where you can get authentic tacos and not much that I see that’s genuinely bad to show for it.

Was there some severe problem that immigration caused in the past in the US? I don’t really think so and so I’m not one of the jump around and yell stop people.

Yes. This infamous discussion between Bernie and Ezra Klein gives away the game. Not everyone is a Kleinian, but you would be a fool to believe that people like that are driven by purely pragmatic calculus about the benefits to Americans.

It also doesn't help that one side maintains a final card they can play: false consciousness.

Feminists do this all of the time: feminism is good for you too and, where you disagree, it's because you simply haven't had enough feminism.

I simply don't believe some of these claims. I've heard a few economists blithely write off the downsides of immigration as "an allocation problem", as if that makes it a matter of a couple of dials for some bureaucrat to fiddle with. Let's grant that immigration has been great for Canada. That doesn't change that the fundamentally political Gordian knot of increasing housing supply still exists so everyone feels squeezed. It's not going to be dissolved by an efficient market because it's a matter of geography,regulations and the interests of some groups over others. Hanania is a libertarian so he does get this, until he doesn't want to.

And, even if I did believe them, I know no nationalist has ever won the debate by saying "I'll take the tradeoff". They just get written off as ignorant.

Okay, let's grant that nationalists are being overly charitable when they assume their enemies are driven purely by altruism towards foreigners (though some clearly are driven by that to a substantial degree). The obvious reason they feel this way is that their enemies continually attack them for their lack of altruism but whatever.

Let's say that what's actually happening is that altruism is one factor but some of these policies are seen as good for Americans overall and some are especially good for certain Americans who benefit disproportionately from the cheaper labour of migrants without concern for any externalities they impose on the rest of the populace.

What's Hanania's point then? "Well, ackshually, it's the nobles who benefit from all of the slave labour, not the slaves!" is technically accurate but so what?

You can argue that anti-globalist positions are stupid, but the fact that they're fighting globalists who happen to be fellow citizens doesn't change that they're nationalists.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person.

First of all: I've gained a lot of contempt for homeless people so I might actually feel this way. I've never felt more like a fool when I gave a former regular on our street money for "food" only to realize he was actively turning down free food from nearby restaurants. Even if I was making bad decisions with my money I'd still be annoyed at my wife for being a gull. I'd still be annoyed that said person gets to hang around stinking up the neighborhood even more, encouraged by our trusting folly.

But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.

Now replace voluntary donations with taxes.

But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.

That may be true! But if that is the husband's problem he ought to say so, not pretend that his concern is spending the household's money frivolously in general. It is perfectly sensible to say "I don't really care what you do with those $50 I gave you, just so long as you don't spend them on things I actively disapprove of; by all means buy a dress with it, or set fire to it on TikTok, just don't give it to that smelly nuisance over there". But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!".

But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!"

Sure, but you could imagine a vindictive, manipulative wife who says, "Oh, so you hate the homeless and what them to die??" and then spreads that exaggeration around their shared friend circle so that everyone thinks the husband is a jerk and shuns him. The analogy breaks down a bit because marital and small-scale social dynamics are different than those between citizens of a nation, but you can see why the husband might obscure his true thoughts to avoid opening himself up to an attack that would ruin his social standing.

It's a lot like calling someone cowardly for not openly stating their thoughts on HBD, or UBI, or Marxist economics. In a society where, for normies at least , "free market" and "tolerance" and rounded up to "good," and "communism" and "racism" are rounded down to "pure evil," inviting your opponents to be frank about these beliefs is really just a disingenuous invitation to step into a trap.

Kanye West pulled an insane stunt at the Grammys where he had his wife strip naked in front of where they take the pictures. Clearly a publicity stunt (since he wasn’t invited anyway), and he quickly got kicked out.

What’s shocking to me is how freely so many media outlets and people on social media are sharing it completely uncensored. For some reason X doesn’t seem to be marking it as pornography either. It’s quite disturbing to me how widely and casually it’s being shared. I’m not going to link because I don’t think it’s good to share this type of thing but I’m sure a quick search will find the video in question.

The worst part is that his wife looks clearly disturbed, sad, and afraid as he stands there looking around in a sort of combative way. It’s truly awful.

A lot of people on the right saw Kanye as a sort of martyr who stood up for his beliefs enough to get completely cancelled. Hopefully this stunt shows that he is not truly aligned with most conservative’s values, and is just a billionaire who loves attention. We’ll see how it goes.

I don't think it's necessarily against conservative values? I can easily imagine there's some type of point they're trying to make about celebrity culture being a form of prostitution and selling their bodies. It came out about as lucid and legible as you would imagine it would when someone with mental issues is in a situation where no one is able to stop him.

That kind of shock value performance art is more of a leftwing thing.

Because the culture's approval was coming from left wing institutions, so it was less fruitful to do shock performance art as a right winger. Maybe we'll see more of it from the right if the culture does shift the way it seems it might be, though Kanye's an attention junkie and is jumping the gun by a lot.

Umm, no, public nudity isn’t really a right wing thing.

For its own sake no, but I can see it as a way of denouncing sinful celebrity worship, once warped through the mind of someone with a bad understanding of how his actions are percieved by others?

No, a right winger denouncing celebrity worship will just say so, and not only not do that but not resort to up to interpretation performance art of any kind.

Kanye could had been a sort of martyr who stood up for his beliefs enough to get completely cancelled in a previous episode. Just don't cancel people who say that Jews cancel people if you don't want them to be martyrs. That and the threats from his personal "doctor"/handler can't be just dismissed because the dude is acting foolishly. He certainly is not some kind of consistent conservative icon though.

His antics definitely have reduced some of the bite of his past complaining about Jewish producers pushing degeneracy in the black community through what art they support, and what they encourage people to be doing. But he could have been partly right then and part of the problem now. Partly, because art isn't only the result of producers desires without artists themselves having influence. Even though producers and agents can be influential not only through dictating to artists but also by what kind of people they choose to promote.

Regarding his wife's extremely slutty outfits. Kanye West seems to approve and so does she. It doesn't make sense to make her a victim in this. It isn't the first time she is almost naked in outfits that circulate online. I highly doubt she is constantly forced into it.

I think it’s best the US stops the way it oddly thinks about sex and the naked body. Granted, I was born abroad but I’ve lived here for decades and probably have the same sensibilities as everyone else.

Europes nakedness probably won’t work here due to many reasons, but I think showing an uncensored news story where the main point is ‘ woman gets nude as stunt at celebrity outing ‘ should be fine.

Kanye I don’t believe was ever seen as someone who was standing up for conservatives or someone with a conservative bent, it always seemed like finger pointing at a crazy guy who was fucked by the liberal establishment and might be clawing his way out in a rightward direction. Plus his gospel album was a banger.

Europes nakedness probably won’t work here due to many reasons

What is "Europe's nakedness" anyway?

I live in Finland and the way people approach nudity is absolutely very different from even Germany, nevermind something farther away like Italy.

It's also highly context dependent. Yes, you go to sauna naked (it might even be coed if you're in your 20s and at the summer cottage with friends). You might also see a bunch of students running naked around the block as a dare if you lived close to the student housing in a university town. If someone pulled a stunt like Kanye, people would think they're crazy and either pulling a shitty and inappropriate performance art stunt or really need to see a psychiatrist and get back on their meds.

Europes nakedness probably won’t work here due to many reasons,

For all that people bring up the supposed different attitudes to nudity between the US and the EU I don't really get it. I live in a European country famous for its supposed sexual liberty and you would absolutely not see something like this stunt in public.

Kanye is definitely a weird guy, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about everything.

That seems to imply that there was something to be right or wrong about. I don't really see it. What even is the point of contention here?

I mean in the controversies he got in before, like, whether George Bush cares about black people or not, for example.

Man, nudity. Not necessarily something you want to see from everyone, but surely some billionaire's wife is easy enough on the eyes. And even if she isn't, we just return to the default case of "well that's just what people look like under their clothes". I don't understand the American War On Nudity, though I shall tolerate your prudish culture.

