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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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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.

I live in Washington DC and physically know the people running DHS Comms. These are not the people who were running DHS a year ago. It’s entirely rational for me to trust different people differently.

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.

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