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An Indian Abroad: The Actually Not-True-Scotsman Ventures Down South
I had a rather eventful weekend, and what follows is somewhere in-between a travelogue and color commentary.
The UK is, at the time of writing, experiencing a "heat wave". This is rather loosely defined as temperatures above 27° C in England, and 25° in Scotland. To my Indian sensibilities, this is somewhere between amusing and ludicrous. I've run my AC at 24° without issue back home, and 27°C is a a nice day in spring where I'm from.
Still, hoofing it as I was with a backpack laden with clothes to the nearest rail station, I had to admit that it was hotter than usual. Enough to break out a sweat. I was on my way down south to England, to visit a distant cousin of mine after he and his girlfriend had been kind enough to spend quite a few hours driving up north to see me. I'd last been in Manchester sometime in 2022, but I hadn't had much opportunity to see the sights. I'd been there to give the final half of the PLAB exam that gatekeeps medical practice in the UK (for foreign grads), and had to rush back to India shortly after with my (now) ex. Still, while I hadn't known my cousin and his girlfriend that well back then, they'd been kind enough to offer us a room in his flat, and we'd hit it off, finding out that despite being raised in very different environments, we got along quite well. Indian currency doesn't go very far in the UK, and the savings alone were significant at the time.
While I've been in the UK for almost a year now, it's been spent up in Scotland. With a weekend free, I decided that now was a good time to see what the rest of the country had to offer during the summer.
I faced no end of difficulty along the way, the British train network isn't made of the same stern stuff as its estranged Indian counterpart. These rather unremarkable temperatures had caused one of my trains to give up the ghost, after I'd boarded the first leg of the trip. I did make it eventually, albeit quite harrowed and sleep deprived.
Manchester is a lovely city. Even the little I'd seen of it 3 years back had convinced me that it was far more to my taste than London was. The latter had seemed expensive beyond reason, and the extra culture not worth the expense. I'd lost much hair in the past over my ex's demands that we eventually seek to settle down there. Manchester, in contrast, was just about rich enough for my taste.
This impression was reinforced strongly while I was there. Much more nightlife, much more local color. In contrast, Edinburgh wasn't bad, but it felt far more condensed, with everything of note restricted to the city center or thereabouts.
We tried out a tapas place, a brand new experience as far as I was concerned. I'd only heard about them while watching La La Land, and had been frankly confused about the concept. Well, small plates and suitable for quick dates? The menu felt deceptive, while each dish seemed reasonably priced, you needed three plates or more per person to have a filling meal. The weather was great for outdoor seating at the very least.
The rest of the night was spent visiting a couple of the neighborhood pubs. I'd been to my fair share up in Scotland, but I seemed to always have the bad luck of visiting those with a clientele of mostly pensioners. These ones were far more hip, and I enjoyed listening to the explanations of how the pubs that aimed to cater to students versus those that looked for the after-work crowd aimed to differentiate themselves. A combination of cheaper drinks in the former, and less policing of what went on in the bathroom stalls in the latter (cocaine, that's what went on), as well as staying open past 11 for those that catered to students free from the rigid demands of a 9 to 5.
(At one of the pubs, the yuppie one, the bouncer demanded that I demonstrate what was in the rather large and bulky backpack I was lugging about. Clothes, that's what. I'd just gotten off the train.)
Unfortunately, when we finally retreated to their apartment that night, it was roasting. The building, while modernized in many respects, still had a Victorian superstructure. It went from bitterly cold in winter, to absolutely boiling in summer. I'd previously dismissed their complaints about the heat as Soft British moaning (his girlfriend is a local, and he's grown up there). Unfortunately, as we ascended the stairs towards their top floor apartment, it became clear that we were making a pilgrimage into a reversal of Dante's Inferno. The temperature climbed what felt like a degree each step, and their place could have been rented out as a sauna. It was conjectured that this was an unfortunate consequence of most British architecture being designed to hold in heat, and because all of the warmth rising through the floorboards ended up trapped on their level by a thick roof.
Cracking open the windows was little relief. There was only one per room, which made a cross-draft a distant dream. His English girlfriend was practically prostrated by the muggy heat, and even I, accustomed to the occasional day spiking into the 50s, felt less than comfortable.
I've previously lambasted the Brits as being too poor for air conditioning, but in all fairness, they might feel the need for it about a week or two every year. It's a tough sell, but their place just wasn't built for the other alternative, ceiling-mounted fans.
The next day was pleasantly spent visiting an assortment of cafes, and later on, some pubs. The former were not much to write home about, barring one that was very clearly a holdover from 2012. A lot of exposed brickwork and faux-incandescent lighting. Very quaint, or very tired, even Indian cafes that get on the bandwagon before the last stop had moved on.
The pubs were more interesting. One of them was the grungiest I'd ever seen, walls plastered with Indie rock and Alternative posters, some kind of gig going on in the basement, some of the bass making the floor beneath us shake even as the lyrics were filtered out.
It also had the dubious distinction of having a very seedy alley right next to it, treated as an extension of the pub by the locals. Hardly unsafe, since it was decently lit and populated by plenty of yuppies and teens with more than their fair share of tattoos. Yet it still reeked of piss, and we were pissed upon by a pair of AC units discharging their condensate right next to us. At least someone has air conditioning. The walls were scribbled over with graffiti crying out: "Free Palestine", and posters for various gigs around town.
I noted quite a number of middle-aged and beyond people clinging onto memories of youth. There was a pair of people who could easily have been grandparents, with about one normal set of teeth between them. Didn't stop granny from rocking a very short skirt while gyrating her arthric hips and ass against her partner's gummy smile. Very amusing.
A gentleman I'd spotted inside eventually came on out. A lounge lizard, if I'd ever seen one. Middle aged, rocking some kind of casual-ish suit I lack the sartorial sense to describe, but one that left plenty of chest hair poking out at the top. Slicked back hair, tastefully hiding potential bald spots. Prowling about looking for someone to seduce. He hadn't had much luck at anything except polishing off several martinis by the time we left.
A girl outside looked like she'd had enough. Very pretty, but with a hang-dog expression that conveyed either severe melancholy or black out drunkenness. My cousin's girlfriend expressed her sympathies, reminiscing about her own misspent youth, and nights where she'd been far too drunk for her own good. I noted the Lounge Lizard eyeing her, but she had a boyfriend on her arm, albeit one that looked about as faded as she seemed. I presume that the nearby gaggle of youngish people were friends, and would keep them safe regardless.
I felt slightly out of place, I must admit. At some point, not quite clear to me, we'd turned into "young professionals" as opposed to college students in the springtime of our lives. I couldn't pass as one of the kiddies grudgingly showing ID, nor could I quite empathize with pensioners seeking to find out quite how much coke they could do before their heart stops. Still, it's nice to actually have money, even if not quite as much time to spend it.
The night passed, though I wasn't quite sure how. I'd stayed up later than my hosts, and eventually realized I'd forgotten how to open the suicide windows all the way. Too late to wake them up for a reminder, so I spent the night tossing and turning in my tightie-whities. I've had worse.
The next, and final day, had been organized at my behest. At some point, I'd evinced interest in visiting the Royal Armories Museum (to meet the ever-entertaining Johnathan Ferguson), but was enthusiastically informed by my cousin that we had the Imperial War Museum in town. With a name like that, how could I not go?
It was a bit of a drive, and the exterior was uninspiring. Very 1990s, all angular slopes and little decoration to break them up.
The insides were rather interesting. I was a bit confused by the currently running exhibition, organized by a Punjabi lady and celebrating her experience of growing up in the UK as an immigrant. A lot of East meets West, leaning towards the East. Not particularly exciting to me, I'd grown up there.
I was rather amused by some of the 'artifacts' on display. Random religious knickknacks, devotional calendars. Holographic wall art of various deities, cheap junk jewelry and packets full of bindis. A lot of it was rather familiar, I might not be Punjabi, but the usual pan-Hindu cultural noosphere is very conserved. It was a microcosm of simpler times, one I'd been just about old enough to catch as it faded away.
I joked to my cousin that this display was rather incongruous, the equivalent of opening a "British experience" exhibit in India with an assortment of such unique cultural touchstones as a Henry The Hoover, the kind of paperback Bibles left to rot in cheap hotels, next to a can of bovril.
I'm still not quite sure what any of this had any business doing in a War Museum, but I guess they have to fill the space somehow.
The actual meat and bones, relating to real conflict? That was far more interesting. This place seemed to restrict itself from WW2 all the way till modern day, if you excuse the fact that Great War on Terror has been past its prime for almost two decades now.
I geeked out over various exhibits, reading random journals, looking at the knives and guns. I'm more of a modern day combat fan, but there's still some charm in 13-pounder cannons (quickly found out to be obsolete at the beginning of WW1), Lee-Enfields and pilot mittens from more genteel times, when Real Men fired pistols at each other while flying at motorway speeds.
Despite the imprecations not to touch any of the exhibits, I did cop a feel of a decommissioned nuclear bomb. Very nice.
The mockup of an Engima machine was out for maintenance, so I went for the most interactive exhibit around: a WW2 tank simulator, with 3 different stations meant for multiplayer fun for the whole family.
A bunch of kids were having a great time, the youngest boy yelling at his older sisters to figure out the controls to move and fire the gun, while he was stuck with the boring old job of loading it.
When they were done, I went ahead, but found myself alone, and decided to flex my chops by single-handedly running all 3 stations by myself. I finished in record time, the mockup Tiger no match for my skills. Rather charming, but the sim had an abysmal frame rate and seemed to be based off a game engine that had been cutting edge in 1999.
Eventually, a full audiovisual presentation began, some kind of over-wrought documentary about the cost of war. I'd already finished seeing everything worth seeing by then, so I settled for shitposting to my Arma 3 buddies and apologizing for not being able to visit despite passing through York.
("They made the HMS Proteus from Arma 3 into a real thing!" I declared, while taking a snap of a model of a nuclear submarine. My player base was intimately familiar with all kinds of unholy shenanigans I'd managed to run with the model in-game, despite it being a static prop.)
There was a molten girder from the WTC on display, thankfully cleaned of residual jet fuel if not a ton of rust. A little personal, that one, I'd been atop one of the Twin Towers a mere week or so before the planes hit.
What else was there of note? Well, a Women In War section, which thankfully didn't stray entirely into "war declared, a million men dead, women and children most affected" territory. A preserved Harrier jet, you think you know how big those are until you're next to them in person, most jets rival school-buses. There was a proto-typical Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carrier from Rhodesia, looking very much like it would fit into the Dishonored franchise.
Not much else to say, really, but I had a decent time.
The rest of the day was spent visiting my cousin's parents. Had to do my duty as an Indian, after all. Lovely people, and they absolutely stuffed me with more food than I could shake a stick at, and stuffed more into my hands to help me survive the train ride home. At some point, I found out that my "cousin" and I were more distantly related than we thought. We were both very bad about keeping track of the tangled web of terminology that wrapped around our hundreds of relations, and had been under the impression that we were second cousins, with a common great-grandpa.
Nope, the line had diverged another grandpa back, making us third cousins. This caused a bit of an existential breakdown, and I dejectedly asked my cousin if he wanted me to pay him rent. He declared, referring to some online calculator, that we only had 1% of our genes in common, we were barely related!
1% of our genetic variance, I retorted, pointing out that we shared 50% of our total genetic material with bananas. He was kind enough to concede without charging me the rent, or rescinding a prior request that I be the Best Man at his upcoming wedding.
I suppose it was a rather important 1%, given that we could pass as actual cousins, barring his love for suits on all occasions and me trotting around in lovingly preserved floral print.
Stuffed, we finally drove back to his place. Along the way, I'm not quite sure how, the conversation diverged into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think the triggering factor was his casual question about how Indians felt about the conflict, and my response that we tended to support the Israelis because of the simple fact that they weren't Muslims. I explained that despite this, in liberal upper-middle class circles back home, the trend was towards vocal support of the Palestinians. They nodded in agreement, and expressed that that's the way that they, and all folk of good character leant.
I was met with a question regarding my own stance on the matter. A rather uncomfortable question, given that I'm rather pro-Israeli and wouldn't really give a shit if Gaza was turned into a glassy parking lot. I respect them for creating an oasis of technocratic superiority in what is, by default, a sandy hellscape that proves that, despite claims on Reddit, even the "Land of Milk and Honey" has an expiry date. I've got nothing against Muslims, per se, I get along fine with them, and would even call another, slightly older, Pakistani colleague a good friend.
I knew this was the wrong answer, so I tried to hide my power level by stating that I was slightly more positive towards Israel.
This was still clearly an inappropriate response. My cousin thoughtfully declared (in the mindset of setting straight a relative Fresh off the Boeing) that in British circles, at least around our age, support for Palestine was the only option within the Overton Window. I quite truthfully said that I didn't want to misrepresent myself (more than I had to).
This still caused offense. His girlfriend declared that Israel was a genocidal bully, murdering and beheading children and starving millions. How could I not possibly condemn them? Well, I said, somewhat honestly, I'd grown up in a country where thousands of children starving or dying in conditions less humane than refugee camps was a sight I could see on a whim, or against my desires not to. This threw her for a bit of a loop, but she declared that it was the business of good people to still try and appreciate the severity of Israel's sins. I said that was easier said than done, I, likely most Third Worlders, was rather jaded by the horrors I'd seen and taken for granted. If I could see open sores and far-too-thin children on the streets where I lived, without burning the place down, why would I come to an entirely different country and make a fuss about events half a continent away?
She complained about how Israel had used the October attacks as a pre-text to engage in the "genocide" that was still ongoing. A mere six hundred Israelis had died, she said, and yet they'd killed 50,000 Palestinians without showing any inclination to stop.
I really didn't want to push the point. Real life isn't quite the Motte, and my immediate arguments, namely that Hamas was an insurgency using the civilian populace as a shield, that the average Palestinian supported them, or that it was futile to expect a "proportionate" response after kicking the bear in the nuts, weren't worth the pain.
My cousin took a more considered approach, complaining that the Brits had caused this whole mess by importing Jews into a homeland they'd ceded thousands of years back. Wasn't it only fair that they make up for their error by taking a stronger stance in condemning the ongoing atrocities?
I was comfortable claiming that this was a myopic perspective, once the Jews were there and the British gone, who exactly had attempted to massacre all of them? Who had tried to push them out from a river to the nearest body of salt-water? I found the most traction by, once again, quite honestly, throwing up my hands and declaring that both sides had blood on their hands and were locked in a cycle of violence with no obvious off-ramp. There are few more inadequate equilibria. I did point out that Jews were flagrant hypocrites by still using the Holocaust as a shield to deflect modern criticism, I'm no fan of being a partisan who doesn't judge arguments on their merits, or of naked hypocrisy (I feel somewhat ashamed about mine). This seemed to mollify them, albeit I still felt some fading radiation of disappointment at me for not seeing the Right Side of History.
Try as you might to simply see the sights and have an enjoyable weekend, the Culture War still comes for you. Even when conveyed through very friendly, kind and otherwise quite sane friends and family. Sometimes you find out that your blood ties aren't quite as close as you'd thought, sometimes it's your political views. Today, I found out it's both. C'est la vie, if you'll pardon my French.
I find if your goal is just to change the subject, saying that the history of the Mandate means that our input is uniquely unwanted by both sides, and that we should take the hint and butt out, works brilliantly. NPCs on both sides are horrified but have no comeback because you are off-script. It's like playing the Sicilian back in the days when everyone was taught opening theory starting e4 e5.
I'm not sure how that would work? Wouldn't their obvious reply be that the Palestinians (and the Israelis) were begging the international community for support and aid?
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Nah. People have been trained to see “we should do nothing” as being equivalent to “we should support the oppressors”, it’s a tactic that they’re very used to dealing with.
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It’s interesting to see the contrast. In Texas air conditioners don’t even come on at 78 degrees outside, except in commercial buildings. You can be pro-Israël in polite circles, you can criticize Israeli policy, you can not care who wins. But being pro-Palestine is quite strange, and understood as the domain of too-liberal for their own good ivory tower students. It might not come up, although there’s a good chance Trump would.
Grandma would stuff you and your friend with food, of course. But if you stayed at someone’s house for free it’s just insulting to offer- or ask for- money after the fact, regardless of relation. You agreed on the price, after all. You wouldn’t care much about the distinction between a second and third cousin, either- and you probably wouldn’t know there is one, second cousin just means ‘blood related but not a first cousin, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, or in direct line’.
I was joking about paying for rent! He's a nice dude, he would never ask. I covered my stay by fighting to the front of the pub to pay for our (many) drinks.
Indians are usually far more adept at keeping track of the clan. I think I personally know just two of my third cousins, this one included. With my coaxing, he's up to four. But if I cared to ask my mom, I could probably find out about dozens of others. Even so, I'm sure some have fallen through the cracks, the average person would have ~192 third cousins, but that assumes each generation having 2-3 kids. At least until quite recently, our family had quite a few more. We guesstimated that there's 500 of them running around, with a sizeable number scattered across the globe. I think the only continents I don't have relatives in are South America and Antarctica.
I was somewhat taken aback. I thought that the UK would be similar to the US in that regard. I'm not sure if my cousins are in a relative bubble of PMC left-leaning folk, or if it really is near universal. All of the media I've noticed here seems to be at least leaning Palestinian, but it had never come up as a topic of IRL conversation until almost a year in. I presume they wouldn't have asked if they didn't feel comfortable around me.
Oh sure, knowing your third cousins isn’t weird. It’s knowing whether they’re second or third cousins- or even caring- thats a bit odd.
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Thanks for always posting these stories! I'm curious how the pro-Palestine monoculture you describe comes to be in the UK - is this stance already the predominant one in their media? Here in Germany, every mainstream outlet is solidly pro-Israel, and since COVID at the latest media skepticism has become right-coded. As a result, we get some wild right-side-of-history positions like "we should let Israel do its thing and take in all the Palestinians as refugees here", along with vegan housecat fantasies that Israel and Palestine could get along if Bibi just were replaced by a proper left-wing leader.
I'm far from an expert on the topic, but it seems to be that the following might be true:
Brits hold a far greater amount of what can be best described as "white guilt", and are more likely to express remorse for colonial misadventures. I think the exhibition I just saw, putting some random Punjabi woman of no particular importance in the limelight, it's a symptom of various attempts to make amends. It is very easy for people to pattern-match Israel into the colonial oppressor, and Palestine into the plucky underdog. There are a lot of bleeding-heart libs around. I might be rather liberal in my worldview, but I'm also very hard-nosed.
Opinion polls show that the average Briton is rather divided between the two options. But the younger you go, the more pro-Palestinian they get. And the young are far more likely to be activists attempting to rally the troops. Those geriatrics clinging to their youth I mentioned earlier aren't likely to be the people graffiting slogans. Supporting Israel in that demographic is very uncool, but it's not like there isn't any strong support at all, they've got their share of lobbyists and adherents in the halls of power. So my impression is that there's a Palestinian groundswell going up against an Israeli entrenched government.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c207p54m4rqt A quick browse of the BBC suggests relative neutrality but a noticeable lean towards Palestine.
You're welcome!
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Like Hawaiian shirts? I knew I liked you …
The first store my mom ever took me to in the US was a place called Marshall’s. A fantastic place for cheap clothes that last season were in the fancier stores.
She told me to go look at the men’s area and when I turned a corner there was this huge H Rack of tropical shirts. My little communist brain was gob smacked.
I mean, I’ve seen blacks and Hispanics at this point but I just didn’t know it was legal to wear such bright colors.
It’s been 34+ years and I still rock my tropical floral Hawaiian shirts almost daily.
I also have social anxiety and am 6ft5 285 so I try to hide by standing out and the shirts help in that department.
Love your posts.
E: as to Israel - I’ve noticed people attacks the weak. My opinion is state what you believe in situations that aren’t related to business. People don’t actually care … they’re just pretending.
Indeed. It's a pleasure to meet another gentleman of culture.
This particular shirt is of great sentimental value. I got a very nice photo taken in Thailand while wearing it, and I've taken good care of it ever since.
Funnily enough, it was in the bargain rack, and the brand I bought it from never released another of the same style that I liked nearly as much.
Tell me about it. You'd think Scotland was in mourning, the way the average person runs screaming from a dash of color. It's all black North Face puffers and drab brown coats. No wonder everyone is depressed.
Thank you <3
In normal circumstances? I'd be happy to defend myself. In this scenario, I strongly value my relationship with my cousin and his girlfriend, soon to be fiancée, and I wasn't inclined to rock the boat. She did seem to care, certainly more than he did, I could tell she was getting worked up by my nonchalant attitude. Plus the UK's approach to free speech is... inadequate. A lot of my spicier takes are necessarily reserved for this site. What I'd give to be in the States instead.
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Sucks so much when people you have normal relationships come up with the most basic, one-sided, emotionally driven opinions about politics.
I had a friend, a serious thinker, works close with govt and has seen/worked in the sausage factory with politicians and really ought to be credulous, come up to me and talk about how she read about how Kamala was just really smart and incisive and kept everyone on their toes with her reading of documents and questions to staffers... You can (and my friend certainly does) hate Donald Trump with a burning passion but this is a bridge too far.
