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Notes -
Election Grab Bag Post
These are just a few unrelated observations about last night's election that don't really fit anywhere else. One of the first things that struck my attention that hasn't gotten much traction is the PA judicial retention elections. All judges here are elected in partisan races to ten-year terms, after which they have to be "retained" by voters to continue serving for another ten years. They can serve an unlimited number of terms, but must retire at 75. When a judge appears on the ballot for retention, it's technically nonpartisan—there's no R or D next to the name, no opposing candidate, just a Yes or No if they should continue serving. If a justice is not retained, the governor appoints a replacement who serves until the next odd-year election, when a full replacement is selected.
The effect of this is that judges are effectively elected to life terms. A judge not being retained is very rare, and has only happened once at the Supreme Court level since the current state constitution went into effect in 1968. In 2005, both houses of the state legislature voted themselves a pay raise in a midnight session just before the term ended. This was a huge deal at the time and the public was outraged. With no other elections that year, voters took out their anger on Justice Russell Nigro, who narrowly lost retention. Another justice won her retention race by only 8 points, when 40 points is the typical margin.
The PA Supreme Court is composed of 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans. The court has, in recent years, issued a number of controversial left-leaning decisions. Three of the Democrats were up for retention this year, and activist groups attempted a "Vote No" campaign. They started running TV ads a few months ago making themselves sound non-partisan, arguing about how it was time for a change and judges should have term limits and we should force an election. This was thin cover for the fact that these were Republicans looking to change the partisan makeup of the court by, if they were successful, possibly winning a couple of those seats in 2027. The fight took on somewhat of a national character, with Trump calling the justices "radicals" and "activists" and urging "NO NO NO". Democrats were forced to counterattack, with Governor Shapiro appearing in ads highlighting their records and commitment to protecting civil rights.
For all the efforts the GOP took to politicize a normally sleepy race, they successfully managed to whittle a 40 point Yes down to a 23 point Yes. This has to go down as one of the most underappreciated lead balloons in political history. This was an unprecedented gambit that took up most of the oxygen it what is usually an uneventful year; no one has ever run commercials about retention before, no one sunk that much money into it, it was just a given that a judge was going to be retained. Even the Nigro thing was more of a grassroots effort that had more to do with anger at the system than partisan politics. The moral of the story here is that you can't get voters fired up about something they don't want to get fired up about, even if there's nothing else interesting happening, especially if you try to trick them into getting fired up about it.
In other PA news, Pine-Richland, a heavily Republican school district in Allegheny County's northern tier, had its school board flip from an 8–1 Republican majority to a 5–4 Democrat majority. It should be noted that, of the 8 Republicans, 5 were raging Moms for Liberty-style MAGA conservatives, and 3 were normal, moderate Republicans. Four of the MAGA members were elected in 2023 in a campaign funded by outside conservative groups with the intention of revising the school's library policy. Which is basically code for removing woke library books. One of the guys had sued the district a few years earlier over their trans bathroom policy. What ensued was an ever-escalating shit show where it took them a year and a half to approve a new English curriculum, culminating in a 7-hour-long board meeting where they denied students the right to speak (over repeated motions) until nearly midnight, the night before midterms. They were regularly confronted by hostile audiences and refused to explain any of their decisions. After a long fight to wrest control over books from the superintendent, they ended up approving all of the LGBT-themed books that had been challenged anyway. Then they decided to ban a book about a black girl's experience during the Tulsa Race Riot from the English curriculum on the grounds that it wasn't difficult enough for ninth graders, necessitating a long retooling of reading assignments (the book is recommended for ages 12 to 17). Residents eventually got fed up with the negative publicity and the last several meetings turned into forums where residents would rip the board for creating a circus. Now they can turn their energies to things like taxes and re-turfing the football field.
While last night's elections weren't particularly meaningful for those not directly affected, they're useful as prodromes for what to expect in the future. While it's expected that the pendulum would shift back toward the left at some point, I doubt many expected that it would happen this quickly or decisively. some in the comments below have brushed these victories off as liberals winning in liberal states, nothing to see here. But I think that attitude is whistling past the graveyard. During Trump's first term, when I would criticize him to a Republican friend and the friend would ask me what he's done that's so bad, I could come up with any number of criticisms, but none that he, as a conservative would care about. And probably none that a moderate with conservative tendencies would care too much about. Democrats could roast him on plenty of things, but the kinds of things they could roast any Republican about and the electorate broadly wouldn't care about because that's what they expect from a Republican. That and personal scandals and gaffes that can easily be reasoned away by anyone inclined to.
He lost in 2020, and didn't take it well. But by the Democrats fumbled the opportunity to right the ship by Joe Biden fucking up Afghanistan, the border, and any number of other things, all the while governing significantly further to the left than one would have suspected based on his campaign. Add in inflation, and despite things not being too bad overall, it was easy to brush away whatever controversy Trump caused four years earlier and look on the pre-COVID past with rose-colored glasses. Was Trump really so bad? All of the terrible things you said would happen never happened. Biden is a disaster. Give the man another chance.
