site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17066 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Welp, turns out more Epstein files are finally getting released!

Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.

This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA. From my perspective, confidence in MAGA at least online is the lowest it has ever been. Many feel betrayed by Trump when it comes to his America First promises.

Add in the storm over Fuentes and Israel, and I feel I'm seeing the conservative coalition fall apart in real time, extremely quickly.

Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?

Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.

So far I haven't seen anything that would prove this. They are however optically negative for Trump. The only thing I find interesting about them is "why now?". The democratic party was in charge for 4 years and they were trying to take down Trump all along, why not release them earlier? Why not release them in 2024 to improve the chances of victory of Kamala?

Releasing them now means they have the smallest effect they could have possibly had. Even waiting until 2028 would have had a greater effect.

The documents we are seeing now are in response to a subpoena to Epstein’s estate. As for DoJ/FBI my guess they couldn't reach “beyond a reasonable doubt” standart. So they don’t bring it and they don’t release investigation evidence.

My null hypothesis was that the people in charge of making that decision didn't really think Kamala would win, and decided holding one last ace up their sleeve in reserve was better than blowing everything they had on a losing battle, and being totally powerless once Trump inevitably took office.

The right wing is sailing through an interesting storm at the moment.

On one hand you have a very public clash between the donor class and the pundit class on the topic of Israel. Where the donor class seems to have lost control over a portion of the latter. How or why is not necessarily clear but it seems like the long awaited beacon of solace that can deliver the USA from ZOG is finally lit. It took a decade or so longer than the earliest prophets would have hoped, but the internet is finally facilitating a mainstream zionist critical stance through some of the biggest right wing pundits in cyberspace. Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes.

On the donor side, we still have Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham on FOX standing strong in televised media. With Mark Levin allegedly making a case for himself on the radio waves. Along with Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire. But all of these voices are far less impressive when it comes to internet reach. Whilst Shapiro does have a strong base and a large Youtube channel, the internet presence of every mentioned donor class pundit, along with the entirety of Daily Wire, fits snugly within Candace's Owens reach alone when it comes to active internet views. Which would be inconsequential if not for the fact that the youth of the republican party is not listening to radio or watching TV. They are on the internet.

It's worth noting that there are large portions of the right wing media sphere that are completely divorced from this discourse. Choosing to simply sail past it. To that extent it might be a step to far to say the right coalition or media sphere is crumbling. But judging by how things are developing, the topic of Israel is fast becoming something to avoid. Why risk saying something wrong on such a polarized topic and risk the ire of the youth mob or the zionist mob? Just keep your head down and talk about the loony left or the government shutdown.

There are plenty of online right wingers with large followings who are doing just that. What will be interesting is to see how much cross contamination there is between those shows and the zionist critical ones. But to that extent, any expressed support for Israel is effectively a step towards a landmine that risks blowing the discourse up again. This puts neutral pundits in an awkward position. What good are they to the donor class if they can't voice support for their cause? But on the flipside, what good are they to the donor class if they fracture and lose their own audience?

I doubt we will see any resolution soon. Barring any major blunders from the zionist critical side, which is not that unlikely all things considered. But it's hard to imagine that this won't leave a lasting mark on right wing politics. There is an entire right wing generation on the way that simply doesn't fit within the traditional GOP mold. And it's the one demographic they would have dared to rely on. Whether that will have a transcendental effect, or if the future political landscape of the US will be too alien to have it make a difference...

American politics is so much fun. I have a hard time believing it's real.

biggest right wing pundits in cyberspace. Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes.

This seems very

  • You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want

  • You can only play the cards in your hand

  • Piss with the cock you've got

November 2nd was Patrick Buchanan’s 87th birthday.

In defense of all who came after Buchanan, they are only where they are because of his failures.

I've slowly come over to the view that it's a good thing Trump was restricting immigration of the best and brightest so they instead went elsewhere. As they say: Democracy is the belief that voters know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. We've seen the humiliating climbdowns against China and if this policy of being unwelcoming to high end immigrants continue I suspect we'll see plenty of self-flagellation from the US 10 years down the line when it's trying to rebuild up its attractiveness for such people.

  • -24

I suspect we'll see plenty of self-flagellation from the US 10 years down the line when it's trying to rebuild up its attractiveness for such people.

Taking what you've said at face value, possibly. If the US actually pursues going closed-borders-for-everyone, maybe it will be overtaken by China, given the slight national IQ advantage (I hedge my bets with the qualifiers because Europeans were the ones to conquer the world a few centuries ago, despite being lower IQ, so shrug)

Of course, you elide the obvious, though politically incorrect, question: What race are the immigrants? As I concede, it may be true that the US will need the best and brightest of foreign Aryans, East Asians and Jews (i.e. high-IQ races) to stay on top - but what of the best and the brightest of the Third World?

I think it is true that, for a sufficiently selective (and then properly enforced) immigration policy, we can have eugenic immigration from the Third World. But, due to HBD, the amount of additional value from Venkateshes and Bhargavas is going to be much less significant (because there are just not as many of them, and just less total human capital altogether to siphon)

On the other hand, once we hop over this fence, there is the constant danger of somehow (fraud, relaxing the bar for "skilled", etc) then allowing a less filtered, and hence dysgenic, influx. This leads to pretty serious harm - either these people assimilate (and hence lower the quality of the nation's gene pool) or you get a permanent racial underclass. In practice, this might lead to, say, your capital city becoming minority White, and the replacements actually being worse on average.

If we are looking at this purely from the perspective of national self-interest, I think this is overall a net negative. There is obviously a moral argument about helping unfortunate people who could thrive in a 1st world civilisation but were born into a low-IQ race, so it is worth the necessary overhead to carefully filter these people out and let them in (and of course, the more extreme one, which is to just let everyone in so everyone in for equality-of-opportunity reasons, and just accept the nation becoming Third World)

With the substance of my reply out of the way: why do you do this? As in, I know you are a high-IQ Third World immigrant, so I'm guessing you are not super thrilled about the recent vibe shift on immigrants: you personally haven't ever done anything bad, how unfair is it that some people implicitly blame you for (or at least associate you with) stuff like Rotherham, etc.

But you've had many conversations in the past with White identarians on this forum, so I'm pretty sure you are aware of this line of thinking, and then decide to constantly post as if you are some bluepilled liberal normie. I think it's bad form to psychologise your interlocutor, so I won't speculate why any further.

I will just ask - is there anything in what I've said that you actually factually disagree with? And I stress the word factually (since your claim that the US would fall behind and later on regret its current immigration policy is a statement about descriptive reality)

Do you not believe in HBD applied to racial groups? Do you dispute the Lynn IQ numbers as being roughly accurate? Do you dispute that IQ is a decent measure of a person's ability to function well in a society? Do you think that it doesn't make logical sense to make probabalistic judgements about groups of people on the basis of race given HBD? Do you think that the issues with Third World immigration that have occured in the past (e.g. Indians in Canada) are actually very easy to prevent if we just do X? etc

If the US actually pursues going closed-borders-for-everyone, maybe it will be overtaken by China, given the slight national IQ advantage

China still has the strongest handicap that isn't genetic or physical. Communism.

I agree with HBD. That doesn't mean there are no 130+ IQ Africans that it's good for a country to bring in. Yes there's some reversion to the mean but that just means increasing the thresholds on what you admit people so that even their children are still significantly above the western average.

