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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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ICE is deporting lots of people. Other people are recording it, opposing it, even offering bounties on ICE officers.

I have noticed a pattern where there is a horrible story that comes out. Blue tribe passes around the horrible story. There was the "black babies zip tied" story. The "deported US citizen with cancer" story. So on and so forth.

The Red Tribe waits for the Department of Homeland Security X account to post a rebuttal, and then that becomes the Red Tribe story. See for example:

https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1986198635466358989

https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1986438229373944199

https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1986086507271106982

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?" In the past I had seen the reverse. Official government accounts were scrutinized, eye witness accounts and video evidence were taken in higher regard.

For example, the Rittenhouse affair had Red Tribe internet sleuths piecing together video evidence of Rittenhouse's activities and movements for the hours leading up to the shootings. Within 48 hours they knew more than the prosecution's attorneys knew over a year later.

I'm not casting doubt on the DHS Official X Intern's ability to give it to us straight. I'm just trying to understand the epistemology that makes this all work. Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now? Just certain parts of the government?

I have no affinity to any tribe, but it is a fact that illegal immigrants are violating the law, the blue tribe doesn't have any regards for the law (unless it suits them), and they have lied multiple times in the recent past. Given that context I don't see why anyone who isn't in the blue tribe -- including the red tribe -- should consider these "horrible stories" as having any credence.

Consider that Red Tribe has always been more accepting of official military/law enforcement narratives. DHS should probably count as law enforcement. I think most of the people replying to you, and you, are overextending these examples to a more general lack/presence of skepticism for both sides.

I think I'm leaning towards this myself. I have family members that are police and others that are military, and I have seen first hand situations where an uncle was shot and severely injured, his partner killed, and the local media and minorities up in arms about police brutality and racism because they managed to off the villain themselves before passing out/dying. I am heavily biased to trust the police until proven guilty.

But I don't trust FBI/CIA. On a scale of CIA to local Police officer, DHS is kinda hovering around FBI territory. But it seems to have dramatically shifted towards the trustworthy side in the past few months.

DHS has been anti-terrorist since its inception. Not to claim that left organizations would be pro-terrorist, but conservatives are stereotypically heavily anti-terrorist and have been a bit more accepting of civil rights creep.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?" In the past I had seen the reverse. Official government accounts were scrutinized, eye witness accounts and video evidence were taken in higher regard

Both red and blue tribe, really every person besides those of us skeptically inclined, believe what the people who have status and credibility in their social circles say and disbelieve what people who don't have status and credibility in their social circle say. When the facts happen to align with their side's story and not the other side's story they get to gloat like in the Smollett and Rittenhouse cases. When they don't they rarely even hear about it due to their bubble, it gets memory holed, if you bring it up later as proof of their side's error they downplay it because they barely even remember that thing and they never really looked into it that much.

The trick isn't noticing this phenomenon, it's having noticed it and realizing in horror that you are not immune to the problem. I'm preaching to the choir of course, this is a place where bubbles are pierced, but if you want to know why normies are the way that they are it's because they are not woke to this phenomenon. Hell, it's why a lot of the people here who seem totally incapable of both sidesing an issue are the way that they are. It takes a kind of freak not to fall into this trap.

I have noticed a pattern where there is a horrible story that comes out. [Team A] passes around the horrible story…[Team B] waits for the [relevant department’s] X account to post a rebuttal, and then that becomes the [Team B] story.

Isn’t this normal? An official statement makes for an easy rallying cry.

As another note on relative trust, I think it's worth acknowledging that the historical red tribe distrust of government lies, to some extent, in the lack of ownership felt toward said government. The idea that red tribers distrust government came to prominence in response to Obama and the establishment-type neocon Republicans that worked with him, further inflamed by the Biden admin's poor communication and media backsliding during COVID. Now that the government is presently controlled by the MAGA movement (whether or not it has been influenced or consumed by the establishment notwithstanding), most red tribers trust the parts of said government run by "their guy." One of Trump's major electoral talking points in 2016 was how he was going to topple the establishment and speak truth to power, and while that sentiment has waned somewhat on his second term, there is still enough of that energy in the MAGA base that official government narratives tend to be accepted.

Reporters are abandoning their standards and playing a game of "we aren't reporting y, we're just reporting that people said y" instead of verifying anything.

Left activists think it's OK to lie in immigration contexts and the press lets them get away with it.