If the Trump of 2025 were similar to the Trump of 2017, things wouldn't have changed. But his time he is doing things that are genuinely unpopular and hard for his base to defend. Tariffs. Aggressive immigration enforcement. Troop deployments to US cities. The George Santos pardon. Mass firings. The Epstein Files. Withholding grant money. Ending healthcare subsidies. This isn't merely bungling like we saw under Biden, but conscious policymaking that could stop at any time. He's making a similar mistake as Biden in treating a narrow victory like a mandate, except he can't even pass a budget let alone achieve any real legislative accomplishments, even with an undivided legislature. At least Biden had the infrastructure bill. He's using the Steve Bannon Flood the Zone with Shit strategy, forgetting that voters don't like being served shit.
Republicans will have to defend every one of those policies next year. Some may be defensible to some people, but Trump's actual policies are broadly unpopular, and there's no unifying ideology to bind them. Maybe there's enough hardcore MAGA sentiment out there that the Republicans can ride through 2026 with minimal damage, but I don't know if I'd be willing to bet on it. Trump certainly isn't, hence the redistricting push. The trouble is that if these policies turn out to be losers it's hard for Republican incumbents to distance themselves from them, even if they want to. I don't see the GOP turning away from Trump en masse, and individual politicians have supplicated to the point that they can't credibly repudiate him. MTG can fight against these things and make nice with the ladies on The View, but she has enough MAGA cachet that it won't hurt her much. Trump himself could, of course, back away from his policies, but that would be an admission of defeat, and Trump will never admit defeat. He might chicken out on the implementation, but what would be involved is a complete repudiation, and that's not going to happen, especially when nothing can affect him personally.
A lot can happen within the next year, so I don't want to make any predictions, but I wouldn't rule out a midterm wipeout. We've heard this before, and it hasn't come to fruition, but all I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if it happened, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened and took the GOP completely by surprise. By wipeout, I don't mean that the Democrats merely win both houses or win all of the "contested" seats, but that they also pick up a few surprise House seats in presumably safe districts that nobody polls, and a few Senate races become spicier than one would expect. Beyond that I don't want to say anything else, because I don't know what will happen, but the amount of personal fealty Trump demands would make things very difficult for Republicans if the electorate turns against him. What will JD Vance do if it become apparent that his chances of winning the nomination in 2028 are akin to those of Dick Cheney in 2008? Are there any John McCain types in the GOP who have national profile but haven't kissed Trump's ring? I don't know the answers to these questions, but htings will sure be interesting.
Thomas Massie
Massie, Rand Paul ... Lisa Murkowski, Brian Fitzpatrick?
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Well it seems like it was an uphill battle, but before trying a campaign how will the GOP know if there's a chance? It's hard to know how voters will respond, and presumably there was no way to know that it didn't go over well. But I see nothing wrong with giving it a shot.
So what? If there's nothing else that's important on the ballot in that area, then whose oxygen is being taken up? Should the GOP just hand over the election on a silver platter to the Democrats? What have they got to lose besides some campaign funds, and seemingly not all that much of them.
This was more of an idle observation than anything else, but to the extent it's a criticism, it's because they bungled the approach by initially hiding the fact that they were urging Nos for partisan reasons, as if they could trick enough people into voting their way. If they had come out and said that the court was too liberal and would remain liberal for another decade unless they could kick those three out and elect a few conservatives in a couple years, they might have been able to motivate some low-propensity voters to vote in an election they'd otherwise ignore.
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Agreed with your post up until this point. They're apparently polling with worse margins than they were in 2018, and I'm pretty sure that "blue wave" ended up somewhat anemic versus expectations?
Americans are cranky at Trump, but the Dems are so ineffectual and weak-coded right now I'm not sure if they'll inspire much voting motivation in the median American. I see them doing better than 2024, but no way they accomplish a "wipeout".
One of my favorite internet comments I've ever read was something to the effect of
"The Republicans are the only party stupid/crazy enough for the Democrats to have a chance to beat, which makes it even funnier that the Democrats lose so much"
It's pretty evergreen, as I read it probably a decade ago, I think it'll hold true next year
To be clear, I'm not predicting a wipeout, just saying that I'd now put it within the realm of possibility where I wouldn't have earlier. I understand what you're saying, but one of the reasons I see this as a possibility is that each of the wipeouts I've seen in my lifetime—1994, 2006, and 2010—has been preceded by people from the party that got soaked saying that it wasn't going to happen. In 1994 the Republicans had a national strategy of opposing Clinton, and the Democrats insisted that this wouldn't work because people voted for their reps based on local issues and not national ones, certainly not to "send a message" to the administration. In 2010 the Democrats had a supermajority and failed to appreciate the pressure they were putting the Blue Dogs under with the Obamacare negotiations. They had a broad mandate and assumed that the president doing what he campaigned on wouldn't be a liability, and they underestimated the Republicans' ability to regroup after taking a drubbing.
But I want to focus on 2006, because I think it has more parallels with what's going on right now. After the 2004 election everyone thought that the Democrats were dead because they couldn't win any states outside of the Northeast, the West Coast, and parts of the Upper Midwest. Then a series of seemingly minor incidents compounded to make Bush broadly unpopular a year into his second term. With Bush's approval rating in the toilet and polls showing Democrats leading in certain races, Republicans were confident that this wasn't a problem. The districts were gerrymandered to such a degree that there weren't nearly as many competitive seats as 1994. They had a better ground game. They had done all kinds of computerized analysis to show which campaign methods were more effective. They had the greatest number of high propensity voters. It didn't matter; they got shellacked. I see the following items that the Republicans seem to be outright ignoring:
Again, I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but the history of the past 20 years has shown that when parties think they have things wrapped up they get overconfident and start making excuses for minor failures rather than treating them seriously. I've seen no evidence that anyone in the republican party other than MTG seem to be concerned about what could happen if they stick to their "Trump's way or the highway" approach. The stakes are even higher than normal because, for the past decade, the party has been reliant on Trump to a degree that's unprecedented, and it's hard to see where they go next. Finding a successor was going to be hard enough, but it's going to be even harder if they have to reinvent the party.