I do dispute the Lynn IQ numbers. They're really not accurate. Sasha Gusev had a pretty good writeup a while ago. But that's neither here nor there for my main argument.

I agree IQ is a very good measure of who you want vs don't want. I agree it's fine to make probabilistic judgments. What happened with Indians in Canada was Canada's own stupidity in importing low IQ Punjabi farmers by the boatload, which they are now paying for, it's got nothing to do with importing top tier human beings. The reason low tier people are imported is that there are lots of low tier jobs that must be done which top tier foreigners or low tier natives refuse to do at reasonable wages, it's a completely separate problem to that of high skill immigration. I'm perfectly in favour of a policy which puts the yoke back on the necks of low tier natives so that they do low tier jobs for proper pay (thereby removing the need for low tier immigrants, what I find galling about low tier natives is not tha they are low tier, but that they are low tier but pretend to be equal to their betters) but democracy means they have more votes than me...

Somehow the United States needs to keep importing “the best and brightest” forever, or we’ll lose. What happened to the best and brightest we already imported? Guess they weren’t the bestest and brightestest.

The one principle I'm learning from the neoliberals is that the importing of the best and brightest must never stop. Can't stop until the white supremacists on Twitter are, themselves, replaced by Indians.

or we’ll lose

Not in an absolute sense, no. Plenty of countries are very livable without immigration. But I do not think you will keep your role as tech leaders without immigration.

What happened to the best and brightest we already imported?

Regression to the mean.

I mean, to be fair, it did work with German scientists. Unfortunately, people die.

The real question is how much the current immigration system actually resembles that.

The best and brightest aren't getting kicked out by a 100k charge. As lovers of subcontinental culture we should be thankful that the happy medium tier remains and is given opportunities to affect systemic reward. It would be a tragedy and an utter betrayal of one's fellow man to abscond to go play zero sum games in the West

The best and brightest aren't getting kicked out by a 100k charge.

Not per se, no. But it will reduce the relative attractiveness of the US as an immigration destination.

Also, the fee is only the tip of the iceberg. It is clear that the Trump administration -- and the people who voted for him -- really get off on kicking foreigners out of the country. Sure, he is unlikely to send random knowledge workers to some El Salvador megaprison without any due process, but most people would prefer not to go to countries which do not want them, all things being equal.

I think a lot depends on the specific migrant and their relative prospects in different places. There are very likely fields where someone who could become a world class researcher in the US can only hope for a meager career outside the states, and Trump can squeeze these people's balls as hard as he wants and all they will say is thank you. In other fields, things are different, and the impact of Trump plus visa costs are enough to make Cambridge more attractive than Harvard. The fact that the universities are generally on Trump's shit list will not help matters, here.

For companies, the calculation is rather similar. The answer to "do we open another research campus in the US or elsewhere?" might be different under Obama and Trump.

A large portion of people get dissuaded from making significant purchases based on a single extra click being required (hence the huge amount of money platforms like Amazon pour into optimizing their process). This effect isn't particularly dependent on intelligence either, smart people also get put off by a significant degree due to needing one more click to buy a product.

Similarly even the fact that there's discussion of a 100k charge going around will be enough to dissuade some of the best and brightest on the margins, let alone actually implementing a policy like that.

Dissuade the best and brightest? Not the employers? It's not like the bestest and brightest are the ones paying directly.

I thihk the best pathway would be for the best and brightest to go back to places of origin and work super hard to develop their own competing paradigms. Every best and brightest who's working on product management or consulting or zero sum finance nonsense is somebody who could be making an active difference in the future. Sadly most lack the personal courage to build a future for themselves.

I thihk the best pathway would be for the best and brightest to go back to places of origin and work super hard to develop their own competing paradigms.

This is going to bite the US in the ass so hard in the next 15-20 years. It's already happening with China etc., see how good Kimi K2 Thinking is as well as GLM-4.6 etc.

China has the benefit of a capable, talented hardworking base with motivations beyond their own immediate paycheck. Unfortunately other potential players are needful of the same dedication and commitment.

If the USA keeps importing the "best and the brightest" it will eventually turn into the country you are so desperate to run away from in order to get to the USA.

Or I am mistaking you for some other Indian commentator who constantly goes on about how they want to get to the USA for the big bucks and freedom of opportunity, are instead stuck in the UK which doesn't pay half as well, and there's a snowball in Hell's chance you'll go back to your native country because it's too poor and full of not-the-best-and-brightest?

Nah, I'm happy here in the UK, I'm in one of the few industries where the pay disparity between the US and UK is tolerable (plus the pay is high enough anyways). Since the Trump election (and even for a while before then) I've found the charms of Old Blighty (minus the people) growing on me.

You are, actually. Burdensome has a different pattern (and iirc is Pakistani, not Indian).

Ah, right. I knew someone was complaining about being Indian and not being let into the USA, but I didn't make any particular notes of user names.

Sure, sure, we'll totally regret it. Just stay out.

You and @HereAndGone both - stop taking personal shots at people however annoying you may find them.

Has the Trump administration actually changed the way the O-1/EB-1A visas work?

There are also interesting leaks from DropSiteNews who obtained Ehud Barak’s hacked emails. Epstein helped write Barak’s op-eds for war in the Middle East, aided Israel’s security deals in Mongolia / Russia / Africa, hosted an Israeli intelligence officer at his apartment for weeks… the notion that Epstein was an independent agent or a CIA affiliate is no longer tenable.

Nothing in this evidence contradicts my theory. Certainly nothing suggests that Epstein was plucked out of his high school teacher job (or perhaps placed in it, as the Barr theories suggest - even though they don’t even understand the forward passage of time) by Israeli intelligence in the mid-1970s and given a world-historical mission by the Mossad, which is what is widely alleged.

That Epstein befriended Barak in the 1990s and that his personal assistant (the “Israeli intelligence officer” in question, since most senior personal staff to Israeli leaders come through intelligence) enjoyed Epstein’s hospitality as his boss did were both widely known. I explicitly stated that Epstein had worked his way into powerful circles by the late 90s (his friendship with Prince Andrew only the most famous). He “brought some leaders together” (as I have said, much of this was braggadocio), opined on American and global politics and wrote articles for said powerful foreign friends (or had associates do so).

What would convince you that Epstein was Israeli intelligence? The emails show Epstein advising the former PM of Israel (& head of military intelligence) Barak on sensitive Israeli security matters and spy tech transfers. He ghostwrote Barak’s pro-Israel editorials. Barak’s intelligence officer assistant stayed with Epstein unaccompanied by Barak on multiple occasions. We have two confessions (Jane Doe #200, Hoffenberger) and one confirmation (Ben-Menashe told by Robert Maxwell). Two American former senior intelligence analysts believe Epstein was Mossad (John Schindler / John Kiriakou). He was funded and gifted by Wexner, receiving literally nothing for his funding, and Wexner ran a secret group of Jewish billionaires who funded Israeli and Jewish causes in America. His accomplice Ghislaine was the daughter of an Israeli “super spy”. The extent of surveillance in his residences makes no sense except for kompromat purposes. Israel has a history of rigging apartments for blackmail.

Surely the chance of Epstein having all these close relationships is statistically improbable. He just happened to be funded by Israel’s top billionaire, happened to be working with the daughter of a super spy, happened to be best friends with former intelligence leader of Israel, happened to also help him with sensitive security issues…

His accomplice Ghislaine was the daughter of an Israeli “super spy”.