So it's a situation where they trust the government much more instead of absolutely trusting the government. They are willing to wait for DHS Official to look at their records and respond.

You seem to be trying to turn trust into a binary and that's not really how it works.

Reporters are abandoning their standards and playing a game of "we aren't reporting y, we're just reporting that people said y" instead of verifying anything.

What standards? This tactic is so old that South Park was pointing it out 20 years ago in the Hurricane Katrina episode Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow.

South Park was pointing it out...

link to the scene

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?"

These stories are all the worst sort of fake news. Man detained at airport for having a JD Vance meme on his phone. Fake. Black baby zip tied. Fake. ICE kidnaps 13 year-old. Fake. Over and over again.

It’s rational to doubt the press when they’re lying. It would be irrational to believe the press stories over the trivial refutations.

Having not seen all (most?) of these before, would you mind providing links to the media claims and the evidence that they're incorrect for these cases?

Man detained at airport for having a JD Vance meme on his phone

It's another one where no one can prove anything. DHS claims the tourist was denied entry for admitting drug use in the US, which he did, but there's no way to determine if that was a pretext for having the JD Vance meme or not.

I know someone whose ESTA application was denied because she had told them, by accidentally checking the wrong box on a form, that she was a terrorist. This happened 15 years ago at this point.

They ask you, "Are you a terrorist?" You can check "Yes", and if you do so, you will be denied. Makes sense, wouldn't want to let a terrorist in after all.

By that standard, I'd say it is ridiculous to pretend that someone who said "Yes, I use illegal drugs" was rejected for any other reason.

It's not about trust, it's about controlling the narrative. In general, I'd say that the Red Tribe (my moderate-right self included) don't care enough about isolated cases of excessive force to reverse course, and we recognize that latching onto popular "official" narratives is more powerful than arguing with a leftist who doesn't share the same definition of words, or the same moral framework.

The structural advantage that the left has right now is that they can consistently paint themselves as the underdog. They understand, and they weaponize, the tactic of physically resisting and antagonizing in every way humanly possible all the way up to, but usually not beyond, the point of clear violence. This makes use of force force by law enforcement look disproportionate and unjust, and any socially contentious issue that involves "marginalized" individuals automatically gives "marginalized" individuals the social license to resist being apprehended. Technically it's illegal, but if they're not violent when they resist and someone videos it, then they have the people and the progressive cause behind them. Use of force is almost always a violation of liberal law, no matter who the perpetrator is. So when it happens, lawyers, redditors, politicians, actors, and others will rush to the defense of any peaceful resister the moment a video hits Twitter. Both sides use this victim tactic, but the right generally uses physical force more than the left, so they're in the wrong according to lib society.

ICE is deporting lots of people.

This is not really true; deportations now are being done at a lower rate than the Obama admin's average, and pretty much the same as in 2024 under Biden. See https://factchequeado.com/teexplicamos/20250820/obama-deportations-trump-biden-numbers/

The "theatricality" with the street recording / media backlash / DHS rebuttal cycle seems to be part of a PR strategy by the Trump admin to make it look like they're being tough on illegals without actually doing anything different.

Is this true in the real sense? How much of Obama’s deportations were at the border?

Not true. Obama admin redefined “deportations” to include turn backs at the border. This juiced their numbers without DHS actually deporting anyone. Trump is actually deporting people.

Did the Trump admin change the definition back to exclude border turn backs again?

I'm just trying to understand the epistemology that makes this all work. Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now?

I think Red Tribe distrust in the mainstream news media has always [within recent memory] been high, perhaps even higher than Red Tribe distrust in the government.

So yes, all of the things people are saying about arguments as soldiers and people wanting to believe what they want to believe are true, but it's pretty consistent for Red Tribe to see a news story and assume there's a massive and substantially misleading spin involved.

Why distrust the media so much? I think this is the perception:

The government always lies to protect its own interests. Sometimes that hurts Red Tribe. Sometimes it doesn't. But when the media lies, it is always to hurt Red Tribe or help its enemies.

Yes, the OP is missing that this is not about trust/don't trust, it's about relative trust. Red tribes may not trust the government much, but they trust the media even less than that.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?" In the past I had seen the reverse.

I am aware of one ICE raid in my area. They raided a local Chinese restaurant on human trafficking charges.