I never considered the fact that Mandami was lying about the totality of his platform to get elected and he'd govern like any other neoliberal. If that's what you mean by 'be more pragmatic', then yes, that was not in the scope of possibilities I was thinking about. But unlike the other DSA dogcatcher positions, he's made big promises that require big money and big buy-in from the institutions, and there's no way to 'pragmatically' magic up billions of dollars or defy the laws of supply and demand, so I don't know what you're going on about.
It's not so much about lying as it is recognizing the realities of the situation. Most of his pie in the sky ideas are contingent on money being appropriated from the state. That isn't going to happen, and when he comes back from Albany empty-handed he blames the state government and works with what he's got. If he gets something then he touts it as a small victory and puts the money to use. It's not that hard.
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Lying's a strong word. IMO a lot of these people sweep into power, don't really have much of a coherent idea of how they're going to deliver their policy objectives and then the actual tools of power are massive stagnant bureaucracies who'll just do things the same way as they always did.
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More to the point, would NYC going to Hell even hurt the Democrats? Granting that John Lindsay was something of an inverse Bloomberg in terms of party affiliation, his tenure as mayor actually being a disaster didn't hurt the Democrats. They held the Mayorship continually until Giuliani, won the Governorship of New York immediately following his tenure, and Carter won New York in 1976.
I do think that the GOP is at risk of reading too much into '24 as it did in '04. '24 in particular was weird. Between the Biden drama and inflation the election was arguably the GOP's to lose, and they barely won it (See also: the 2022 midterms.). Trump is polarizing but at least some variety of popular. The rest of the GOP are almost as polarizing and lack the charisma.
More fundamentally, the GOP as a party (Trump sort of has a direction, but it's a largely incoherent and surface level imitation of Pat Buchanan, and the GOP has neither the numbers or the consensus to push anything through Congress.) hasn't answered its post '06/'08 dilemma. Educated Republicans (aka. the Mitt Romneys of the world) aren't a big enough coalition to win Presidential elections (and probably not the House since Democrats have caught up to REDMAP), their priorities aren't shared by anyone else (Hint: 2012 was as white, male, and boomer as the college educated will ever be again.), and 40 years of largely uninterrupted culture war losses mean that they hold no sway with the high school educated base. The hardest of copers can note that Reagan got smashed in the '82 midterms, but there isn't an incoming equivalent of the 1-2 tail wind of crashing interest rates and oil prices that juiced the economy in the mid 1980s. Even getting rid of tariffs returns us to the baseline of late-stage Biden.
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I think your analysis is spot on
As someone who isn't a fan of Republicans, you love to see it!
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My impression of the last 10 months is this:
Trump wins, most radical conservatives and even many centrists and liberals expect a continuation of Trump I, ideologically and politically. Sure, that means a move moderately rightward on immigration and maybe a reduction in support for Ukraine, but broadly not much is going to change, since most presidents don’t change radically in a second term and even though Trump’s is non-continuous, that is the general assumption. The dissident right already has Trump at arms length, not just the groyper factions but also the BAPists and even Heritage AmCon types, in part because of Trump’s disavowal of the hardcore pro-life crowd and his seeming ambivalence toward Project 2025.
Come late Jan and early Feb, the new administration seems to embark on things with a zeal that was completely absent in the first Trump administration. Not only are many cabinet picks radical or unusual, but DOGE starts shutting down things that he never touched previously, and doing so very publicly. The ideological tests come out for some federal employees, people get fired visibly, the press is outside federal buildings as employees wait outside locked doors.
Most importantly of all, as the press tries previous Trump tactics like trying to cancel DOGE staffers for previous racist or sexist tweets or posts, nothing happens. The Vice President even defends the staffers. The Jan 6 protesters get the widest possible pardon, more than many even on the right expected. Rhetoric against mass immigration heats up with the Homan appointment and some high profile raids. Non-groyper dissident rightists start celebrating, even many Trump-ambivalent people come onside, hope accelerates rapidly.
The tariff situation happens, which again is vastly more radical than anything in the first administration. The market crash is reversed when Trump rolls some things back, but that only cements the impression of this administration as fundamentally unstoppable. Democrat protests fade away or are smaller in size than in the first administration.
Trump passes a budget that gives him almost everything he wants, which feels like the high point for him and his support (so far). The liberal and progressive press is full “it’s over” in a way they never were from 2016-2020. The administration openly cancels media figures, and the leaders of major corporations and tech companies who were full prog #dei in term 1 are now scrapping diversity programs and swearing fealty to the president and even saying in interviews, self-servingly of course, that the left went way too far. This includes industries that are notoriously progressive like Hollywood and Big Tech. White shoe law firms are pressured to abandon legal assistance to the left under threat of sanction and no government contracts, which finally feels like the right is playing hardball in a way they haven’t at any time in modern American history.