American culture is far more tolerant of nudity now than it ever has been. When else would television shows like The Boys and Game of Thrones get away with showing so much of the human anatomy as within the last three decades?

More tolerant than before, but still quite puritanical relative to Europe. As I understand it, nudity in Europe is much more divorced from sexuality than in America. The shocked reaction demonstrated here seems exaggerated for a dress (well, "dress") that's 15 square inches of fabric away from a bikini.

Recent examples of nudity in American media reinforce the contrast. Even now, anything including nudity/involving sexuality is Adult and Mature and even the mere acknowledgment of genitalia is risqué. Meanwhile, the Netherlands has a children's show about a man's prehensile penis.

More tolerant than before, but still quite puritanical relative to Europe. As I understand it, nudity in Europe is much more divorced from sexuality than in America.

There is some truth to this, but it also sounds like a teenager's excuse how he came to possess a VHS tape of Emmanuelle. It is a variation of "the grass is less prude on the other side of border" effect, and not very good one. I don't think a pretty lady in skimpy outfit is divorced from sexuality anywhere in Europe. There is only a local difference in where the lines in previous battles for standards of public mores have been fought and lost. In general, Paris, London, Berlin and other big city urban cultures have had a different mores than more conservative small town - rural cultures. In some countries the urban mores have gained more ground than in others.

Concerning Dillermand show, I think Danish religious conservatism decidedly lost during springtime of people's and definitely by around WW1, something to do with industrial pork agriculture urbanizing the rural areas and parliament's iron grip of church providing no ground for a Christian revivalist movement. (Church of Denmark has no archibishop, they are ruled in name only by king and directly by parliament, resulting in a church ruled by concerns of secular non-believers.)

Paris, London, Berlin and other big city urban cultures have had a different mores than more conservative small town - rural cultures. In some countries the urban mores have gained more ground than in others.

I LOLed a little. I live in a very rural area far away from big towns, and you can find nude camping grounds and saunas practically on every other hill, and for every three majors bathing spots at a lake, there's another where skinny dipping is the norm. And it's not only or even mostly the libertine city folk who trek out here to go wild where nobody recognizes them; there really is a significant demand practically everywhere.

Which isn't to say that there isn't a cultural rural/urban divide. There is. But nudity is on the rural side.

Edit: And to chime in on the matter of the separation of nudity and sexuality...yeeeeah. That's the rule. That's how it's supposed to be. But it never quite matches the facts on the ground. How could it.

Big difference between same-sex nudity and different-sex nudity, no? I am a proud connoisseur of nude Japanese hot springs: there is a certain comforting intimacy in having a bath with all the members of your community from the young men to the ancient wrinklies. I can’t imagine that a mixed-sex version would be relaxed in the same way.

(Yes, there are opposite sex attendants. They are not young and nubile, quite the opposite, and they do not send any of the signals that would make nude bathing awkward.)

Boy’s nude swimming was a mandatory subject in American public schools until the seventies.

A clever way to weed the gays out.

Right after penis inspection day, right?

No, Americans just used to have a very different attitude towards (male)semi public nudity.

Those were not the only different attitudes. Those attitudes existed at a time boys would receive direct instruction on the dangers of preditory homosexuals. Homosexuals could be excluded from many places due to their propensity for unnatural un-chastites.

The YMCA had greater focus on young Christian men. There are lots of older pagans at the YMCA where my children swim. I'd prefer the organization to return to Muscular Christianity.

I don’t know that gay rights has anything to do with changing attitudes on the subject- skinny dipping went from boys being boys to being unacceptable before attitudes shifted about homosexuality. But it did coincide with gender desegregation. The YMCA introduction of bathing suits came when the YWCA was shut down and merged; boys nude swimming ceased when swimming lessons went coed. The YMCA was also notorious as a den of homosexuality during this period and nobody worried about adults-on-minors predation very much in postwar america, homosexual or not.

It was removed from the DSM for the '74 edition.

Boys Beware saw several updates.

Boys Aware

Boys Beware, 3rd

Someone was concerned enough about homosexual grooming and predation to make several films.

Seems to me they're actively trying to be transgressive, and nudity is a means towards that end precisely because it's still so very taboo.

Or maybe nudity just tickles people in the lizard brain and showmakers can finally get away with it because the taboo really has weakened.

Hell, I don't know. I just find it weird that something as extremely basic as being naked remains a big deal at all. But I realize of course that this is not a mainstream opinion.

They are cable shows, not TV ones, aren't they? Theoretically, you can only watch them if you paid for HBO/Amazon, you can't stumble upon them while browsing the channels for cartoons after school.

Do you really think Kanye chose her outfit? Seems to me the woman is an exhibitionist. She always dresses semi-nude.

But yeah, the 'dress' giving the news outlets a veneer of plausible deniability that she's naked is pretty funny.

The pre undress pics in my feed are maybe the first I’ve seen that lady fully clothed.

A lot of people on the right saw Kanye as

How people see him as anything other than mentally ill is beyond me. He constantly expresses delusions of grandeur, and he's freaking Kanye West! His beliefs and values are tied to reality by gossamer threads. I don't mean to dismiss or demean him. I think he is very talented. He thrives in the spotlight, and seems to enjoy it. But he behaves like a lot of people with bipolar disorder. Who knows why he does what he does sometimes.

On a side note (deliberately avoiding the morality-side discussion):

It is interesting to watch the back-and-forth between "everything social you do is potentially publicly visible forever" and various attempts to allow social contact without said permanency.

In this case, you can view this as an attempt at "you can't share this publicly without running afoul of explicit content laws". Not a particularly successful one.

Other attempts I can think of offhand (not from Kanye West in particular, just in general):

  • Always wearing the same outfit. (Daniel Radcliffe did this a fair bit IIRC.)
  • Loudly playing copyrighted music so recordings get copyright-striked. (copyright-struck?)
  • Sending voice calls instead of text to make it more difficult to search through after-the-fact. (This one is rapidly becoming dated.)
  • Sending videos of text instead of text; ditto.
  • Copyrighting your name or likeness and then suing if someone uses it to refer to you in a negative light. (Doesn't tend to work, but the act of suing even if it doesn't win is often a deterrent.)
  • Deliberately including PI in communications and then using GDPR if necessary.

I do not think that this was the intend. I mean, it would be trivial to put black bars over the naughty bits and then you can share the photo on prime time TV.

Personally, I think that different settings have different expectations of privacy. A bedroom is different from a private party, which in turn is different from the streets, which is then different from big entertainment spectacles. If you run naked across the field in the middle of a big soccer game, you can hardly argue that your privacy has been violated when people take pictures.

The worst part is that his wife looks clearly disturbed, sad, and afraid as he stands there looking around in a sort of combative way. It’s truly awful.

Maybe. I'm sure a hypothetical therapist would ask her, a model, "so, what are you getting out of posing nude at the Grammy's?" and her response wouldn't be "absolutely nothing, I'm just a prisoner here in my world famous musician husband's $35 million Beverly Hills mega-mansion".

Just seems like performance art to me.

I agree. It might even fail to rise to the low bar of "performance art." This is a publicity stunt and one that a Kanye affiliated lady has done already!.

When women don't have clothes on, people take notice. It isn't just attractive or famous women. All over the world, every single day, men pay out inordinate amounts of cash simply to see women with less or no clothing on. Sexual interaction need not be present. I'm talking about topless bars / strip clubs / what have you. Let's also remember that men continue to do this when endless explicit sexual content is freely instantly available in digital form. In 2025, more people have access to endless free porn than clean drinking water - and men are still literally throwing cash at IRL women on the daily.

So, Kanye, a person who has made his money in the pop culture entertainment industry, knows that "tits = eyeballs" and that this will be the same today, tomorrow, and forever.

There is nothing more and nothing less to the story.

Always a little bit amused when people not only take the most surface level read of a particular person's behavior, but aggressively impose their own biases on it, reading deep into 'body language' tics that may not even be there.

Its trivial to 'fake' a particular emotional state, especially to cameras. They're literally entertainers its part of their job description. The weird public behavior is about the weakest evidence of the true situation you could find.