It was not a secret to the locals that this was happening. I had spoken with a handful of friends and coworkers who called a federal tip line or other over the years. Hell, one time I was there for an acquaintance's birthday the proprietor offered to get him a wife from China. Despite all that, it wasn't until the Trump administration that anyone actually decided to do anything about it.

The news reports it as ICE raiding an upstanding business owned by an American citizen. They're rather circumspect about the dozen unrelated teen girls who don't speak English and have no papers that they pulled out of there. The locals who saw it described a very different story to me.

Which one should I believe?

This feels like Culture War 101. Arguments as soldiers. If an official source if bolstering your side, take what they say as gospel. If they oppose your side, find a reason why they can not be trusted.

The Red tribe does this. The Blue tribe does this.

Expecting them to have good epistemic standards, to even be interested in the truth for its own sake, is like expecting a bank robber of caring about the Gini coefficient.

If Satan is the only one that can remove migrants and asylum seekers from Europe, I would moderate my opinion on the Unholy Legion.

Ice are doing something that large parts of the red tribe think of as necessary.

Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now?

Always has been. I remember feeling the same when the Ukraine war was the dominant theme of the day here, and suddenly all the people here who thought themselves experts in spotting and dismissing cathedral media misinformation joyfully slurped up the same manipulative slop deployed in the sense of the USG's foreign policy agenda. If you believe anyone actually adheres to principles rather than just using them as rationalisations for naked tribalism, you will be disappointed time and time again.

For example, the Rittenhouse affair had Red Tribe internet sleuths piecing together video evidence of Rittenhouse's activities and movements for the hours leading up to the shootings. Within 48 hours they knew more than the prosecution's attorneys knew over a year later.

Why do you believe the internet sleuths knew more than the prosecution's attorneys, as opposed to the prosecution's attorneys feigning ignorance in order to conduct a politically hostile prosecution despite the available and mutually-known facts?

Yeah they pretended Rittenhouse had a short barreled rifle until the judge asked them if the were sure and propsed getting a tape measure to check. The judge had to dismiss a criminal charge based on it being a short barrel rifle, so it wasn't just idle falsehoods from the prosecution.

Why do you believe the internet sleuths knew more than the prosecution's attorneys, as opposed to the prosecution's attorneys feigning ignorance in order to conduct a politically hostile prosecution despite the available and mutually-known facts?

That's actually effectively confirmed at this point. The prosecution knew the identity of "Jump Kick Man" and didn't disclose it to the defense until after testimony had wrapped up. Oh and big surprise, he was another career criminal

Re #1: Is it that hard to just stand still and get arrested? "Chasing" implies "fleeing", and fleeing to a daycare is even worse than normal.

Re #2 (link, since it isn't included): "federal agents have been the catalyst for chaos and clashes." Odd way to not blame them, but I'll take it. “To safely clear the area after multiple warnings and the crowd continuing to advance on them, Border Patrol had to deploy crowd control measures.” “Our officers are facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them" " inadvertently been exposed" Odd to include those lines with no pushback if they're inaccurate. Also note that this is a couple weeks after the temporary restraining order that restricts tear gas when not under imminent threat, and the article didn't even hint that they could be defying that order. The media very rarely lies, but NBC sure is pushing it.

Re #3: What's the alleged misconduct? Driving the child away seems like one reasonable course of action to me, and the rest is nothingburgers. The crowd's conduct wasn't great, but that's not the father's fault.

There's no need to wait for the DHS official rebuttal before dismissing those stories. I suspect the rest are similar.

Here is a video from that #2 incident. It happens after most of the action; I don't see ICE doing anything except finishing arresting people and moving some cars around. Some tear gas canisters are still active. But tell me... based on that video (and audio), would you believe that there had just prior been sufficient unrest to justify the use of tear gas?

I watched it initially with the audio off, and I was like "What am I supposed to be seeing? Aside from the sheer number of cops and the leftover tear gas, it looks like a pretty normal arrest?". With the audio on, it's a different story.

You don't seem to understand what "don't trust your lying eyes" means. It means trust me over your own experiences. A random maximally emotionally exploitative WaPo article is not my own experiences. My own experience is that there are still far too many foreigners out and about so ICE needs to step it up, start denaturalizing as well.

A better example would be what the Trump admin is trying to do with affordability and food prices after their shellacking during the elections. People feel that the economy is still bad and things are still too expensive but they're on an all out blitz to deny this and claim prices are down. This backfired for Biden (vibecession) and will likely backfire for them as I don't see many conservatives buying it.