She was the daughter of a man who facilitated arms deals from the Eastern Bloc to Israel early in its history and so was held in very high regard by the old cadres of the Mossad several decades later, sure.

What would convince you that Epstein was Israeli intelligence?

The Israel connections came through Wexner, whom he met in the late 1980s in Palm Beach. Israel didn’t need Epstein to build relationships with wealthy Zionist billionaires. He used Wexner’s network to meet other billionaires and because Wexner was/is a passionate zionist, others like the Mega group / Ron Lauder.

What would convince me? Very simple. A single shred of evidence that Epstein had even the faintest connection to Israel or Israeli intelligence before he became a close associate of Les Wexner. Given that, as I have documented extensively, Epstein’s self-professed connections to the world of Annan Khashoggi in the arms market in the early 1980s were largely or entirely fabricated (by himself), I think none exists.

Epstein met Wexner in 86-87, before he began trafficking girls (90s) and right before the scam with Hoffenberg (87). The chronology is in line with Wexner (Israeli intelligence via Wexner) facilitating Epstein’s activities in the 90s. Whatever Epstein was doing before then doesn’t mean much IMO, as his charisma alone would have made him a useful sayan. Was he loafing around and ingratiating with the elites? Useful. Was he already engaged in the underworld? Even more useful.

The claim that Robert Maxwell was a spy (or more accurately sayan) can be sourced from Ostrovsky’s Way of Deception:

Suddenly, the sinister nature of what was being done with Maxwell became clear to me. In his zeal to cooperate with Israel, and even though he was not an agent himself {as the British had made clear when I had spoken to them in Washington), Maxwell was a sayan on the grand scale. The Mossad was financing many of its operations in Europe from moneys stolen from the man's newspaper pension fund. They got their hands on the pension funds almost as soon as he'd made his purchases (initially with money lent to him by the Mossad and on expert advice he received from Mossad analyses). What was sinister about it, aside from the theft, was that anyone in his news organization, anywhere in the Middle East, was automatically suspected of working for Israel and was only one rumor away from the hangman's noose. I explained to my host, as I had to the British, that in the beginning the Mossad would help Maxwell purchase the newspapers by lending him money and causing labor disputes and other problems, making the target purchases more vulnerable. Later, the tactics changed; they would target in advance a paper that he was to purchase and start it on a collision course with bankruptcy using all available strategies, starting with workforce agitation and ending with pullback of funds from the paper through bankers and advertisers sympathetic to the Mossad. Then, once the target was softened, they'd send Maxwell in for the kill.

[…] The ties between Maxwell and the Mossad went back a long way. Elements within the Mossad had offered to finance Maxwell's first big business ventures, and in later years Maxwell received inside information on global matters from the Office. Maxwell was originally code-named "the Little Czech," and the sobriquet stuck. Only a handful of people in the Israeli intelligence community knew who the Little Czech was, yet he provided an unending supply of slush money for the organization whenever it ran low. For years, Maxwell would hit financial lows whenever the Mossad was in the midst of expensive operations that could not be funded legitimately and when other less legitimate sources were unavailable, as was the case after the American invasion of Panama in 1990, which dried up the Mossad's income from drug trafficking and forced Maxwell to dig deep into his corporate pockets

I still suspect there was probably cooperation with the CIA, hence why they never did anything about this massive security breach.

Wait, what? @Rafa, does this change your calculus about Epstein?

Not at all, in fact I discussed Epstein’s personal connection with Ehud Barak several times in my posts; they met in the 1990s as Epstein was rising in the world and as he was courting various world leaders. The “Israeli intelligence officer” was Barak’s personal assistant, who travelled with him. The op eds he wrote were for mainstream newspapers, it would make sense as a foreigner in the pre-chagpt era to get your rich, charismatic, native English speaking friend to write them instead of doing so yourself.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply.

”Is this inevitable”

Probably. Intra-coalition jockeying always peaks around this point in the election cycle. Remember all the Kyrsten Sinema hate back in the winter of 2021-2022?

Regarding this cycle specifically, the Republican coalition that won the election was pretty united that mass immigration is bad, but they weren’t in agreement on why it is bad. Some people think it’s bad because “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Some people think it’s bad because it drives down wages. Some people think it’s bad because immigrants are poor and stupid. Some people just think it’s unfair that illegals get to jump the line literally and figuratively. All of these groups will be more or less sympathetic to different particular types of immigrants.

Why does it have to be "white children" and not "American children"? Why can't a man (or woman for that matter) want to secure both a future for their family and a living wage for their neighbor?

It's a reference. My list was of course not all-inclusive. I assure you however that there exist people who are okay with white immigrants and not okay with any other immigrants.

Why make that reference? Are you trying to imply that Trump voters are Nazis?

I don't think it's controversial to imply or state that some Trump voters are self-identified white nationalists. I don't think they represent a majority of people who voted for Trump, and would hazard a guess that there might be fewer than 1 million self-identified white nationalists in the entire US. But if I were to meet an American who described himself as a white nationalist, I would put money on him having voted for Trump over any competing candidate.

But if I were to meet an American who described himself as a white nationalist, I would put money on him having voted for Trump over any competing candidate.

You probably haven't listened to anyone over at therightstuff.biz, then. Several of them openly supported Biden over "Zion Don," and some of them even Kamala — because there's plenty of open "anti-Zionists" over on the Democrat side, while Trump is "practically one of the Tribe" since he "gave his daughter to one of (((them)))." That the "Russian Collusion" narrative about 2016 was right in every detail… except that it wasn't Moscow that meddled to install Trump and give him his weekly marching orders, it's Tel Aviv. That, contrary to what many on the right claim, Trump did accomplish in his first term everything the people who got him into the White House put him there to do: he moved the embassy to Jerusalem and gave tax cuts to Jewish billionaires.

I don't doubt that some self-identified white nationalists have voted for candidates other than Trump. But I think it's reasonable to assume the majority of such people have voted for Trump in every election they've been able to.

This is like when Russia had Trump’s pee tapes. Or when Stormy Daniels had Trump’s blackmail. Or when the courts would finally prove Trump raped that woman in a shopping plaza thirty years ago and she forgot about it until just now.

There is no pedophile network running Washington DC, Donald Trump is neither a child rapist nor a sex trafficker, Trump’s connections to such are extremely thin and the emails being discussed don’t even show what people claim they do.

No one will remember this in a few years because the evidence is so embarrassing it expires and becomes unappetizing like refrigerated fast food. Cold French fries. Hopefully sooner.

Yes, I see "Epstein files" and my eyes immediately glaze over.

Who nowadays remembers the great scandal of 1977, "Koreagate"?? Took over all the front pages for weeks.

Hadn't heard of that one, but looking into it at least one member of congress served actual prison time over it, so that sounds like a big deal to me.

A lot of people haven't heard about the government (together with Quaker Oats) feeding radioactive oatmeal to retarded kids without their (nor their parents') knowledge for a science experiment but that doesn't make it any less bad.

I think it is very relevant even today that threats to withdraw US military forces abroad are met with bribery from foreign agents.

This is like when Russia had Trump’s pee tapes. Or when Stormy Daniels had Trump’s blackmail. Or when the courts would finally prove Trump raped that woman in a shopping plaza thirty years ago and she forgot about it until just now.