The exuberance results in some infighting on the right, especially in the wake of the Kirk assassination. Miller and other senior figures are hyperborea-posting on Twitter, DHS is posting 80s synthwave and Halo remixes on top of videos of illegal immigrants being led onto planes in handcuffs, the shitposters are in charge. All the while the economy is deteriorating, graduates (including young white and Hispanic men who did vote for Trump in large numbers) find it much harder to be employed. I agree with a lot of the policies (and am in full alignment with Miller) but there does seem to have been a certain ignorance from the admin about how this is perceived. Many people don’t like illegal immigrants, but there are a surprising number who are too squeamish for certain kinds of imagery the admin was pushing out.
Now, some defeats happen. It’s not disastrous at all. The GOP still polls ahead on many issues, including immigration and crime. I don’t think the groyper war on X over Israel is particularly important for these national results. But the economy is concerning, and its effect is larger. A downturn will make it impossible to hold congress in 2026 even with favorable maps. Big tech that is being AI automating jobs now being ‘on the side of’ the right will make a populist economic message much harder.
One hidden aspect of this is that BigLaw provided a large amount of pro bono legal work to NGOs, so now many NGOs bringing leftist litigation are finding themselves without hours and hours of high-quality free legal work.
Apparently, the chill has gone so far that the ABA itself had trouble finding help to sue the Trump admin. Some lulz to be had there. Also:
I wonder how some of those clients paying $1000/hour for legal services feel about the money going to subsidize "activist nonprofits." I have to suspect that's finally playing a role, too.
Is it just me, or has the vibe of "nonprofit" shifted in the last couple years? A decade back, "I work with a nonprofit" was generally seen as a positive contribution, but it seems today there is a lot more cynicism about how those nonprofits compensate their management (sometimes heavily), and whether their mission is even good (no, the world doesn't need even more puppies).
Recently I had a friend lament that there was no counterbalance to corporate lobbyists and I had to remind him that nonprofits existed, that their goals are not axiomatically good and uncontroversial.
My gut feeling is that there is still likely a majority of people immediately translating in their head "nonprofit" as "charity", and who generally think of them as non-partisan, non-political, altruistic, net-positive.
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It has definitely shifted among some people, but I can't tell how widespread the attitude shift is. I work in criminal defense, and I find it impossible to take most non-profits seriously, which puts my poker face to the test at times. If someone like me has decided that a solid 95% of NGOs are useless makework facilities at best and seriously detrimental to society at worst, then I suspect many normies are not fans either.
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What? This is exactly what I've been dying for, and expected from him. I would not call either tariffs or immigration enforcement genuinely unpopular. They're the only thing that sets Trump apart from Dick Cheney. They are the enormously popular policies that let him first bulldoze through the republican field in 2016 and have kept him uniquely popular, since nobody else wants to pick up the crown in the gutter. No one else was willing to say what everyone wanted to hear.
I think it's less tariffs specifically and more that they don't seem to be doing much to help the economy as it's just continuing to chug along similar to the end of 2024. Now, you can certainly argue that Trump doesn't really have the power to affect such rapid change but that obviously wasn't really how Trump sold it and voters tend to blame presidents for economic issues regardless.
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Tariffs I think are generally unpopular among legacy "business Republicans". Immigration enforcement also, but less widely so (and Trump has been accused, possibly correctly, of making carveouts which would help here)
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I'm skeptical about most of that list, but I don't really trust any polling at this point in a cycle. Most of the polling from before suggested that a straight majority of Americans wanted every illegal gone (and a supersupermajority for illegal + criminal history), but yes you can probably show some women pictures of a crying Guatemalan and they'll report not liking that. I'm not sure there's any takeaway beyond "Dems still have a hell of a propaganda machine".
From the people I talk to, it isn't so much women being sympathetic for crying Guatemalans as it is concern about what the objective is. When you sell a policy based on the idea that these people are all parasites and criminals, it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.
I too am skeptical of polls, but you ignore them at your own risk. Especially after elections are sending a clear signal. You don't want to be in a position where you get your doors blown off because you decided that inconvenient information was simply incorrect, based on nothing but gut feeling.
No one is seeing this. Functionally no one has ever seen anyone get rounded up by ICE at all. If you think that's a reasonable description of reality, then you're in a propaganda bubble. What they're seeing is context-free clips on Facebook and TikTok elaborated with straight up lies, posted by activist Karens who assault and harass federal law enforcement with near impunity due to their overwhelming privilege. OTOH, DHS and ICE don't ever shut up about the prior criminal convictions of the people they're deporting, but that doesn't go viral by abusing weaponized empathy.
Maybe some conservative billionaire needs to start shelling out a grand for every woman who posts a crying fictional sob story video about how she was raped by an illegal immigrant.
Not wrong, but I'm also super skeptical of this "Better stop doing that stuff you were just elected by promising to do because we've suddenly gotten better at narrative control!" line.
Like, yeah Sherril just won, but she did so while disavowing everything she'd ever said as a progressive, dumping a fortune into painting Citarelli as a tax-and-spend liberal and swearing to fight against her own Democrat economic policies.
Maybe ignore that at your own risk?
How are those going viral, then?
There are ads playing on my local radio about “a Honduran convicted of raping a child” and the like. (I couldn’t find transcripts but i think they’re part of this program.) If that’s not weaponizing empathy, I don’t know what is.