My "lying eyes" see illegals fleeing, resisting, and wreaking havoc around town, and agents rounding them up and sending them back to where they belong. It's the fake news screeching about it and crying crocodile tears for some reason, but when I look at the video I see absolutely nothing wrong.

Even if ICE specifically raided a preschool or daycare, do parents really feel that good having their kids taken care of by illegals? Go get em!

"We had agents with guns who were walking around the facility with teachers inside, with children inside," said Ald. Matt Martin, who represents the 47th Ward.

Oh the horror. Next thing you know, they'll be sending agents with guns into schools to tell kids not to use drugs.

I walk past a middle school in a major blue city on the way to work now and I am constantly seeing kids smoking and selling pot and other shit right in front of the school. It's ridiculous.

Yep. I’ve argued for a long time we need a radical restoration of discipline.

Oh the horror. Next thing you know, they'll be sending agents with guns into schools to tell kids not to use drugs.

This was literally done with the DARE program? At least when I was in school it involved an active police officer (armed, as US cops tend to be) going into an elementary school classroom to talk about how drugs were bad. I do remember at least one of the student questions was "Is that a real gun?".

This was literally done with the DARE program?

That's the point @phailyoor was making - you can make things sound awful by phrasing it in the maximally offensive way.

Compare: "The government must move to ban dihydrogen monoxide, a dangerous chemical that leads to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of deaths per year, especially amongst children!" to "Swimming pools can be dangerous for young children - remember to never leave children unattended near a body of water."

The first one comes with that breathless air of "you should be outraged," while the second is much more realistic.

Exactly. There's an assumption on the Left that quite a large degree of rebellion against ICE is acceptable, which makes the whole thing messy. If this were the alternate headline where red tribers were being hit with police brutality whilst trying to protest desegregation or abortion or whatever else, the fucks given would be zero. See the COVID response et al.

The leftist project to make schools, hospitals, churches, courtrooms, home depot parking lots, and anywhere else illegal aliens may go sanctuaries - in the medievalist sense of the term - is obvious nonsense. Do they want open borders or not? The Right isn't Charlie Brown, where you can falsely claim to be rule-of-law but decline to enforce immigration ones because of 'reasons'. It's blindingly obvious they're objecting to the enforcement in comparison to... what? A claw machine from the sky? Asking nicely?

The football has been pulled too many times.

The left will continue its endless parade of condescending “play nice” politics until they get their feet held to the fire of the consequences of what ask for. Until people pay a price for being wrong there’s little reason to stop treating America as a national Ken and Barbie household where we can all sit together and sing kumbaya.

Hilariously, NY is in the finding out stage of relentlessly importing foreigners. Surprise suprise, just because you got them here doesn't mean their politics or identity suddenly magically changed.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?"

There don't seem to be any "lying eyes" involved. In your first story, the Bezos blog says

Armed ICE officers arrested a teacher early Wednesday in Chicago after chasing her onto the grounds of a private preschool and grabbing her as parents and students looked on, according to a local official and witnesses.

DHS says

Law enforcement pursued the vehicle before the assailant sped into a shopping plaza where he and the female passenger fled the vehicle. They ran into a daycare and attempted to barricade themselves inside the daycare—recklessly endangering the children inside.

These are compatible stories, with different spins.

In your second story, the videos I've seen start AFTER two people had been arrested. There's no evidence available against ICEs claim that they were "SURROUNDED AND BOXED IN".

In the third, ICE claims they arrested a guy who had his kid in a stolen car. (Or maybe I'm reading it wrong; they may be claiming he had a stolen pistol in his own car). Looks like one agent did screw up and hit the kid with a ball, though the kid doesn't seem particularly bothered. The LA Times headline is "Agents drive off with child after detaining her father". Well, yeah; they arrested the father, they're not going to leave the kid at the scene. The kid was later brought back home to his mother.

Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now?

It hurts to see all these poseurs. It's particularly bad when they 180 because of Trump e.g. on Epstein. Regardless of party, I hate the federal government and all its bureaucrats, left or right.

Based and consistent-pilled

I'm not casting doubt on the DHS Official X Intern's ability to give it to us straight.

Then you and the Red Tribe are in agreement?

The Red Tribe generally believes the police's account of things unless they have a pretty strong reason not to. ICE is part of the police in their reckoning. Things are different with the FBI, but does the FBI even put out official statement about their side of the story?