Yeah, these and the Epstein file situation feel/felt like seemingly never-ending anime filler episodes that eventually just get quietly dropped as possible plotlines.

An amusing recent example of trying to insinuate that Trump is some sort of sexual predator was the seethe over the Gatsby-themed party, which allegedly featured young attractive women dancing in skimpy outfits. Because among men above age 29, only pedophiles don't mind looking at women whose brains haven't fully developed yet (or have only finished developing for a few years). Plus, everyone knows that young women hate being sex objects and would never teehee around in skimpy outfits unless they were coerced, manipulated, or trafficked.

There was also the Motte-and-Bailey—at least in distributed form—in the bailey of seething at Trump having young attractive women dancing at the party, to the deeper bailey of seething at Trump having a lavish party while SNAP recipients supposedly starve, to the Motte of seething that the optics of Trump having a party while the government was shutdown would cause many to be upset. The Motte of which is a self-reinforcing claim.

This is my take as well. Every time I hear someone bring up Trump in reference to Epstein it just makes me roll my eyes and yawn. I want to say to them, “Yeah. Trump’s a pedophile and a pervert.” And then move on from that and watch the weather report.

Unless there’s truly something damning and huge in the files, the hype surrounding the matter and the “what’s to hide,” vibe people keep letting off has only reminded me that the average person loves a conspiracy and are duped pretty easily.

Well, Trump kinda promised he would release the Epstein files while campaigning, and I think someone in his administration claimed that she had the files on her desk after he took office.

So him going "nothing to see here" makes people wonder why he has changed his mind.

For the left, this is such a good dead horse to keep flogging because "elites are raping kids" is an evergreen hit with large parts of the MAGA base.

Personally, I do not think that the files contain video evidence of him raping some 13yo. If the Biden DoJ had this level of dirt on him, they would have leaked that.

Its just oppositional. Bill Clinton got a sloppy from an intern while Kennedy was railing Monroe. Hillbots emails are a nonissue but got traction because everyone fucking hated her. Progs managed to hold their nose about Bidens only "flaw" which was the crime bill, and cons had to dredge up Hunter Biden level irrelevance to attack him.

Trump has been in public forever and has a whole suite of weird shit that is somehow teflon. All that weird Ivanka sex shit is fucking cringe but no one gives a fuck. Epstein is a last gasp for the moment, and when it turns out no one gives a shit about a glorified party host that brought in groupies for boring losers people will cast about for other shit. Music groups are full of teen and even preteen groupies and they still get defenders. No one really cares about the crime, only the one they want cast as a criminal.

I thought it was hilarious that Bidden couldn't stop himself sniffing and handling teenagers in front of dozens of cameras.

Its how pop-pop showed he loved me back in the day and Ol Joe gotta keep up the good old ways. Plus their hair smells of strawberry and its just so nice you know.

While I get the impression you’d say this no matter what was in these files, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Given that the clock in question is 'unwarranted claims that this is the scandal that will sink Donald Trump,' is there a reason to believe the clock is stopped?

No, not that one. I was talking about the clock with 20 comments, literally all of which are praising Donald Trump.

I don't think this is the right analogy here. I'm not sure if there's a comparable platitude, but the stopped clock one implies a 1% success rate that happened to get lucky, while I think this is more of a 99% success rate that we should expect to generally be right.

The vast majority of people are not child rapists or sex traffickers. Even if we restrict ourselves to wealthy powerful people, the vast majority of them are still not child rapists or sex traffickers. Even if we restrict ourselves to wealthy powerful people who are kind of sleazy like Trump, which probably have a much higher rate of child raping or sex trafficking, the rate is still much much much lower than 50%. The only reason Trump was ever suspected at all was because of wolf crying: his political opponents really really want it to be true, so they preemptively say it's true. That's not actual evidence, it should do nothing to shift our priors.

A broken un-watch that always tells you the time is NOT 6:30 is not very useful, but it's more truthful and less annoying than a broken watch always telling you the time is 6:30 and letting off a constant alarm that won't turn off.

For the 99%, the Stormy Daniels scandal puts him far, far closer to the ethics of someone who'd have sex with a minor. Now, not pre-pubescent, and not personally involved in trafficking or grooming, but a recipient willing to look the other way or even believe nothing (else) criminal preceded the encounter.

"Well, if you were as rich and connected as him, you'd try to bang a porn star too! All men think about it and want to go through with it but not all have the means."

I actually don't think that's true.

There is a sufficient sample size of well connected and extremely wealthy celebrities to say that most of them don't cheat on their pregnant wives with porn stars.

Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon. The narrative among the conspiracy-minded for the better part of the past five years was that the Biden Administration was concealing the Epstein Files to protect prominent Democrats, and that Trump would release them so these people could face the music. Or at the very least everyone would learn how depraved they all were. The only comments about this I ever heard from IRL friends on the left was that the logic behind this was ridiculous because Trump was close with Epstein and it would take a lot of faith to believe in the conspiracy yet not any involvement from Trump. And it wasn't a topic that came up that frequently. I didn't hear Democrats talking about this much at all until Trump went out of his way to say there was no conspiracy and prominent Republicans started echoing that sentiment. People like Charlie Kirk reversed course on the whole thing. Now my friends on the left started saying that they weren't suspicious before but were now because otherwise why would Trump be so adamant about keeping these confidential?

The Epstein-Trump stuff is recent, but I'm talking about more broadly. Trump has been accused of being a racist, nazi, rapist, pedo, Russian plant, etc, since he announced his candidacy for President in 2015. This is one more thing in an unending series of accusations that's been happening for a decade. If you had told me ten years ago that there would be a list of people who were somehow vaguely connected to a pedophile but the exact nature of these connections was ambiguous, and Trump might or might not be somewhere on that list, I would predict exactly this response from the left. Scott made a post in 2016 called You are still crying wolf.

I am admittedly more suspicious of Trump than I was before, because if he wasn't on the lists at all he would have pushed super hard to get them released. But "Trump friendly with Epstein in a way that looks bad but no real proof of wrongdoing because he didn't actually commit any crimes here" is exactly in line with my priors, and consistent with Trump being hesitant to release them but not freaking out or abusing his power to suppress them either.

Scott made a post in 2016 called You are still crying wolf.

You are Still Crying Wolf is specifically about claims that Trump is racist/white supremacist, and arguably about the even more specific claim that Trump is openly racist (which Scott correctly points out he isn't). The Rightful Caliph considered Trump utterly unsuitable for the position of Grand Vizier in almost every other respect on grounds of character.

Trump is certainly unsuited for Grand Vizier. The Grand Vizier is the one who stays in the background, whispering things into the sultan's ear and manipulating the visible actors from behind the scenes. Like all administrations, Trump's is full of aspirants to that position, but Trump never seems to listen to any of them for long.

I was referring to the Epstein stuff specifically and make no comment on anything else that may have happened. I've written about this extensively in the past; suffice it to say that I don't think there are going to be any bombshells, and I doubt that there are any "lists" at all. I don't like Trump but I'm more suspicious of him than I was previously for the simple reason that he leaned into this whole conspiracy until it was time to release the files. There's obviously something in there he'd rather not make public, or, alternatively, he hasn't seen the files and there's something in his past that he's worried may come up. I don't think it would be criminal. My first guess was going to be that he stayed in contact with Epstein well after any decent person would have cut ties, but the recent emails seem to undercut that theory; in the "dog that didn't bark" email he talks about Trump in a manner that suggests they aren't in regular contact.