So no, I have my beliefs about Kanye, but not much reason to believe he is actually going to lock a woman up without her consent and abuse her until she can't think of leaving.

Its absurdly hard for me to believe that this woman is 'trapped' in a marriage with Kanye in any real sense. My current most likely hypothesis is they both have some kind of exhibitionism kink that Kanye is rich enough to indulge on the largest platforms around, which is gross in that including the public into that is really violating everyone elses' interest in maintaining certain standards of decency.

And in those cases, acting embarrassed or humiliated is oftentimes literally part of the kink.

Also vaguely reminded of Bezos' new wife and her outfit at the Inauguration.

Its absurdly hard for me to believe that this woman is 'trapped' in a marriage with Kanye in any real sense. My current most likely hypothesis is they both have some kind of exhibitionism kink that Kanye is rich enough to indulge on the largest platforms around, which is gross in that including the public into that is really violating everyone elses' interest in maintaining certain standards of decency.

And in those cases, acting embarrassed or humiliated is oftentimes literally part of the kink.

Yeah, this is my take too. It's a way clearer explanation than both people risking their reputations for basically nothing.

Nothing Ever Happens

DOGE is as good as dead. They’ve hit the wall.

Federal judge pauses deadline for federal workers to accept Trump’s resignation offer.

DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts.

The one shining light of hope for true government reform was Elon Musk’s DOGE. They seemed to be making real progress. They may not have been loved, but they were feared, and Machiavelli said that’s enough.

Now they have lost the momentum. Stays and injunctions will start pouring in as district court judges stop fearing that their orders will be simply ignored.

If the deep state career civil service can draw blood with a trick as old as “drag-up old racist internet comments”, then DOGE really are toothless. No one will take them seriously anymore.

“Some US officials had begun calling the young engineers the “Muskovites” for their aggressive loyalty to the SpaceX owner. But some USAid staff used another word: the “incels”.

Maybe Congress can tap in…

  • -11

I'm still hoping that Lord Dampnut and the Deep State take each other down, and make room for something between Bernie Sanders and Scott Alexander....

The first communist, polygamous state in the modern era?

If the Nibblonians send Old Man Waterfall back in time to become its AG.

posted comments that most people would find racist

Uncharitable small minded people, perhaps.

Of the online comments attributed to him which is the most racist?

eugenic immigration policy

Aren't most points based selection criteria or 'skilled' immigration policies broadly eugenisist?

you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity

'Most people' don't marry outside their ethnicity. This 'controversial' interview from 1971 with Muhammad Ali seems to be broadly supportive of the sentiment. It's not something you hear much in current year, so much has fallen to 'you do you'. A desire to marry within your ethnicity is not racist. While I would agree that 'most people' would say you should be able to miscegenate, 'most people' in fact do not. His expression that there is no dowery large enough to induce him into miscegenation, seems consistent with the observed behavior of 'most people'.

Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool

In current year, where so much is 'racist', espousing non-DEI, non-antiracist, views is called racist. The term is used so widely and frequently as to have lost substantive meaning. He's a twenty-something being edgy on the internet.

alt-right / dissident right isn't necessarily racist.

A more charitable understanding, in the context of edgy SV adjacent kids might be

Normalize opposition to mediocre Indian H1b immigration.

Wasn't included in the coverage I read. There are more charitable interpretations were you inclined.

In context with his age, industry and medium and other posts attributed to him

99 percent of Indian H1B [visas] will be replaced by slightly smarter [large language models], they’re going back don’t worry guys.

Normalize opposition to mediocre Indian H1b immigration. Fits well enough, and is absent the inflammatory language.

Attributed to him here

https://futurism.com/elon-doge-resignation

I addressed it in responses to both you and wowwowwow.

In context with his age, industry and medium and other posts attributed to him, there are more charitable interpretations were you inclined.

A more charitable understanding, in the context of edgy SV adjacent kids might be

Normalize opposition to mediocre Indian H1b immigration.

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I'm 100% on team HBD, because that's where the evidence strongly points, and I'm sick of midwits trying to smear those of us who can actually follow the science as racists, but "normalize Indian hate" sounds an awful lot like actual racism to me.

In my opinion, that might be a good thing for what I value. I would much prefer for some other arm of Tumpism to be stopped, not DOGE, since I value cutting government bloat... but at least it's something. My politics is based on the idea of keeping the left and the right stuck in a stalemate so that neither becomes dominant.

Now that Trumpism and the new right in general have given the woke a number of brutal punches and the woke is on the ropes in several ways, Trumpism begins to seem to me like the bigger threat, so now I turn my attention to strategies for doing some damage to Trumpism.

This would not have come about, other than that the left turned out to be weaker than I expected. I thought they would put up more of a fight, and that the stalemate I wanted would naturally come about, but I was wrong. The left has turned out to be a bit of a paper tiger and Trump's people have been running wild, which was never my preferred outcome. I just wanted to stop woke authoritarianism. So now I pivot yet again and, since the left turned out to be weaker than I had expected them to be, I now, despite having no love for the left, find myself wanting to at least prevent them from being crushed, since although I am neither left nor right, unfortunately the left is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the right, just like the right is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the left.

You are basically a leftist, dude. The left wins by pretending neutrality and always demanding the right to be impotent.

The right will need to do a lot more victories before anything like a stalemate happens.

A somewhat blunt way to put it, but I agree even as another person who would take 100% Left domination over 100% Right domination without blinking. It would take a lot more to balance the scales - when as many universities test right-wing credentials for applicants to student or faculty positions as do diversity statements and progressive stack scoring and 50% of illegal immigrants to the US have actually been removed, you could talk about the two parties being in a stalemate. The problem is that the US Left has really destroyed any objective sense of what balance looks like by tactical Overton window shifting, so even slight compromises to their preferences are depicted as huge norm-shattering transgressions, and in the end removing some 0.0?01% of illegal immigrants or firing that percentage of progressive federal government workers winds up feeling as if it may outweigh continued progressive domination of whole industries.

The problem in doing this for Leftists themselves, I think, is that in a world where so much power is built on kayfabe or rather the perception of invincibility, this might actually result in their downfall against all odds. You can keep a roomful of unarmed people in check with a machinegun, but if your strategy is to hide the gun and instead insist that you are a Sith lord who could force choke them at any moment, someone calling the bluff on your sad devotion to that ancient religion might just result in everyone laughing and bumrushing you before you can get enough bullets through your barrel.

the woke is on the ropes in several ways

Let me tell you it makes me a bit sick to be doing my best @2rafa impression, but my guy it's been 18 days. It probably took you longer than 18 days to turn against the party of Obama, did it not? Can you explain how the woke is on the ropes in several ways? A few federally sponsored organizations have been told to stop doing some types of work.

What exactly been done that can't be undone January 20th, 2029?

I never supported the party of Obama to begin with. I enjoyed seeing the Republicans go down, but Obama's movement creeped me out. I found all that hope and change stuff, and the legions of young people treating Obama like some kind of superhero, to be disturbing in a cult-like way. But I did enjoy seeing the Republicans eat shit.

The woke is on the ropes. First, they have failed to censor discussion. The old meme was "just build your own Internet". The anti-woke did just that, but what's more, they didn't even get driven off most of the existing Internet. Un-woke discussion is completely mainstream on X, Facebook, and YouTube. Second, DEI is being rolled back both in government and business. Third, the Democrats completely embarrassed themselves in the last year. Even a bunch of their supporters are disgusted by their ineffectiveness and elitism and/or are calling for them to become less woke. Fourth, apparently zoomer guys are lurching right.

The woke isn't completely defeated, but they have sustained massive blows. In my opinion, the woke is still a threat but a relatively minor one, at least to my values. The bigger threat to my values, which are largely classical liberal, right now is, I think, for the first time ever, the Trump coalition. I do hope that the Trump coalition deals huge damage to the establishment blob before it goes down, though. That said, I also do not want to live in a country dominated by Trumpism.