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So upfront, I basically think every illegal alien criminal has to go. Non-criminal illegal aliens I care less, but I do agree that it’s hard to make the case that they shouldn’t also go.
I object to the current DHS, CBP, ICE behavior on the basis of the collateral damage they seem to be ok inflicting on actual US citizens who aren’t even bothering them. One incident that hits pretty close to home for me since I’m a runner is this case in Chicago where a 70yr old white guy was driving back from his run club and found agents blocking his driveway with their cars. From what I’ve heard from friends in the area, the agents asked him once to back up, didn’t give him a chance to comply, and proceeded to drag him out of his car and kneel on his back, breaking 6 of his ribs. He was training to run the NYC marathon this past weekend, and this meant he had to miss the race. Months of work down the drain for pretty much no reason. You can find plenty of videos of it if you search.
Yeah this is one incident, but I keep seeing stuff like it. Stuff like agents pulling their gun on citizens for almost nothing, etc. Again, US citizens minding their own business. I’m sorry but my desire to have all illegal immigrants go does not outweigh my desire to not have a risk of being attacked in that manner by agents of the state. You might tell me to avoid seeking out trouble by following ICE around like some people do, but this guy was literally just trying to get into his own house. I’m chalking this up to extremely poor training due to the pace this admin feels they have to deport people at, and the resulting increase in headcount they’ve had to do. But I simply don’t think that behavior like this is what Trump voters voted for when they voted for immigration enforcement. Assaulting an old man who wasn’t even impeding their activities is in no way a necessary part of deporting illegals.
The high cost of removing immigrants is an argument against their admittance in the first place. I refuse to accept a ratchet, and so I assert that we simply can remove these people, and this is right and good, and that the costs are steep but worth it.
Ideally we wouldn't have old men with broken ribs. Ideally we wouldn't have tens of millions of hostile foreigners, either. The world isn't ideal.
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I found a video that starts with the man already on the ground, bitching like a Karen, while an angry crowd crowds around the agents screaming hostilities.
I'm going to express a bit of skepticism that things played out the way your "friends in the area" say it did.
And just putting this out there, but these anti-ICE protestors are doing a lot to radicalize me. They come off as so delusionally self-righteous, so appallingly entitled, wreathed in such false bravery, that I think they nearly automatically discredit whatever cause they support as well as anyone who thinks they're the good guys. If you want to convince me that ICE are doing evil, muzzle these retards first.
I always find it mildly disconcerting when Americans (especially right wing Americans like the ones here), a people who's whole national mythos was "fuck the British, and fuck anyone else who tells us what to do" , who's contemporary culture is deeply shaped by concepts like "get the fuck off my lawn before I shoot you" and "fuck the government they shouldn't tell me what to do" go from that to:
"Erm, well actually it's fine when the immigration enforcement people break the ribs of a middle aged white man when he gets annoyed they're depriving him of access to his private property. If you didn't want the feds to hurt you, you should just let them do whatever they want to you and your things without question. Don't forget to tip!"
Like seriously one of the reasons the Dems are so lame is because they're pussies, the right is cool because they're not. But the second it's your team doing stupid shit you don't stand up, you hop in the cuck chair with a big smile on your face
Oh look this keeps happening:
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will
I mean, Americans have a history of going "fuck the Feds, we're keeping our slaves, get off my lawn before I shoot you", which resulted in the only large-scale civil war in the nation's history. Could have gone either way, too.
Of course, the group currently keeping the slaves, and arguing that there should be more slaves, and doing anything they can to acquire and encourage more slaves has built their identity around "being the people who ended slavery". So they couldn't be slavers (or "oppressors" more generally) simply by defining their identity away from it.
Besides, what they're doing is only "illegal immigration" and that doesn't mean "growing a group of sub-citizens that have zero rights and is as such more or less wholly dependent on their massa's good graces to stay fed and clothed, and keeping them around because you only have to supply [a proxy for] those things"... right?
Then again, I'm sure the Confederate soldiers thought what they were doing was right too. Ironically, that is the one thing Blue cannot admit.
I'm not pro mass immigration at all, I'm quite unhappy with how it's been implemented, especially in the last decade across the West.
I'm just very very anti government force being applied retardedly and without extremely high standards for conduct and use of force
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A libertarian nightwatchman state was off the table before I was born. If you build a boot and gleefully stomp on the faces of your opponents, you don't get to cry when the boot ends up on the other foot.
Alternatively, would you rather Trump just issued letters of marque and reprisal to citizens to hunt illegals and communists? Something tells me you'd flood the zone with tears over that, too.
Sorry forgot to respond
I didn't build the boot? I'm also not a shitlib and have been deeply against wokism for basically my entire life.
I went to schools that were deeply immersed in grievance politics and "wokism" long before it was cool, and I found it stupid then, as I do now.
No, I just think that agents of the government exercising a monopoly on force should be held to extremely high standards, and relaxing those standards because they're "on your team" is stupid, because they very much are not on your team, even if your goals are aligned right now.
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If your reaction to this is to make fun of a guy acting the way most people in his situation would act, and then express anger at the people protesting it instead of the federal agents actually doing it, you’ve lost me and most Americans, and you’re gonna see it at the ballot box.
First, you don't get to just assume what's happening there. What the agents are actually doing in that video is restraining a guy. There are countless examples of old, boomer libtards assaulting these officers because they are bad people with delusions of grandeur. Maybe the ICE actions against that guy were unprovoked and unreasonable, but you certainly don't get to just assume that.