The thing that's weird to me about the whole thing is that anyone who has studied this closely and isn't a total hack like Daryl Cooper would be of the opinion that it's highly unlikely that anyone other than Epstein and a few select people were involved in the wrongdoing. Nothing about Trump came up in the civil lawsuits, and the 2020 report about the original prosecution made it clear that no one in the Justice Department even knew that Epstein had famous friends until his attorneys told them. To be clear, the "Epstein Files" as it pertains to this case only involve the files from the Federal Investigation, and the only investigation that could have possibly revealed anything spicy would have been the 2019 investigation.

Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon.

About him being a paedophile and child sex trafficker, maybe. They were crying wolf about his genocidal ambitions, alleged Hitler parallels, aspirations to transform the US into Gilead etc. throughout the 2016 election and the entirety of his first term.

No, "Trump went to Epstein's island" and "Trump was on Epstein's plane" and "Trump was in the files" have all been said before. As far as I know the latter two are technically true and the first is outright false.

Theyve been said before but theyre one of the few things still being said. Turns out "Trump is a racist nazi who wants to deport all brown people!" turns out to be the reason why he was voted in, so the attack angle must be retired. Maybe a few months later the progs will examine why that statement didn't work, but the priority is to find something that sticks.

I think it's partly inevitable when you've got a lame duck president, especially one 79 years old like Trump. He's not going to be on the ballot anymore, and his time in power is limited, so there's no reason any individual member of the party should look to him for leadership anymore. Trump is just focused on getting through the next 3 years, but a congressman or young activist still has decades of political career ahead of them.

The only reason I suppose someone would still look to Trump is only for picking up where he left off, and extricating whatever’s valuable from his political playbook from the standpoint of an outsider who bulldozed his way into the presidency.

Trump can still be a starmaker for three years, he can still endorse and attack, he can still appoint to sinecures and fundraise for. Any Republican would-be titan can be easily placed in a position of power by Trump, and that won't entirely evaporate upon his death, Sauron like.

Plus, somebody is going to get his dying endorsement, and that will count for something. I don't think enough that it can win anyone the presidency, but probably enough that it can keep any other Republican from winning it.

Plus, somebody is going to get his dying endorsement, and that will count for something. I don't think enough that it can win anyone the presidency, but probably enough that it can keep any other Republican from winning it.

Trump is sufficiently popular with the GOP base that anyone he endorses will sail to the nomination in 2028 (with the possible exception of family members). For there to be an effectively open primary, you need one of three things:

  • Trump loses his base by late 2027 - I think this is unlikely, even if he loses the rest of the country.
  • Trump is visibly too senile to govern but is retained in office Biden-style by his family and/or his core White House team - such that his endorsement is worthless but Vance can't run as an incumbent.
  • Trump can't make an endorsement because he is still acting like he is running for a third term (it doesn't matter whether he is serious or trolling).

In all three of these scenarios the 2028 election should be a walk for the Democrats, although the Democrats have got very good at blowing winnable elections lately.

Agreed, the Republicans I've seen who have political ambition either seem to be jockeying for Trump's favor or attempting to distinginguish themselves from him to try and steal the torch of party leader. Either way, Trump is still the locus of Republican energy and the lions share of political action these days seems to be done in reference to him, not just for its own sake.

...the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.

Do you have some example in mind, here? Everything I've seen from this latest release appears to simply confirm what has long been known: that Trump and Epstein were substantially birds of a feather, but Trump kicked Epstein to the curb for stealing his girls. Since that time, Epstein has occasionally ranted about having some kind of dirt on Trump, which for some reason he never actually used and of which there is (still!) apparently no plausible evidence.

I would stop well short of describing Trump as "innocent" of anything and yet the plainly intended implication of all these reports--Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein island or at least with Epstein's knowledge or assistance--appears to still remain purely in the realm of the undemonstrated, indeed, in most contexts the unstated. Nobody wants to get sued for defamation, and they all know Trump will happily sue them for defamation, so they are just continuing to parrot vague claims while winking and nodding in the direction of Prince Andrew, producing many guns but none smoking, nor even bearing fingerprints.

Trump has spent his adult life a man of wealth and fame, albeit also the butt of many jokes. I would honestly be surprised to learn he hadn't had more than a little bit of illicit sexual contact in his life; I would in that case need to revise my priors on the nature of rich, powerful men. But it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are utterly convinced of the details on this, who keep telling me that some bombshell or other is going to drop (including Pam Bondi!), only for those bombshells to never actually manifest. It was the same with the whole "Russian watersports" thing ten years ago. If Trump were guilty of 1% of the weird, crazy, illegal things he's accused of doing, I would expect at some point for someone to be able to produce hard, non-circumstantial evidence of something. Instead we get lawfare on novel legal theories and this recurrent "this time, we've got him!" nonsense from breathless (and brainless) journalists.

I'm open to evidence! I would not be at all surprised to see it! But again, it seems, no such thing is on offer.

Yeah, nothing big do far, but some small evidence that they were talking in 2017. Still, I'd say Trump acts differently compared to other allegations, how it's "boring" and so on. Some sycophants already try "it's actually ephebophilia", but I doubt it's that. Not sure what he would be afraid of that he didn't walk off before, tome will tell

Is there any clarification on "by underage we mean 17" or "we mean 13"? Because I've seen plenty of online 'it's true he's a pedo he raped 13 year old sex slaves' stuff but nothing concrete (the Katie Johnson case seems to be smoke and I have no idea what exactly Virginia Giuffre was claiming happened. If I go by Wikipedia, she was allegedly 17 when Maxwell and Epstein approached her, which is not at all the same as 13 year old).

In one way, I think the very murkiness of the term "underage girls" works for those who want to get Trump; it's easier to convey an impression that this means "13 or 14" and not "17 or just under 18 or even that legally a minor is under 21 in some states". See The Onion; yes this is satire, but they're making it satire on "fucking a 13 year old" and not "fucking a 16 year old":

“Epstein was no friend of mine, and I never drew us becoming knights and competing at a joust for the virginity of a 13-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine,” Trump said when asked about Time Pedophiles by a reporter, suggesting that someone else could have written, inked, and lettered the series before falsely signing his name. “Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t draw myself in a covered wagon picking up minors on the Oregon Trail, nor would I write a story arc about going back into prehistory, long before humans invented the age of consent, to hit on Cro-Magnon girls. Sorry to disappoint, but the fact is, I don’t draw cavemen.”

...The storylines in the series are largely driven by the reliance of Epstein’s time machine on Enigmium, a mysterious substance that “never ages” and can only be obtained via sexual encounters with girls between the ages of 12 and 17.

"Children" to the modal mind is prepubescent innocents who elicit protective instincts. Definitionally it also includes adolescents that are protoadults. Conflating the two is necessary to get the moral value immediately realized, and any attempt at deeper examination is met with hysterical screeches of "ARE YOU A BIGOT". Refugees are always stated to be "women and children" but you never get a picture of these huddled masses because people don't process bearded males as "children". The assumption that Epsteins sex island was a San Francisco Armory dungeon filled with crying prepubescents being abused by leering rapists is as rampant as the assumption that Rittenhouse killed 3 unarmed black men, and of course equally as fictional.

you never get a picture of these huddled masses because people don't process bearded males as "children".