Neither of us are American! Where is this stuff even coming from? So many are living in a totally closed media environment.
It really is a shame. I find politics occasionally interesting to argue about, but I find myself dismayed when people can't do it without becoming heated. "It's only a game (of thrones), why you gotta get mad?"
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Here is the Imperial War Museum's purpose, in its own words:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/sites/default/files/files/2025-04/IWM%20Corporate%20Plan%202025%20-%202028.pdf
Of course there is an exhibit exploring the family, marriage, religion, and the role of women within Punjabi culture in an English war museum. Its like they picked an exhibit as conceptually distant as possible from what they tell the public their purpose is. Its so quintessentially English, of their all encompassing self debasement. Just a little snapshot, a microcosm, of the degradation of their own culture and people perpetuated by their own elites.
Trust me, I feel second-hand embarrassment about the whole affair. It's somewhere between performative, maudlin and plain old cringe. Even if they'd wanted to showcase the undersung colonial experience, in the War museum, how hard could it be to find something to showcase that has something to do with war?
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Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
Your anecdote reminds me of how much H.P. Lovecraft was a xenophobic misanthrope.
But his stories wouldn't have been the same if he didn't have that deep fear and hatred.
Not justifying it. Just saying that its sometimes better to separate the art from the artist.
The details of H.P. Lovecraft's life never bothered me. Probably because I never admired him as a human being or public persona the way I admired Harlan. So I can sit back and intellectually register that the existential dread he conjures up in so many of his stories just wouldn't hit the way it hits if the man wasn't constantly terrified of the mongrelization of his nation.
Also, well, my stance on what I believe to be the future of my nation is on record here. But it's enough to say I don't even necessarily find those stances to be offensive, and perhaps even somewhat prescient after the irrefutable evidence of the failures of multiculturalism we've all been subjected to in the countries or localities tipping white minority in the western world. But that's a separate topic.
No, my heart break with Ellison is from the fact that as a kid, I didn't love him for his work, but for his public persona. I came to his work much after the fact, and if anything, it's working backwards. I've rewatched several of those Harlan Ellison's Watching bits, and instantly fell in love with this witty outspoken firebrand telling it like it is. Then I go back to the fiction and my heart sinks at another autobiographicalish story venting his spleen about how much he hates me.
I mean, yeah. He could be funny and charming. My late father, who knew nothing about the guy, saw some of those on the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it was the Sci-Fi Channel and not Syfy or whatever they're calling it today), and he too loved them. Thought they were funny, thought they were witty, they made him laugh, and he liked Ellison.
So it goes, as another SF author said.
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Lovecraft was pretty intense in his writing, but in person he was usually pretty kind to his friends and relations. Even those who belonged to racial groups that he otherwise didn’t care for, like his ex-wife Sonia Greene, who he remained on good terms with even after the divorce. And he was nice to cats.
TIL, thanks.
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So you mean to say, he was an artist!
The greater works are always autobiographical to some degree. In minor works, the author's own individuated personality is not strong enough to shine through ("every great philosophy hitherto has been a confession on the part of its author" [emphasis mine]).
Sometimes you won't always like the autobiographical content that is thus exposed. It won't always be admirable, it won't always speak to your own experience, etc. But you can still choose to adopt a more detached viewpoint and find what can be appreciated in it as a phenomenon for its own sake.
Of course this is not a natural and spontaneous attitude, but one that must be cultivated through diligent practice. I try to make a habit of doing mental exercises like, I imagine someone I admire, either because of their work or on a personal level or whatever, and I imagine: what if I discovered something absolutely horrifying about them? What if their own values actually turned out to be antithetical to everything I value? What if they hated free expression, what if they supported wireheading, etc. Or maybe there's something far worse than any of that, something that my conscious mind won't even let me access. And in this hypothetical I try to remind myself that, in spite of all that, there still has to be some kernel there that made me admire them in the first place, so my goal at that point would be to achieve an understanding of the phenomenon that is the person as a whole, rather than get bent out of shape about the individual things that we disagreed on.
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I'm not sure how much of Ellison's writings are his own faults, rather than exaggerated versions of failures he's seen and done, but there's definitely a mix and I agree that it probably doesn't favor him -- the man did end up with a bipolar diagnosis late in his life, and it pretty clearly wasn't some badge-of-accomplishment diagnosis. And he definitely has some of that 'I talked to a taxi driver' rather than 'I did this enough to grok it' going on.
Tbf, my gutcheck has some of the exaggeration in The Essential Ellison feels like self-loathing, even before I knew about the BPD... but it wouldn't, wouldn't it, whether because he actually had those flaws that bad or because he felt his minor failures were the end of the world. On the other hand, it's hard to tell how much of his hating was anti-anti-semitism rather than just being a hater in general -- the man famously loathed Star Wars and Spielberg in general, and had a number of non-Jewish cause celebres like van Vogt.
On the gripping hand, it's hard to tell how many of those cause celebres he really cared about, rather than just hating their enemies: From Alabamy With Hate is the best-known example, and particularly damning because its denouement revolves around a letter from a bigot who was 'bad as mud' but 'better' than racial minorities, without much consideration of what made Ellison good rather than just better than bigots, but it's pretty consistent everywhere from race to sexual behavior to the military to his stories to convention behavior. His enemies being idiots, or nazis, or chuds, or the teeming fandom masses, or normies, or whatever... might be better than racial resentment, but it's still not good.
I don't have a lot of room to criticize a hater for hating. I do have a lot of room to criticize a man that wrote at length about how science fiction and speculative fiction aren't the same thing, who can't do anything more himself.
On one hand, there is a point where you have to kill the buddha. Most heroes have feet of clay, few philosophers can commit to the bit to Diogenes level. Especially in media there's always going to be a temptation to present someone who's better than you can be, and whatever extent the mask molds the face, it's never going to be perfect and it can't change what's already happened. It's never pleasant to recognize the extent a writer's real positions are weaker than what they present, but Litany of Tarski -- but in turn neither does a philosophy of life become wrong merely because its proponents can't live up to it. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings, but wanting something that isn't true, or maybe even can't be true, because it's worth the progress toward it, is an acceptable tradeoff in my eyes.
On the other, I'm trying to write up an effortpost about cyberiatrogenic conditions (and, uh, come up with a better name than that), and one of the subleads is "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them", and how that's incredibly dangerous. Few heroes are carved full from in-situ marble, few philosophies can survive being used every day... except in this distant or fiction view, where every consideration comes through the camera lens, at most from wholly-artifical canned challenges built to reinforce the themes of a story. It's easy to forget that, or what it means. This is a way you'll be burned, and the stovetop hurts, and you'll be burned again. That's part and parcel of how heat works. Tech has let us forget that, for short periods and for induction cooktops, but that's an artifact of memory, not of the world.
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
I feel like this would be different if Ellison had any sort of coherent views aside from being loud and angry. What did he stand for that could outlive him? Following along with the civil rights movement? Earning a few attaboys along the way? He mostly just spilled hate across countless pages.
Like I said below, I fell in love with the man's TV persona. And I greatly enjoyed many of his non-autobiographical stories. But undergoing this deep dive into the person has been a journey into the horror of the man. Where as I naively assumed before that the TV persona was the real Ellison because it was so much more impactful than Ellison on the page, and so I assumed written Ellison to be schtick, it turns out the TV Ellison was the schtick, and the written Ellison was the genuine article.
I can only describe it like this. There is a horror film coming out called "Cannibals Rape, Murder and Consume College Coeds 3". You watch all the press junkets and the actors seem very charming and likable. You know when you see the film you'll see some shocking stuff, but you know it's not real. There are no actual cannibals eating anyone.
Then 2 months later Italian authorities arrest the cast and crew because they did in fact rape, murder and consume one of the extras when they were filming in Sicily. Do you still separate the artist from the art? I mean, it was the most amazing cannibal film you've ever seen.
Possibly the only defining feature of Ellison's entire body of work is the hate. It used to exist in a box with suspension of disbelief applied. They were just words on a page. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that more likely than not, the hate was the realest part of him he ever put out there, and it's just sad. Not fun and edgy anymore.
Kevin Spacey did this to both American Beauty and House of Cards for a lot of people pretty closely. So great analogy.
I haven’t read Ellison so I can’t really say, but it has consistently been true that among many artists of all types, suffering, restrictions and angst leads to great art (or at least, the reverse is true, conditioning on great art). The real question is, how often does art in general present actual worldviews rather than merely challenge them, or throw out fascinating ideas that we then grapple with and fill in ourselves? Quite often! I think that’s partially the point, that new ideas, perspectives, and filters can be intoxicating and intriguing. And honestly I view sci-fi writing as more art than science or engineering or something, despite the reputation and being more “cerebral” (not a bad thing). As visionary as art can often present, I think most art is actually overwhelmingly reactionary on both a personal and societal level. It’s just how art is. Once you see it you can’t unsee it, and it shows up everywhere.
So in that sense I do wonder if you put more expectations on his art than any art merits. At the same time I deeply sympathize and more specifically you might not be wrong (again never read him)
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Yeah, that's pretty fair. I'd argue Ellison a few other bits going on (eg, themes of self-sacrifice, some of the hate including legitimate criticisms, a not-IFLS-style scienticism), but I've got of tolerance for well-aimed hate, and I can understand his public persona as a lot deeper a disappointment than Moore-style stuff.
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You have been awarded the hapax legomenon price for extraordinary achievements in rationalist brainwrangling.
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I’ve been a colossal fan of Jeopardy! (a long-running American trivia game show, for those unfamiliar) for most of my life. My enthusiasm for the show skyrocketed during Ken Jennings’ historic 74-game winning streak in 2004. A geeky, witty, self-deprecating guy, Jennings’ prodigious knowledge was matched by his appealing personality, making him a TV phenomenon and boosting the popularity of the show.
After returning to various Jeopardy! exhibition tournaments, cementing his legendary status, he got into the running as one of the potential candidates to replace the show’s iconic decades-long host, Alex Trebek, whose cancer diagnosis had been made public and who was nearing retirement. In 2021, Jennings was officially announced as the new official host of Jeopardy!. He has breathed new life into the show; while Trebek’s personality was aloof and almost enigmatic, Jennings is warm and jocular, frequently engaging in witty repartee with the contestants and helping to bring out their personalities. Jennings also clearly knows a lot of the answers to the questions without needing to read off the cards, allowing him to make more informed split-second judging decisions about the acceptability of contestants’ answers, and allowing him to make certain edifying clarifications and to add cool fun facts about some answers. In other words, he’s the perfect host for the show, the perfect ambassador for the brand, and the perfect steward to carry the show for decades to come.
His politics are also very obnoxiously woke. I try not to use that word very often, considering it over-used and under-defined, but I think it fairly encapsulates his public statements on politics, which can easily be found by perusing his Twitter and Bluesky accounts and, apparently, by listening to his various podcast appearances. He has the typical smug, sanctimonious approach of a guy who was the smartest person he knew for his entire youth, and who was used to winning every argument he came across due to pure cognitive processing power and verbal agility. Political dunks phrased as though they’re so self-evidently obvious that only a total dolt would fail to agree with them. A deep and abiding belief that “supporting” trans people, abolishing borders, and ending “mass incarceration” are the urgent moral responsibility of every good-thinking person.
This commitment to progressive politics has bled over into Jeopardy! itself; since Jennings took over hosting, there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists, and a Jennings has made several on-air comments (mild, but obvious to those who are attuned to them) which reveal his own politics. It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues, despite the ease with which the internet allows people with even a modicum of curiosity to expose themselves to the best arguments from the other side.
Now, I do hope/plan to meet Jennings some day; I have auditioned for Jeopardy! before, making it past the initial testing phase but never getting the call. I plan to continue to audition yearly until I eventually make it on the show, where I’m confident I could make a decent showing of myself and even win some real money. It crushes me to know that someone who’s something of a minor hero of mine would, upon learning my politics, want absolutely nothing to do with me, and may even not want me to be able to appear on the show, one of my life’s dreams. I try to studiously avoid hearing anything about Jennings’ politics, not wanting to further tarnish my warm feelings toward him. My single biggest fear about being doxxed, even above the effect it’d likely have on my personal and professional relationships, is the fear that it could prevent me from having my chance to compete on the show; I try not to think about whether Jennings would want me disqualified.
Given the trajectory of many, many programs which don’t involve Mr. Jennings, it’s likely not his doing. Correlation, causation. Not that he has any reason to fight it, but if it makes you feel any better, you can probably blame faceless executives and market research.
There’s, uh, a few conclusions that you could take from that.
But I think the set of (knowledgeable & impressive faculties & nuanced opinion & wanting to talk about it & visible) is vanishingly small. Having a complicated, technical opinion on the Current Thing is inversely correlated with wanting to blast that opinion on social media. And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
I don’t think that this is honestly much of a factor; my understanding is that Jennings has been very consistent and very vocal about his politics for many years before anyone was considering him for a major media role, and before those specific beliefs were fashionable. The guy genuinely is an old-guard Gen-X progressive, and I don’t see any evidence that he’s either played up or played down those opinions based on any mercenary career concerns. Nor do those politics appear to have had much bearing on his selection for the Jeopardy! hosting gig; he got the role because he was already an extremely well-known institution on the show, and because he genuinely earned it over a long period of time. That’d have been true whether or not his political commentary was frequent or sparse. (Although obviously his specific opinions didn’t actively harm him, which wouldn’t have been true if they’d been significantly right-of-center instead.)
Sorry, I meant that in the general case of media selection pressure, not for Ken in particular. It’s just another filter.
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To be fair, you’re describing about 75 percent of the major 20th century authors here. The personal dysfunction (Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, James Ellroy, David Foster Wallace), the string of failed careers with writing chosen less as a calling and more because it’s easier than working a real job (Bukowski notably, but most of them), the constant seething racial and personal axe-grinding (Phillip Roth, James Baldwin, James Ellroy). Sci-fi writers back then tended to be more functional and less of an emotional garbage fire, which is probably why this was such a surprise to you. To be fair I think it’s a big part of the reason their writing is actually interesting. Riley Sager has a stable home life and is emotionally well adjusted and unfortunately you can clearly see that on every dreary page of fish-wrap.
Agreed, you can see a similar dynamic with Comedians as well.
The greats all seem to have (or had) some deep well of trauma or crazy that they would draw from.
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This is why so many successful authors were on drugs- they got to be mentally ill when they needed to be, to help them write. But individuals who are capable of writing a novel are not stopped from managing their own lives in a semifunctional manner by a little crack.
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Yes. And no. I loved the writing of Harlan Ellison, and he was responsible for one of the best ever Star Trek stories in all the series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", as well as some classic Outer Limits episodes.
But towards the end of his life, he beclowned himself, notably at the 2006 Hugos where he groped Connie Willis.
All through his career, he had (and cultivated) a reputation of being a grade-A pain in the ass, someone awkward to work with, someone who was a troublemaker - but who was worth it because he was just that damn good. And indeed, if you take the title of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, that's exactly what he thought science fiction could and should do, shake up the conventional pieties, show a different version of reality. He really, truly believed in the 60s and the counter-culture as "this is going to change everything". Of course, in the end, a lot of things stayed exactly the same despite it all. (And the delays, delays, and yet more delays and problems with the Dangerous Visions anthologies were also an example of classic Ellison).
On the other hand... we have to separate the artist and the art. This is a guy who could be a total dick, and yet then he writes a story that smacks you in the chops with its humanity. Sometimes he's screaming in justified outrage, in righteous anger, about a real wrong that should be redressed.
Yeah. And then he goes and writes a story like Croatoan which does not go where you expect it to go (he should be writing a slam-dunk pro-choice fable here, shouldn't he? but it's not. It's very differently not).
Ellison was someone who suffered in life, and who took advantage of that as an excuse for being an asshole. I was very angry with him in his later years. And then a while back I read a very sympathetic piece (possibly the foreword to the final Dangerous Visions that he edited after Ellison's death) by J.M. Straczynski about his friendship with Ellison and how he (probably, likely, definitely) had undiagnosed/untreated mental illness for a long time, and how he was declining physically and mentally in his later years and that explained a lot about Ellison for me and won back some of the sympathy he'd lost. This comes from an article about Straczynski and Ellison:
I don't understand how this makes him more likable or sympathetic. I find it odd that people treat mental illnesses as something separate from a person that isn't reflective of the "real" them. But this isn't like some parasite was controlling his brain, his mental illnesses, if they existed, were just as intrinsic to who he was as his good qualities. I don't see how this is different from me saying "I'm really a nice guy I'm just suffering from untreated assholeism"
All of this below is somewhat moot in the sense that I'm not convinced that Ellison had Bipolar.
Disturbances in cognition exist on a spectrum from "this is not recognized pathology and is just my personality structure" (like a preference for scrambled eggs, a love of baseball, or being an asshole to your girlfriend because you are insecure about your small dick) to "this is purely something with an organic cause and blaming the person for their behavior is asinine" (a classic example benign example is a granny who is violent in the hospital because she's delirious and thinks she's is in a Nazi camp because of a UTI, a classic scarier example is someone who engages in a mass shooting because they have a golf ball sized tumor pressing on a few key structures in their brain).
Cases of the former are much more legitimate to blame (whatever that means) if love of eggs cause problems. Realistically insecurity about the small dick requires some sort of sex therapy or something if the person wants to stop hurting others and have a bit better of an experience of life.
Murder granny gets put in restraints and we treat her UTI and then everyone goes about their business and forgives her afterwards.
When it comes to things in the middle of those two extremes (that is, classic mental illness) we have a similar range. On one end you have personality disorders, like borderline personality disorder. These are in truth diseases of personality construction and really tease at what a "disease" is. It's easy to not feel bad for them (although I encourage you to) and this is true to the point where people don't want to give the diagnosis because of stigma (they give bipolar instead, relevance to Ellison?).
At the other end is one of: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. You could debate which one and they are certainly interesting and have interesting impacts on how much sympathy and guilt we should feel (what do you mean a symptom of the disease is that he doesn't think he has a disease and that's why he doesn't take medication and then ends up hurting people?),
True Bipolar 1 with psychotic features is the most stark here. Again I doubt Ellison had this but this the most sympathy you can have. This is a person with a monster inside them that comes up abruptly and severely because they run a 5k and their metabolism of their lithium changes.
They go from total normal nice person to a violent felon who doesn't sleep, spends their entire family's money and does X,Y, and Z ends up in jail with HIV and then gets started on medication and then goes completely back to normal.
Some people do things that put them at higher rate of an episode, but many people commit no mistakes and still lose.
Living with that should increase sympathy, no?
Most people aren't as stark as the straw patient above, but that is what it can be like.
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With bi-polar though for example, being on medication can literally turn you into a different person. My exes mother had bipolar and on medication she was a sweet Christian lady who baked cakes and wouldn't hurt a fly. Off it she was a foul mouthed, paranoid who lacked impulse control and used to beat her kids with metal coat hangers.
Which was the "real" her? The difference between a mental illness and just being an asshole, is an asshole can choose to not be so. With a mental illness you can't.
This should really be “With a mental illness, it is much more challenging not to.” I don’t give a lot of sympathy to people who use excuses like BPD or autism or whatever else to be a jerk.
Some people are dramatically helped by medication (see using Ritalin to make it easier to have executive function with AHDH) - the consequences of not having executive function should not be inflicted on others. If you struggle to remember to (for example) bring both children to school, then put a note on the doorknob, or the coffee machine, or wherever else you will definitely look. Too often, I see people who claim (for example) that they have to make a mess for their partner to clean up, but somehow the negative consequences of their actions never seem to land on themselves.
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And indeed, most working class people treat 'being crazy' as a major character flaw akin to being cruel or lazy or greedy or whatever, while having some sympathy for those who are stupid or disabled. What goes into what bucket of 'how your mind works and you can't help it vs you need to fix that' varies from viewpoint to viewpoint and the progressive view that having a mental illness is an excuse for whatever awful thing and makes you sympathetic in the same way as a disabled person is is not only not universal, it is in this redneck's perspective actively harmful- people with the sorts of minor mental illnesses that could be treated if they'd take some damn responsibility are discouraged from doing so, instead they just harm others, even if minorly, with impunity.
Seriously lots of these 'mentally ill' people just need to go to church and call their mom.
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Because while it doesn't excuse everything, it does explain behaviour. I was angry about it because I thought he was just being an asshole, just pushing to get away with things because he thought he was that special and entitled. Finding out that his brain was busted helped explain "okay, sometimes he genuinely couldn't help it/didn't realise what he was doing".
Genuine mental illness, like physical illness, does have an effect on you that no amount of willpower or grit or 'just decide to do better' will shift. Of course some people will use that as an excuse. But if you have a problem, and don't realise it's a problem, and don't get treatment for it because you're not aware of treatment, then it gets as much latitude as "I never knew I was diabetic and that's why I was always fainting and lacking energy because I wasn't eating correctly" would get someone.
If it's okay to take insulin to treat the problem, it's okay to take antidepressants. It's not about 'the real you', it's about 'this is you when you are healthy and this is you when you are not'.