Have you ever actually lost a fight or suffered serious physical pain? Most people, in that situation, act a certain way. They become irrational and agitated, stressed and panicked.
The guy in that video reminds me of a different video. I won't link it because it's quite upsetting, feel free to look it up. In the video, a couple confronts a male neighbor in the snow over some petty bullshit, the culmination of months of relentless Karen harassment, and the man, a single father of an extremely disabled child, finally loses it.
He goes back into his house, gets a gun, and opens fire on the couple, fatally injuring both of them. And the truly remarkable thing about the video is that while the couple is bleeding to death on the ground they are still ranting and screeching like the unholy avatar of Karen. Not "OMG, help, I'm in so much pain." But "I don't care if I'm dying, your brutally autistic son's wheelchair makes too much noise in the morning, and I'm going to report you to the HOA! Why haven't you shoveled your driveway?! You're a disgrace, no wonder your son is a retard!"
That's the energy that dude brings in the ICE video. He doesn't sound hurt, or even alarmed. He sounds like he's saying the magic words that make law enforcement the bad guys. He'll probably get to pop a Cialis and fuck an old hippie afterwards.
But I don't think you're correct about "most people". This crap comes from a special breed of entitled Main Characters and every bit of enabling just makes the world a worse place. Do you really want carefully clipped sections of those videos to be the new meta for what we see at the ballot box? Because there's about a million hours of body cam footage going the other way.
I don't recall this part of the altercation post the actual shooting starting. I assume you're talking about Jeffrey Spaide killing James and Lisa Goy.
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I mean this is equally speculation on your part that the guy is just some libtard of the type you describe. I don’t have much else to say on this other than that I agree the bodycam footage would be good to see and I hope it comes out, though I’m not optimistic that it will. I do acknowledge that often bodycam footage shows quite a different story than what media reports, so if that’s the case here it’s in ICE’s interest to release it.
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Your example seems to prove the opposite of what you're trying to. If one of the possible reactions to obvious fatal injury is angrily ranting as if you haven't just been shot, then that makes the ICE video guy's ranting less indicative of whether he's actually hurt, not a proof that he wasn't.
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I actually don't act this way with authority figures. Even if their apprehension of me is unjust. Nor do most people I know.
Are we talking "traffic stop" unjust apprehension, or "barged into your home and put your face to the floor"?
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Is this actually happening, and if so, how often? Searching for your story I see a lot about a "shocking video" but the video i find, while it does show a man in running gear being arrested, shows nothing more than that and isn't shocking at all. All the "shocking" details seem to come from biased sources.
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will
170 citizens detained and counting
... So about 1 in 2 million American citizens? Are you genuinely concerned you'll be one of them? You weren't in the past year. I'll hazard a guess you also weren't struck by lightning in the past year and that is the more surprising fact (about 1/1,222,000 per year).
I'm actually shocked the number is so low; this isn't deportations, just detainment. I'm pretty sure the normal police have a much worse record of detaining innocents (though my attempts to look it up only give results about ICE, perhaps predictably).
If this number is accurate, it's just not a real problem: it's not going to happen to you and it's not going to happen to anyone you personally know. In fact, it happens just enough the media can make it seem like a common occurrence. The fact you're aware of it at all is the Chinese Robber Fallacy in action.
I'm not American, so no
I just think standing up (or massively expanding) a new militarized government force, one who also in this case likes to mask up, not uniform up, and generally act like aggressive retards is a massive self own. They're racking up a small, but growing resume of doing awful shit to American citizens which will only grow larger and more frequent as they expand.
I think further, if you support the government creating yet another group of goons who get to fuck people up, detain them without rights or due process, and above all, operate in an environment of "eh whatever, shit happens" then you are a cuck.
You might feel fine about it, but make no mistake, you're sitting in the chair
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A similar number of children have been receiving trans medicine and surgery and this forum has been absolutely livid. Seems like every user with children expressed genuine fear of their kids being transed. It is quite fair to be livid about similarly miniscule numbers of detained citizens, especially when the supporters of ICE indicate that they want the numbers to increase.
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"Detained". So, comprehensive examples of "detained" that have come up in the stories I've seen and that we've discussed here.
Retired vet who was working security at the weed farm that used illegal child labor. Was held for a few days.
The guy who was technically born in the US, then his mom took him back to Mexico to raise him in a remote village that didn't even speak Spanish. Guy snuck back over the border with his actually illegal friends and got stopped by them in Florida. Was held for a few days while the authorities figured out what Aztec language he spoke and confirmed his identity.
And in general, 170 out of 500k is an arror rate of 0.00034. Can you name another government function with an error rate that low?
As I said in my other comment, I'm not against ICE at all, I think that agents of the government exercising a monopoly on force should be held to extremely high standards, and relaxing those standards because they're "on your team" is stupid, because they very much are not on your team, even if your goals are aligned right now.
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Have you considered that you, too, are affected by a propaganda bubble?
Just a couple days ago there was an ICE raid at a car wash right down the street from where I live. They didn’t have a warrant to enter the building so they simply arrested all the employees who happened to be outside at the time (which is to say, the ones who were drying and vacuuming cars). Many of those arrested said they had legal work permits in their lockers inside, but they were not allowed to retrieve them. In fact the owner insists that ALL of the employees had proper work permits and has been pretty furious to the local media. (For what it’s worth I find this believable, because the car wash is a relatively bougie one for the area, the kind where people bring their nice new BMW— I don’t even always use it, even though it’s good, because it’s more expensive than the others nearby— and so I honestly don’t think the owners are short-changing the workers, which is the primary motivation for hiring illegals.)