Ironically in this context, there's a current murder investigation about asylum seekers as "unaccompanied children" who were put in emergency accommodation meant for minors, and it now turns out one of the "minors" may in fact have been a legal adult.

Vadym Davydenko (17) died following a serious incident at an apartment complex in Grattan Wood, ­Donaghmede, on October 15.

He had been in Ireland for four days and was staying at a Tusla facility for juvenile international protection applicants separated from their parents.

A suspect was later arrested as part of the investigation and charged with Vadym’s murder.

The male was also residing at the juvenile care facility at the time of the incident. His age was given as 17 in his first court appearance with his case last heard before the Children’s Court last month.

The Irish Independent has now learnt that inquiries have led investigating gardaí to believe that the suspect is in fact an adult male and not a juvenile.

Examinations into his background, including procuring a birth certificate from relatives, have indicated that he was over the age of 18 at the time of the incident.

Gaming the asylum system, you say? Surely not!

When Kabul fell to the Taliban, there was a widely shared picture of an overcrowded C130 filled with refugees. I love that picture because it is FULL of men, with barely any women or children. I contrast that with the fall of hanoi where evacuees had women and prepubescents. My liberal friends actually had to stop for a second to wonder what "women and children" really meant, and anytime refugees got raised in any conversation subsequently they all bit the bullet immediately before I could play the photo card.

Sorry to butt in but I don't know what you are saying here. And what's the "modal mind"?

I have no idea what exactly Virginia Giuffre was claiming happened

Nothing. She claimed nothing happened.

It's all tangled up, though, with Prince Andrew (who is losing everything over allegations that he may have had legal-in-Britain sex with her) and the overall media presentation that Epstein was providing 13 year olds for his rich and famous clients to fuck on his private island. "Okay I said I was a teen sex slave for Epstein, but that particular client nothing happened" is too fine a distinction for the current meat-grinder to make (particularly since Giuffre is now dead so we can't get her version of what did or didn't happen, or if she would change her mind and suddenly remember 'oh hold on, yeah I blocked it out because it was too traumatic but now I remember that Trump did rape me' like E. Jean Carroll).

As an American, I have to say I don't give fuck about British royals. We knew they were degenerate retards in 1776, and a couple of popular Queens notwithstanding, why should we believe that has changed, or care?

The only Trump-related thing in the current meatgrinder is years-old nothingburger. Giuffre had a job at Mar-a-Lago; she was one of the girls that Epstein poached. She's talked about a lot of people, including Trump -- and said nothing bad about Trump. If the Democrats were trying to make some hay involving ex-Prince Andrew, they would have used her name. Instead they redacted it so some people wouldn't realize it was her they were talking about.

If you're going to hypothesize that she would have accused Trump if she were still alive, this is just making shit up out of whole cloth. Maybe Jimmy Hoffa would accuse Trump of putting out the hit on him if he were still alive too.

At this point, Nybbler, I think all the waters are sufficiently muddied that we'll never know who actually did what (apart from Epstein and the previous underage sex charges brought against him, which were explained in a previous comment on a different thread).

Giuffre and what she might or might not have said - her book is out now and a lot of media commentary on it was dragging in Trump's name. I could well believe she might be coaxed into dropping hints about Trump and Epstein in order to sell the book, were she still alive; it seems she did exactly this (changed her statements) about her husband:

Giuffre also talks about her husband, Robert Giuffre, extensively. In the main body of the book, she generally portrays him in a positive light, describing him as a supportive partner and the person who "rescued her from Epstein and Maxwell's clutches". However, this positive portrayal became a point of contention after her death. In the weeks before her suicide in April 2025, Giuffre made public accusations that her husband had physically abused her during their 22-year marriage, and she expressed a desire to revise the book to reflect this. The book's co-author, Amy Wallace, addresses this conflict in a foreword, explaining the situation and the reasons why Giuffre might have initially chosen to remain silent about the domestic abuse in the manuscript itself. The published book therefore contains her original, more loving descriptions of her husband, alongside the foreword and other editorial notes that acknowledge the later abuse allegations.

So when there's money to be made, victimhood status, and pressure to 'name names' on someone probably not very mentally stable, I am ruling nothing out.

At this point, Nybbler, I think all the waters are sufficiently muddied that we'll never know who actually did what

After entertaining various noxious allegations and then finding they are unsupported, it is at the very least discourteous to then fall back on invincible ignorance.

Is there any clarification on "by underage we mean 17" or "we mean 13"?

They mean 16-17. If they were 13, they'd have said 13.

The anti-Trump faction has a significant, perhaps even majority, element whose entire objective is to pretend there isn't a distinction between 17 and 13 in this matter. Pointing out the adultery adultness of these women works against this goal, so they won't do that.

The pro-Trump faction is well aware of the above, but they also don't have any other effective tools to oppose that viewpoint other than flagrantly ignoring people who claim they're the same. Saying "well, akthually, they're adults" works against this goal, so they won't do that.

The demand for sex crimes (as with hate crimes) vastly exceeds its supply.

If they were 13, they'd have said 13.

That's what I'm getting at: they can't say "the girls were 13" because they weren't ('Katie Johnson' aside), but if it's "yeah he foozled around with hot 17 year olds" that's nothing really. It might be grubby, but if it's generally considered that 14 year olds can be mature enough to decide to have sex and go on birth control, it's tough to argue that 17 year old is too young to have sex.

But the insinuation that "Epstein liked 'em very very young, and Trump was a big best pal of Epstein's and liked to party with him, so you know what that means" is what they're going for to do the damage.

if it's generally considered that 14 year olds can be mature enough to decide to have sex

With each other.

it's tough to argue that 17 year old is too young to have sex

With someone much older.

You may or may not think this distinction relevant, but it is drawn by those advancing the aforementioned propositions.

Not just with each other, with someone X amount of years older than them, the precise number of years depending on the state and the law.

If 14 is old enough to decide to have sex, then by 17 you've been sexually active for three years, making decisions about your fertility, and should be experienced enough to decide if you want to sleep with a 30 year old, right?

That's the equivocation that sticks out like a sore thumb to me: 6 year old Johnny or Susie is old and mature enough to have a solid grip on their gender identity and know if they're really a boy or a girl; under-18 year old Susie is mature enough to decide for herself to have sex and can get a judge's decision to circumvent parental notification laws if she needs an abortion; 22 year old Susie was a poor helpless immature girl coerced into an unequal power-level relationship by wicked 28 year old Johnny!

Ins't the US age of consent 16? Now you can well argue that these 16 year olds were coerced but then having sex with them would be rape regardless of whether they were 16 or 21 so the age factor would drop out of the equation completely and it just becomes "Trump used coerced prostitutes" which is a much weaker story and would have dropped out of the news years ago (see the Stormy Daniels saga, although she wasn't coerced). The fact that it's continuing means at the very least some of the people were under 16 when the relevant events happened.

  • -12

Trump used coerced prostitutes

Everyone knows that's false, though, for reasons Sloot covered above. And most claimed "coercion" is just progressive/selfish-woman-speak for "he said he wouldn't keep supplying/buying me X if I didn't put out/consent" anyway, so using that standard I'm forced to conclude it's very unlikely the Rotherham girls were coerced either.

The fact that it's continuing means at the very least some of the people were under 16

In a landscape where the media tends to blow its load all at once I sincerely doubt this is the case.