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You built an image out of the man outside of the thing he is widely known for and then are surprised to find out that your image of the man doesn't match?
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Anyone who has even tangentially heard of I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream or any of its many, many derivative works could tell exactly who he is. Harlan Ellison is a viciously angry, frequently bitter to the point of actively poisoning his readers, incredibly gifted writer.
I give him a lot of slack because anyone filled with such seething, frothing rage is the exact opposite of the people who write soft pap dripping with apathy these days. His fiction has a lot of this as a result: he raged against what he saw as the dying of the light. The works he's become most famous for are alarm bells, warnings, bitter screeds, portraits of existential evil and beasts naked shivering in the dark.
And yes, he was also writing lurid scifi for subsistence, so churning out large volumes of work and acting out as a shock jock to get attention and eyeballs on his work would feed back into it.
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The remarkable predictive accuracy of Nick Fuentes on the Israel Conflict
I'm sure most here have heard of Nick Fuentes, maybe seen clips where he's said something funny or outrageous. I do not consider myself a follower of Fuentes, I have my criticisms of him and his movement, but I have to give credit to Fuentes for churning out consistently correct predictions.
When it came to the Israeli-Gaza war, Nick Fuentes registered these predictions in this short clip, in summary from just the first 60 seconds:
Nick Fuentes registered these predictions on October 8th, less than 24 hours after the Hamas attack on Israel. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Fuentes may have registered the best predictions out of anyone in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7th (feel free to keep me honest here if you think someone else was even more on the money).
Hindsight bias being what it is, the accuracy of Fuente's predictions may seem less impressive than they actually are. But I still remember the huge amount of uncertainty leading up to the Gaza campaign, including a high degree of uncertainty over the strength of Israel's retaliation against Gaza- whether they would show restraint or even put boots on the ground in the first place, and even if they put boots on the ground would it be a relatively short and mostly symbolic campaign. Certainly at the time "Israel is going to ethnically cleans Gaza, provoke escalations from Iranian militias, and widen the conflict to try to draw the US into war with Iran" was a prediction registered by not very many people.
Fuentes drew a huge amount of criticism for vocally opposing Trump's campaign due to his belief that Israel would draw Trump into war with Iran. A lot of that criticism comes from the "Bronze Age Pervert" sphere, and BAP is a sharp critic of Fuentes for Fuente's low-IQ obsession with da Joos. But we can contrast Fuente's sober-minded and accurate predictions with BAP's own incoherent analysis of the conflict he published last week, chalking it up to some old-man syndrome while remaining baffled as to why Israel is pursuing the strategy it has engaged in since the beginning of the conflict.
Nick Fuente's live-stream on Rumble in the aftermath of the US bombing campaign against Iran had something like 66,000 live viewers, with overall viewers on that VOD now around 530k, putting his viewership on par with Ben Shapiro despite the fact Fuentes is banned from YouTube so his content is relegated to a much less mainstream platform.
One of the most remarkable parts of the Ted Cruz / Tucker Carlson debate was that Ted Cruz:
And then, just a few minutes later, Ted Cruz accused Tucker Carlson of being "obsessed with Israel" for Carlson's pointed questions on AIPAC as a foreign lobby. The turnaround of why are you so obsessed coming from someone who just said God has commanded him to support Israel is just a discredited attempt to derail the conversation.
Fuente's obsession with Israel appeared to result in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the series of events following Oct. 7th among anyone else.
Of course this is going to end with Iran conducting a nuclear test. You know that, right? The ayatollah will take a break from tweeting out relationship advice and repeal the fatwa(or reinterpret it) and Iran will launch a volley of conventional missiles which get through and then conduct a nuclear test.
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They're still not accurate. You snuck in there "enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing" as a "successful" prediction. It's actually a failed prediction.
"Knowingly" and "will give Israel an excuse to" are not successful predictions either, unless you can read minds.
Both the US and Israel have at this point made it clear the Gaza population is going to be deported and not allowed to return. It hasn't happened yet but both Trump and Israel have stated this position. Gaza is completely destroyed, even if they wanted to keep the Gazans in Gaza it's hard to see how that would be possible at this point even with a good-faith effort. But the overtures from both Trump and Israel is that the population is going to be deported; sorry, "allowed to leave."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-gaza-war-not-expelling-palestinians-egypt-post-ceasefire-plan/
If nobody will take them, then they will remain in Gaza. There's an entire wall around the place.
They are going to couch it mostly as voluntary emigration, but if you blockade a region and completely level the cities and make intolerable conditions, and then set up offices to facilitate "voluntary emigration" that is an expulsion as far as I'm concerned. The extent of the destruction of Gaza doesn't point in a different direction with respect to longer-term plans.
That is called a siege. It is a legitimate military tactic, albeit one that Israel has not employed in this current engagement.
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These predictions are pretty damn weak, man. Fuentes isn't making any good predictions. "The terrorist attack on Israel will encourage Israel to attack back!" is not prescience. Nor is proclaiming that this is what gives us license to attack Iran's nuclear facilities; we've been dealing with their attempts to go nuclear for years and years at this point.
Predicting retaliatory violence after an attack isn't foresight.
Not very many people predicted the extent of the destruction of Gaza, not to mention that escalation path that would ensue from that response. Many here were consistently underpredicting the Israeli response every step of the way.
The Israeli response has been quite measured -- Gaza still exists, and its population has even climbed, last I checked. They should go harder, but they seem unwilling.
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People were protesting and demanding ceasefires almost immediately after October 7. I assume this was because they expected destruction.
At least on the left some personalities like Cenk Uygur - whose geopolitical acumen I don't value particularly highly - were explicitly condemning Hamas because they thought Israel would just absolutely wreck Gaza in response. (This bit faded as Oct. 7 became more distant and now it's mostly Israel criticism)
A lot of these people overestimated the damage (they assumed much heavier starvation much earlier on) they didn't downplay it.
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In that case it should be easy to provide an example of others that made the same predictions.
Sure, I personally responded to October 7th with "oh, damn, Gaza's gonna get fuuuucked."
Didn't we all? One only needed to have looked at the Palestinian-to-Israeli death ratio in any given scuffle to have known how this was gonna turn out
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At the risk of sounding, I dunno, petty? Did Fuentes put any money on the line, did he find someone to take the other side of his position, reduce the bet to fairly specific terms, and have someone willing to judge who won by a given deadline?
Bryan Caplan puts money on all of the bets he makes and chronicles them in a wiki he maintains. He's got a great record against some very smart people.
There's specific lose conditions, plus incentives to be accurate/not bullshit.
Fuentes also didn't put any specific confidence estimates on those bets, so he can always walk back the ones that were off base if he wants "oh that was a long shot anyway." Well you never said if you thought it was a 10% chance of a 90% chance, so I guess you can retroactively change that belief.
This is how pundits operate. Throwing a bunch of vague predictions against a wall, phrased to feel specific and of course they never let someone take up the other side of the position who can then call them out later.
Like when I was talking about how Tariffs would play out I really tried to be specific enough that I can be judged wrong and lay out a strict 'I was wrong' scenario.
Speaking of, looks like the time is ticking down for some more 'permanent' deals to be worked out in the next month or I'll have missed the mark on the most recent extension.
Edit: And I'm still confident (80% to be specific) that they get it done soon. 20% is reserved b/c we're in a time where crazy events can happen in short time frames.
EU is allegedly pretty close:
https://archive.is/WmZRp
As is India:
https://archive.is/1An8l
Caplan's record, as he readily admits, is somewhat less impressive when you account for the fact that he wins by consistently betting in favor of consensus and the future being like the past. He's not successfully predicting black swan events, but arbitraging others' overestimation of the frequency of black swan events.
Yes.
My point is he records everything and has a clear counterparty rather than just spitting predictions with no skin in the game and crowing that he was right when a few of them land.
But Fuentes ain't predicting black swans either. "Israel and Iran will try to hurt each other" is a generally reliable prediction at its base.
And once you've been given the information "Hamas just killed a bunch of Israeli Civilians, in Israel" there's a few straightforward guesses from there RE: Israeli response.
I'll say there's zero chance I would have correctly predicted the Pager operation, even in the broad "Mossad wipes out Hezbollah's entire command in a single attack" strokes.
But "Hezbollah gets decimated by Israeli espionage" is not a wild, out there guess by any means.
If Fuentes was specific enough to say "The U.S. drops bunker busters on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities" as a likely outcome I'd start to give him credit.
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I think what's actually going on with Fuentes is that he's alienated with what he sees as the low-class nature of modern conservatism. Here for instance he attacks conservatives for being "openly hostile to all the good things about liberals" and being "low-IQ hillbillies who take pride in being simple and hate the rich:"
https://x.com/FuentesUpdates/status/1908187813117411525
The problem with populist political movements is that the people who rise to the top tend to have psychological traits more characteristic of elites, intelligence, drive, and ambition, which wind up alienating them from the populist masses.
Bold of you to claim that intelligence, drive, and ambition, are qualities incompatible with being a populist.
You, Fuentes, and Hanania are all coping hard. If somone disagrees with your takes it must be because they are stupid and lazy not because of legitimate differences.
That said, congratulations to Fuentes for being the first gay man invited to speak on Iranian State TV.
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Ah, yes, notoriously high class… Nick Fuentes?
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Has Gaza been ethnically cleansed, or is this ethnic cleansing ongoing? If so, that's news to me.
Ethnic cleansing, as a distinct concept from genocide, has traditionally involved there being a territory where the population being cleansed is cleansed to. Thus far, Israel has not succeeded in finding such a territory.
Under a very loose definition of "ethnic cleansing", the IDF forcing Jews out of Gaza in the 2005 withdrawal (in some cases unwillingly) fits the definition, but is hardly the central example you're looking for.
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Gaza is already ethnically spotless; it's basically all Palestinian Arabs, and all Sunni at that, with few exceptions.
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My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.
It’s just war. It’s even a just war based on any literal thing I can think of in our psyche over the last several decades, much less the last two thousand years.
My prediction is Iran squirreled away its nuclear stuff and they’ll bomb a few bases and we’ll all call it a day - no idea if the regime is falling or not.
And I’m sure Israel wants leaders around them in various countries that don’t want to slaughter them completely.
Yeah that’s one of the obnoxious aspects of the post-WW2 mythos.
Stop trying to guilt trip me into seeing one side or the other as intrinsically righteous. Everything has to be a “genocide” or an “ethnic cleansing”. Why can’t it just be a fight? Men fight with each other. Always has been always will be.
There is a difference between men fighting one another (Hamas vs. IDF) and men fighting unarmed civilians (Hamas vs. Israelis; IDF vs. random Palestinians).
As much as I would prefer the former, it’s not on the table. Hamas can’t stop hiding behind civilians without getting slaughtered. Israel can’t stop killing civilians without giving Hamas opportunities to slaughter Israelis. Neither side is willing to let it “just be a fight.”
So yes, it’s teetering on the edge of ethnic cleansing. Not because of a psyop to claim righteousness, but because all the remaining options look an awful lot like killing noncombatants and driving them off.
I don’t understand this perspective. Obviously the fair fight is Hamas/palestinian army versus IDF, and Hamas are the ones who refuse to fight it. Therefore, the blood of civilians is entirely on Hamas’ hands.
If throughout history's wars the defeated party's army said ‘we’re not surrendering, we’re just going to do terrorism in civilian clothes now’, genocide would be the routine consequence.
I more or less agree, but I was trying to argue against @Mihow and @Primaprimaprima’s complaint about the term “ethnic cleansing.”
If Israel is fighting a just war, then it has a legal war goal which isn’t ethnic cleansing. Therefore activists who insist otherwise are being disingenuous.
If Israel isn’t fighting a just war, though, its war aims might include things like killing all Palestinians. This is verboten in the post-WW2 world. Naturally, Hamas has made it impossible for Israel to fight without killing some noncombatants and, in doing so, casting doubt on its war aims.
My point is that calling it ethnic cleansing isn’t a sign of mindkilled bad-faith partisanship. It is an intended outcome of Hamas’ strategy.
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The difference being Israels exceptional brutality, their politicians using references to biblical genocides and the high civilian death toll.
High Civilian death tolls according to whom.
I have such a hard time determining anything accurate here b/c both sides have major pressure to lie. And very early on Hamas got caught in an apparently blatant lie about a Rocket hitting a hospital, leading to civilian casualties. Note that Gazan authorities ALSO misstated the number of injured and dead!
So now I have to take all their claims with a veritable pound of salt.
Whoops.
And of course the October 7 event was specifically a bunch of Hamas warriors attacking, massacring and kidnapping civilians. So I'm pretty inclined to say "A pox on both your houses" for the duration of the conflict. Yes, I am aware that U.S. tax dollars and weapons are streaming to the Israeli side of the fight.
Finally, the incidents I CAN generally verify include a dude in the U.S. Setting Jews on Fire and another shooting two unarmed Jewish Embassy staffers.
Don't know of any incidents in the U.S. going the other way.
So these Hamas rockets that have barely been able to kill anyone leveled an entire hospital during Israeli bombing. Seems like something AIPAC cooked up.
As for October 7 Israel was engaging in military operations against Gaza, they had murdered hundreds of civilians and taken thousands of hostages.
There war a roughly 50% civilian death rate on the Israeli side. Is 1 civilian death for every military death acceptable or not? Why isn't it terror when Israel kills more than one civilian for each military casualty?
If you're suggesting that the war in Gaza is a genocide because half of all deaths in Gaza were civilians rather than combatants, that would imply that virtually every modern war was a genocide, as many wars had a vastly higher ratio of civilian to combatant deaths (as high as 9:1 in some cases). If you're happy to call the Korean war, the Gulf war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq genocides, all well and good, just as long as we're consistent.
There is also a point of comparing Gaza to other cases of dense urban warfighting where the millions-scale civilian population is stuck in the dense urban area. There aren't many other examples, but in the closest analogs (such as the fall of the ISIS caliphate), the casualties are pretty analogous when controlled for time.
Turns out, urban fighting is dangerous for attacker, defender, and bystander alike. Who would have guessed?
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According.
to.
Whom.
There were ample photographs of the rocket impact site
It didn't even hit the hospital proper. By most appearances, it landed in a parking lot and set a bunch of cars on fire. Even the trees in the immediate surrounding area are still intact.
It was the Gaza side that was alleging it was a mass casualty event at all.
So yes, this absolutely looks like a Hamas rocket flew off course, set things on fire, and Hamas decided to cast blame away from themselves since this would inevitably make them look like idiots.
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Fighting Hamas is a just war. Reprisals against civilians, on the other hand, are broadly prohibited. Since Hamas has a vested interest in entangling the two, it is very hard for Israel to keep its hands clean.
The strongest criticisms of Israel involve the parts of it which appear profoundly uninterested in doing so. There are more of these than I would like.
Regardless of intent, every dead civilian lets critics pattern-match to My Lai. That’s the kind of event which shaped the antiwar psyche.
Even though they're outlawed and abhorrent, reprisals are still a frequent though unfortunate part of war and occupation. They have happened in many cases without a significant genocidal or ethnic cleansing objective.
True, but they don’t help beat the allegations.
It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.
But of course that would come at some cost in Israeli lives. Understandably not popular in Israel.
I would say that Israel is not treated quite fairly here. Russia is way more indifferent to civilian casualties, they hammer the energy infrastructure of ukraine more, blew up a fucking dam and so on. And yet no one is seriously accusing them of being genocidal.
Israel decided instead of doing the fast, cheap and easy way - cover from end to end with napalm and throw a match, to actually put their men in street and urban fights. And also why no is accusing Egypt of starving Gaza when there is another border there. And in theory this is Egypt territory. And they didn't just throw some dry ice or lpg in the tunnels. Now probably not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they care of PR and anyway they are paying the price of a genocide anyway.
Ukraine's population is 20x the size of the population of Gaza, but the civilian death toll in Ukraine is 3x lower.
So on a per capita basis, Gazan's are dying at a per capita rate of ~42x higher. My incredibly rough math has 1 civilian death per 3,158 Ukrainian citizens (using 2022 population) versus 1 death per 74 Gazans.
Couple of orders of magnitude there.
What’s the civilian death rate in Bakhmut/mariopol/etc? Ukraine’s land area is pretty big, and life in Gaza and life in bakhmut or chernihiv might be a one to one comparison but live in lviv definitely isn’t.
Also, as I understand it, the government of Ukraine doesn't make it a deliberate tactic to hope their own population gets killed so they can get PR wins which bring international pressure on their behalf.
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Ukraine's leadership has a vested interest in protecting its citizenry, while Hamas has an official policy of intentionally putting Palestinian citizens in harm's way. Hamas and the Arab world have continually refused to allow Palestinian refugees safe passage into neighbouring countries.
I'm not saying the manner in which Israel is prosecuting this war has nothing to do with the rate at which Palestinian civilians are being killed, but suggesting that they are solely responsible for the level of civilian collateral damage is literally falling for Hamas propaganda hook, line and sinker.
You're absolutely correct
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I think "no one" is excluding a lot here: the governments of several NATO member states have made such claims, and the ICC (which admittedly isn't held in the highest esteem everywhere) has issued arrest warrants for Russian leaders on genocide or genocide-adjacent charges.
I'm not suggesting you have to agree with those descriptions, but I think it falls well short of "no one."
Probably I didn't phrase it well. Because those are performative pearl cluthing mostly. I don't believe that anyone smart and informed sincerely believes Putin wants or is committing genocide.
I think Putin's stated goals of destroying the idea (the meme as it were) of a distinct Ukrainian identity is, under the more expensive definitions, considered "genocide", but I will concede that it's a much less central example than "industrially kill them all" or just "evict them from their lands and ignore the obvious implications" that people would typically point to in WWII.
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Sure, and then they couldn't hit Hamas. This is the same Hamas that builds command centers under hospitals, then accuses Israel of war crimes when said command center gets bombed. Anyway, the various violations Israel is accused of are typically either nonsense (that is, there's no such rule in international law) or they are violations of treaties Israel has not agreed to, such as Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention.
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I really don't think it would. I would describe their current conduct as studiously avoiding the general populace, but the nature of the place of combat means even an 'A' student is going to kill or injure a ton of "civilians" (a term I hesitate to use when the population has elected Hamas, and the only people who would have a chance if another election were held were people calling Hamas too soft on killing Jews).
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It didn’t help them in previous wars. No matter what Israel did to avoid casualties, it either wasn’t enough, or it was considered evil. I think this is why they’ve been so gloves off this time. The gloves are pointless, as any sort of fighting back is demonized as apartheid or genocide. So, rather than risk their soldiers to prevent such war crimes, just go for it.
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That's basically the first example Bryan Caplan gives in missing moods about why he doesn't trust the war hawks defense of civilian death.
What he expects is more like "It's a sad but necessary drawback to the messy reality of war that sometimes peaceful civilians are swept up as collateral" and yet instead often sees stuff more like "Hell yeah let's wipe them out, the only good [nationality] is a dead one!"
No, that's just how human psychology works. Earnestly keeping in mind the pain suffered by the innocent in the prosecution of a just/necessary/Good war is just asking for your enemies to act like puppy-killing utility demons. That's what dehumanization is for, so you can fight and win without being hobbled and cripped (and eventually, raped, murdered and genocided) by your own suicidal empathy.
It's the same reason conservatives post Ghibli memes about crying deportees. They are no longer willing to give a shred of concern or credibility for crocodile tears of the people who caused the situation on purpose. Accusations of cruelty are met with mockery, because if you give an inch they'll let in another 50 million unvetted randos.
It's the same reason progressives never, ever, ever express any concern about the feelings and harm they may cause to their outgroup. It's the same reason no one is even bothering to try to use anything like this argument on Hamas or Iran, or their supporters in the US.
Just round the situation off to "blame goes to the aggressor" and win the damn war.
If he says "X happens", a response of "Yeah that's how people work" is an agreement that X happens, is it not?
That can serve as an explanation for why they do it, but it doesn't dispute Caplan's claim whatsoever then, it's in agreement with it! That instead of taking a somber "sad but necessary" view, they appeal to collective guilt and laugh about it.
You frame your comment like a dissent, while the actual substance is the same just under a different framing.
A: "Why is this marathon runner sweating so much? I would expect them to not want to be sweating. Do they not realize that sweating is unpleasant?"
B: "They're sweating because they are running a marathon. The sweat is an adaptive strategy that makes them better at running marathons. If they did not sweat, they would be worse at running marathons, and probably not be able to do so at all."
A: "Isn't that what I just said?"
B: "No. It really isn't."
Bad analogy.
Caplan points out that they aren't somber about civilian deaths, but instead often cheer it on/laugh about it.
An explanation why that happens isn't a dispute if it is happening.
Nope, you and Caplan are both just wrong about what the "reasonable hawk" looks like. You are the ones missing a mood, namely "competing when the stakes really, really matter". Actively hemming and hawing over the acceptable costs of a desired, good outcome is retarded and maladaptive. The overwhelming majority of human beings, even highly intelligent ones, are not psychologically capable of the the level of sociopathic, rationalist autism required to attempt his "reasonable hawk" nonsense - and even one of those 0.0001% decouplers would rapidly find themselves dehumanizing the enemy because it's just wildly more efficient in terms of mental load.
Worrying about the feelings of a lethal, intractable enemy is the sort of luxury you spare for things you outclass on the same level that we outclass wolves and bears. And even then, the people who actually live in areas with wolves and bears are less sympathetic about it than urban fools.
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Caplan isn't that much older than I am, so he's mostly seen the same wars I have. These have been predominantly wars in Islamic countries, where his argument doesn't hold much grip on reality. We are talking about Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, now potentially Iran. These are territories where "Death to Israel" holds 90%+ popularity and "Death to America" is only a few clicks behind.
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I've always been very ambivalent on the 'missing mood' argument.
On the one hand, if someone's explicitly-stated argument seems like it implies a particular emotion, and the person making the argument lacks that emotion, that does seem like a good sign that the argument is not motivating for them. The argument is excuse or justification, rather than the real motivation for the position.
On the other hand, taken too seriously, the missing mood argument also sounds a lot like, "You don't feel the way that I imagine you ought to feel - therefore you are not serious." But human psychology is extremely diverse and unpredictable, the way people express their deep emotions varies very widely as well, and you should not typical-mind. Caplan summarises it as, "You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold", but the phrase "the mood reasonable proponents would hold" is doing a lot of the work there. What is the mood reasonable proponents would hold? Are you sure? Is there only one such possible mood? How confident are you of what's going on inside another person's head?
I suppose I think missing moods can be a weak piece of evidence, which may suggest that we ought to look more deeply into a person's agenda, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately the actual examples Caplan gives in his piece are unconvincing and suggest a lack of moral imagination on Caplan's own part. Other people don't appear to feel what Caplan thinks they should feel, so he concludes they're insincere. But maybe Caplan is just wrong about they ought to feel. Maybe he's assuming that they accept facts and moral principles that Caplan himself accepts, and if he looked closer he would realise that they don't.
I think the examples from Caplan are more like
"Ok I can just consider that it's the morals that we disagree with, that they are just people who I find to be monsterous in ethics but just assuming "disagreement = evil" is bad, so I should look at the logic I expect from aligned morals making that argument and see if people are doing that"
Well that's the question. "Do people disagree because of a different logic or evidence base, or do they disagree because they genuinely just do not care about or actively want to harm other people, which I think is a Monster behavior"
He looks at it and says "huh, this isn't what I would expect if they weren't monsters, this is behavior I expect if they were. Oh god, these people seem like Monsters"
I can think of examples, I suppose, where mood is a relevant piece of evidence for judging a person's sincerity.
Suppose I'm favour of stronger welfare policies and more generous handouts for people in poverty, and I'm arguing with a person who believes that, however well-intentioned, public handouts like this are bad. They disincentivise people working to better themselves, they involve the government in what ought to be private charity, and so on. The state providing free welfare for the poor is ultimately detrimental both to the poor and the state. I suggest that their position is heartless, and they protest, "Not at all! My heart goes out to the poor as well. I really care about their plight. We just disagree about the best way to help them."
Suppose I then discover this person cheering as people get kicked off the dole and laughing. I would probably conclude that they're insincere and that their real motives are not empathy. Even if they sincerely think the dole is bad, mockery of desperate people is a cruel thing to do, and unlikely to coexist with genuine empathy. Alternatively, suppose I instead discover that this person volunteers at the soup kitchen run by their church. I would probably conclude that they are sincere, they really do empathise with and want to help the poor, and that they realy do believe there's an important moral distinction between public and private interventions.
I'm sure you can think of lots of examples like that. The key there is that the person presents as having certain motives, but behaves consistently or inconsistently with that motive.
The typical case is when someone neither particularly hates or helps the poor. But the missing mood test looks at how things are framed and at superficial elements. So if he thinks the dole is good for the poor, he doesn't need to prove himself, because the belief itself already says that he "wants to help the poor". But if he thinks the dole is bad for the poor, he faces an uphill battle. The problems with this are obvious.
This also leads to moral busybodies. How exactly do you know that someone hates the poor privately? Well, if he's a friend or relative, maybe you know him. But if he's a politician or someone else you don't know personally, this is an incentive to dig up ten year old Twitter posts out of context to "prove" that he's cruel so you can dismiss his beliefs.
And then there's the situation where someone who thinks some policy harms themselves always fails the missing mood test. After all, they aren't showing concern for the other people who are helped by the things that harm themselves. (And "I think my harm is more important than someone's benefit" is selfish, so it doesn't count as showing concern even if you acknowledge that someone benefits.)
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I am not watching the video, but I notice that the tweet said:
The Assad regime did not end because Israel drew the US into a regional war. The US did fuck-all to bring about its end. In a nutshell, Israel took out Hezbollah, Turkey sponsored the Jihadists who defeated Assad and Russia did not offer less than usual military support to their ally because they were otherwise occupied.
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Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, began attacking Israel on 10/8 though, before Israel did anything.
Nasrallah characterized it as follows:
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As far as punditry goes, he was right on the money and deserves credit where due. Whatever that is.
Fuentes being in the ballpark of accurate wouldn't be a big deal, given how much pundits talk, except calling attention to this instance drives a lot of people towards needless argumentation and grievance. I'd be interested to hear what people want to be said instead, and by whom, in contrast to what Fuentes is saying. Given he can drive up so much ire even when apparently accurate.
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I count 3/8 accurate predictions.
◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say Israel would respond to Oct 7
☒ "Solve the Gaza Question"
◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say anti-Zionist militias would continue fighting Zionism
☑ Iran
has towould respond, but splitting hairs☑ Israel, Iran exchange strikes
☑ Would precede (US) strikes on Iran nuclear program
☒ Initiates war between Iran and Israel
☒ US drawn into war
☒ Syrian regime fell, but not as consequence of US-Iran war
☒ Iran regime change†
†Fuentes' predictions conclude it from a US-Iran war; it might happen as a result of the instability from Israel walking all over the nation's ADS and domestic security apparatus.
The meaningful prediction is strikes on Iran's nuclear program, except it was the US and not Israel, and it didn't start a war. Trump's already joking about it, and there's this meme.
Concur. He legitimately got his first and most important prediction wildly incorrect.
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You don't count that conflict as war between Iran and Israel? That's just bad faith. Even Trump is lobbying to call it the "12 day war." America undeniably was drawn into the war, both defensively and offensively. Syria falling was directly related to the conflict between Israel and Iran's proxies, Hezbollah in particular.
"Solve the Gaza Question" is undeniably underway, he didn't say it would be resolved immediately he said the attack gave the Israelis cover to solve it, which is ongoing. Basically Iran regime change is the only thing that hasn't happened yet, even though that was clearly an objective of Israeli aggression.
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You can bet on Conservative inc ( yes even Trump) doing Israel's bidding and you'd be right 10 out of 10 times. The level of influence AIPAC has over the us is disgusting, especially when contrasted with the histrionics we got from the left and the media for 4 years alleging all sorts of non-existent bullshit wrt Trump/Russia. At one point they were throwing a hissy fit about Russian citizens existing in the vague proximity of Trump.
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The Oct. 7 attack is going to be the tripwire that enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing.
Has it? Was Israel unable to, before? Are 18+ months later, is Gaza being ethnically cleansed?
How is this different than the pre-October 7 Iran-backed terror attacks?
Was the stated motivation state-sponsored terrorism, or progress towards nuclear weapons?
Bombing initiating war isn't much of a prediction, so let's focus on the US - was the US drawn-in by Israel or self-motivated and seizing an opportunity?
When did the bombing occur, and when did the regime in Syria end?
Are we going back to the theory that Israel deliberately let the October 7 attack happen, to use it as justification for war in Gaza?
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I wrote up a post late last week about Trump ordering airstrikes against Iran's major nuclear facilities. Consider this a follow-up:
On the one hand, this seems literally incredible. On the other hand, Vance is on TV right now answering questions about the process, so they're committed to the bit, and it would be a rather strange thing to lie about. On reflection, it's possible that both belligerents have taken enough punishment that they're ready to call it a draw.
If this is not real, it's going to be about as humiliating as imaginable for the administration. If it is real, on the other hand, it's going to throw a lot of the discussion over the last few weeks, and particularly since the airstrikes, into fairly sharp relief. I'm particularly interested to discuss Nick Fuentes's remarkable predictive accuracy with regards to this new development.
There's been some discussion lately about whether it is better, on breaking events, to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately. Many have argued that it's better to wait. I disagree: When one of these things happens, and we want to talk about it, and we experience the nervousness that we might be making fools of ourselves if what we say is proven wrong by revelations tomorrow morning, in that moment we have an opportunity to be far closer to honesty, with others and with ourselves, than at any other time throughout the year. Uncertainty is the prerequisite for charity, and these moments of uncertainty force us to realize that we ourselves can, in fact, be wrong. People should be more open to talking about breaking news, not because it allows for hotter takes, but because it gives one skin in the game and favors rational analysis over sophistry. It is good for us all to call the coin before it has landed.
In that spirit: I think this is real. I think Iran and Israel have in fact agreed to a ceasefire and to an end to the war, and I think there's a high probability they'll stick to it. I think the strikes actually worked, and Iran's nuclear program has in fact been pretty thoroughly wrecked, with their timetable set back by, say, more than five years.
If this is what it appears to be, it's a hell of a thing.
Am I understanding this incorrectly or does this essentially mean "Israel gets 12 hours to do whatever it wants to Iran"?
By my reading, only "officially", while the "true" agreement is for a simultaneous ceasefire as described in the previous sentence.
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I mean, you could say that avout any ceasefire. Most of them don't take effect immediately, and a lot of people keep their guns firing until the alotted time for various reasons (some professional, some personal).
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Israel just tried to blow up the Ayatollah. Multiple bunker buster strikes in Tehran, other cities in Iran. I don’t know if this technically counts as a ceasefire violation, so the deal may still be on?
EDIT (2:20 GMT) Iran is now launching ballistic missiles at Southern Israel. I’m seeing some sources saying that the ceasefire time is a bit ambiguous and might not start for another hour or two.
EDIT (4:35) It is now well past the agreed ceasefire time and both sides are still enthusiastically bombing each other.
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I'm no expert on Middle Eastern politics, but to me it looks like they agreed to a ceasefire because neither government has anything to gain from continued hostilities. Israel has already achieved its strategic objectives and Iran is struggling to effectively retaliate. Getting into a protracted war would be costly and destabilizing for both of them.
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I think this is real. Iran not wanting a ceasefire and truce at this point would be literally crazy- and while they have a different value system from the west I'm pretty sure they're not literally crazy. Trump can definitely bully Israel up to a point, too, and they probably also want a ceasefire now they're taking casualties.
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I previously expressed some skepticism about the details of the US strike. And I noted that many on X were questioning it as well.
One narrative was that Trump executed some clearly telegraphed strikes on Fardow that didn’t accomplish a whole lot other than be a highly visible strike on the Iranian nuclear program. The 5d chess speculation was that this was a clearly telegraphed move that didn’t in fact cross any Iranian red lines as a way to appease the Iran hawks.
Now it appears that this Iranian attack on the Qatar military base did no damage, cost no lives, and, if Trump is to be taken literally, the Iranians called them up and told them it was coming.
And now we have a ceasefire.
Was this just all theater? If it were, what would look different?
Obviously it’s a good outcome. The only downside it see is that it makes the US look incredibly weak to be led around by Israel. But then again, that’s par for the course.
What a puzzling thing. Another downside would be further emboldening Israel, the Israel US lobby, and the pro war faction of our leaders.
Compounding on this aspect of the narrative, I see people theory crafting that Trump denied Israel their cause celebre to continue strikes against Iran. So they get ahead of Israel, without bombing any hospitals or apartment buildings, and then try to make it seem like everyone is even now, capiche?
I have no fucking clue how much of the theory crafting I see is true. I have no clue if this truce is even real. I've seen reports than Iran is reporting they know nothing about it, and other reporting saying it was back channeled through Qatar.
I've been trying to disengage from politics as best I'm able. Which isn't very. But an effort is being made. Largely because the information space is being too polluted to even be worth the effort of forming cogent or accurate models to discuss. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm waiting until the midterms. Either my life will be better or it won't. World War 3 will have begun, or it won't. Whatever day to day nonsense happens between now and then I'm powerless to effect, and seemingly being lied to from all directions.
I will say, re: the theory that Trump used the strikes to get ahead of Israel, if any of this shit is real, Trump is either the luckiest fucking man on the face of the Earth, or he truly is a 4d genius. If it's all bullshit, well, it's not that much different that Biden just announcing the that the Equal Rights Amendment passed with practically zero basis for actually asserting it. We're fully into Clown World already, and I'm not going to hold it too against Trump if he's bold faced lying and making shit up out of whole clothe like all the rest. At least he isn't trying to sterilize and mutilate children.
You can't fight against a man who has the Mandate of Heaven: history bends to his whim, success manifests in his chamberpot. All that the hero king touches turns to gold before his manifest destiny.
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Things will start to make much more sense once you understand that we are not playing chess (5-d, 3-d, or otherwise) Mr. Spock. We are playing poker.
If Trump thinks we are playing poker, we are doomed. Poker is a zero-sum game where you want your opponent to go all-in and lose. War is a negative-sum game where an all-in confrontation and showdown means everyone loses.
In a tournament, yes. But in a cash game, you can cash out at any time.
Tournament and cash poker are equally zero-sum.
In poker, if you are strong you want to hide your strength so people pick fights with you and lose. In war, if you are strong you want to advertise it so nobody is stupid enough to pick a fight with you.
If we want to torture this particular metaphor to death: historically war is poker with extremely high blinds and extremely high rake. The cost of maintaining a war footing has always been high, high enough to bankrupt players without sufficient stacks, high enough that players are quickly forced to go all in or lose without ever playing a hand.
Do I need to quote Blood Meridian again?
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And you often do the same in war. Sun Tzu says that exactly— where you are weak you want to look strong and where you are strong, you want to look weak such that your enemy attacks where you are strong and not where you are weak.
But the biggest part of poker is the fact that it’s one of the few games where the entire point is that you have incomplete knowledge. And therefore a lot of the strategy is about using the odds and psychological power to make the most of the cards you have. This is how both war and politics work. You don’t know what the other guy has or is going to do, so you act to maximize your odds based on tge cards you have. Trump seems to be pushing hard on the “I have really good cards here, you better agree to this ceasefire or im going to take it all.” It’s not a check, it’s a raise. Agree or get more of what I just did to you.
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Remember, in the game of chess you can never let your adversary see your pieces.
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I pray that it is real.
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Related: Israel phoning 20 Iranian generals and telling them that they will bomb their children unless they renounce the regime.
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Half an hour ago, Iran's foreign minister said no ceasefire. Fifteen minutes ago, Iran's foreign minister said ceasefire.
On the topic of premature declarations, the second would be a mightily overconfident thing to say if no agreement were actually reached, so it sounds like there's something real. But given how today's gone, for all I know, nukes could be flying before I hit "comment."
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I 100% believe waiting for further developments is better. Unless you are a direct actor, I believe there is negative value and insight following the news minute by minute. Without greater context, everything looks random and chaotic, offering no clearer understanding of the world. My own community transformed into a news feed and we've faced insight collapse, although some lovely contributors track less popular things, contextualizing them etc. illustrating the problem precisely.
Iran launched missiles 30 mins ago. The ceasefire is over or rather is between certain groups, since multiple entities share/negotiate sovereignty within Iran. Let's see what this actually means, next week.
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I hadn't considered that perspective. It isn't nervousness that I might be wrong that stops me from commenting on breaking news, it's the dearth of information. Anything I might say is going to be an uninformed opinion, and the same is true for everyone not in the administration. If people were able to argue without getting personal, maybe, but everybody gets so heated that even playful criticism wounds people - and to get like that over an event which doesn't have basic facts nailed down yet is madness.
But you are right about uncertainty and skin in the game promoting rational analysis over sophistry, and I loathe the idea of people thinking I'm scared of being wrong. So I would like to say I hope and believe that this is real and with that conditional I also hope and believe Netanyahu will retire within the next year.
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Assuming it is real and Iran will stick to the ceasefire... what would that mean for Ukraine/Russia? What would that mean for USA/China? I mean, it would seem like the "Axis of Evil" would be a little off balance, no? That wouldn't be great for China, right? Or would it not affect much?
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As someone who argued for "wait two weeks", I actually agree with this, but the core ingredient is that it has to be a deliberate choice, and that the speaker willingly puts his credibility on the line. I still owe @fmac, who couldn't quite believe I was being serious, a reply, but this is part of why I said what I said in that post. Exposing yourself to the possibility of having your credibility shot is the mechanism by which just going with your gut ends up yielding superior results to meticulously calculating all the Bayesian probabilities.
Sure, only making predictions on things you are confident making predictions on is a bit of a cheat, this is why I always rolled my eyes at Scott's annual "calibrating" predictions. That said, there does need to be some space for "I honestly haven't a clue". There are cases where I can see a clear signal in the vibes (see "tides turning on trans" or "Elon Musk is cooked"), but there are others where I try to listen to the vibes, and all I can hear is noise, and I think it would be unwise to stake a claim under those circumstances.
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Of course it's real. What else could Iran have done? They can't project power, their long-range weapons are running low, their terrorist groups abroad have already reached the limits of what they can do. They won't exactly just cancel the Islamic Republic and call the game lost. Anything drastic they might do - buy nukes from Pakistan or the Norks, mobilize their army and march on Israel through whatever is in the way, or rebuild Fordo two miles below the mountain - will take time, and time is exactly what a ceasefire buys them. Does the same for Israel, too, but I suppose that's a gamble worth making when all your alternatives range from wishful to fantastical.
Edit: Time to eat crow. I guess Iran is taking a stand on principle, where the principle is "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me". That, or they don't have their missile men under control.
Also yesterday Israel started getting serious in eradicating IRGC
How so and will they continue with the ceasefire in effect?
Probably no. Which is why I think that the ceasefire got accepted.
This is what I have always said - don't kill the schmucks. Kill the elites. Easiest way to bring someone on the table to negotiate is to put their skin on the line
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Agreed. In an exchange of missiles and bombs, Iran would be losing decidedly, so it makes sense for them to not engage in it.
From my understanding, this ceasefire is mostly that both sides will cease lobbing missiles at each other for now, not anything about Iran stopping their nuclear program.
If either side feels they have anything to gain by breaking the ceasefire (e.g. Israel seeing another opportunity to delay the Iranian nuclear program by bombing them), then they will break it.
While it is a defeat for the Iranian regime, it is a defeat that they likely can survive -- they ideology is not based on how they are technologically superior to the West, after all. I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
Of course Trump announces the ceasefire like he had just negotiated the fucking Good Friday Agreement, when all he did was bomb Iran without getting into an indefinite missile war with them, which few if any people claimed was the main downside of bombing them.
Building on this, the 'more important' ceasefire for most of the world isn't even Israel-Iran, but US-Iran.
The US entry was limited to the bunker buster attack (which Israel could not get on its own). Iran responded with the telegraphed attack on the US base in Qatar. This was a basic tit-for-tat, and the 'cease fire' had neatly concluded that.
A lot of Iran's more major potential escalatory steps- shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, needing a nuke for regime survival- are assets more against the US than Israel. But they are also assets with higher global fallout for global energy markets / global proliferation than just the Israel-Iran conflict as is/was.
It's not that the Israel-Iran part isn't important, but even if it breaks down (and there were reportedly some late-fires already) it won't have the same implications of the US being directly involved.
This part I'll disagree with, however. Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.
As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes. That Iran has reached a point where its proxy strikes lead to direct retaliations is more of a measure of strategic misplay of proxy warfare* than an issue that can be resolved by gaining nukes.
*The first rule of proxy warfare is that plausible deniability requires the opponent to variously not know, or have enough doubt, such that they prefer to avoid the consequences of direct conflict and prefer to focus on the proxy regardless. If the proxy lacks plausible deniability, then there is no meaningful difference to the receiving state, and the proxy-using state has no higher authority to appeal to if the receiving state wishes to retaliate directly.
Plausible deniability isn't in practice about plausibility to the other side's leadership, although it is possible that the Truman administration (who coined the phrase and initially developed the doctrine) were stupid enough to think it was. It is about plausibility to a sympathetic audience (primarily your own domestic audience, but also sympathetic neutrals). The Soviet leadership was rarely fooled by US denial of responsibility for obvious US covert ops. The US people frequently were.
Sometimes it provides a face-saving exit for the victim - if the USSR pretends to believe a "plausible denial" from the US then the domestic political consequences of not retaliating are mitigated.
In the modern sense, "plausible deniability" generally means "everyone knows I did it but if it can't be proved in a formal quasi-judicial process my dittoheads can go on pretending to believe that I didn't"
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Counterpoint: the two main participants in the Cold War, the US and the USSR, were both very active in fighting proxy wars with the other. Supporting Hamas against Israel is not that different from supporting Bin Laden against the USSR, for example. Both sides tried very hard to avoid situations where US soldiers would have a shootout with USSR soldiers, because both sides were very aware of the danger of escalation.
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well. Sure, the other side would support the opponents with weapons, and they might send the odd liaison or special op soldier, but these would generally not participate in the killing of US/USSR soldiers and if they were killed, their side would not sweep that under the rug.
So if Iran was a nuclear power, as far as the cold war etiquette between the US and Iran was concerned,
Another point of etiquette is that you do not try to critically destabilize a nuclear power, even through indirect actions. While their soldiers are out bringing freedom and democracy or the glory of communism to some backwater, they are fair game for your proxies, but you want your proxies to stick to their local theater, not engage in intercontinental terrorism. For example, you would not back 9/11, or arm Ukraine to the point where they might force a regime change in Moscow. (As far as cold war etiquette between a hypothetical nuclear Iran and Israel are concerned, the Oct-7 attacks would be debatable. Attacking civilians -- especially in the deliberate manner displayed by Hamas -- of a nuclear power is going to piss off that power, and you generally don't want to be anywhere nearby in the causal chain of events.)
Tail risks are an important consideration for military interventions. If you are pushing around a conventional enemy on another continent, the question to "what is the worst that could realistically happen due to bombing them?" is likely stuff on the level of "they miraculously manage to sink an aircraft carrier" or "the sponsor a terrorist group which manages to kill a few thousand citizens". If you try to push around a nuclear enemy, then even for NK the answer is a lot bleaker -- they might not be able to nuke you on another continent, but they will certainly be able to drop a nuke or two on your regional allies.
There is also a case to be made that the knowledge that your side has nuclear weapons will make you more careful when engaging other nuclear powers. At the moment, Iran can lob rockets towards Israel whenever they feel like it -- the tail risks are sharply limited -- Israel is not going to nuke Tehran over a few dozen citizens killed, at the most they will kill a few hundred Iranians in return. By contrast, if you are an actor who has some but not absolute control over a nuclear armed side, perhaps a general or military advisor, you want to be careful to avoid a spiral of escalation where your side might be the first to use nukes and gets destroyed in retaliation. Say nuclear Iran launches a few missiles, Israel responds in kind, and as usual their missiles are much more effective than the ones fired by Iran. Suddenly there is some possibility that someone will nuke Tel Aviv, and Israel will nuke Tehran in response.
In conclusion, no, a nuke does not make you completely untouchable, but it very much protects you from direct confrontations with other nuclear powers both by limiting their and your own conduct. I can totally see why the ayatollah regime wants nukes.
I think the mutually-agreed, informal rule in the Cold War was (after Korea, where both sides violated it for no net gain) that you don't attack the other superpower's client directly, only with your own client. So the US could send troops to defend South Vietnam, but not to attack North Vietnam. (And the USSR couldn't directly participate in North Vietnamese attacks on South Vietnam, but they didn't need to because they had a much better proxy). And the US couldn't invade Cuba with regular forces, which they otherwise clearly wanted to do, given that they did the Bay of Pigs.
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Trump’s bombastic, over the top rhetoric has always been his strongest spot. The average person doesn’t check geopolitical realities and likelihoods, they check ‘who’s shooting at whom’.
I wonder if that's how presidents had to be in the past, and the rest of us
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I think the ceasefire is fake, like the Russia-Ukraine ceasefires. Both sides are just manoeuvring to look like they want peace when they really want victory. They'll say 'oh they broke the ceasefire' and continue on. Israel has broken no small number of ceasefires throughout the years and the Iranians do similar things with their proxies.
Trump's powers are not that great. He can produce drama and break things but he cannot mend or create to any significant extent. He can rugpull Ukraine for instance but he cannot actually achieve peace with honour like he promised. He can rugpull the NASDAQ with tariffs but he cannot actually reorder the world economic system to spur sustained manufacturing growth in America per his goals, let alone abolish the income tax per his musings. Note that both of these are very difficult tasks!
The prospects of him using diplomacy effectively on Iran of all countries is very slim. Firstly, Trump does not know how to do diplomacy in general. Secondly, his entire Iran policy consists of being as untrustworthy as possible, reneging on treaties, issuing ultimatums and bombing the country.
They both want victory, but Iran clearly cannot achieve it. Israel can't either, though they may think they can. Peace may be the next-best-option.
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Iranian victory is surviving, and climbing in the Jihadist Power Rankings.
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They've also allied with Hamas, which is primarily Sunni.
There's a global jockeying for status among Islamist groups. Part of that will involve actually killing each other, part of it will involve harming Israel/USA or drawing the attention of Israel/USA and proving their ability to take a hit.
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It isn't real. Both sides are still shooting at each other. Israel is claiming that Iran should be blamed because they fired the first shots after Trump's deadline, and they are just retaliating. What is definitely the case is that both sides tried to do maximum damage in the hours between the ceasefire being announced and entering into force, which is not what people who actually want a ceasefire do.
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It's real. In the sense that this looks like a tit-for-tat draw down preceded by a mad smash and grab. It is not real in the sense that "ceasefire" means ceasefire. The two nations haven't conducted open diplomacy for 40+ years. I don't think anyone believes a "ceasefire" looks anything like peace. Iran will mostly get its airspace back after the launch missile quota, the US gets to leave for a moment, and Israel must be satisfied with the operation. None of these things prevent future actions or new phases. If you require a "ceasefire" be a ceasefire, then it's not real. It's still a meaningful change in posture.
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Israel says Iran violates ceasefire announced by Trump, orders new strikes
Looks like Iran fired two missiles, Israel dropped two bombs in response. Given that the missiles were intercepted I would think Israel could afford to ignore the violation, but probably they figured that would make them look weak.
More likely they didn’t want a ceasefire to begin with, but Trump made it a pre condition of their using the B2s. So now they are taking any excuse to renew the conflict.
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Trump, on Truth Social, after reports of Israel continuing to bomb Tehran:
This tone towards Israel is, to me at least, unexpected given the terms of the ceasefire. I expected Israel to have carte blanche to 'finish the job'.
Maybe a reductive take but I genuinely believe the next move depends on what Trump is currently watching on television. If Fox News presenters start covering for Israeli actions, or harping on about Iran 'breaking the ceasefire first', Trump may be convinced. It really is a shame that Tucker isn't on a major network anymore - if it's not on TV, Trump doesn't care.
Israel can’t actually finish the job on their own, at least not with conventional arms. Their whole strategy was to suck the United States into the conflict, preferably with a ground invasion. Trump knows this, hence his annoyed tone.
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Looks to me like Trump imagined that because the US is large, it has magical powers to compel others to do what it says. I’m getting a strong feeling that this is the same exact thing as happened with Russia and Ukraine. Wasn’t he supposed to end that war? What happened there?
Trump appears to be compelling others to do what he says. Israel's airports have just resumed full operations. Iran is telling the Saudis that they're ready to resolve their differences with the US.
Trump does not actually have magical powers. He has considerable power, but exercise of that power comes at unknown but significant costs. So far, ending the Ukraine war is beyond him. We'll see how it goes in the future, though.
The Ukraine War is tougher because the United States has less leverage over both parties. Russia is an already heavily sanctioned nuclear nation and the only major stick that can be deployed against them is the threat to deploy American ground troops in Ukraine, which is unlikely. Europe is still convinced that the war is a good idea and if they are willing to sacrifice a bit they could continue to fund and arm Ukraine for the next several years, even if all US support is cut off. Both Ukraine and Russia seem to be convinced they can still win and that continuing to pursue the war is in their own best interest. There’s not a lot that America can actually do to force them to stop.
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That didn't last long.
How can you hate that guy?
He certainly has his moments.
Especially speaking off the cuff. It’s a gift.
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Trump is acting as though he expects the ceasefire to be respected. Notably, he's acting like he expects both sides to respect it, and is willing to criticize Israel for shooting back. It seems pretty clear that Trump is, in fact, imposing a ceasefire on people who have a strong preference to continue shooting; if this is the case, then both sides are going to want to goad the other side into accepting blame and consequences for breaking the ceasefire, so that they can continue shooting with their opponent in a worse position. If that's the situation, then getting the ceasefire to stick means convincing both sides that they will not succeed in this and that brinksmanship games are an unacceptable risk, which is what Trump and his administration appear to be doing.
I maintain that Trump at least appears to be doing the right thing: pursuing obvious American interests as efficiently as possible, while actively avoiding entanglement in the problem. Trump declaring a ceasefire and blasting both Iran and Israel for limited violations makes it significantly more likely that the fighting will stop, and indeed both Israel, Iran, and the media are acting as though the ceasefire is a real thing that there are consequences for violating. But also, it seems to me that Trump's general approach vastly reduces the chances of America getting dragged into the war, because our stance now is that there is no war to get dragged into, and contradiction of that narrative by Iran or Israel is being framed as wrongdoing.
This seems like a pretty significant change from the status quo, and I am happy to see it.
[EDIT] - ...And skepticism and resistance to the contrary, it does in fact appear to be working. Per CNN headlines:
And of course:
...some things never change.
Indeed, by the standards of Middle Eastern ceasefires, this one seems to be holding together OK. Iran fired off two missiles (most sources say both were intercepted, one says one hit a residential building), Israel dropped two bombs in response (and told Trump they would have dropped more if he hadn't yelled at them, quick thinking on Netanyahu's part), and nothing more. Also no Houthi attacks on shipping, no closure of the Straits of Hormuz, and no bombing of Iran's oil terminals
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I think it did: Shaky ceasefire between Iran and Israel takes hold as Trump voices frustration
Agreed. A single instance of tit for tat is impressive. Almost all the way there.
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Looking Forward (In Time) To The Democratic (Midterm) Civil War (And Likely Trump Law Enforcement Accelerant)
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How about that Democratic National Committee drama last
weekmonth, am I right?This post started being sketched out last month, in expectation of a predictable event just last week. Then the last couple of weeks happened, and what could have been an interesting culture war episode got overshadowed by, well, war-war. Crazy times… but the premise is still relevant in the future, if not now. So, ahem.
Last week’s resolution to some ongoing party drama has implications for the next year or so of American politics. Implications include intended infighting, pessimistic predictions for Senate prospects, and a predictable next
escalationenforcement of federal laws that will feed the partisan polemics of dictatorship and whatnot. This is because as the progressives and establishment Democrats begin to position against eachother while trying to use Trump as a foil for their internal party power struggle, the Trump Administration looks to be preparing enforcement action against the professional protest apparatus involved in recent not-entirely-peaceful riots in LA and elsewhere, which both will strike at parts of the Democratic power base but also provide leverage for the Democrat factions to try and use against eachother even as they loudly decry it.This post is looking to organize thoughts and identify trends that can help predict / make sense of some of the upcoming predictable public drama that will shape American media coverage through 2026. When equally predictable media campaigns follow, you’ll (hopefully) be taken less by surprise, and have an ear open for what may not be said at the time.
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Part 1: The 2026 Democrat Senate Prospects
Not to put too fine a line on it, but in some respects the 2026 midterms are a lost cause for the Democrats, and some of the ongoing politic are going to be a reflection of that context.
Part of the background of today’s subject really begins five years ago, in the 2020 US election. The same election that brought Biden to the Presidency also got the Democratic Party 50 seats in the US Senate, giving them control of the Senate with the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote.
At the time, this was a great and glorious thing for the Biden Administration, as it was a key part of giving the Democrats the might trifecta, which is to say control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. As narrow as the Senate margin was, it supported things like appointing judges, budgets via reconciliation, and so on. This was a highwater mark of Democrat institutional power, before last year’s 2024 brought in the current Republican trifecta.
Most people are familiar with this, and are also likely familiar with how the ruling party nearly always looses House of Representative seats in the midterms after an election. Presidential approval drops, the base gets complacent, the opposition gets hungrier / more motivated, all that jazz. The US House changes quickly, as every elected representative is up for re-election every two years.
What people may not realize is that only a third of the Senate is up for re-election every cycle, as the 6-year terms are staggered so that only one third are up for grabs at any given cycle. This means that far less of the currently Republican-dominated Senate is up for re-election. It also means that the seats that are, are the seats that were last voted in 2020.
It also means that senate maps can be deeply uncompetitive. Like how most Republican Senate seats this cycle are in solidly red states, so that there are about two competitive Republican seats, but four competitive Democratic seats.. While there are no guarantees in politics, it is not only plausible/likely for the Republicans to maintain control of the Senate this cycle, but to increase their margin of Senate control. After all, the last cycle these seats were up was 2020 pandemic election, and Biden’s results then were considered an especially good showing.
This is why US political watchers have been warning since the earliest parts of the Trump Administration- before any of the current drama- that the Democrats face a rough wall next year. While the House is often more competitive and up for being flipped, the Senate is much less malleable. And without control of both the House and the Senate, the ability of the opposition party to limit / oppose / impeach the President is relatively limited. (Or rather- they can impeach all they want, but lose in the Senate.)
The lack of formal ability is important. It would mean that even if the Democrats take the House, then they could impeach Trump however many times they want, but not remove him due to a lack of the Senate. It means the House could refuse to pass a funding bill, but they couldn’t use Control of Congress to dictate terms of short-term spending bills to prevent Trump’s options to further gut parts of the federal government during a shutdown. Having one chamber of Congress is better than none, but it makes those leaders relatively impotent.
This is relevant scene setting, because this is a clear and obvious wall that the Democratic Party is heading towards. If they fail, they can take solace in ‘just’ retaking the House, but the worse they do, the more bitter the recriminations. At the same time, while the senate map is daunting, there is also a clear way forward.
If the Democrats want to defeat Trump over all else, they need to (re)build the anti-Trump coalition. Use opposition and public discontent to Trump to turn out their base. If there isn’t enough organically, then manufacture and generate more, using all the levers of influence and political mobilization they can across the institutions they still control. To do as well as they can, they need to work together.
Insert laconic ‘If.’
Alternatively, a dismal year where Senate gains are unrealistic is the best election cycle for internecine conflict over the soul, leadership, and composition of the Democratic Party going into 2028.
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Part 2: DNC Drama
Insert the multi-month Democratic National Committee drama that resolved last Friday, when Washington State Democratic Party Chair Shasti Conrad won the election for the open vice chair position of the DNC. Shasti Conrad herself is irrelevant to this story, besides that she is an establishment democratic, and onboard with the DNC’s job of helping get Democrats elected across the country.
Why was there an open vice chair of the DNC? Because the Democratic establishment defenestrated the previously elected chair, David Hogg, over his still current intention to primary ‘asleep at the wheel’ sitting elected Democrats with younger (and more progressive) challengers.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. No one literally threw David Hogg out a window. He “resigned” before he could be formally removed. And his removal technically wasn’t because he promised to use his DNC position to give $20 million USD to his personal super PAC ‘Leaders We Deserve,’ breaking DNC neutrality to primary his internal-party political opponents. Rather, a DNC subcommittee recommended a redo of the otherwise uncontested DNC election on grounds of procedural issues.
And by procedural issues, the standard media coverage is obviously referring to
If that parsed to what you think it parsed to- yes. David Hogg, a young white man whose ascent into progressive politics was based primarily on being a school shooting survivor](https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/article286954330.html), got out-progressive stacked by a female minority over… a race and gender quota.
Ms. Free filed her objection at the end of February, well before Mr. Hogg was called a Jackass by notable / still influential Democratic strategist James Carville in late April](https://www.drewberquist.com/2025/05/james-carville-calls-out-jackass-david-hogg-directly-to-his-face-watch/). Clearly her action was unmotivated by any desire for personal advancement, and her complaint was not a convenient pretext for senior Democratic party officials like DNC Chair Ken Martin to remove a vocal progressive who sought to style himself as the next AOC.
If it were, though, then it seems the DNC establishment won an important victory. Given the first-past-the-post nature of (most) US elections, primarying your own party is a great way to expose almost-certain-win seats for a Republican upset if the primary dispute bleeds over to the general election. (American politicians are infamous for their magnanimous forgiveness in such things.) Additionally, even though Hogg ‘only’ wanted to primary dems in ‘safe’ seats, that in itself would have represented an attempt to make the permanent / core Democratic party more progressive, and leave the non-Progressives in the unstable / competitive seats. Over time, attrition would ensure that the powerful committees (which tend to go to those with seniority, i.e. safer seats over time) would go to progressives, while the non-progressive Democrats stood to be turned into the next round of Blue Dog Democrats- tolerated to a point, but sacrificed in the name of some policy priority popular with the core but unpalatable to the broader electorate in competitive areas.
Or perhaps the geriatric problem got worse. David Hogg was, after all, supposed to be part of the solution by getting the younger gen-Z into Democratic offices. His earlier PAC efforts of $8 million for young progressives was lauded at the time for getting candidates on the ballot and elected at lower levels in various red states, such as the youngest Texas-Senate senator. This was supposed to be all the more important after Trump made major gains amongst young voters in the 2024 election. David Hogg was (supposed) to be part of the solution for that, hence his relatively meteoric ascent. Even his message on primarying out the old, infirm, and insufficiently progressive resonated- something like 60% of the Democratic party want the leadership who just replaced Hogg to be replaced.
Or perhaps not. James Carville may be one of the louder cranks to publicly claim the Progressive wing is detrimental to the Democratic Party, but he is not the only one by any means. And while Carville has suggested that the party should have an amicable split over pronoun politics with progressives going off their own way, he’s also accused progressive wing leaders like AOC and Bernie Sanders of being more interested in running against Democrats than the Republicans. While Carville makes the motions of a good party man who would come behind the party regardless who wins, there is an awareness that not everyone is interested in the party winning as much as winning the party.
The point of this segment is not (just) to give some context to an American political drama you’d rarely hear about (and probably didn’t given the events of last week). The point is that an institutional power struggle is already underway between the progressive (and often younger) wing of the Democratic Party, and the (older) establishment.
David Hogg was just an iteration of more direct party-on-party fighting. He lost the institutional battle, and his supporters were not influential enough to protect him. At the same time, David Hogg would like you to know he’s not going anywhere. He still intends to primary, or at least threaten to primary, sitting Democrats. Since Trump bombed the Iranian nuclear program over the weekend, Hogg has argued any Democrat who supports Trump on the conflict should be primaried. Now that he is free of the expectation of DNC neutrality, he is free to pick fights with fellow, though rarely progressive, democrats.
For now, though, inter-Democratic competition for influence and future electoral prospects is taking a more amicable, or at least acceptable, turn of targets- who can turn out support for anti-Trump efforts.
Or, to put it another way- the acceptable form of inter-Democrat competition is, for the moment, orienting to who can oppose Trump the best.
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Part 3: Trump Protest Power
Not to blow anyone’s mind, but Trump is kind of unpopular with Democrats, and they’d really like their elites to fight back.
After a dispirited and divided start to the new administration, where Trump’s 100 Days agenda was dominated by DOGE tearing through the bureaucracy and Senate Minority Leader Schumer avoided a government shutdown to partisan discontent, despite his belief that doing so would have empowered Trump more, early Democratic party polling suggested a desire to on the base for more and more active resistance.
How to fight was up for debate, and rather than a comprehensive strategy something of a spaghetti strategy of ‘throw everything at the wall and see what works’ was pursued. Many of these have been covered in the Motte over the past weeks, from the record-breaking national injunctions, to the media campaigns over the ICE deportations trying to equivocate migrant deportations with citizen exile, to the efforts to stall DOGE and administrative personnel actions. The recent Ivy League struggles by the likes of Yale and Harvard against Trump are also emblematic, as (university) administration have risen and fallen depending on if they are seen as weak against Trump. That’s not to say all these actions have been successful- for every ‘Trump suffers major blow in effort to [X]’ there is often a partially or mostly reversed decision later- but it is popular, and clearly so.
In the last weeks, this has organized to the point where various Democratic media organs are explicitly re-raising the #Resistance moniker, trying to re-build the sort of mass-mobilization efforts that fortified democracy to save the 2020 election. This recently culminated with the mid-June No Kings protest, where various DNC-aligned organizations including MoveOn, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America organized nation-wide protests. These protests were meant to eclipse the military parade in D.C. for the 250th anniversary of the US Army (or Trump’s birthday, if you prefer), and called to mind the various early anti-Trump protests of the first administration. These protests demonstrate organizational capacity, coordination efforts, influence with the sort of people to show up, and of course the supporting media coverage to get their message out.
There was just one slight problem for the stage-managed revival of the #Resistance- rioters waving the Mexican Flag over burning cars in Los Angeles, California, beat them to the punch.
While the actual photo was almost certainly one of those naturally occurring protest images, the California protests weren’t (quite). On 6 June, about a week and a half before the No Kings protests for the 14th, hundreds of protestors rallied in downtown Los Angeles to protest various ICE raids that had occurred across the city earlier that day. By the 7th, local riot police and teargas were being used On the 8th, Trump federalized California National Guard over California Governor Newsom’s objection to protect federal property and personnel.
This was an unusual, arguably provocative, decision. In US law, national guard operate under the state governor’s control and are not legally under Presidential or federal control unless done under certain legal authorities. Failure to do so is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a post-civil-war-reconstruction act making it a crime to use federal forces in law enforcement roles except where authorized by Congress. Trump invoking these authorities- which provide the Congressional authorization criteria- has been the subject of litigation by Governor Newsom, who opposed activation at the time, allegedly on grounds it would inflame the protests- which it arguably did.
Why did Trump do it, besides malicious disregard for the governor? Trump’s decision to do so anyways was likely influenced by the acting ICE director alleging that the LAPD took 2 hours to respond to requests for law enforcement assistance on 6 June despite multiple calls when ICE agents were swarmed by objectors during the 6 June enforcement raids that kickstarted the protests-turned-riots. The LA Police Chief has disputed this, claiming police responded in 38 minutes, citing traffic. (There is a joke to be made about LA traffic and how this is plausible.) The Police Chief also claimed they weren’t informed ahead of time, which is… also quite plausible.
Naturally / inevitably, however, the California protests became at least a short term win for Governor Newsom, whose post-protest Presidential prospects for 2026 seem stronger for having stood up to / opposed Trump. Resistance in this contexts has been more about verbal sparring and legal objections than something more concrete. Less assembling a platoon of people and buying the biggest fireworks possible to attack police, and more name calling, daring the administration to arrest him, and general ‘Trump is acting like a dictator’ themes. You know, the usual things political opponents in dictatorships do. At the same time, Newsom is playing the role of the moderate, and while it’s not like he can take full credit for the work of District Attorneys and such, California is publicizing charging some of the worst protestors in ways that weren’t really publicized during the Trump 1 era left-coded protests.
Except… Newsom isn’t the only winner here. Or necessarily the biggest Democratic power player. That may yet go to another, David Huerta.
If you don’t know who David Heurta is, you are not alone. He is not an elected politician, a party strategist, or elder statesman. He is a union leader. To quote his Biden-era White House bio when he was an honored guest-
Or to put it another way- David Huerta is part of the labor union wing of the Democratic party, except his labor union is of the totally-not-illegal-immigrant sort of organized labor. And his role in the party is totally not as part of the labor union mobilization to party member pipeline that organized labor has served in the past.
Mr. Huerta was arrested Friday the 6th of June, which is to say when the protests started, for interfering with ICE operations. His protest seems to have been both non-violent and directly intended to obstruct ICE activities.
Mr. Huerta may well have been correct. Instead of everyone being arrested, Mr. Huerta was arrested. And within 12 hours hundreds of protestors were in downtown LA. Within 36 hours, hundreds grew to thousands and cars had been burned in the streets. Within 48 hours Trump sent in the national guard, clearly taking it seriously.
One on hand, this can be (as the sympathetic media seek to characterize it), a case of a peaceful labor leader being unjustly suppressed, leading to a cycle of provocation due to reckless escalation.
On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?
To my knowledge, no. And that’s why I would suggest that Mr. Huerta, not Governor Newsome, may end up being the bigger winner from these protests. A $50,000 bail fee is one of those things that is not exactly going to cripple not only a labor union leader with friends in high places, but someone who has- probably- gotten far, far more popular with the would-be resistance. Willing to fight ICE, protest Trump, and a labor leader?
Mr. Huerta may not be challenging Governor Newsom for the governorship or Presidency any time ever, but Mr. Huerta probably has a good future ahead of himself in the Democratic party… if the glowing editorial linked in that first mention of him wasn’t clue enough that he’s already a significant local power player.
But remember- it’s not just Mr. Huerta.
Mr. Huerta’s glory comes, somewhat, at the expense of Governor Newsom. Media coverage, and public attention, is a 0-sum game. Some elements can reinforce each other, and in this case arguably did, but other elements work against each other.
After all, their glory/prestige/anti-Trump cred comes from the protests that came at the expense of the No King’s protests. Their exposure / attention grabbing was zero-sum between ‘polite, professional’ #Resistance, and a far more immediate, visceral ‘snap’ protests.
And the California protests- where both Huerta and Newsom had their political interest incentives be firmly in the ‘maximally oppose Trump’ side of things- have given Trump and the Republicans the sort of made-for-campaign-add images that only a Mexican flag over burned cars in American cities can.
And this doesn’t count the other people involved, initially or later, and who tried to get in on the action / influence. One man has been charged with trying buy the biggest fireworks he could to arm his ‘platoon’ and shoot at police in the later LA protests. When political fireworks- figurative or literal- are prestigious, bigger demonstrations of ability garner more prestige for more influence for bigger groups.
The LA Protests and the No Kings Protests weren’t formally or even directly at odds. But they were competing in various ways. For public attention, yes, but also for Democrat consideration. The #Resistance revival has, for the moment, failed to take off. Maybe it already would have, but the LA riots stole wind from the sail, to speak. And in turn, the LA riots- despite being vehemently anti-Trump and anti-ICE, two very popular things with the Democratic base- are likely to undercut the Democrat position going into the next election cycle. Now any future No Kings-style mass protests has to either take better care to distance from the more combative, or be tarred with the politically unpalatable for the non-democrats in the electorate.
Which lowers the value (and ability) of a combined effort… but does encourage partisans to do what they can for their own interest, regardless of how it affects the rest of the party. The nature of such publicity-driven contests creates natural incentives for speed (to pre-empt others), high-visibility (to dominate attention), and excess (the rawest form of proof-of-sincerity).
This creates something of a prisoners dilemma where everyone has an incentive to ‘defect’ first by going for their own public display, rather than coordinating. Even if the party, collectively, would perform better if everyone sang from the same sheet of music, any ambitious leader is incentivized to not be part of the choir.
The point here isn’t that these contemporary protests are adversaries. It is that these contemporary incentives are occurring at the same time as the inter-party conflict, where the David Hogg and progressives of the party want more combative responses at the expense of other party members. And if they can do so- and win party acclaim- by pushing protest actions as aggressively as possible against Trump, the acceptable target, rather than against other Democrats…
That’s a risky mix, even before you consider that another key actor has his own agency in this brewing inner-party struggle.
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Part 4: Trump Can Strike Back (Lawfully)
I’m torn between introducing this section as ‘Trump’s White House is more competent than you may want to believe’ and ‘it’s not legal just because it’s anti-Trump,’ and ‘don’t count on departed friends to protect you.’ All are applicable.
The first is a reminder / warning against those who want to dismiss the Trump administration’s ability for deliberate, even clever, action. Whatever your opinion on Trump himself, he is not an incompetent at everything he does. Nor, more importantly, are the people he’s brought into this administration. There are implications of some exceptionally competent people who understand how the government works at a mechanical level, as demonstrated from the takedown of USAID through dual-hatting, the ongoing efforts to move Executive branch agencies outside of the National Capital Region, and the budget/shutdown politics. I’ve even gone so far as to argue that various policy rollouts like DOGE have been done with the intent of shaping later / future policy efforts. The Project 2025 wishlist may not have been a formal Trump policy plan of everything he’d agreed to, but there are a lot of discrete, actionable items there that have been pursued as able by those willing to work with/for Trump.
The point here isn’t to praise, but to make a point about institutional competence. There are people in the administration who know what they are doing, know what they want, and know how to go about turning that desire into policy. And when they know to expect resistance, they loosely know who and what they need to act against- not least because various parts of the #Resistance wrote extensive tell-all articles last time to take credit for how they worked together to link elected politicians, media, labor organizers, and business interests worked together to manage anti-Trump protests.
When political opponents write a brag sheet of dubiously legal measures they took to defeat you, it doesn’t take the most capable political actor to plan to mitigate it on round two.
It’s not even something that necessarily only started this year. Reaching way back to 2017, you may (not) remember the Dakota Pipeline Protests, which were one of the anti-Trump-coded protests in the early first trump administration. In short, American tribal / environmentalist protests over a pipeline escalated after Trump voiced support, including occupations of work sites, blockades against ground routes to resupply them, and so on. It was framed as ‘Trump against native Americans and environmentalists,’ and the protestors received significant public media support at the time.
Well, after over half a decade in court, Greenpeace has been $660 million in damages for defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts. This may threaten to bankrupt the organization, though it will be years more before it works through the system. The crux of the verdict derives from the tens of thousands of dollars raised to train and send thousands of protestors, along with logistical support, with awareness and sanction at the highest levels of the organization.
Parallels to other mass protest organizers should hopefully be obvious.
This Time Would Be Different even if Trump were not Actually a Dictator this term, but because various factors that the Democratic party and partisans have taken for granted in the past two decades are changing. Various dynamics that let the election fortification of 2020 succeed were based variously on low awareness by the Trump administration of what was going on, having the right friends in the right places to make it work, and reluctance by the government(s) to go after coordinating elements.
As elements of this change, the system gears grind against rather than with each other. And in the sort of decentralized, every-Dem-is-pursuing-their-own-interest protest environment that the No Kings vs. Newsom vs. Huerte anti-Trump protests have been showing, there are probably going to be far more loose threads, and far more willingness to pursue them, going forward.
Take the Justice Department. A good deal of prosecution by any government is discretionary. You only have so many investigators, only so many prosecutors, and more potential crimes than you can handle. You prioritize what to pursue, and drop what you don’t want to. This is how something like 90% to 95% of the 2020 Floyd protest charges were dropped or never pursued in various jurisdictions.
But at the same time, non-prosecution is a choice, not a natural state of a just world. And it is a choice that can be made otherwise if someone wants to. Or if the people who wouldn’t want to depart and are replaced.
For example, the DOJ Civil Rights Division had a reputation for seeking certain types of civil rights cases, and not being as interested in others, such as university admissions discrimination. I say ‘had’ because something like 70% of the DOJ Civil Rights Division has departed since Trump took office. Whatever reputation / expectation you have of the Civil Rights Division, it’s probably not quite what the new DOJ CRD priorities are.
But this is the new institutional direction of the CRD. It still has the legal authorities Congress gave to the ‘old’ CRD. But as the saying goes, “people are policy,” and the people in the CRD have changed. Other people’s expectations just haven’t caught up to, say, the DOJ opening a civil rights case against any state or local officials involved sanctuary city politics that also just-so-happen to overlaps with, say, anti-federal riots.
I raised the fireworks platoon guy earlier, but that is far from the only case that can be pursued. About a week into the protests, a crowd broke into an ICE detention facility, overpowered national guard soldiers, and tried to release the detainees before about 100 law enforcement officers responded. That’s various charges on its own. The FBI is reportedly considering a criminal conspiracy line of effort for any groups involved in organizing the violent protests. The IRS is reportedly reviewing into non-profit and other organizational funding as part of the money flow investigation. Parallel to those parallels, House Republicans are investigating a US billionaire with possible ties to the protests, and the Chinese Communist Party… and Code Pink,an anti-war/social-justice organization.
And this doesn’t include other possible things that could be pursued. Doxing can be a crime… but what if its a municipal mayor who decides to dox ICE agents? When mostly peaceful protests are held outside of hotels suspected of hosting ICE agents, what if / when a not-entirely-peaceful protest occurs outside of a hotel that isn’t? When left-coded social media encourages eachother to follow and record ICE agents at work, what happens if someone ignores the ACLU’s carefully worded advice on dealing with law enforcement, particularly what the agents areallowed to do?
Would arrests and prosecutions be politically motivated? Sure, if you want. When any prosecution is discretionary, all high-profile investigations and prosecutions are arguably motivated. Similarly, a refusal to do so can also be motivated.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that could be found. It won’t even require ‘three felonies a day’ over-criminalization of anything.
The point I am trying to make here is that there is a greater risk of legal risk to anti-Trump partisans this administration than in the last two, and this is matched by a greater interest in the Trump administration to do so.
This is going to challenge people’s expectations / understanding of what ‘should’ be tolerated / not challenged as illegal, but will be viewed as suspect now. I want to emphasize this even further, since this isn’t ‘merely’ corruption of justice, but an element of generational norms being overturned.
12 of the last 16 years have seen the American federal government under the control of the Democratic party. The Obama and Biden administrations would generally sympathize with, and not be interested in aggressively pursuing, Democrat-coded protestors. Four of the other last 16 years were the resistance phase, where significant parts of the government bureaucracy deliberately stonewalled Trump efforts- and in some cases, in active collusion with protest organizers. Four years before that, the last four years of the Bush administration, were also a period of large-scale and sustained political protest environments as part of the Democratic party apparatus, when the Bush Administration was sensitive to how it could respond due to falling political legitimacy and political norms of the era.
20+ years of established expectations on ‘what you can get away with at a protest’ is a generation. Younger partisans like David Hogg have spent their entire adult / politically-aware lives in that environment. It is a norm to them, the way things have ‘always’ been.
But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.
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Part 5: When a Resistance Devours Itself
This is the final section, and an effort to bring the points above together into a hopefully coherent but non-obvious synthesis.
My forecast prediction is that over the next year, inter-Democrat competition is going to revolve around who can ‘stand up to’ / fight Trump by pressing the limit of the law, but attempts to toe the line are going to overstep changes in enforcement practices. This will fuel anti-Trump sentiment amongst Democrats and accusations of tyranny, but also influence the unfolding of the Democratic internal struggle not only going into 2026, but even into the 2028 election. This will be because the Trump administration will likely go after the ‘connective tissue’ of the Democratic protest-mobilization apparatus where it detects legal risk. This, in turn, can become a tool in the Democratic internal conflict that sub-factions can utilize against each other, because those same mobilization organizations are factional players in the Democratic internal conflict.
In part one, we made a case for why the Senate will be a rough bet for the Democrats at all. While coherent parties can spin a partial failure into a partial success, this will likely hinder the institutional ability of the Democrats to do major limits on the Republican party. This is liable to frustrate partisans, and lead to highly symbolic protests in the institutions, and other actions outside of institutions.
In part two, we raised the ongoing internal conflict within the Democratic party. Significant parts of the Progressive wing have and are making efforts to actively displace non-progressive rivals for control and even composition of the Democratic Party establishment. The non-progressive institutionalists won, but they are facing the challenge of the upcoming mid-terms, even as the progressives are trying to take the mantle of ‘actually fighting Trump.’ Democratic institutions are already being used against each other.
In part three, we raised how ‘actually fighting’ is something of a zero-sum game on the ability of leaders to mobilize protests and take the spotlight. Would-be leaders trying to organize great protests can be pre-empted and upstaged even accidentally by those doing their own thing with more modest means. When paired with the internal party struggle in part two, this creates incentives for would-be leaders of the party to push aggressive protests to the limits of the law.
In part four, we make the point is that the limit of the law is changing, and that this implication is not widely recognized. Between changes in institutional composition that have changed out more sympathetic actors who could have turned a blind eye, increased awareness of how the Democratic protest mobilization structure works, and the improved institutional understanding of the Trump administration on how to shape and act through the bureaucracy, the legal-enforcement environment has changed. When it is noticed, it will be probably be decried as tyranny, but there are non-tyrannical causes.
In part five, I want to make a point that these are not just individual facets that might each be an interesting observation of their own but part of a feedback loop. How the Trump Administration chooses to prosecute law-pressing protests is itself going to be a factor in the internal democratic power struggle in both future elections and the outcome of the Democratic power struggle.
The 2026 election argument is reasoning from (future) public polling. Will Trump and the Republicans be more or less popular if they crack down on lawbreakers involved in protests? If the public supports anti-ICE protestors over Trump, then the more anti-ICE protests, the better the midterm results. As a consequence, internal democratic party logic might be to maximize protests, even if it involves lawbreaking, for a net gain. Especially if/when anger at Trump administration arrest and prosecutions might turn out the base.
But this is an assumption, not a conclusion. While there are parts of the Trump migration policies that are unpopular, there are parts that remain popular. Moreover, prosecutions of protest elements can motivate the Trump base as well, and voter apathy/antipathy could deter Democrat support. It could well be a negative effect. We’ll see which proves right in the midterms.
What is arguably more important, however, is if the organizations that organize and execute start to being targeted, and what that might mean going into 2028.
Organizations that engage in mass protest politics, like Greenpeace, don’t only organize protests against Red Tribe-coded efforts. That money and manpower is put to use in other ways in other contexts. For Democratic party organizations, that includes things like voter mobilization, organizing fundraising, and coordinating communications. These take money and manpower, and when you lack the resources and the unified efforts, you end up like the Florida Democratic Party, which has practically collapsed in the third largest US state.
That is the larger 2028 election implication, if aggressive protest mobilizers in 2025-2026 lead to investigations/prosecutions in 2027-2028 due to the increased willingness to enforce against grey zone activities. The generational expectations of what could/would be prosecuted are shifted, so there’s the risk, and the consequence could be a partial paralysis of the Democratic Party mobilization/organization infrastructure in the next presidential election. Organizations frozen, donors uncertain/afraid to give to who, and so on.
This will obviously, understandably, and predictably alarm Democratic partisans. Condemnations will be demanded and almost certainly provided. However… it will also shape the inter-Democratic conflict as which organizations are affected/investigated first and most will matter.
After all, Democratic organizations don’t only try to help all Democrats get elected. Some, like Leaders We Deserve, would rather some Democrats lose so that a personal faction can get in place instead.
And if, hypothetically, some process error or rules violation were to expose that faction to legal risk- where the big bad Trump administration might act and convenient clear the field…
Well, the surviving winners would certainly happily condemn the Trump administration for doing so. And get the perks with the party base for doing so. But it sure would be convenient, wouldn’t it?
This is the risk of the Democratic civil war quote-unquote “escalating” in the midst of the Trump administration’s willingness to crack down where it can. It’s not just that Democrats are fighting each other, or that Democrats fight Trump. It can be that Democrats use Trump to fight each other as a tool for their internal conflict.
If anyone has studied (or, worse, lived in/through) a country going through a civil war, especially one with a resistance with little formal power but motivated by performative acts of defiance, this should not be surprising. This has been a common / well recorded dynamic where rival insurgent groups are nominally on the same side, but competing with each other, and leverage the hated oppressor as a tool in their conflict.
Sometimes it’s as direct as an anonymous informant dropping a tip, so that a raid can go after a rival. Perhaps that old, establishment incumbent is in the way, but wouldn't be if evidence of patronage-network corruption were passed on to a hostile FBI. Or maybe that young, reckless progressive who didn't learn how to play the limits of the protests of the 70s makes a mistake that could leave them out and unprotected. Action, or inaction, could have similar effects when a hostile administration is looking for something to act on.
Does such feuding it hurt the combined potential of the resistance overall? Sure. Does it improve the hated authority’s position to have one less threat? Also sure. But does it position you better for influence / control of the local resistance networks, i.e. the democratic party?
This is why David Hogg was called a jackass for trying to primary fellow democrats as DNC chair. It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere. The value of a reputation of neutrality is that people don’t expect neutral actors to be that sort of backstabber, and they don't make plans to backstab the neutral actors either. It reduces internal coalition tensions.
But in making that power play, and then the institutionalist purge of Hogg through totally-not-pretextual means, the Hogg struggle helped reframe the nature of the competition. It is not merely ‘how do the Democrats struggle against Trump?’ It is now, increasingly, ‘how do the Democrats use existing institutions in the struggle against each other?’
And since Trump is still a relevant actor, both as a foil and as an agent in his own right, the emerging Democratic infighting paradigm may well become ‘how do we use Trump in our struggle against each other?’
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If we follow your logic at its word, the natural conclusion would be the total collapse of the Democratic Party.
Right now, the fringe elements of both parties are wildly unpopular. The question for most elections is who comes across as the most repulsive and who successfully tamps down on their extremists in public messaging. Since Democrats are better educated and hooked into their politicians, this has turned into a real advantage for the Republicans. The Democrat extremists are able to effectively pressure and primary politicians into following their worst ideas, which have a lot of salience right now.
So we have a civil war right now, between the Democrats from the Reagan days who want to relive that heady sense of resistance like they were young again and the young progressives who have been educated into mind-meltingly unpopular ideas. Out on the distant fringes are the swing-state Democrats like Fetterman who are effectively untouchable by the party mechanism but equally have no sway over it. Whoever wins is going to win based on their ability to signal #resistance to the equally extreme base, as voters on the edge increasingly disengage with the party. But the party does not compromise on its least popular tenets, and in fact broadcasts them as a matter of principle, and the way things are going, will stand absolutely no chance in upcoming elections (only exception being the presidency if Trump does something dumb like defy the law to run for term 3 and scare the normies way too much).
So we should expect to see evaporative cooling concentrating the heart of the overeducated party, keeping seats where urban Millennials and Xers dominate and hemorrhaging the rest. And then, probably, the Blue Dogs try to create their own party and recapture the many voters who really don’t like Trump but can’t find it in themselves to vote D.
There was a moment, after this election, where I wondered to myself: is this when the Dems will figure out what’s happening? Is this where they Sister Souljah the woke out and start trying to win elections again? But that moment passed in a heartbeat, and the old party mechanisms reasserted their dominance. I think this is a general pattern, not just for democracy but for every kind of human organization, where the mechanisms of power become too cleanly rationalized, too stable, and the possibility of an internal coup vanishes. The existing order loses the possibility of making mistakes and being replaced from within, as they control all the needed feedback mechanisms and are not vulnerable to it. It’s at this moment that the levers of power cease to be representations or formalizations of the real sources of power, and become sources of power in themselves. When that happens, the power structure itself is in dire jeopardy, as it’s lost all connection to reality and has become a sort of ouroborus, swallowing its own tail and growing smaller and smaller.
I suspect that part of this self-consuming behavior is related to class divides like the educational alignment of the parties, but that’s probably enough on this for now.
While I think there are real concerns about what happens to the GOP Post-Trump, yeah, the Dem's issues are structural and the alliances they've forged by being maximally divisive on sex, on race, on religion, on class, and on age too, I guess, mean there's no way to please each of these disparate groups.
In fact, the post-Trump era might be harder on the Dems because opposition to Trump was like the one thing that united them!
Dems can't run another stodgy White Guy for President. I mean, they can, Biden proved that the party can get everyone in line and on task if needed, but it is impossible to imagine the guy who has the political juice to win the primaries at this point.
Likewise, Dem leadership is ossified and they've hamstrung any new blood from acquiring much power. AOC is popular but she's also been ground down by the party machine. Pelosi et al. will grip the reins of power right up until their dying breath. Trump, by elevating Vance, is giving the 'new Generation' a generous toehold on power which they can use to climb up.
David Hogg was stupid about it, but he had the right idea that there needs to be enough of a shakeup that young upstarts can compete for influence in the party and identify talented candidates. Kinda how Obama got into power (which, ironically, was probably what prompted the party to lock down that issue so Hillary could win next time).
On top of that, I don't see any possible way the Dems can attract young male voters back. They've gone way too far out on the "men are inherently evil" limb. Can't reel that back in without pissing off the unmarried white female demographic that is their backbone. But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session, like with Harry Sisson, will balk at anything they say. There's NOTHING to offer them.
Whomever they nominate, it'll either annoy their base, or it'll alienate the median voter.
And all this is before we talk about how the extreme progressive wings are demanding concessions constantly.
I could imagine it. Much of the Republican coalition would also like to put the average young male voter through a struggle session for such crimes as watching pornography, playing video games, engaging in "devil worshipping" activities like D&D, and not being married. Trump won because he wasn't identified with that faction of the party. If the 2028 candidate decides to wrap themselves in conservative Christianity, those young men could decide to take a hike. Remember, it won't be BASED Christianity developed by and for young men, it will be the Christianity of boomer-brained Gen-X-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies.
This just isn't true nowadays, I don't think. The religious right has never been weaker or had less cultural sway. The Republican coalition nowadays isn't a bunch of disaffected people united by Mother Church's guiding hand -- the religious ones are just a small part of that coalition themselves, and need make concessions to other people, not vice versa.
Plus, they got their destruction of Roe v. Wade.
What large issue do they have to animate them to action and grant them leverage over the national GOP, after that?
They still have abortion, which they want to ban at the federal level.
The Republicans will not ban abortion at the federal level. Neither will they commit significant political value to attempting such a ban.
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If they can't get bans at the state level when they have control of the governments, it'd be a real tough sell to make it happen Federally.
They can of course push for it, but winning the fight to remove the Constitutional 'right' to abortion was the gift that also made it so the issue doesn't need to be fought at the Federal level.
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I am constantly reminded day after day that although the right has a very good understanding of what the left wants and thinks, the opposite is not true.
Suppose I told you that Democrats want to make abortions of unrestricted term legal on the federal level. Then, you would say, that is not true: that only certain extreme activists would say so, that they are a minority within a minority: that democrats in general absolutely do not celebrate abortions or attempt to sacralize it as some sort of female right of passage.
But yet, knowing this, you apply the broad brush to Republicans without the nuances or the understanding. All of the logic and reason of the previous paragraph falls out of the back of your head, and you say: "Republicans want to ban abortion federally."
Be honest with yourself. Are you being generous with your political enemies, or are you close-minded and prejudiced?
(After writing this out, I realize you could be referring 'they' as evangelicals, but the basic observation still is the same. Which ones?)
I'm maybe somewhere in the middle of Alexander, faceh, and you. I think the left has the progressive and center factions, and the right has the evangelical and libertarian/populist factions. Right now the populists are winning so hard you barely even hear the evangelical faction any more, but that doesn't mean the evangelicals have stopped existing. They're a minority, but they absolutely would push for a federal ban if they thought they would succeed. The moral framework of pro-life demands it, because if the neighboring state legalized murder the median person would be outraged by the decision and wouldn't care if someone else tried arguing about state's rights. That's why you have things like Texas outlawing traveling to another state to get an abortion. And if they succeeded in it, I doubt the pro-choice right would defect because of it.
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There's an inherent problem with the political landscape right now continually asking sacrifices of young men but being very short on the rewards that are promised to them.
Nobody in power seems to want to acknowledge what these men actually want out of society and, by contrast, what they're actually getting.
I think this problem is going to become unavoidably salient as the Boomers die off and a lot of guys enter their 30's unmarried and with few prospects on starting a family.
The side that at least wants the men to stop watching porn and to start a family might come around to realize that this requires addressing those men's concerns and shifting cultural incentives.
The Dems are intrinsically unable to address mens' concerns.
So yeah, maybe they walk away from the Boomer evangelical coalition, but they ain't walking into the arms of the lefties.
They will, but only long enough to say that it's disgusting or that them not getting it is entirely their own fault. The latter might be reasonable if it were actually true.
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It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.
The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.
But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.
Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.
...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.
I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.
I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."
The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.
I will at least observe that Red states have been, even in this era, pushing back on the prevalence of online porn. Pornhub, notably, has blocked a number of states that have passed relevant legislation to require age verification. It's Very Possible Nowadays to circumvent such things or find sites that don't care about (American) jurisdiction quite so much, but it is happening.
Notably, though, the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".
One might draw a parallel to (broadly speaking) Democrats and smoking tobacco. In the 90s, there was a claim around the Republican side of things that the Democrats were going to ban tobacco. One could believe this, because it was very clear that the Democrats as a group were not fond of the tobacco industry, and because the people who really did want to ban tobacco seemed mostly to be deep-blue democrats, and also because the people making this comparison somehow didn't mention counterexamples. But in fact, Democrats did not ban tobacco, nor did they make any serious effort to try to. Instead, they took numerous steps to paint tobacco consumption and the tobacco industry as sleazy, dirty, and dangerous, relying on coordinated social power and messaging to try to push people to drop the habit of their own volition, thus carving away the industry's financial base and reducing its lobbying power. What laws were passed were either focused on forcing the tobacco companies themselves into cooperating with this push, or else targeted attacks on areas where tobacco was framed in the worst light and where public support was strongest, such as the lawsuits.
I think this is a pretty good model for what an actual Red-Tribe attack on porn and the porn industry would look like.
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What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Sin is definitionally injurious to individuals and societies.
All that's changed is that instead of warning people (and getting called crazy), we now get to say "I told you so" (and still mostly be ignored).
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What's the actual harm? I'm just not seeing it.
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The obvious GOP front-runners for 2028 and 2032 are Vance, Rubio, DeSantis, and Hegseth in roughly that order. All of them are currently under 55 and much closer culturally to what @FCfromSSC is describing than anything you have.
Talking about GOP front runners at this point is more snail brained than usual: the odds that more than one of Rubio, Hegseth, and Vance are still in Trump/MAGA's good graces in 2028 are lower than the odds that none of them are.
I'll take that bet.
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I think that framing it this way misses some important alternative possibilities. Possibilities like "Trump doesn't survive to 2028" (even leaving aside the assassins, which will continue for the foreseeable future, he's less than four years younger than Biden), and "the gameboard has been flipped; this question is no longer relevant" (most obviously by WWIII or by AI).
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The obvious front runners are Vance, Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin.
Vance is a ‘based Christian’ catholic convert
Rubio is a Hispanic cradle Catholic
Abbott runs ads on having become a Catholic to bond with his wife’s family. While she prefers to go to Latin mass governor Abbott definitely doesn’t. He has a good relationship with the Texas Catholic bishops(not the most based bishops around- the most based archbishops in the USA are, ironically, those of Portland, San Francisco, and Denver, in addition to military services and the ordinariate for former Anglicans).
Youngkin is a country club conservative picked, in part, specifically to be non offensive. The chances of muscular Christianity are low.
I’m counting one example of based muscular Christianity out of four.
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Which has largely shown the decline bottoming out in recent years?
2010s "don't be a dick" secular humanism is now right wing. Left wing atheism is witchcraft and social justice identitarisnism, right wing atheism is hedonic self indulgence. Split the irreligious into those 2 broad factions, make a 1 second guess on who is more repelled by who, and 'religious identity' is no longer the savior of the left. Maybe they can make a hard pivot to Islam like the European left did, the USA has a lot more runway before critical mass for sharia becomes unmanageable.
Well, this right wing atheist isn't exactly generating a bunch of hedons these days, nor indulging in much of anything (except being poor and miserable)…
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From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
But the obvious corollary to that is that if the "new right-wing counterculture" wins, it will then become The Man and there will be a rebellion against it, too, at some point, no?
Yeah pretty much. The party that controls the zeitgeist favours conservation, because they want to preserve the zeitgeist. The people in charge are in charge in one sense because the culture favours their politics, if it stops favouring their politics they'll lose power.
Edit: Added the rest of the post I meant to write when I accidentally hit send. God damn it I am getting worse at posting every day.
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One of the interesting things that the right wing in the USA is doing is working to destroy many of the institutions that can be deployed to be The Man (the Department of Education being perhaps the prime example).
I don't think this eliminates the chance that the right-wing counterculture suffers from victory (as seems to typically be the case!) but I do think, if successful, it makes it more difficult for the right to seize and hold the low ground of "mandatory and cringe" that typically alienates people. Banking on "diversity of thought" to skew right-wing is a bold choice that may not pay off, but if it does it is actually likely to help keep the right more diverse (and more tolerant) by ensuring that the right's "client base" (for lack of a better term) is diversified.
The right lacks the Elite Human Capital(TM) necessary to take over these institutions, and it knows it. Scorched earth tactics - destroying positions you cannot hold to deny them to the enemy - is the second best solution.
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Interesting quote; but isn't just copy-pasting a long quote (with a link to source), adding no comment of your own, pretty low-effort for the Motte?
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The chance of that is pretty low- not least because mainstream Christianity has gotten much better at appealing to young men, but also the religious right is just used to being a junior coalition partner.
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You are listing 90s and 2000s culture war topics. It just needs some "preserving marriage" talk.
In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.
Right, and there are a lot of people who want to go back and re-litigate those same fights. Some of them are in this thread.
"devil worshipping" DND? I wasn't aware of a sentiment against it around here.
That is rather the weakest part of his argument. Many people here absolutely do argue against video games, against pornography and in favor of marriage.
And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?
In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married, and recognition that excessive porn use or video games are actively emasculating them is pretty common.
They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system, which republicans are the only party actually trying to address.
It’s a key psychological difference between young men & women; addressing these issues are more likely to actually feel supportive & empowering rather than making them feel “under attack”.
Talking to you young men like defective young women is how the Democratic Party got in this mess to begin with.
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I am opposed to video games, porn, weed, fornication, rap music, and sports betting. I can’t say I have anything against DnD but I also don’t know very much about it and I’m certainly willing to be opposed to fictional entertainment in principle.
Now the difference is nobody believes that republicans will put me in charge of regulating these things.
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Many young Christians I know, of various stripes, play DnD. I’m sure there are some boomers still railing against it but millennial and zoomer Christians are generally in agreement that fantasy stories are cool, and fantasy roleplay is a fun hobby.
Now something has to be responsible for the increase in Wicca and various forms of witchery over the past couple decades, but that seems concentrated within new agey women and not the geeky introverts who played DND in the 90s.
It turns out the real problem was
the dawning of the age of Aquariusthe hippies and their intellectual descendants after all, though I will certainly stand firm on the proposition that occasional atheistic/countercultural men were more than willing to invoke the occult if it meant getting inside some witchy panties.I think the problem was social conservatives conflated several different countercultural groups who all rebelled against the moral majority, and couldn’t tell the fantasy roleplay apart from the new age cults. This hardened a lot of hearts, which was a shame.
But I still see the spread of witchcraft among women as an unresolved historical question. But I suppose people on the other side would say the same about the spread of conservative Christianity among men. Dissatisfaction with secular materialism is startlingly widespread, a fact I find hard to diagnose despite being a part of it. But if I had to make a diagnosis, perhaps it’s because technology increasingly feels like it limits human freedom rather than enhancing it. (Let’s not start another debate about the automobile or social media.)
The invocation of supernatural forces of any kind becomes a kind of trump (no relation) card that lets people feel like they have control over their lives, or at least have a direct line to someone who does. I suspect that magical thinking and superstition also load on neuroticism, because neurotic people often feel like the world is dangerous and they’re too weak to face it. Supernatural powers serve as a means of personal protection against a world they feel like they cannot control. Occultism spiked during COVID, where people felt like they had little power to control the situation (whether because of state authority or fear of the disease itself). Hence you get people panicking over the election of Trump (relation intended) and trying to trump (no relation) his political power by casting hexes on /r/witchesvspatriarchy.
Sometimes I wonder if being so morally concerned about the occult in the 80s and 90s actually was the cause of increased occultism. It certainly demonstrated that getting into occult things would really piss off conservatives! So if you're a young lady and you hate conservative Christianity, and you want to express in strong terms your contempt for it, well, you might go reaching for the very things they said were deeply wrong. In particular, this might go some ways towards explaining how massively popular these things are among gay people.
Perhaps if conservatives had mocked occultism and superstition the way a lot of skeptics did instead of getting incredibly angry and treating it like a real thing, we wouldn't live in a world where 40% of young women believe in astrology. Mockery and indifference kills ideas; outrage reifies them.
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You forgot pushing Intelligent Design in schools!
Nobody has argued about embryonic stem cell research in a while. Although we have had left-coded arguments about HeLa cell line research.
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Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
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Eh. We've heard enough about neckbeards, pick-me's, and incels not to buy that line.
Nobody's being honest here. Just waving the old carrot and hoping it's not rotten...
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Does that even matter though? Harris still cackled her way to 75 million votes. Given her complete lack of appeal, that appears to be a floor as to what their organizers can gin up through harvesting, bussing, etc. And its enough for the party to maintain 40+ seats in the Senate basically in perpetuity.
There’s another upcoming structural wrinkle, and that’s the 2030 census and accompanying electoral college redistribution. Blue strongholds like California are set to lose electoral votes, and several increasingly red states like Arizona and Florida will be gaining them.
That can amend the Presidential computation, but it doesn't change the Senate, and in the House there still will be like a floor of 195ish.
Sure, but there’s plenty of states getting redder at the same time. Off the top of my head, it’s not implausible to add Rhode Island as a New England state in reach for the GOP in a good year, and Minnesota is a when not an if. If republicans really do work their way to single party dominance I’d expect Virginia to get much redder quickly, too. And if current trends continue in the Hispanic population NM is likely to be competitive for republicans again soon.
I wouldn't be above 10% predicting any of those things, all of them combined I'd be under 5%.
Democrats just resoundingly demonstrated they have an incredibly high floor. Harris-Walz got 75million votes. On those non-existent (probably negative) coat tails they were just -4 in the senate with a very tough map given the Montana and WV retirements, while actually receiving more total votes for their candidates, and actually gained 2 house seats. They also managed to hold steady in governorships, even with the crazy North Carolina guy somehow holding on in a reddish state.
They don't need popular policies or politicians. Those are outdated. They have vote-harvesting operations, which is what matters.
In comparison to Mark Robinson?
And how many of those vote harvesting operations are functional without USAID? How many of them require a DNC not at its own throat?
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Agreed, Virginia probably will get redder as a bunch of deep blue government workers find greener pastures in other states (although that has knock-on effects depending on where these people wind up.)
But, where are you getting your thoughts on Minnesota? As great as it would be to have the land of our most “Uff da” saying people rejoin the Red fold, this seems like the reversed version of Blue Texas always being just around the corner.
Minnesota’s continued blue-ness is due, partly, to a highly unionized rural white population. But unions are shifting red, undermining a key advantage for the DFL. Additionally, Minnesota has been getting redder, just not as much as its neighbors, and it’s reasonable to expect current trends to continue. Finally, Minnesota’s blue is nowhere near as sticky as Texas’ red if you look at state level elections, the MNGOP is able to put up a fair fight in a way Texas democrats are not.
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Heres the straight dope compadre, the new democratic party isnt the old boring rubes ya know? Dems spent 20m to learn how to talk like men do and in mens spaces. So get ready for the Committee Approved Male Representatives to drop a few f-bombs in mens spaces like a CSGO Lobby or a weight rack about how manly it is to support a woman and why toxic masculinity is just like the worst. Because clearly what men really want is for someone that simply drops a few swears and hangs out around them to gain traction.
Once the men are listening they'll automatically absorb all the lessons pushed by democrats because men automatically listen to their betters like the pack beasts they all are. Ideally the democrats can have their version of joe rogan. The emblems of democratic manliness, David Hogg and Dean Withers, should be good. Maybe that Hasan Piker guy could work too, but he has visible muscles so he might be a secret right winger.
Not sure how sarcastic you are being, but considering that the last iteration of this was the fat beardy guy who claims to eat carburetors for breakfast, I'm not sure "democrat Joe Rogan" will be something they can pull off this cycle...
People think Hasan is like Rogan which is so telling. He's hot and fit and popular so it's the same thing apparently.
If you know anything about either creator's character and biography it's insane to think people who admire Rogan would look kindly on Hasan.
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I realize your whole post was sarcastic, but I'm reminded of something someone said here a week or two ago: Joe Rogan was the Democrats' Joe Rogan, they drove him and people like him away.
That said I'd love to see the dems put major support behind Hasan, the backfire would be hilarious and it would probably give Roach King Asmongold a year's worth of content from that alone.
Honestly I'm surprised the left hasn't tried to figure out Asmongold 's popularity with young men. He's a midwit at best on his good days, but his takes come across to audiences as "common sense" (regardless of if they actually are). He just has a disarming way of talking and presenting himself, and I think that's something shrieking feminist harpies are constitutionally incapable of.
Was it this one?
https://www.themotte.org/post/2015/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/333055?context=8#context
That's the one
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I've heard this being said, well, everywhere since late 2024 at least. It's kind of an obvious point to make, so a lot of people made it.
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To give proper credit, the quote was originally from Shoe0nHead.
I'd guess that the quote or something like it was independently created by many people around the same time. The idea that Joe Rogan was a leftist who supported Democrats such as Bernie Sanders is just an obvious fact backed up by mountains of historical evidence that no one denies, and the idea that Democrats look for heretics to drive away is also a pretty non-controversial one (the only real controversy being on whether this is a good thing or not, perhaps because these heretics actually wanted to be driven away and were just looking for an excuse). And so putting those together into a pithy comment poking fun at the self-induced misery of modern Democrats bemoaning the lack of their own Joe Rogan to aid in their propagandizing is something that's almost trivial to do. Certainly the thought occurred to me long before I'd encountered the quote externally, but I'm not a public commentator who would state such a quote out loud and who wouldn't be noticed even if I had.
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"Doesn't look like anything to me."
The left is approaching the problem statement from the wrong direction: men aren't right wing because they listen to a magically popular midwit trash goblin, the roach king is popular precisely because he shits on leftist shibboleths. Its a literal blind spot for the left to see any positive value in the anti-woke and generally anti-identitarian rhetoric of Asmongold, which is one of many blind spots but the most pertinent one. The only time such data can be noticed is when it is a cudgel to attack enemies "the evil men like Asmon only because they are anti-woke" or "Asmon is anti-woke because he needs to appeal to chuds!"
Viewership stats seem opaque but my gut tells me the right wing anti social-justice creators have way more traction than social justice. I did a quick peek to see how Breadtubers are doing and I didn't realize how inconsequential they are, much less against Asmongold. This just reinforces the point that the left wing just doesn't have the sauce to keep audiences engaged, but the reason for that isn't the packaging its the message itself.
Leftists are hoping that they can infiltrate mens spaces to share the message, convinced that the gatekeeping is what keeps the message from being received. Its like they never learnt the problem is the message itself. Infiltrating mens spaces to spread the gospel of The Future Is Female doesn't create converts, it hollows the space. Shoving ugly they/thems in Concord didn't tap into Modern Audiences and for all the technicolor progressives populating Overwatch R34 still clearly shows skinny hot chicks dominate.
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I wonder if we'll get a democratic collapse along the lines of the 1850s Whig party. I don't see any particularly salient issue that could divide the party like that. Instead, it seems like lots of really small fractures, which paradoxically keeps the party together. Which is unfortunate, because we need a collapse like that of the Whig party: the Democrats don't stand for basically anything other than grifting anymore.
I think we are going through a Whig collapse, if much slower and less of a split. The party is sloughing off working-class voters and refocusing on the educated elite. The “small fractures” in the remaining party mean little; the core agrees on everything but whose ass should fill which seat. The real fracture is between center and periphery, and in the years to come I would predict an increasing muscular fringe of swing-vote Democrats whose real selling point to voters is that they do not fall in line in front of Trump or Vance or whoever, nor the Democratic apparatchiks. There will eventually be a showdown of sorts between that fringe and the party center, and the result will either be a takeover of the party itself or the founding of a new party. Either way, the principles of that group will steal voters back from the Republicans and re-establish the unstable equilibrium of two-party democracy.
That’s my prediction, anyway, or possibly my hope. I’m real damn sick of the current political divide.
Or, in other words, the aisles are swapping underneath the parties, and the Ds are going to fully re-emerge into the collective consciousness as the right-wing/conservative party (the term "progressive-conservative" comes to mind, back when right-wing causes had the social license that left-wing causes do today). The Rs have very solidly positioned themselves on the left-wing/reform side, and Trump II exemplifies this.
Remember, Obama was the last time a D voter could logically/consistently claim to be on the side of reform, and [Rs voting in 2012 or 2016 for any non-Trump candidate] was the last time an R voter could do the same on the side of conservatism. This is what "right is the new left" was talking about. Biden was fundamentally a conservative pick, exactly what you want in a crisis (which said conservatives manufactured, but that's not actually important with respect to the actual dynamics).
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The democrats do have a very unpopular wedge issue their party could easily fracture over- trannies. There’s a faction die hard opposed to any semblance of moderation that makes life hell for any democrats who say things like, you know what, schools shouldn’t keep this from parents.
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The Democratic machine is too good at generating votes to actually collapse. The voter's preferences aren't really relevant to that.
That won't save the party alone. It might save the name.
The Tories in the UK are basically in that spot right now. They have a machine and no shot at relevance. Therefore everybody expects Reform to essentially buy the machine and maybe the name attached to it, as has happened before (they are after all officially "The Conservative and Unionist Party").
I doubt that happens to the Dems because Americans have their two party system bolted down to the institutions pretty solidly so there's little path for a takeover, but you can't run a party on machine politics alone, not a government party anyways.
Another trajectory is what happened in Malta, another famous two-party system where one party just consistently wins and another consistently loses but not by large enough a margin as to make the loser party politically irrelevant. And essentially you just start seeing the winner party leadership make deals with the loser party to keep power, in a classic example of the high-low vs middle mechanism.
All that said, it seems very early to call the Dems permanent losers at all. They're in disarray but I don't think they've been dealt a killing blow the likes of which the Tories got. I can totally see a Clinton or Blair type figure come up with a novel coalition formula and reinvent the party.
The UK Tory machine doesn't deliver votes any more. To the extent they are irrelevant, it is because nobody can see a scenario where they win a majority at Westminster and form a government (except possibly as a junior coalition partner to Reform, or heaven forfend as a junior partner in an anti-Reform grand coalition with Labour if they find themselves swinging that way). To the extent they are relevant, it is because people can see a scenario where they will continue to hold 100+ seats by inertia and hold the balance of power between Labour and Reform.
The Democrats are likely to take control of the House in 2026, and the 2028 Presidential election winning party market is currently a toss-up on oddschecker.com, which aggregates the big UK sportsbooks. (In contrast, the "Most Westminster seats after next UK election" market is a toss-up between Labour and Reform.) The Dem machine in its current state can deliver 48% of the popular vote for a poor candidate.
Right now, the party which is most likely to blow itself up is the Republicans, because they need to manage the succession to Trump. The MAGA GOP relies on Trump's reality-TV star charisma to turn out the down-with-everything loser voters who are now part of its core vote, and there is no obvious successor who has that. The Democrats OTOH have a decent shot at the 2028 Presidential election with a replacement-level candidate, just like they did in 2024 (where Trump was never as much as a 2-1 favourite after Biden dropped out).
Yeah that's essentially what I have in mind with the Thatcher into Blair analogy.
That said, as a counter-counter-counter-point, succession fights can also be positive if they are sufficient free for alls instead of entrenched factionalism. We must remember here that Trump himself comes out of this kind of situation.
The way the splits in MAGA are shaking out though, I think we'll get factionalism. Techies vs Neocons vs Populists is just too clearly drawn with Trump the sole unifying figure. Unless Vance (or anybody else) manages to soften up the two other factions, it's going to be mean. There won't be any Dem radicals to sue the opposition into unity this time.
Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin can all foreseeably unite the three factions with the always-second-string religious right. Desantis is also a strong maybe on that front.
I don’t see Vance doing this, I don’t see Cruz, I don’t see Hawley.
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Uhh, which one is which? The timeline here shows both Nationalists and Labour holding power for long stretches. I checked some of the recent elections and Labour seems to win bigger victories when it wins, but still, winning is winning.
Labour are the winners and NP the losers since 2013. The roles switch around every few decades or so. I didn't mean to imply that it's a one party state with some subsidized opposition like Singapore. It's just very stable for long stretches which allow for the dynamics I described.
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Texas since ~2000 has had a de facto three party dynamic with moderates, conservatives, and democrats, and the moderates consistently the kingmakers in legislative coalitions while whichever wins the Republican primary holds unitary roles. That’s probably a better example of a stable two party system where one party always loses.
Younger commenters seem to consistently
underoverestimate how long the South has been "Deep Red" territory: the legacy of the Southern Democrats held on at the state level well into the '90s. I am frequently amused at local Blue commenters in my Red state complaining about (perceived Red) state laws and policies that were actually enacted by the Blue team 40 years ago.Was Manchin the last of that breed? He just left office this year.
You can't blame them that much, as the South, politically, was weird. You had cases in the South where the governorship and local politics as a whole were deep Blue, as you said, well into the 90s, but the presidency would go Red.
It certainly made me raise an eyebrow or two when I stumbled across that knowledge.
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This I would consider a hostile takeover in the same vein as Trump. Someone on the outskirts of the party enters the running and totally shatters the central machine despite its opposition. I do not think that such an individual can come from the party center, due to their excessive purity testing and effective shadow networks. See the top-level for evidence there. Secondarily, the party center is attached to a convenient notion of a coalition that simply does not exist, or which exists in irrelevant form: the nonwhites plus the women plus the gays who specifically want to organize against white men. In reality, each group and subgroup listed has internal priorities that have nothing to do with targeted resentment (except, maybe, some of the women - which is a different and serious issue), and therefore have nothing to organize around. Gays in particular have already “won” their battle as a group in a decisive manner. Gay sex is legal, gay partnerships are official, and so any gay man or woman has everything required to live a normal life - meaning their own priorities take over and they vote as members of different blocs. Meanwhile, there is no real effort or ability to reach uneducated white men and the people who do not reflexively hate them.
So, how likely is a hostile takeover? In my eyes, not likely. Sanders tried it ten years back and was effectively frozen out after a serious grassroots effort. I remember there being a serious attempt to primary Biden last election which was totally shut down and the instigator punished - before he was eventually proven right. So the party is very powerful at self-policing. A potential challenger would have to break through all that, including an increasingly ideologically concentrated and radicalized primary voter base (the less committed have been driven off - because why would you hang around in areas where people scream hate at you for disagreement), to win. They would need to create a parallel mobilization network to capture disaffected voters for the primary, to weather unequal debates, to get their message out despite hostile legacy media, and to possibly even attempts to procedurally take them off ballots, which has become an actual practice of the Democratic Party! I consider this fairly unlikely, unless some cataclysm befalls the central hierarchy and renders them incapable of organized resistance. I guess a civil war that shatters any unity between young and old could do that, or mass prosecution by Trump, but I doubt it. Thus, a slow continuation of decline ending in irrelevance.
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Of course, if you thought the DNC was neutral before Hogg you were mistaken. They have learned since Clinton made a joint funding agreement with the DNC that effectively gave her control of the party for her run against Sanders in 2016, leading to the wikileaks emails that showed key DNC officials suggesting strategies for the Clinton campaign to use against Sanders and Donna Brazile feeding Clinton debate questions. Primarily they learned not to use email to discuss that sort of thing. That's how you maintain neutrality!
What always struck me as weird though, was that people act like the DCCC are somehow separate from the DNC, despite both being commanded by the party leadership. So when the DCCC blacklisted vendors from supplying Justice Democrat candidates like AOC on behalf of the incumbents, that's somehow different from if the DNC had done it. It's a real "Clark Kent wears glasses. Superman doesn't wear glasses. How are you confusing these guys?" vibe.
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Thank you for writing this up with more comprehension and detail than I could have done. I’ve had roughly the same impression- Trump has people to put democrats in jail this time, the party is increasingly in disarray, 2026 is going to be a disaster for the DNC in the senate for structural reasons, etc.
But Trump has also gotten good at performing the part of a strong rightful king, and by nature people love rightful royal power. He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor. Obviously, writing this way to Trump is a great way to get what you want(or at least make it more likely), but it also sets a precedent that this is how the president, leader of the free world, POTUS, is to be addressed, and that in turn makes it more normal, which in turn raises the impression that president Trump has the Mandate of Heaven. People understand that on a primitive clan based society level.
I wrote earlier about how Trump was campaigning not as a better leader, but as the rightful leader. Democrats don’t have any counter to that. That’s why Trump’s popularity keeps rising.
I’m not so certain that the founders of this country would agree. Quite honestly this kind of attitude feels unAmerican. How did we get here?
Obsequious, disgusting behavior. What happened to manly dignity and self-reliance? Isn’t America supposed to rise above feudal Europe?
If you read the correspondence of the founding fathers, I am pretty sure they would wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment described above. They put a lot of effort into making sure the Republican government they devised insulated itself from people's worst habits. The fact that we have unwound most of those protections is a different topic of discussion, but related.
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The answer to your questions is ‘the natural process of time’. Elected leaders being treated as kings would be item #9000 that horrified a resurrected Jefferson or Washington. Indeed, the founding fathers thought America had strayed from their vision in their lifetimes, and we know that because they said so.
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What difference does it make if the fathers were opposed? This is human psychology and human nature does what human nature does. I think there’s something to the theory as unitary monarchs are probably the single most universal form of government in every culture that has ever existed. Other forms exist, but if you threw a dart at a chart of world governments, you’d very likely find some sort of unitary monarch in power. Most of Asian and European history is the history of monarchy and empire. We’re used to democratic societies, but historically speaking, they’re pretty rare.
Even the “love letters” are fairly normal across time. Welcome to the historical norm of most of human history in which your country’s fate is determined by whether or not they can appease the guy with the most powerful military.
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Because America is gradually turning into Europe. All the land is fenced off and owned, there is no social mobility or opportunity for economic advancement, social class is passed generationally and rigorously guarded with shibboleths and rituals that go far beyond the money in your bank account, what you are allowed to do is constantly policed and often varies based on your class, top-down authority is lauded and self sufficiency and personal autonomy are frowned upon, all the lower classes hate each other because of 1000 year old ethnic grievances, people have effectively zero control over what their government does. What exactly does a having a king change at this point?
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Arguably, the manly dignity and self-reliance aspects were a side effect of feudal Europe, or at least an older, aristocratic way of thinking. The Founding Fathers were never interested in mass democracy. Excluding Paine, who was also ostracized in his own time, the closest you really get is Jefferson’s idea of every American man becoming a sort of natural aristocrat by being both yeoman farmers (landed gentry), and brave warriors (citizen militia).
The idea that a nation can even encourage manly dignity and self-reliance, while also validating and giving equal weight to the opinions of lowest common denominator dreck, seems revealed as not well founded in reality. Fulk Nerra, for example, had more of those laudable qualities than probably any American since Andy Jackson. And even Old Hickory probably lacked the cojones to burn Rachel at the stake for cucking him.
I can't really speak to "manly dignity", since I'm not really sure what that means, but self-reliance was never an aristocratic value. It is an eminently middle-class one. One of the notional justifications for aristocratic arrangements was that it enabled the aristocrat to pursue higher callings without having to be bothered about the sordid necessities of life.
Yeoman farmers are pointedly not landed gentry: they might have farmhands, but they work their own land. In a sense, they are agrarian petit-bourgeoisie. The gentry by contrast, manage estates (or, more likely, have it managed for them) of tenant farmers (or slaves, in the pre-ACW US). The idea of doing their own farming would've been seen as distasteful.
I note this not to be pedantic, but to point out that there is a massive, yawning gulf between a nation of yeomen and shopkeepers on the one hand, and an aristocratic one on the other. The former is one that at least permits the idea of universal dignity; the latter is one that sees dignity as a zero sum affair.
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While the 20th century mass democracy was a later development, they were explicitly not setting up an aristocratic government ("No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States"; if Paine was the extreme democrat, the nearly-half-monarchist motion by John Adams to call President "His Majesty" was laughed out of the committee.)
History of idea of "dignity" is complicated, I believe it should be traced back up to mashup of Voltaire and Christianity
Speaking of Adams, heres his Thoughts on Government (1776) on how virtuously organized republican government will inspire virtue among the common people:
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This idea is not very aristocratic, it’s thoroughly rooted in middle class democracy. Even in the Middle Ages towns were governed by property holder suffrage electing officials and defended by militias of property holders. The aristocrats were for the countryside.
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Im starting to wonder if "Fortifying the election" might ultimately go down in history as the choice that brought down the DNC as a viable national party. All it seems to have accomplished is undermine thier own credibility while giving Trump four years to build a viable post-Trump MAGA coalition. Vance is the obvious hier apperant, but Rubio, Hegseth, and DeSantis are all relatively young (Rubio is the oldest at 54) and well positioned to be candidates in 2032 and 2036.
Rubio, Desantis, Abbott, Vance would be my top picks for 2028 candidates; I don’t think Hegseth can survive the allegations. Cruz is too ideologically hardline and Hawley is too eccentric.
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What makes you think this? What proportion of people?
Do you think they think Trump has the Mandate of Heaven?
I am not sure he has the mandate of heaven, but the bastard has barakah. If you had to write Trump bio so far as a movie script - no one would buy because it is too implausible
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That is not evidence of Mandate of Heaven, many a failing despot and warlord has required submission and effusive praise while in process losing the grip of power. You know, end of Qing emperors comes to mind. It is evidence of lack of virtue on Trump's part, both on counts requiring subjects to verbally prostrate themselves and being so easily flattered.
The Mandate of Heaven is just important non-state people(Elon musk, Cardinal Dolan, Harold Daggett) going out of their way to praise the legitimacy of the government.
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This is not the first time you've gone off on this Mandate of Heaven schtick, and I can't help but feel it relies on creating monarchist fanfic only loosely connected to reality. That or it's a bit. You write like Trump is this massively popular figure instead of an incredibly divisive one. Like, in what world does Trump's popularity keep rising? People love rightful royal power?
Is there a reason we should prefer this narrative over the more boring theory that Trump won because of inflation, immigration, and short memories?
Or an exceptionally vain toddler. Trump is known to be comically susceptible to flattery, even as the same people shit-talk him behind his back. That is not an indicator of someone who commands respect. I would question the leadership qualities of anyone who wants to be treated in such a manner, and I would question the judgment of anyone who looks at such a figure and sees a worthy leader.
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Honestly I expect the “resistance” to Peter out pretty quickly once the gloves actually come off. I just don’t see anything that makes me believe that these people understand power, strategy, or even real desire. It’s like they’ve almost decided that Trump is going to get away with it anyway so other than making noises so that people don’t mistake them for supporting Trump. But there’s no real drive there.
Chuck Schumer writes “strongly worded letters” that do nothing and mean nothing. He had not, however used the filibuster to block any of Trump’s legislation or nominees. He didn’t refuse to raise the debt ceiling when that came up. Corey Booker sat on the steps of the Capitol for a day, telling everyone how much he wanted to save Medicaid. He also voted for Trump’s nominees even when it wasn’t required. No Democratic legislators have introduced impeachment or contempt of Congress charges, they’ve held no hearings to investigate the supposed crimes. Even Newsome is pretty much rolling along. He could have easily as governor ordered the National Guard to stand down. He didn’t try it. This isn’t a group of dissidents willing to do whatever they can to stop something they see as an evil regime marching towards authoritarianism. This is a group mostly miming opposition while doing nothing.
And the protests are much the same. These are not spontaneous protests brought on by genuine outrage. These are planned protests, short in duration, carefully crafted such that they are short, easy to get to, and coordinate with most people’s schedules. Holding a planned demonstration from 11-2 on Saturday is pretty weak sauce. Holding a protest like that without making any concrete demands is a joke. We are here, clear, and only doing this so long as it doesn’t interfere with work, chores, or Billy’s little league game. What’s the point? How does this demonstrate power? Resolve? Anything? But 3.5% showed up on a sunny weekend day in June so according to them the Revolution will succeed. Again, I very strongly suspect that this movement is less about Trump or anything Trump is doing and more about having learned in school that they’re “supposed to oppose this” lest history judge you complicit. It’s not about Trump, or ICE, or anything else. It’s the nagging fear that their grandchildren in their horror scenarios will ask them why they didn’t do anything. So they’re making a public show of opposition they don’t actually care about. Because how will anyone know they’re the good ones if they don’t hold up a “honk if you don’t like fascism” sign.
But since nobody is serious about anything they’re saying, it will absolutely fade under real opposition. A few sidewalk protesters thrown into prison, the arrest of a political figure who defies Trump, cutting funding for a pet project for their district, whatever. They won’t continue fighting when it has a real cost. As such Trump can do pretty much anything he wants to.
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I will also highlight the Teamster delivering face shields to rioters. Could just be coincidence, but the timeline I have been able to figure out for the LA riots is really tight, and the LA-area Teamsters and SEIU are both known to work together and for 'energetic' protest. Even if the DoJ does seriously investigate things I dunno if it could be proven, so no way to know whether the early parts of the LA protest were waiting for something to start rather than were outraged and surprised by Heurta's arrest and spontaneously acted.
And, from the other perspective, I'll point to characters like Judge Duggan, or the various Try To Arrest Me, ICE politician protests, or to the Dem nominee for New York City mayor having Luigi fanboys high in the communication and outreach ladder.
Maybe, but I'll point out again that Lujan Grisham wasn't impeached, censured, indicted by a grand jury, called a fascist on national television or a nationally-syndicated paper, yada yada. She did technically receive a preliminary injunction, but it was immediately stayed. Fauci isn't under arrest. No lawsuit Carter Page could file would ever get to trial. Mahmoud Khalil is out on bail.
Maybe that'll change. Duggan could end up being the first swing of a very hard-hitting hammer. But every single attempt to bring these forces forward has a built-in time crunch. And there's a lot of ways to delay and slow and drop every single effort.
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The DNC pursuing a perception of being a 'neutral leadership institution' is frequently at ends with its actual institutional purpose: getting democrats elected.
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It seems odd to write a massive post about Democratic infighting and barely mention Gaza.
Support for Israel among Dems is underwater. It's also declining among Republicans. 71% of Democrats under 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel.
Democrats have nonetheless failed to offer any coherent policy against Israel, even now when they can do so irresponsibly. Democrats failed to offer any organized opposition to Trump when he launched an illegal war (which he has since hopefully concluded). Democrats have failed to speak to their base's concerns, and abandoned their principles.
It cost Dems in 2024, and if they can't get out of it, it will cost them in 2026.
No they didn't - the fact that you falsely call it "illegal war" (it's not a war and it's completely legal) is owed solely to the organized effort of Democrat politicians and Democrat press. And it's working. It can't stop Trump - because, again, what he is doing is completely within his powers as the President and Commander of the military, so short of removing him from that position in some way, it is not possible to stop him from doing it - but it does what it intended to do, creates the false image of Trump violating the law.
Did Congress declare war on Iran when I wasn't looking?
No, the Congress didn't declare any wars since 1942. That doesn't make your false claim any more true. And the fact that you are using the same fallacious logic as Democrat propaganda instructs you to use is a good confirmation Democrats did deploy an opposition to Trump's actions, and this opposition is quite effective - people are now thinking, completely contrary to the facts, that Trump "launched an illegal war". That didn't happen by itself, they made it happen.
If Congress didn't declare war, committing an act of war is illegal and unconstitutional. I didn't get this from whatever fantasy of Democratic talking points you're imagining, an opposition I haven't seen in any way in the newspapers I read, I got it from carefully reading my tattoo of the US constitution.
No it is not. You are welcome to provide a single precedent confirming otherwise, and the list of Presidents prosecuted for Vietnam, Korea, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, and similar military actions. I don't even require a conviction - a mere holding by any appropriate judicial authority, such as SCOTUS, that all these usages of military were illegal, and that the Supreme Commander of the Military has no rights to use the military without congressional vote, would suffice. Absent that, I will be forced to conclude you pulled this judicial opinion from some place where you have tattoos - which is usually not a good source of judicial opinions.
No you did not, unless of course Article 2 is tatooed in some place that is hard for you to reach. And even if you did, US jurisprudence somewhat developed since 1789, and one of the things that has been well established and confirmed by numerous precedent is the power of the President to employ the military. It is not absolute - if you have some un-tatooed places left, you can probably fit War Powers Act somewhere. After you are done with that, you may think about why the Congress required the President to merely notify them in 48 hours about something that you claim is completely illegal and unconstitutional - and then gives them 60 days to keep doing it, and then another 30 days to keep doing it. Is Congress really unaware that it all has been illegal from the start? Did you do you civic duty and tell them so they could fix this colossal blunder?
My imagination is so powerful that is reflected on TV, in major Democratic newspapers and in many speeches of Democratic politician. How stupid of me to imagine this silliness instead of using my vast powers to imagine myself a billionaire!
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