This is very literally “rounding up hardworking people trying to make a buck”! They were actively working when they were arrested! Trying to convince people this stuff isn’t happening (and it’s good that it is) is
ridiculousan extremely ineffective messaging strategy.I am not completely unsympathetic toward ICE, I don’t want to see it abolished and I certainly acknowledge the reality of the problems we have with illegal immigration. Most people being deported very much deserve it, and I have limits on my sympathy even for the sympathetic cases. But the impunity being given to ICE is genuinely very bad, and raids like the one I’ve described (which very much ARE happening) are pretty much indefensible. If nothing else, people need to have the opportunity to show their papers if they’re being accused of not having papers! If the response to that is “well we can’t let them go get them because they might run, and we can’t escort them to their locker because we have no warrant to enter this building”, too bad, you should’ve thought of that before you started.
The relevant factor isn't lazy or hardworking, it's American or foreign. Once upon a time I would care more about this, but that was millions and millions of foreigners ago.
I decline to participate in your ratchet. We can undo the immigration if we choose to, and I want Trump and the admin choosing to every hour of every day until 2029.
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I honestly don't believe you. If this were true, I would expect it to lead the national news. Every leftwing journalist in the country would be talking about it. We've had nine months of these stories being falsified or collapsing under scrutiny, to the point where I'm genuinely baffled at how on point ICE seems to be. Maybe we should just put Tom Homan in charge of the entire government.
But the grand total number of arrested and deported people so far is something in the ballpark of 500k. Many of those will not have been in super visible locations, so round that down further. The overwhelming majority of Americans (99%+) have never seen anyone getting loaded into an ICE van. The number of people who have watched with their real eyes as a "hardworker just trying to make a buck" gets picked up for deportation is probably something like 0.01% of Americans as a highball estimate.
If I seem to offer them impunity it's because I've been having this conversation for 9 months, and as best I can tell their error rate is between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude better than any other branch of the government.
I also found it, wasn't that hard
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I don't want to doxx OP so I'm not going to post it, but I found a local news report after about five seconds of looking. On the other hand, everyone knows where I live, so I'll have no trouble posting this news report from a couple months ago. It's not mentioned in the video, but the restaurant was open at the time, with customers inside, and the agents also managed to start a small fire in the kitchen after they damaged the gas line of a stove. I don't want to say these stories are exactly common, but when they appear in the relatively unbiased medium of local news every couple months in an area without a high immigrant population at all, what sort of impression are people supposed to get? Why would people think that those detained are criminals or otherwise bad people when ICE just no comments the news?
Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about what kind of people are being deported because it's really beside the point. The important thing is that the perception exists among a lot of people, and calling them morons who live in a bubble isn't going to change that perception. This is the same logic that led to the Democrats underestimating Trump in 2016. "How could anyone possibly vote for that man? We can't lose!" Followed by a bunch of crap about how Hillary's email scandal wasn't a big deal and all the other nonsense that they assumed the electorate downplayed because they were motivated to not care about it. As I say in another comment above, this is how waves happen; you assume you have a broad mandate without doing any research to confirm how popular your policies are, ignore or downplay information that suggests people don't like this shit, talk about whatever "structural advantage" you have through gerrymandering, a Blue Wall, becoming majority minority, or whatever, and then act surprised when you get shellacked. This is exactly how the Democrats went from having a supermajority in 2009 to being in the position that they are now.
Bro, did you watch your own video? It's literally a press release from an anti-ICE activist group presented as a news clip. Every single person interviewed is from the same anti-ICE rally without a single countering take.
Meanwhile the reporters do note that the agents had a warrant and arrested so many illegals that both locations shut down temporarily. That is nothing like the "legal immigrants dragged away while begging for the chance to go get their papers" crap I was replying to.
And this perception has little to do with reality. So please stop actively making it worse. "A lot of people believe these wild exagerrations and lies I'm actively peddling, so you'd better start acting as if the lies are true". How about I keep pointing out that they're wild exagerrations and you stop making it worse?
You're simultaneously missing my point and making it for me. They aren't presenting the other side because the other side isn't saying anything. They're doing the same thing you're doing where they're hoping people just assume that everything that ICE does is 100% justified, optics be damned. And if they think otherwise then it's just because they're brainwashed by activist propaganda. Both of those things could be completely true, but it doesn't matter.
When that story broke I watched the news report in the kind of bar where people sit and watch the news, with people who aren't exactly liberal, and they were all uneasy about the whole thing. That restaurant has a location about ten minutes away and everyone has eaten there (though I'm personally not a fan), and there's a very real anxiety that they could be enjoying dinner only to have it interrupted by Federal agents barging in because a dish washer doesn't have his papers.
I flesh this out more in another comment, but wave elections happen when a party ignores obvious warning signs and either denies that there's a problem or makes excuses for why things aren't quite going the way they like. Maybe you're right and maybe this isn't really a problem, but there's a long list of other things people don't like about this administration, and if your only response is that it isn't a problem, then don't be surprised if something catastrophic happens.
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The problem is there's a million of these, where someone says ICE came in and arrested everyone even the American citizens who didn't do anything but ask the ICE agents some questions. And the stories often place front-and-center irrelevant details like the people detained not having a criminal record. But there's never any follow-up showing that all the relevant stuff is actually true. Instead this reporting is all simply repeating the claims of advocates. Which means that even someone like myself who is biased against law enforcement and believes they tend to be generally brutal starts to disbelieve the stories.
If that is indeed the case, then the administration needs to do a better job communicating that. By which I mean they need to make that information available to media either via press release or simply giving all the details when they ask. They can't just not comment or simply confirm that they executed a search warrant. Local news these days won't even hire copy editors; it may be a journalistic best practice to verify everything, but in today's media environment they aren't going to have a guy looking up criminal records, especially when these stories go out the same day. That being said, the stories I've seen around here never mention the criminal record or lack thereof, or anything about the victims for that matter. People aren't going to just assume that someone has a criminal record. If that's part of the story, you have to tell them.
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To be fair, everyone is in some sort of bubble, and as such you ignore the bubble at your own risk. Most people are getting their view of the world through some sort of media, and unfortunately social media, so you can’t just throw your hands up and say “it’s just a social media propaganda bubble.” The bubble has caused three assassination attempts. It swings elections.
If I wanted to steel-man the administration's choices, it seems that the very public ICE actions are intended to broadcast a message of unwelcomeness to would-be illegal immigrants. Uncontrolled traffic at the border is down, I think, in a large part due to changing perceptions here, and while many of the individual actions seem cruel, it's demonstrably effective at piercing perceptual bubbles ("Uncle Joe will let us in") more than having the VP say "do not come."
I don't have the time to write this up at length right now, but I feel like this aligns with a much deeper pattern. Basically, I think there's an older kind of wisdom that says it can be socially optimal for authority to make credible, even hard, threats that different groups take seriously, because if people take those threats seriously, they'll often behave in socially desired ways and then the threats don't even have to be exercised for the most part. BUT doing that does require authority figures to look, publicly, like mean assholes, and it might require implementing nasty punishments a couple of times in especially public ways. You could say this goes all the back, at the level of theory, to at least Machiavelli, with his observation that, if a ruler has to choose between being feared or loved, it's generally more stable to be feared.
Internalizing this requires understanding second order effects on some deep level, and understanding that authority might need to be dickish in the correct ways for the greater good. And it absolutely seems like an understanding of the world that is apparently abhorrent to a lot of well-educated progressives I know. Interestingly, those same progressives seem to have exactly the same difficultly when it comes to parenting and holding the line on their own kids, a difficulty that often produces nasty consequences, so I don't think this is about hypocrisy. I think it's just an actual deep moral revulsion at "being mean", even if it's trivially necessary and for the greater good.
When I hear of "migrants dying on rickety boats trying to cross to Europe" I keep wondering if the tally would be positive or negative and by how much if Europeans countries had been sinking the unidentified vessels with unlawful intentions approaching their coasts right from the start. Sometimes, real mercy is harshly disincentivizing bad and dangerous behavior.
It's trivially true, even obvious. Sink a couple of boats and far fewer people die in the long run, nevermind the preventing other problems.
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When ICE is raiding Home Depot parking lots,.farms, and restaurants, nobody is under the impression that the people they're rounding up are just there to hang out.
Isn't Home Depot where they picked up the wife-beating, human-smuggling, child-exploiting gang member?
Is that the weed farm with the child slaves you're talking about?
But what's the ratio of Home Depot day laborers with no other legal problems to people who are criminals even aside from the border crossing? Do you know? Does it matter? Is the standard "your policies can never have a single instance of a sad optic and will never get any credit for any number of positive optic scenes"?
There's a reason you're not posting links to the ICE twitter feed going "Damn, Democrats. I'm so concerned about the optics of all these rapists you're going to the mats to protect."
Just so with every other issue. Troop deployments; are people seeing Stunning and Brave Activist Women denouncing tyranny, or are they seeing the charts with stunning drops in carjacking and murder rates?
Your point isn't wrong, but the real issue is that conservatives need better methods of dealing with suicidal empathy.
That may be a coup complete problem.
I haven't seen these charts. Do you have a link?
Only normie source on the first page of results. Damn. I knew that mainstream outlets reacted to Trump wins like vampires to a cross, but I'm still surprised by the dearth of coverage.
The DC police statistics do show a drop, but the chart isn't IMO clear that it was a specific inflection point. Plus I have trouble believing that the last month or two have all their paperwork completed and won't change later. But down almost 50% in the past 12 months versus the previous 12 months is good. But 2024 was massively down from 2023 too.
https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/carjacking
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It is. There really is no way to stop a sufficiently committed suicidal person short of killing them. As an example, Seneca speaks in a respectful tone about a gladiator who killed himself by shoving the communal toilet shit sponge down his throat.
That’s commitment. How do you stop that guy? Every gladiator has to use the toilet, so do you assign a guard to him every day? He’s a gladiator, he might be able to take a guard, so do you assign two? Three? Does the Imperial economy eventually just center around everyone guarding everyone else so no one commits suicide? Because that sounds like a very fragile and unsustainable equilibrium.
Our society is like that gladiator. It yearns to die and will shove the shit sponge down its throat if no more pleasant opportunity presents itself.
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