I'm forced to conclude it's very unlikely the Rotherham girls were coerced either.

The Rotherham girls were a lot younger than the women/girls on Epstein's island. The official report states that the majority were between the ages of 10 and 16.

They were also threatened with/subjected to violent reprisals.

Depends on the state, but crossing state lines to have sex with a woman under 18 is probably illegal somehow, even if the states involved have a lower age.

I wonder what odd juxtapositions exist in places like Nevada where prostitution is legal and the age of consent is 16. Like if you’re a teacher at a public high school and some kid there is employed at the Mustang Ranch, is it legal to go and fuck your students? That always seemed disgusting as fuck to me.

Whenever you see an age of consent below 18 it almost always is actually accompanied by a number of caveats. Prostitution, pornography, age difference and the adult being an authority figure being very common variables to be taken into consideration.

IDK about that, but Texas has an age of consent of 17 unless you have some legitimate reason for knowing the minor in question, in which case it's 18, and flat out bans school district employees from having sex with the students. These seem like obvious rule patches.

This page indicates that the minimum age for prostitution in Nevada is 18 or 21, depending on the county.

The fact that it's continuing means at the very least some of the people were under 16 when the relevant events happened.

I don't think that follows. I think the fact that it's continuing means that, at the very least, the people who are continuing this believe that they can create a public impression that some of the people were under 16 when the relevant events happened. Hard to say if the people who are continuing this also believe that some of the people were under 16 when the relevant events happened, but their belief regarding this doesn't matter, it's the belief of the voting populace that matters.

Ins't the US age of consent 16?

Like everything else in America, it varies by state. However, since Hollywood is in California, 18 has been memed into the canonical age of consent throughout the country (and, indeed, around the world).

Critically, 18 is the age at which normie parents - and particularly normie red tribe parents - stop thinking "What if this was my daughter?". Of course the reality is that Mirpuri rape gangs, Jeffrey Epstein, your local street corner pimp etc. all preferentially go after kids without high-functioning, involved parents, so it was vanishingly unlikely to be your daughter. But I don't think normies get this.

If it was your teenage daughter, the age of consent in your jurisdiction wouldn't be relevant to your desire to wreak terrible revenge against the sleazebag.

Some US states have their age of consent at 18. But even if it wasn't, it's not like the moral outrage would stop over that. I notice that people who loudly decry sex with late-teen girls generally aren't considering local ages of consent as a valid argument in favor. It would simply shift to "they weren't adults".

This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA.

You really see the craven lack of any consistent position across the congressional (and executive, but Trump’s loyalty to himself is widely known) GOP here. Weeks ago, MTG was arguing in her big Reason interview that actually deporting non-criminal illegal immigrants is a bad idea and implying, essentially, there should be some kind of pathway to citizenship. Today she’s criticizing the administration for being soft on immigration.

Miller opposes both illegal and legal immigration. But the reality is that deporting illegals (which can be done without congress) is higher priority than deporting H1B workers or ending legal work visa immigration, which requires congress to repeal laws it passed and where even minor measures like the $100k new application fee are likely to be successfully challenged. Importing an Indian elite, 150,000 people a year at a time, may be an issue in the medium to long term, and I find that argument persuasive, but on a fundamental priorities basis it’s low skill illegal immigration in the millions, primarily from Central America, that is far worse for the future of America when it comes to crime, schooling, welfare, tax receipts, public services and general civilizational quality.

But of course MTG (herself a construction business owner) and various other Republican congressmen work in states where red business interests rely on illegal labor, whereas H1B Indian immigration is a distant thing that’s easy to performatively oppose because it’s concentrated in a few coastal cities and the constituencies that like it are either WITCH outsourcing firms owned by non-Americans or big tech companies in California.

Trump’s loyalty to himself is widely known

I don’t know how there are people who aren’t loyal to themselves.

Absolute loyalty to your personal self interest over anyone else’s is widely considered a bad trait in politicians given that perceived personal self interest (especially financially but also in terms of influence, donations and so on) is rarely absolutely aligned with public support.

Personally I see it often as a good trait, because it is predictable and easy for the population to align it with their own interests. Trump is a self-interested narcissist who wants the adoration of the masses, and maybe be remembered as a "big important" president like Reagan? Then all he needs to do is do a good job according to half the population and everyone gets what they want. The ones that are harder are those with complex or unscrutable loyalties. The Bushes, Hillary, McCain, etc... People that you can suspect have a long list of favors to repay once and if they get the big job.

Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.

Because the Democrats are releasing old nothingburgers with enough redacted to make them hard to identify, and people are falling for it.

My suspicions (which I'll admit are low-confidence and might be wrong) are that (1) there's a lot of smoke there, but not much fire regarding actual criminal acts on the part of major politicans, and (2) "the files" contain stuff that the government considers sensitive, but not necessarily in a way that is directly related to (1).

For (1), I'll observe that the previous blue administration previously held these files, and I doubt would have held off on either prosecuting (if sufficient evidence exists) or at least making it an embarrassing spectacle during the election (leaks or off-the-record comments). The only reason not to is if the evidence is particularly weak, or if the story implicates enough collateral damage to other Powers That Be --- the former seems more plausible to me. For (2), the entire investigation wasn't done anticipating direct public release, and it seems quite likely that some of the investigation would be politically damaging to reveal: someone here previously gave the example of "we were tapping Prince Andrew's phone even before we started the investigation", but generic "sources and methods" is probably correct in some sense. Also for (2), the side demanding the release of the files has shifted and (overall) stayed with the party opposite the executive.

Its probably something boring yet procedurally ruinous, like the party island being access capitalism at its finest and attendees not disclosing their presence. A guest list showing Pelosi at the same venue as Sheikh Iwantobuyalotofjets and CEO of myjetsareITARconstrained can be coincidence but its still fuel for congressional investigations.

It seems very unlikely to me that everything works in a sufficiently mechanistic or rules based way that 1) photos exist of Donnie snuggling a teenage girl, 2) they are in the possession of the federal government, run by Donnie for some time now and by his sworn enemies for years before that, 3) We've never seen them before, meaning that his sworn enemies were too principled to leak them, 4) they haven't been destroyed, meaning that Trump is either too principled to have them destroyed or in some kind of power struggle with someone within the federal government.

This all just seems to be way too much "playing by the rules" on all sides to be credible for me. The theoretical FBI agent who is too principled to leak it under Biden, and too principled to destroy it under Trump, while also being too powerful to be fired by either, doesn't strike me as a realistic character in our drama.

Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?

In part, it’s something like the narcissism of small differences, but more specifically it’s the nature of coalitions and the big-tent two party system.

When out of power (or at risk of losing power), the optimal move is to rally around a unifying platform or candidate who can both rally the base and bring in independent/non-aligned voters. Typically this involves sweeping major differences in ideology, policy, and values under the rug for the sake of winning the next election. Strange bedfellows and all that.

When in power, the optimal move is to fight and horse-trade for your niche, sectional interests, in the hopes that the aforementioned bedfellows just don’t care as much as you do, or are willing to compromise for something else in return.

The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.

… the optimal move is to rally around a unifying platform or candidate who can both rally the base and bring in independent/non-aligned voters. Typically this involves sweeping major differences in ideology, policy, and values under the rug for the sake of winning the next election. Strange bedfellows and all that...