It's not particularly different from the pattern where Blue Tribers exclaimed how terribly badly Derek Chauvin behaved, and the Red Tribers mostly thought that, huh, maybe that's bad, the police will probably investigate, and he'll get in some kind of trouble if his actions were unusually bad, but on net it's probably worth letting the police get away with a bit more roughing up than they are now, in exchange for more public order.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?"

They expect Blue Tribe outlets to reliably lie all the time. If the Blue Tribe is making furious, emotionally-laden claims about the police, then my bet is that the police are probably at least less in the wrong than the Blue Tribe is saying, because I expect Blue Tribe media outlets to wildly exaggerate at best.

If the NYT and MSNBC were very performatively angry that the sky was blue, I'd lean over to the nearest window to check.

What people actually do, if they do anything besides buy what the mainstream media is telling them at face value, is find an entity who's motivations and biases they align with, and then pick that guy's story. Sometimes the establishment consists of flaming hot liberals (Rittenhouse), sometimes it consists of based law enforcement (ICE Twitter). What "establishment" figure gets trusted more depends on whos listening.

That’s always been true. That’s just confirmation bias applied to people’s news diet. No one is different in that sense. I think that’s why you saw a push in advertising in some news outlets for a time for sites like Ground News and Inkl that try to categorize and aggregate news by coverage you see according to different accounts.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?"

The Department of Homeland Security is obviously biased in favor of themselves, but just like the media lying, you'd expect any factual statements they make to be correct. If they say that the guy has been previously arrested for assault, then you can bet that the guy has actually been previously arrested for assault. If that was a lie, then first of all the left would pounce on that and tell everyone that it's a lie, and second, the DHS would know this and not lie in the first place. If it's truthful, the left would be silent about it.

If the DHS had instead posted "Chicago residents say the man had been arrested for assault" you would be right to be skeptical.

Except we recently had a government that literally lied on the facts - the Hunter Biden Laptop story is one such situation.

I suppose it's a "Government can only lie on the facts when they have a favorable media environment?"

I'm honestly trying to figure out for myself why I trust the DHS accounts when I would typically try to verify the information in other ways.

One reason to treat these claims differently is that the people making them physically changed because we had an election in 2024.

The Biden Laptop story was hushed up during Trump 1.

The security state officers that lied about Hunter's Laptop are enemies of Trump.

While it's useful to speak of "the government" lying, this is an abstraction. A government is made up of people. And it's unremarkable to trust some people over others. The people running DHS are not the people who lied about Hunter's Laptop. It's totally consistent to trust the one and not the other.

So the 2024 election counts as a physical change in personnel, and since Trump purged his enemies, you can totally trust DHS.

But the 2016 one didn’t, because…?

Please state directly what you are implying without putting implications in my mouth.

I think you only trust DHS because they’re more obviously polishing Trump’s knob. I think “we had an election” is an excuse, because this is a stupid way to establish trust.

More comments

If there's one thing that Trump was notoriously awful about that even a lot of his die-hard supporters would agree on, it was staffing the executive branch with people who wouldn't try to undermine his interests back in his first term. He has clearly learned a lot from the experience and that's why there have been far fewer issues with him getting backstabbed by bureaucrats and his own appointees this time around.

I do actually think this is true.

It also makes “we had an election” into a fig leaf.

Except we recently had a government that literally lied on the facts - the Hunter Biden Laptop story is one such situation.

Like the media rarely lying, the government rarely lies. This was one of the rarelys. But even with a media that was mostly friendly to the government, there were significant sources questioning the government. If the DHS was lying here, the media would be going through the DHS's claims one by one and talking about how each one is a lie. The fact that that hasn't happened is a good sign that the DHS is telling the truth.

Also, the Hunter Biden laptop is one story. It would not be possible for the government to keep up a series of lies, one for every single immigrant arrest story.

Also, the Hunter Biden laptop is one story. It would not be possible for the government to keep up a series of lies, one for every single immigrant arrest story.

It would if no one was questioning them.

I'm honestly trying to figure out for myself why I trust the DHS accounts when I would typically try to verify the information in other ways.

You probably shouldn't. However, I have tried to verify some of these other ways (though only those available to a keyboard warrior, I'm not doing investigative reporting). Most of them are basically inconclusive; there are atrocities claimed that have no evidence for them, and DHS says the situation is some other way which also cannot be confirmed. Very often the "atrocity" side is making highly emotive claims that aren't even really atrocities if you turn on your brain for a second or so -- for instance, it's not an atrocity that they're arresting illegal aliens outside a car wash when they don't have a warrant to search inside. It's not an atrocity for them to detain illegal aliens with no criminal record. It's not even an atrocity for them to temporarily detain US citizens who get in the way when they're doing a raid, though this may be justified or not depending on the details (which are not available). It's certainly not an atrocity to drive an arrestee's car away with the arrestee's toddler child in the car -- what are they going to do, leave the kid alone? It's not an atrocity to chase a suspect who then runs into a daycare, nor to arrest the suspect there. But all these claims are presented with a spin that makes them sound like accusations of misconduct, and that makes me mistrust those sources.

Then there's the claims that really are bad -- for instance, the runner with the six broken ribs, supposedly backed up by a "shocking" video. But the "shocking" video just shows the runner after he's been arrested. We not only don't know if he did anything to deserve arrest, we have no idea if he's actually got "six broken ribs". All we have is stories repeating claims made by activists as if they are true. The fact that the video is claimed/implied to have the shocking details but does not works against their credibility. And if I was to believe that kind of thing, I'd have to believe that DHS deported an Allentown grandfather from Chile to Guatemala when he went in to get his green card renewed, a story that made The Guardian among other places, and from thence here. As you may recall, the gentleman named had passed away -- in Santiago -- in 2019. DHSs response to this story while it was happening was basically "¿Qué? ¿Quién?", until they said they'd found records and the guy had been to the US only once, on visa waiver, without incident, some years ago.

So, if you don't trust the government much it's fair to view DHSs statements with skepticism. But the statements from the other side should, IMO, be viewed with far more skepticism, due to their record. That works out to at least tentatively believing DHS when there's no good evidence either way.

Of course, if the police department of Kenosha had made a statement after the Rittenhouse incident that Rittenhouse had unlawfully crossed state lines with a rifle and shot three black men without provocation, I suspect most of Red Tribe would believe them at least at first. They really are generally credulous of law enforcement, with some exceptions (ATF and FBI in particular)

Most of them are basically inconclusive; there are atrocities claimed that have no evidence for them, and DHS says the situation is some other way which also cannot be confirmed.

I'm not even convinced of this. Things like "this man is wanted for assault" and "was wielding a hammer and threw rocks" are things that could be verified. Maybe not immediately, but they can.

Very often the "atrocity" side is making highly emotive claims that aren't even really atrocities if you turn on your brain for a second or so

Of course, this factor is probably more important. The anti-immigrant side of these stories is obviously mostly or all spin even without having to decide whether the government was lying.

I'm not even convinced of this. Things like "this man is wanted for assault" and "was wielding a hammer and threw rocks" are things that could be verified. Maybe not immediately, but they can.

By the time they can be verified, everyone's forgotten about that story and the next several atrocities have been claimed.

A lie can get halfway round el mundo before the truth can get its pantalones on

This is just part and parcel of the swap that goes on whenever one side gains control of the white house. The "right" now believes the government story and the "left" doesn't - essentially the polar opposite of two years ago - and it'll swap again once the democrats win the presidency again.

It’s highly rational to start trusting the government again when people you don’t trust are replaced by people you do trust.

No it isn't, because the vast vast majority of people who comprise "the government" do not change with election cycles

And that's not even to mention the fact that the two parties have way more in common (albeit diverging more recently) than they are different

And that's not to mention how foolish it is to trust politicians, period

"It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

I trust Donald Trump. I imagine there were naysayers who said it was foolish to trust Alexander, or that Napoleon was just a pawn in a far greater scheme.

I trust Donald Trump

Also insane given his profound track record of lying and clear self interest in all his activities and statements

I wouldn't trust any of those three characters, as I'm very confident that any of them would gladly send me to my death if it helped them

Fake news

This comment is virtually devoid of substance, the very definition of "low effort." Make an actual point that doesn't waste our time reading it.

The comment I replied to states opinions as facts

My point was the opposite of this. You don't have to "believe the government" at all except to the extent of accepting that they'll say literal truths, which is a very low standard and is something that applies to the other side too.

I fully expect that with the next Democrat in the White House the government will still say things that are literally true.

I believe them enough about who they are deporting, especially after seeing the videos.

Competing visions for society is all it really comes down to.

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