Edit: One important thing I should add, which I did not think of when I originally wrote this, is that I still view the woke as being excessively strong when it comes to property crime and violent crime in blue cities. Some progress (as judged according to my values) has been made on this issue lately, as one can see for example from the fact that even on Reddit, which is a solid blue bastion, blue city subreddits have been condemning overly progressive approaches to policing lately. However, the "defund the police" types are still too strong for my tastes.

The woke are not on the rope. They have not even begun being dislodged. What has happened is the start of some setbacks for them. It is fine to admit you don't want them to be dislodged, which is what will happen if victory is declared already.

The anti-woke did just that, but what's more, they didn't even get driven off most of the existing Internet.

Non anti woke liberals support censorship and woke agendas. They support doing it on progressive grounds and zionists on zionist grounds.

There isn't this movement of moderate, centrist liberals out there, because mainstream liberalism shares the pathologies of anti white racism, virtue signalling authoritarinsm, hatred of dissent, distorting things in favor ,progressive political corectness over what is true, obviously it is part of patronage networks and corruption where money is directed to them and their client groups. Are definetly nationalists for their favorite demographics and are definetly motivated by hostility towards the continued existence of homogeneous ethnicities of their etnhic outgroups and want to replace and end them both for ideological and ethnic hatred and to gain an electoral advantage. They see fascism in the existence of european ethnicities which is very extreme, and also treat with fanatical hostility those dissenting with them on such issues.

And so, I don't think from the depths of such hostility that you can have people who respect freedom of others. Nor are all freedoms equal, the freedom of totalitarian tyrants to impose their struggle sessions on their ethnic and ideological outgroup is not equal to the freedom of not having this imposed against you and suppressing political commissars who demand that you hate your group. The liberal war on all sorts of isms leads them to support cancel culture constantly and with intensity.

National freedom necessitates keeping out extreme foreign nationalists or Communists for example, that favor your nation destruction and subjucation out of ethnic hostility or ideological hostility to your nation, or both. That liberals blacklist those who don't share their extreme ideology, in addition to discriminating against white males, is something that can't be forgotten, since we can't have institutions be controlled by people who abuse their position.

This isn't to say that those who claim to be anti woke can't be for censorship either on progressive, which is most common, zionist, or even right wing grounds.

There is also the question of what measures are necessary for a good public morality. I doubt the Trumpian right which is authoritarian on criticism of Jews and Israel, is going to ban porn. Authoritarianism in line with the same old establishment ends seems more of a threat than genuinelly right wing cultural authoritarianism.

Personally, I would rather people who tell the truth and care about what works well, are promoted, while those who lie, censor, are suppressed. And the first get rewards and praise while the later get scathing criticism and lose opportunities. And there are some general ethical priorities too. People who care about their own nation's well being, and therefore can't be for maximizing individualistic hedonism, but are honorable in their dealings with rest of the world. I don't believe you can have every institution this idea of "everything goes". Discernment inevitably will exist, and it should weight against the Walter Duranty characters but in favor of the Gareth Jones type of characters. Instead of letting the Walter Duranty types of the world as it happens today, to cancel the Gareth Jones types of the world. https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/news/a-tale-of-two-journalists-walter-duranty-and-gareth-jones/

Now, as far as liberalism goes, it falls in the Walter Duranty side rather than the Gareth Jones side. Cancelling their patronage network hasn't even started happening and would be welcome news.

To the extend one can identifie a pervasive liberalism that differs from a pervasive "woke", it will still share most its pathologies, with the woke are just even further extreme on the same direction.

My view of the matter is that it does not make sense to pretend of a center left that doesn't exist, because far left policies is the behavior of the mainstream left, and of mainstream liberals. Extremism is what the supposed center left is about. This pretension just ends with the far left doing far left things while those who aren't them, we let them and are asleep. It is just a big myth to justify their anti right wing extremism and their far left politics.

That liberals who think the right which hasn't even started doing things, should stop, is part and parcel of the extreme ideology against the right wing doing things which has lead to things being so far left to begin with. It is obligatory for right wingers who have started changing things to not listen to liberals who oppose them from doing so, and see them as part of the entrenched far left. The far left has become such a big problem while there has been countless rhetoric of liberals downplaying the problem of far left extremism and exaggerating the problem of right wing extremism during that time. In response the right wing has started to evolve, and these tactics no longer work anymore.

There isn't this movement of moderate, centrist liberals out there

I might be misreading you, but while I think you nailed most of this post chum, here you are wrong - there is, it's called the maga movement. Also I think actual moderate centrist liberals are definitely nationalist, it's the natural cultural foundation.

The MAGA platform is bog-standard populism: pro-government-intervention for their side of social issues. That’s not centrist. Especially not given the OP’s argument that the mainstream left can’t be centrist because it gives too much time to the extremists!

I agree that within the american political system, MAGA is more centrist than liberals and neocons. But not sure that it is a centrist liberal movement. And in practice it doesn't seem to be a break from neocons sufficiently. For one, it is willing to champion foreign policy moves and rhetoric that does not fit into that. Like Trump's rhetoric about annexing Canada.

I don't think liberalism is a good thing and a centrist movement would not be liberal but not totally exclusionary of liberal notions. It would be a synthesis of some liberal notions, with conservative and nationalist, with even some dose of internationalist. Like I am a family first type of person but try to treat people outside my family with honor, provided they do the same.

Liberalism in practice is the purity spiral dogmatism. Historically there have been some people more in line with what I favor that might have called themselves liberals as within the national liberalism ideology but they lost and have been overwhelmed by the new left type which is the dominant and representative of the historical trajectory of liberalism. This includes the people who call themselves classical liberals. What they want is new left liberalism with its dogmas and consensuses.

And so I am against it. Only in lower amounts and on specific issues is it valuable. To go with zero liberalism and adopt a purity spiral as liberals do towards conservatism and nationalism (for their white ethnic outgroup, they are more supportive of nationalism for ingroup), would lead to abandoning good things. I like liberal opposition to war crimes for example but then there is a liberal tribe that is also for war crimes. While liberals fail to do this as a tribe, liberalism is to an extend related with concept of political impartiality which is valuable again to an extend. Liberalism in practice fails to even follow its supposed virtues but while I would abandon liberalism, I wouldn't abandon anything related to it. Trying to avoid the same folly that liberals war on "fascism" that leads them to support the extinction and second class status of white people and to aggressively hate those who think otherwise.

The purity spiral to be part of the dna of liberalism and how it developed, but within the views, principles that are associated with liberalism there is some value to be extracted. But to be a liberal is to adopt a framework that will lead you adopt dogmatically too much the new left agenda.

To give it as an exercise: Homosexuality is not illegal but society promotes heteronormativity and champions nuclear families and tries to promote more pro natal monogamous ideology and social mores which is reflected in the media. Promotes its historical reBecause the current situation is actually too unbalanced against heteronormativism and healthy social mores and fertility.

Such society, does not present homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality since the later is both more normal and useful for society, and less related % with other even nastier sexual behavior that to an extend appears as more prevalent with LGBT groups. And there is a patronage network to promote this. It bans surgeries that mutiliate people and doesn't accept trans ideology. But it also doesn't try to aggressively humiliate homosexuals for example.

It is nationalist and pursues its own interests, obviously tries to maintain its ethnic community and promotes some level of pride and self confidence but is honorable in its dealings with other nations. It would never side, support or allow its people to act like some other groups that engage in rape gangs and then close the wagons, or try to convince ethnic groups that they should have no national identity, self hate, and go extinct and be replaced by them and would never tolerate people doing this to them. So this is a synthesis but of course fits well outside what liberals would accept.

Seems to me that decentralizing liberalism from the way we identify is important to having a vision that manages to synthesize important things that both liberals and liberalism are found in opposition to. Since liberalism fails to be a synthesizing reasonable vision, why treat it as a category that we, or the MAGA movement must fit into?

What would you say is a natural right-wing movement, if MAGA isn't it? Religious fundamentalism? Ethno-nationalism? But then what would be left to count as far right? (This is a genuine question, not an attempted gotcha.)

But then what would be left to count as far right?

The original right wing, per the defining of "left" and "right" in the seating organization of the French National Assembly during the revolution: Throne-and-Altar Monarchy and hereditary aristocracy.

Outside of Moldbug's wildest dreams, this is not a position that meaningfully exists in America, nor is it likely to within our lifetimes, or our children's, or our children's children. I don't see why we should skew our common-sense political terminology just to leave a whole quadrant permanently unoccupied.

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As far as I know, I am the only De Maistre-ian social conservative(you know this is a different thing from nrx, right?) on the motte. If even on the motte you can only find one of us then there are not enough to occupy a meaningful part of the political spectrum.

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It's a tough subject to tackle, because as the battlefield currently lies yeah, it's right wing. But if there is any objective basis to the political axis at all (a big if) I think it's hard to call the party that unites the likes of Rubio, Vance and Gabbard anything other than centrist. And like Igi says it's goals are the archetype of the national-liberal. I don't know what a natural right wing party looks like to be honest, I only know there hasn't been one since I became politically active.

This is not a "no one is right wing enough for me" argument btw, I am on the Trump train precisely because of this. Like @aquota mentions elsewhere, I also want an equilibrium between the right and the left. Further though I believe the most stable equilibrium puts the right in charge with the left as counterbalance, due to the personality types each side attracts.

MAGA is an archetypal national-liberal political movement. Down to even the McKinleyite foreign policy. It's made up of a lot of people who don't like or care about liberalism, but there's the irony of our current situation for ya.

I'm not sure why I should invest in responding to one of your typical walls of text if you start out by assuming that I am basically a leftist, which in fact I am not except from your sort of pretty far-right perspective on the political spectrum, and that I wrote my comment because I want to stop people from further attacking the woke, which in fact is not why I wrote my comment.

I see you as a far leftist who defines as far right people who disagree with you and defines yourself incorectly as centrist. Since this is a very common tactic of the left to win, I think it is an important issue.

You can fit into what is tried to be presented as mainstream center left and disagree with people further left than you and still be sufficiently far to the left to qualify as far left though. Because the mainstream left is far left in its agenda. Same applies with the establishment agenda in institutions that you declare has already changed too much, even though it has not. It is a woke agenda that hasn't been dismantled and so it is obviously reasonable to question whether your self identification is inaccurate over what you actually support.

You might even honestly define yourself incorrectly as more moderate than you really are and others as much more extreme than they really are. I understand why far leftists who constantly do this tactic don't want to explore this issue, but they are actually the aggressive party, defining everyone who doesn't share their radical ideology as far right. The common principles of the mainstream liberal ideology are a far left radical ideology and you personally have fitted sufficiently with this ideology with your sentiments of insulting on people on the right who oppose for example the great replacement and aren't liberals. Again what you promote fits with wanting wokeness to remain entrenched which is an obvious point that you could have addressed directly.

It is only fair after you guys constantly try to aggressively label and marginalize others, to accept people who disagree with this and see you as the radical extreme faction. Sorry but you can't just win unopposed by just incorrectly labeling others inaccurately and labeling yourselves inaccurately, and after labeling others that you can't complain for others who disagree with your labels. Feigning neutrality while doing far left things is the tactic of far left 101 that it has constantly done.

I even worked to break down how some of the principles of liberals are extreme. That I don't just lazily label you is not the advantage that you think you are. Nobody forces people who don't want this to read only shorter posts. Let me do this again.

The truth is that if we are to put ideologies into circles, if your circle does not have shared ground with what you call far right, on nationalism, you are far left. And the reason you are far left is that your ideology is too extreme and hostile against a group and proposes a radical destructive vision, and shares within it hateful intolerant authoritarian perspective. If your ideology is a radical ideology that says that your ethnic outgroup should go extinct and be happy to do so, including the demographics that historically made a big part of a nation, that is very radical. It actually fits within treasonous hetoric in many countries, even within the text of their constitutions. It is even more radical if it is within your own nation. It isn't far right to be hostile to this ideology, but far right is a self serving arbitary label to justify this extreme agenda. In fact it is an element of the extremism that people want to label others as far right for opposing it.

If we are to put a line from anti white to pro white for example of one issue, you and mainstream liberalism will be on the far left. Or consider heteronormativity, or fertility rates and whether it makes sense to be dogmatic for liberal dogma. Or intersexual relationships and feminism vs more conservative norms. What is called far right for being too pro white for example often encompasses more moderate space than liberals. By the principle that to be too extreme in one category makes one far right, then liberals should be considered far left. Or take conservatism. When it comes to social behavior, the liberal typically is not a moderate who combines conservative with non conservative notions at least the non left wing sense, and what is called far right tends to encompass those who are more synergistic in combining conservative and some elements of social liberalism in less amount than the liberals. Or take censorship, you try to present non woke liberals (which should include neocons who are not conservatives but a form of the tribe of iberals) as betters for censorship but the discussion had various people who others wouldn't label woke, who supported this guy being fired after being doxed for his more right leaning non liberal views. A position more extreme than Vance's which was that he disagreed with him but he shouldn't be fired, because he might be good in his job and that this was the result of left wing doxxing.

If we are to analyze ideology through circles that encompass ideology, purity spiraling means to really avoid to have any shared ground with others on the areas they aren't wrong. This is a central aspect in what the space complaining about far right does on issues of nationalism, social liberalism vs conservatism, interethnic relationships. The position of the mainstream establishment fails to be at all a reasonable synthesis, or compromises in line with Aristotle's approach in Nicomedean ethics that seeks a moderate virtue that contrasts two extreme vices.

Beyond the liberals declarations of others to be far right, and for the liberals to represent some sort of reasonable center lies begging the question and purity spiral dogmatism. It is one of the biggest myths and assumptions that must be challenged and reexamined.

If people don't want to bother with doing that because it isn't in their advantage to do so, it is expected. If you want to be lazy about it, then posting that, just sounds like an excuse to avoid confronting the argument and to dismiss the other party. I think to an extend liberals have grown entitled due to expectations of censorship, allowing them to get away with just labeling themselves and others and win, without examining in the substance, if what they support is actually good and reasonable and to dissent is to be an extremist as they present it. That, and because of previous march on institutions and authoritarian measures and stubborn zealotry in repeating such associations, to an extend it has stuck and even people who oppose liberals to an extend sometimes adopt their terminology. It hasn't stuck with everyone thankfully and it is arbitrary self serving propaganda that is meant to help a political faction at the expense of any opposition, and what is true and good. That is because you are willing to label too positively untrue and destructive agendas and label too negatively true and moral perspectives.

Obama's movement creeped me out. I found all that hope and change stuff, and the legions of young people treating Obama like some kind of superhero, to be disturbing in a cult-like way.

I know this isn't your main point, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. It was so creepy the way a cult of personality formed around Obama. Even still, to this day, my mother in law basically equates "the Obamas" with "good people". There's a similar thing with Trump but nowhere near to the same extent as it was for Obama. "Cult-like" is a great way to describe it, and I was astonished how many people just fell into the cult.

Obviously I'm not saying that all Obama supporters were in the cult of personality, much as not all Trump supporters are. But it was so pronounced that it really was freaky.

There's a similar thing with Trump but nowhere near to the same extent as it was for Obama

C'mon, are you kidding me with this?

There are people who treat the trump family as royal, but few who have the fawning demigod attitude the left still has for Obama.

No, I'm not. I don't think you remember just how big the Obama cult of personality was if you think Trump is on the same level. Obama's was everywhere. The news, the arts, you basically couldn't get through a day without encountering that stuff.

By comparison, though Trump personality cultists surely exist they don't control mass media (and in fact are shamed by said media, not that that's right either). I've never personally encountered one, whereas I knew several people who were all in on Obama. They simply are not as big nor as much of a cultural force.

Immediately thought of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2fZHou18Cdk

Seeing that '17 years ago' next to the view count was a real 'Holy shit' moment because it does feel like yesterday

Personally I'll always remember the Chris Matthews. He was the 'I felt this thrill going up my leg as he spoke.", who also cried over an Obama speech and compared him to Jesus.

I haven't seen any actual shrines to trump with candles and offerings at the alter, and I haven't seen any newspaper articles saying "Many spiritually advanced people I know identify Trump as a lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet"

So that's one level of crazy even his colloidal silver quaffing fans haven't reached yet. They just think he executed Hillary Clinton and replaced her with a clone as part of The Plan.

I know people (unwillingly; they're in my neighborhood) who honestly think that if they can just manage to get Trump to pray for someone sick, said person will be healed. No shrines and prayer candles that I'm aware of, but I don't hang out at their house, either.

I mean to be fair, judging by all the prayer request chain emails I get from friends, they think this about a lot of people. There's some carcinisation features of folk religions that evolve over and over. In another fifty years I wouldn't be surprised to see Americans burning money at funerals so the deceased can tip St Peter the customary 25%

remember this creepy song/chant being taught to children: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qp-ot_vChlU

I think a lot of people today would have a hard time believing how intense the Obama personality cult was. This is partially because it won - it seems more reasonable to people today that he was so admired seeing as so many of his scandals have been relegated to the dustbin of history. It's also partially because it's now irrelevant and discarded - Obama, while still powerful in internal DNC politics, is out of office and no longer really needs a personality cult, which would have been difficult to sustain for so long anyway. But between both of these factors, I don't think most people today realize that the Democratic consensus around, say, 2008-2011, was that you needed a Maoist degree of unconditional support for Obama or else you were an evil white supremacist. He also presented himself in a much more extreme light back then - far from the basically-Bill-Clinton-but-black that we now remember, his promise to America was that when elected, he would usher in a totalitarian Soviet-style communist state, radical change beyond the wildest dreams of what DOGE is trying. We don't remember that because it failed, because it hit the blob and got absorbed.

One of my formative political experiences was going all in on the cult of Obama (as a Brit) and being told by an American friend of many years, “who the fuck do you think you are to tell me who to vote for? You know nothing about American politics, nothing about McCain, and you’re telling me how I should vote?”. I’ve never forgotten it.

Second, DEI is being rolled back both in government and business.

I work at a company where DEI has been rolled back and internal discussions of this are uniformly condemning the change. I have literally not seen a single person defending them. I know I can't be the only one who isn't sorry to see them go, but the culture is still such that people don't feel safe expressing that.

Woke at the top may be on the ropes, but on the bottom it's still alive and well.

One huge thing is defunding so many USAid payments is almost certain to result in shuttering a huge number of NGOs. Those aren't just fund and restart by a new administration. The brands will be lost, the employees scattered etc. That might be the biggest accomplishment Trump has made in his political career.

I'm actually a little happy to learn that America is still a republic with the rule of law.

As you say, Trump and Congress can work together to realize his goals with DOGE. I think there is a huge difference between Trump doing things entirely on his own, and doing them with the cooperation of Congress. Slash budgets if that's what the voters want, but do it the right way.

Exactly!

There’s no shortage of Republicans willing to defund the D.Ed or whatever. Get them to propose a short, straightforward bill whenever courts block one of the DOGE cuts.

That's not how it works. The democratic parts of the American government are set up in a rock-paper-scissors type way. Where if any one part of government tries to get something done another one can block it with everyone just pointing fingers at each other to shift blame. This is to ensure that democratic priorities never get addressed so that the unelected bureaucracy can work on lobbyist priorities unhindered.

When the bureaucracy is strong and you need Congress, the Courts, and the Executive to shrink the bureaucracy do you really live in a Republic?

I think there is an interesting question around whether you can have a true republic in which the popularly elected assembly is powerless in the face of an also-elected single leader. Probably

I mean, you totally can, as long as it’s elected. A republic doesn’t have to have checks and balances.

Well yes. Both / and. I just find it curious that people are upset and calling it dictatorship when the elected executive reduces the unelected bureaucracy seemingly with the support of the majority of congress.

Isn't it just a Russel Conjugation?

I'm pruning the excesses of the unelected, self-serving buerocracy

You're making cuts to government agencies

He's destroying vitally important institutions

Question is how quickly can the government get this to a higher court. This is sad.

Looks like they're going after Medicare and Medicaid:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14364811/doge-elon-musk-target-fraud-medicare-medicaid.html

That's the big one. Do it, Elon. And social security while you're at it. It's what the people voted for, after all.

The 65 year old vooooters would turn on Trump real quick if those particular funds were touched at all.

The fraud isn't in the over 65s it's in all the working age people getting disability payments.

SSDI pays out $150B yearly. Unless it's mostly fraud, it's not that much of the federal budget.

While true, that’s still like $1000 per taxpayer. Fixing government fraud and waste will involve cobbling together lots of small wins. Like a fine wagyu steak the fat is everywhere, not just in one easily removable chunk.

It's more like $400 per taxpayer (and it's not all fraud) but sure, I agree that it's probably more fertile ground than the piddling $1M NSF grants that were being bandied about a few weeks ago.

Just how many taxpayers do you think there are?

Fair, I was calculating per person. About 80% of people pay some kind of federal tax (including payroll taxes) so it's like $550 per person.

I suspect that medicare billing fraud normally doesn't benefit the patient much.

Yes but that's not how it will be framed and discussed. It will be "$X Billion cuts to Medicare!1!1!!!"

Apparently, medicare/medicaid fraud is a big thing with hospitals. Apparently, there is a US Senator (R) who used to be a CEO of a hospital company that engaged in a large amount of fraud with the US government.

I think you're thinking of Vivek Ramaswamy.

rick scott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott) but maybe there are two

Any major Social Security savings are going to have to come from legislation, because the formulas for payouts are dictated by law. Maybe they find some people cashing dead parents' checks, but I don't expect that to be more than a small single-digit percentage, if that. Plus there's no real room for discretion, since payouts are only based on contributions and age of retirement.

There's some room for fraud in disability, but rooting that out without inspecting each individual on a case-by-case basis might be tough. Maybe they can look for doctors with anomalously high rates of diagnosing disability that can't be explained by specialty.

There's a lot more room for fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, because there's much more room for discretion. Again, reviewing individual cases is probably not possible, but maybe they can find providers with anomalous numbers.

There was never a doubt that court orders would be followed. This isn’t 1964 Alabama.

DOGE could never succeed because the biggest cause of the deficit (assuming raising taxes is unacceptable) is welfare spending (most of which is not ‘fraud’ but entirely legal and intentional), followed distantly by defense.

If you’re not significantly cutting social security or medicare, medicaid or defense, it doesn’t matter. Trump knows cuts to these are politically impossible, so DOGE can (at most) trim the edges.

Lastly, who really believes that Trump will not tire of Musk in four years?

assuming raising taxes is unacceptable

And do you know what happens when you assume?

Lastly, who really believes that Trump will not tire of Musk in four years?

I do wonder what becomes of their alliance once the honeymoon phase of this term cools down. Imagine trump eventually does something that musk doesn't love being associated with, does musk have the ability to grin and bear it, or would he be tempted to resign from his thankless government job to be a humble private sector executive again?

Nothing Ever Happens. DOGE is as good as dead.

We shall see

From Musk on Twitter about an hour ago (in reply to Vice President Vance), on Elez:

🫡

He will be brought back.

To err is human, to forgive divine.

They made a good start. “Look how well we were doing until the lawyers brought their cases (and we control the lawmakers)” is a much better case that “hey, shouldn’t we set up something to do something about spending?”. It’s all marketing, but marketing exists for a purpose. There is nothing the Blob hates more than exposing itself on prime-time TV.

Federal judge pauses deadline for federal workers to accept Trump’s resignation offer.

I was initially surprised by this, not because of any detailed reading of statute, but because federal employees can simply ignore the offer. I find it intuitively odd that proceeding with the status quo is fine, making this offer without a deadline might be fine, but making the offer with a deadline isn't fine. Concerns about enforceability seem at least plausible to me, but I really struggle to understand why a short deadline to make the decision would be a problem in and of itself. If you don't take it, well, you're just back where you were a couple Tuesdays ago.

It sounds like it’s the combination of the deadline with the ongoing litigation. Can’t force a decision while the outcome is still up in the air.

Plus, I’m guessing neither unions nor employer wants to deal with an employee who accepted the offer if the courts walk it back.

Because the deadline is likely the marker for what happens "next" - the RIF. The probie list has already started getting marked up

Elon Musk just posted a poll: "Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?" (It's yes/no, pretty steady at about 80/20)

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887867644814020902

It didn't occur to me this was even an option, but bringing him back would be even better than not firing him in the first place (in my opinion).

The polling is embarrassing, really. Asking your own fans whether you should do something they want you to do, like a king who needs his courtiers’ permission before every little ruling. Bring him back, do not, let that authority rest with you. Also, who asked him to resign, if not either someone very senior in the White House (in which case Musk would be dimwitted to overrule them) or someone in Musk’s own employ at DOGE? Neither reflects well on him.

The poll could be rigged. He owns the website.

The worst it could get it 50/50, do you really want to make a bet that most Americans want to get him fired given the result of the election?

Actually, would you want him fired?

Is it just 'his own fans' now on twitter? I'm really asking, I'm still under the impression that none of the spinoffs took off enough to really change that 'everyone' was still on twitter.

Also, Musk is not the King, Trump is. Musk might be the sovereign of his own domain, but in the White House he is himself a courtier. One doesn't have to descend into Kremlinology to see that Elon was probably getting data to cover his ass. Or he might have just been genuinely curious, he does seem to do polls a lot for this kind of thing.

To your last question does anyone know how many employees DOGE actually has now? The memes took off so fast that this image of half a dozen guys reporting directly to Elon is already seared in my mind. Like my instinct is to say Elon personally let this guy go and the decision to hire him back is also his

In my experience on X, Musk's polls tend to overwhelmingly support Musk's side of any given issue. I don't think that Musk is faking the polls, it's just a combination of a certain degree of leftist exodus from X combined with the general tendency that online polls have to skew unrepresentatively heavily one way or another because of a combination of brigading and the natural emotional tendency of one side to get really excited to vote while the other side stamps its feet in disgust and refuses to participate. Since these polls have almost no real-world consequence, there is little emotional incentive for people who dislike Musk to participate in them, whereas people who agree with Musk want to show their support. Certainly the 80/20 figure means little when it comes to gauging the average American's thoughts on the issue.

I understand the dynamic you're describing and it all rings true except for I'm not convinced Elon's preferred outcome was having the poll come out in favor of the fella. Short of not hiring him in the first place, I think he would've preferred it just went away. But there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how we were regressing to the days of freely handing the enemy scalps and I think Elon maybe put the poll up as a result of the umbrage.

Although that's sort of just a little idle Kremlinology, sorry. Thanks for your thoughts, interested to see how it plays out

The polling is embarrassing, really.

About as "embarrasing" as the emperor getting the temperature of the colosseum before he gives his thumbs up or down.

The poll is to show influential people what the masses really think about it. Musk rehiring him is more defensible when a million people think he should be rehired. When an investor or politician presses him he can say that he asked the people, even if it’s not actually a fair sample size.

They can't get entrenched on this specific battle. They took a casualty, gotta move on, keep the objectives in mind. The objective is not "give this 20 something a job," the objective is "Zero Base Budget (ZBB) the federal government, remove the welfare of the elites." They are at war.

If this person is crucial to the fight it is one thing. If they are just starting a new fight that's another.

Maybe it is about the principle that anti-Doge forces shouldn't have a say who Doge employs. If Doge fire anyone its enemies can dig up allegedly offensive postings of, then it isn't Doge draining the swamp, but the swamp draining Doge.

Or maybe it is a "No man left behind" sort of thing, where one precommits to spending resources (in Doge's case political efforts) to defend your own, as to make sure thoey fight with greater devotion to the cause.

I don't really care about Doge, I care about results. Elon Musk can take care of the Doge staffer by hiring him at Space X or Tesla. Everyone at Doge needs to be aware that success is everything. If they win, they will have a great resume, many tech billionaires willing to pay them nice salaries, etc. If they lose they may never be employed again. They may end up in jail.

These are the stakes. This is the mission. They have one chance at this.

They can't get entrenched on this specific battle

This is true of 'both sides' (sorry, convenient shorthand) - but all they have to do is hire him back and go about their business. If anyone wants to blow up about it (which I imagine they would, biblically) then they're the ones getting entrenched, to their disadvantage. Presumably, new giant things will keep coming along for them to continue blowing up about.

Or, ideally they'd just do it this afternoon with an intentionally quiet announcement and everybody would forget about it by Monday after the Super Bowl.

Look at me, being all optimistic - feels good man

If we want DOGE to be popular long term, so that Congress backs its recommendations and they become more permanent than the sitting president, we need to stick with things normies can understand and get behind. If Edgy Tweets turns 5% of normie opinions against DOGE, then DOGE can lose significant ground in the theater that matters..

Here's something plenty of normies can get behind: "One shouldn't be fired for the posts they made on their own time on social media".

This is obviously not a principle without limits though, and for a lot of people being avowedly racist is beyond that limit. How would it even be possible not to take that attitude into the workplace?

Is this obvious?

Fairly obvious. If someone had tweeted [terrorist] did nothing wrong even on their own time it would be disqualifying. It's not so much the act itself but the attitudes it betrays, attitudes which are (or rather ought to be) incompatible with his position.

More comments

Idk, normies pretty regularly get behind firing teachers for starring in porn.

Sexual immortality is different than kids shit posting online.

Classroom teacher is also different from coder / sysadmin.

Unfortunately I'm not sure that's 100% accurate. Most normies have a tipping point. "Maybe a teacher should be fired if they post photos of themselves stripping on Facebook." "Maybe a tech bro should be fired for posting that they would never marry someone outside their race." Everyone draws a line somewhere.

When I was in primary school, in a pretty normal place, there was no Facebook, but there were teachers who stripped. And at least some of the parents (and students) knew about it. And they remained teachers despite this. So no, I think the normies can chill.

Nothing says his behavior was unprofessional. He just said things which are "inappropriate" as described by who knows whom based on whatever definition of what's appropriate. Most likely not even in a professional setting, if I'm getting the "deleted pseudonym" part right.

based on whatever definition of what's appropriate

There isn't a single mainstream workplace in the Western world where saying 'normalise Indian hate' would not be considered unprofessional.

If you're at home and you stub your toe and say fuck, is that considered unprofessional? Are people supposed to act 'professional' in every part of their lives?

From the New York Times through academia to Lockheed Martin, expressing racist sentiments has become so mainstream that I have trouble understanding how you could say this. Not only is it normal to shitpost racism on social media when you're off the clock, it's literally in some people's job descriptions.

From the New York Times

I wish there was a bot which replied with just two words under any mention of that guy: "Sarah Jeong"

What are you talking about? Non-white non-males say mad racist-sexist shit all the time, and not only don't get fired, but were on dedicated payrolls to do just that.

It's not an exception if the idea they should be fired is purely aspirational.

In what sense is it false? People like this had cozy jobs in both the public and the private sector for like a decade, and were in no danger of losing their jobs at any point. You said this sort of stuff would get you fired anywhere else, that's blatantly false.

Did Vance actually call for cancelling someone like that? It's not like there was a shortage of targets.

The point is that they're making an exception...

An exception from what? Can you point to any left-winger who was fired for similar conduct? (preferably enough of them to make a pattern, but that's way to much for me to realistically ask for)

That's speculation. Can you point to any left-winger who was as an actual matter of fact fired for similar conduct? It doesn't even have to be at/by DOGE, anywhere in the American public sector is close enough for me.

Without that evidence, I think you're just projecting your ideals onto them and accusing them of hypocrisy when they don't live up to standards they never claimed.

Case in point

https://www.dailywire.com/news/shell-game-the-feds-said-anti-white-activists-dei-unit-was-disbanded-she-was-actually-promoted

So Indian-hate is about to be normalized?

Wait, who fired him in the first place if not Musk?

And J.D Vance has endorsed bringing him back.

Firing him for statements that would get him fired anywhere else

Shitposting on the internet should not get him fired anywhere else.

I don't find it obvious at all that "normalize Indian hate" isn't a true reflection of how he feels about Indian people or why it's "shitposting".

Cool, but I come from a world where the idea of digging out someone's social media posts in order to get them fired was seen as absurd, and I'd like to get back to that world.

"would", not "should".

From what I read it was under a pseudonym

Yes he did change it later to a pseudonym

He used to have the account under his name and later renamed it, which isn't great opsec.

Yeah not exactly genius level behaviour, although the account was deleted in December but people found the archives. Nothing safe online once you attach your name to it

Beyond my wildest optimistic dreams - what is happening

That’s a death knell? How many people were even going to take it, anyway? It doesn’t make a difference if Musk can keep refusing to disburse apportioned funds.

I won’t feel comfortable until I see enforcement of the Impoundment Act. Are there any suits bringing that forward?

It doesn’t make a difference if Musk can keep refusing to disburse apportioned funds

Wait, who's the President, again?

I think it’s Vince McMahon?

Obviously Musk. Trump is his PR representative.

Benjamin Netanyahu

IMO the right play would have been to announce massive unforgiving layoffs immediately after the deadline. Anyone who took the offer gets 8 months pay. Anyone who gets laid-off gets the absolute minimum. That’s how you establish credibility.

Except they can’t offer 8 months pay since there isn’t yet a budget after March.

Here’s what I’m confused about: if they can’t offer 8-months pay because there isn’t a budget after March, how come they can offer to not lay-off everybody in March? It seems like everyone expects that money to be there. The only question is if the employees in question will be required to work.

Because there’s a specific law against offering such payments before the funds have been appropriated.

Presumably that law applies also against making binding commitments to not fire those persons for that duration.

Only problem is 8 months is less than the minimum, for folks at about the mid career stage after 22 years of service you're guaranteed to get more than 8 months pay as severance.

I thought max buyouts under federal law is 25k?

I was referring to severance under an involuntary separation. There's of course a formula.

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-administration/fact-sheets/severance-pay-estimation-worksheet/

Only works if you’ve got an iterated process, though. If done one department at a time, that’d deploy the fear of God.

And he's back.

I feel like this whole thing is a microcosm of how the world works.

So these DOGE kids can push their way past the weather nerds at NOAA, but what would happen if they tried that at the Pentagon or CIA? Surely the billions vanishing into thin air at those two places are far more pressing.

The DOGE kids have done very little so far beyond getting read-only access to some non-classified disbursements that they can’t actually stop.

Surely the billions vanishing into thin air at those two places are far more pressing.

Yes, but in their defense, these kids have their whole life ahead of them.

Everyone should have expected resistance. Looks like bureaucrats were stunned by Musk's quick advance, but have now reacquired their composure.

It's far from over. Now the real fight begins.

And where is this wall?

You've listed a DOGE member who was too politically toxic to keep in DOGE. Okay. Is he the only member of DOGE? Critical to DOGE? Impossible to replace? Did the great DOGE experiment hinge on this one person?

You have also raised a court case. Was... that not part of the expectation? Was DOGE only supposed to be able to work if literally no one tried to bring a lawsuit against it?

Its not dead and there legal challenges were always going to happen. For the curious, the tweets in question were from this summer.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,”

“Normalize Indian hate” in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool"

“I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

Not sure how that last one is conceivably racist. The now-deleted account was @nullllptr but previously was called @marko_elez - the staffers name.

Why would he ever say these things under his real name?

Did he say those things when the account was under his real name? Or did he say them after the account had been renamed?

I'd agree that these are racist. I'd also point out that there have been many, many, cases of leftists crying wolf when they supposedly dredged up something racist that someone did, and 9 times out of 10 it's innocuous, happened twenty years ago, or both. Having it actually pan out is unusual. That's why this case was met with a lot of skepticism--most of the time something like this doesn't pan out.

They're racist. Now what? They're racist in a way that's extremely common if you observe how people actually behave. Most people won't in practice date outside their race. This guy just admitted it. A healthy society is structured such that people don't have to lie all the time in public about their honest preferences.

Stays and injunctions will start pouring in as district court judges stop fearing that their orders will be simply ignored.

Did you know that you can appeal stays and injunctions on an emergency basis all the way up to the Supreme Court? This isn't a slam dunk to way to a hearing, let alone a win, particularly since you now need to clear emergency hurdles as well as prevail on the questions on the merits - but the court system can move surprisingly quickly when it wants to. And recently, on balance, I would say that it is likely to be deferential to the executive, particularly on these sorts of questions. Trump v. Hawaii is a relevant case here, both in terms of SCOTUS' deference to the executive and in terms of the fact that the case was heard by SCOTUS within a year of the Presidential action in question.

...which brings me to my next question: did you know that people sometimes attempt to provoke lawsuits on purpose?

I have no idea if Team Trump is that smart, but one potential strategy is to draw litigation on an area that you know is favorable (in this case - executive branch's management of its own employees!) and get a ruling from SCOTUS that is in your favor and maybe just a bit broader than absolutely necessary. Now you use that ruling to cover your next round of broader, slightly less precedented actions - and this time your enemies are thinking twice about suing you because they don't want to lose before SCOTUS again and give you cover for whatever your next move is. Really, if you can be confident that the courts are on your side (and they might not be, this stuff is a bit arcane to me so idk) you're in a win-win scenario at this point - either you get away with doing what you want, or you get to do what you want after a short break and you set precedent that lets you do more in the future.

TLDR; I don't think a single lawsuit means DOGE is dead.

Maybe Congress can tap in…

I do think this will be necessary for Continued Trump Winning. I might try to flesh this out more as a top-level post, but basically while DOGE is whipping up the true believers into a feeding frenzy, setting a right-wing narrative about, say, USAID, and perhaps getting solid reform, letting Elon run the narrative has a serious problem: unless you're following along with every Tweet (and most Americans are not) you're sort of vaguely getting splattered by a firehose of information. Now, you'll recall how well that approach worked during the Stop Trump push. Instead of focusing on one clearly bad thing, Team Anti-Trump hit him from 40 different angles and ultimately none of the attacks stuck narratively even if they stuck legally.

Letting Elon Tweet this stuff out in bits and pieces is great for Team Trump morale, but to get a win that sticks in the mind of America Team Trump needs to find a clear-cut case of (ideally criminal) malfeasance by an ideological enemy and then either make hay out of the criminal prosecution or have Congress make a big stink about it. (Ideally don't have Elon tweet about it before it hits the newspapers, that can have an inoculatory effect in some cases.) The narrative needs to be something extremely simple, no more complex than "Under our political opponents, $400 million in fraud was facilitated at USAID," and then they need to get their allies in Congress to do nothing except talk about that exact message until USAID and their political opponents are discredited - and then move on to the next target.

I'm not saying the discombobulating series of actions are bad - it's actually a very good strategy, I think - but for it to have lasting effect, there also needs to be a very simple narrative that everyone can grasp and that everyone can hear. Think Watergate, or even better the Lewinsky scandal.

At least, that's my sense. I'm not trying to argue that it's good or bad for America, I leave that up to you, but in terms of what works, I think America needs to hear something simpler and louder than Elon tweeting for four years. Congressional hearings might just do it.

Trump's true test was always going to be whether or not he can get Congress to work for him. If he crashes on the same shores as Obama did, he's capped at being a powerful executive and doesn't secure a lasting legacy.

I hope that unitary executive action wasn't the only chapter in his plan and that he actually has a consolidation phase in mind. Otherwise this is going to end up a very heroic defeat.

I agree with this, with a caveat: Congress has been pushing more and more off on to the executive. If Trump simply destroys much of the administrative state and streamlines the rest, it's possible he will have a lasting legacy simply because Congress may not sign off on future expansions of the executive and because even if they do, it might take decades for the bloat to return.

However, I you're correct that a consolidation phase is probably necessary to really cement a legacy, particularly when looking ahead towards future electoral dynamics.

The delay in closing date is actually doing Musk a favor by allowing an extension of time for more workers to accept the offer in the meantime. Only 40k have accepted so far.

I think Muskateers was a much better way to refer to the Dodge staffers.

And if one of the four resigned it's now the Three Muskateers so even better!


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