The unstated irony in all of this, funny enough, is when all the major parties talk of unity and coming together to defeat the other side, you’re still mandated to follow rank and file under their banner. “Everyone has to be united under my way of thinking. I’m not budging for anyone else!” Nick Fuentes can make the same argument. Is the Republican Party going to move in his direction? That was always the clearest admission to me of the gatekeeping of the party duopoly.

Yeah unfortunately this seems to be the case. The dynamics of the two party system are screwed. There are issues with other setups like Kingmakers, but still. I wish their stranglehold would drop...

Also everyone has 2028 in the back of their mind, and the various sub-groups of the Trump coalition are starting to jockey for pole-position in the post-Trump vacuum. And given the possibility that the Democratic might actually just collapse (the recent races were promising for them but it’s no guarantee of survival), it makes seizing control of the GOP especially important.

I was recently watching a new TV miniseries, Death by Lighting it’s about President Garfield’s assassination. This was during the Reconstruction era when America was basically a one-party Republican state. One thing that struck me was how vicious the intra-party jockeying was back then in the absence of a robust opposing political party.

I don't know that this is a great analogue, but I'm reminded of around 2008-2012 when all the people with basic human decency - like me, at the time - were excited about the prospect of a permanent Democratic majority in the USA due to demographics and such. It's hard to parse out the causal factors, but one possible effect was that the most extreme factions saw this as an opportunity to push their ideology to the top, and one of the more extreme factions - what is generally known as CRT/identity politics/social justice/woke-ism/postmodern neo-Marxism/the ideology that shall refuse to be named/basic human decency - had positioned itself over the course of half a century to be in that sweet spot of being extreme enough to make partisans feel like they're righteous freedom fighters but not so extreme or personally costly as to turn them off.

I'm not alone as a Democrat who thinks this has been disastrous for the world, for America, for American society, and also for Democrats specifically. But there's potentially some good that did come out of it, such as catching predators like Cosby & Weinstein during the #METOO fervor of the late 2010s, or bodycams becoming far more common in police. Arguably, these would have happened anyway, but also arguably, this ideology helped make these happen more quickly, which matters. Which makes me think of what good could come out if, say, the Groypers were to prove to be the successful right-wing analog to the successful left-wing "woke-ism?" The first thought that comes to mind is widespread knowledge and acceptance of HBD could be a positive consequence, for helping us to build better policies, because a more accurate model of the world should allow us to better design policies for accomplishing the goals they are ostensibly meant to accomplish.

It's hard to parse out the causal factors, but one possible effect was that the most extreme factions saw this as an opportunity to push their ideology to the top

Isn't that effectively part of the game-theoretic stability of the two-party system? If you assume voters can be mapped to a normal distribution on a single axis (a poor model, but probably serviceable here) and have democratic selection within the parties, the left half of a left party claiming 60% of the total would get better representation for their views if they shifted the center of "left" towards their side, and dropped to 51% of the total but still winning the overall. The same applies in reverse for the right side.

I think you're right. Back then, I stupidly believed that the left, as the side that represents actually getting things correct rather than getting things according to our preferences, would properly moderate the ideology of the Democratic party, in order to actually get things correct (which necessarily means giving more leeway and charity to one's ideological opponents than to one's allies) and thus keep holding onto power. What I stupidly didn't notice was that the left half of the left half were actually at least as religiously and arbitrary-preference-motivated as the right half of the right half, and they had spent decades from well before my birth laying down the groundwork to manipulate people like me to believing that there was any there there. When you're naive and looking from the top, turtles all the way down can be confused for a really tall tower of turtles.

the prospect of a permanent Democratic majority in the USA due to demographics and such.

I think this was actually plausible, it’s just that Democratic strategists badly misread the thesis of The Emerging Democratic Majority and so they fumbled the ball. The thesis was that if Democrats could maintain the Obama coalition of minority voters and college educated suburban white voters and white working class voters, they would have an unassailable majority. The party seems to have misread this as “minority voters=win” and told the rest of that potential coalition to go to hell.

Texiera (author of The Emerging Democratic Majority) and on a meta level Fukuyama assumed the Obama ascension was a teleological endpoint: the old order of stale white christians is over, we have in our unconstrained state decided that a young charismatic black man with 00s liberal sensibilities and economic acceptance of "help us to help you" support. These commentators failed to predict that the neoliberal equilibrium would be actively disrupted from within by insurgents looking to seize the spoils for themselves. Texiera was sounding the alarm by the end of Obamas second term about the social justice movement cannibalizing public patience, and now Texiera is considered a nazi by whatever progressive commentariat exists.

The party seems to have misread this as “minority voters=win” and told the rest of that potential coalition to go to hell.

I don't think that's quite what happened. The Democratic party as it exists today is essentially a high-low alliance between affluent (predominantly white) liberals and the (predominantly black) urban underclass. This transition started under Clinton and was cemented under Obama. The problem this coalition presents from the perspective of establishing a "permanent Democratic majority" is that the only things these two groups share culturally are an affinity for identity politics and an animosity towards members of the working class.

The under-employed college grad saddled with debt resents the high school grad who's making more money than they are managing a Gas Station. The urban underclass hates the manager of the gas station for chasing them off his corner, and being "pro-cop".

Keeping the working class inside the Democratic Party coalition was never a realistic ask, it just took half a generation for the new coalitions to shake themselves out.

Just pointing out, the stereotypical gas station owner is a minority immigrant who almost certainly votes D, and both Trump voters hate him(for not assimilating) and lower class minorities(for making them miss the white owner-men), but the hyper-educated parts of the democrat base do not hate the middleman minorities that own gas stations.

The stereotypical Gas Station owner is either a local, or they are a Christian refugee from someplace like Syria or Nigeria. In my experience the locals are too "pro cop" to vote D in a post BLM environment and I don't think those refugees are voting D either. I think that if the hyper-educated parts of the democrat base were to talk to them for more than thirty seconds and become aware of their opinions on things like Israel Vs Palestine (the problem with HAMAS is that the Jews haven't killed enough of them) or illegal immigration (I did it the right way why cant they?) they would learn to hate "the middleman minorities that own gas stations" very quickly.

At the time the democratic supermajority was pronounced it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to somewhat nod your head and think the case they were making had a logic foundation to it. I remember sort of nodding my head slightly but still not abandoning the general pendulum effect politics has. I was never in doubt that their hubris was going to cause them to eventually eat shit after sniffing each other’s ass so much.

Two things the democrats missed. One was a fairly well known fact people didn’t attach significant weight to that they should have, namely that minority immigrants are some of the most staunch supports of pulling up the ladder after themselves once they’ve made it, and many of them are often highly racist against other demographic minorities or subcultures in their original country. These are not people who are going to be sympathetic to your liberal idealistic wishlist. On that point the ball is in the Republican’s court with their responsibility not to fumble the advantage they have.

The second point was the less well known but later empirically adduced Cultural Backlash thesis by Norris and Inglehart. The nativist reaction to systemic cultural, demographic and social changes greatly empowered a political hiccup like Trump to gather as much appeal as he did. A lot of people initially were in denial that this was ever a factor because they see America as a post-racial, post-identity country when it isn’t. We faire a lot better and are more progressive than Europe is historically, but just because these issues are taboo in society doesn’t make them go away in the minds of most people. You see it embodied in debates between people like Mearsheimer and Pinker. I think Mearsheimer is completely right and Pinker always struck me as the quintessential Shitlib Intellectual.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats