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Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.
Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.
This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.
The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.
One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.
I'm not so much tapping the sign as open palm slapping it like a goddamn Conga Drum.
Tapping the sign doesn't really do much. What you're dealing with is parasitism, and you don't get rid of parasites by saying "Wow, look at all the parasites!" or putting a sign up that says "PARASITES" and slapping it ´til your hand is raw. Even calling the parasites parasites to their face won't do anything. They don't give a fuck lol
And to double-down on the metaphor, this is not merely typical roaches-wandering-into-the-kitchen problem. You have a malicious-party-actively-collecting-roaches-and-dumping-them-into-the-kitchen problem.
I don't want to be accused of mincing words or hiding my intentions, but I also want to respect the rules of the forum which clearly state that you can't advocate for violence, so... I'll say it this way: the solution to this is violence, and yes, following the rules means you are incapable of enacting any realistic solutions. So, to square the circle and avoid advocating for this solution, I'll say course of action I advocate is to flee Sodom and Gomorrah before the rains of destruction fall. It won't save anyone else, but it will at least save yourself.
Look, when I seize power as the Supreme Warlord of the Southeastern United States, elevated to victory on a strong anti-corruption, pro-free enterprise, pro-free association, pro-free speech platform (and tons of organized violence)...
And I start executing Bureaucrats by firing them out of a battleship cannon into the sea (Re-commissioning the USS Alabama for the task)... I want there to be an established history people can point to so as to explain exactly when I snapped and my motivating impetus for the campaign.
That said, I think that Bukele and Milei have shown that it is possible to reverse certain declines without going on all-out cleansing campaigns, dragging people out of bed and gunning down dissidents in the street.
But I am, yes, increasingly convinced that unless the Government is willing to apply the death penalty, and ideally make the executions public, for aggressive criminal activity that directly betrays U.S. interests in favor of foreigners, that they simply can't be serious about solving things.
You cite Bukele, but Bukele for all practical purposes suspended the law and went full fash: the algorithm was "if you look like a criminal and smell like a criminal, you're a criminal." They were not spending months carefully dissecting each bit of evidence to make sure Fernando really is the perpetrator of the exact incidents we're charging him with. Luckily for everyone, once Bukele arrested all the duck-typed criminals, he relaxed and everyone now lives in sunshine and rainbows.
Now, granted, the US does not have a homicide rate on the scale of what El Salvador used to. But if you consider mass illegal/dubiously-legal immigration a serious problem and intend to resolve it, then yeah, it is at that scale. Even larger, actually. The idea that doing this is going to solve anything is delusional. It's pissing into a hurricane.
Similarly, for fraud of the sort in the recent video the top-level comment is discussing, I don't think carefully investigating every incident is realistic. How much human effort do you estimate it takes for a scam ring to setup a new fake daycare (or god knows what else)? If it takes them less resources to produce the scam than it does for you to fight the scam, you're losing.
Is the relaxing part happening? My read of the data (which Bukele is trying to obfuscate) is that the prison population of El Salvador is continuing to increase even after the murder rate stabilised at a low level. If you want to lock up the most criminal-looking 5% of each cohort as they enter the peak crime-committing years, you either need to start letting them out in large numbers (which Bukele has promised not to do) or you end up with 5% of the population in prison, which is probably unsustainable.
The US didn't scale back mass incarceration because of soft-on-crime Democrats, they scaled it back because Republicans stopped wanting to pay taxes to pay for prisons once crime dropped in the noughties. Despite the calls for longer sentences on the populist right, there still seems to be a consensus within the MAGA movement that the Trump tariff revenue and DOGE savings should be used for tax cuts, not prison building.
Huh, I thought he ended the state of emergency after they'd finished the gang crackdown. But apparently it's still in effect (after having been "extended" multiple times)!
I guess that's some good PR on their part.
Surely someone at the Heritage Foundation can do some clever accounting to factor in the cost of crimes committed by unincarcerated criminals. When a 20 year old is killed, that's 40 years of tax revenue you lose! It's not even dishonest math, that's actually how this should be accounted.
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In the long run, they simply have to be executed. Keeping them locked up is unsustainable (and runs the risk that some later administration will release them, like a sealed evil from a fantasy novel), exile is infeasible, and the state no longer allows private individuals to dispose of them through e.g. lynching.
Surely they can earn their keep with a bit of forced labour?
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That's a bit misleading. We are not seeing the same kind of increase as we did earlier, so we do definitely see relaxation. We are also quite definitely observing the rest of the population living under sunshine and rainbows.
The average person's views on taxation and spending are incoherent, and that's true no matter whether you're talking about the left or the right. Either way, if you want to imply that the DOGE-enjoyers want to cut spending on prison, maybe you can provide a link to an example or two.
Given that the level of imprisonment in El Salvador is not something where there is trustworthy data, I am not going to get into an argument about the second derivative.
Sure, they're about as untrustworthy as any western institution. Though in this case, since they are already yes_chadding the highest incarceration rate in the world, I don't quite see the point in lying about it.
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Not quite. If by prosecuting fraud you deter more future fraud, you can win, indeed.
if you suspend the law and instate a relatively friendly version of fascism, and then get re-elected by obscene margins, what's that tell you about people's regard for the state of the law?
I think all the judges trying to hamstring Trump with national injunctions are basically BEGGING for people to stop caring about the sanctity of the Judicial system. All the more so when the Dems keep calling the Supreme Court illegitimate.
Where else could we possibly be heading?
Fraud is only deterred if the expected consequence outweighs the expected gain. In a Western world where fines for wrongdoing often are smaller than the money gained by the wrongdoing - fraud is simply never deterred. Especially among those who have few other options!
The solution is excessive punishment, potentially including executions as so many posters have mentioned, but this of course runs counter to Western instincts and our legal tradition. We don't have a solution to this problem.
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The state of the law varies by time and place. Crime in El Salvador shortly before Bukele was elected was an order of magnitude worse than it ever got in America. At some point (which the 2020s US has not reached, except in the deluded minds of a small number of San Francisco leftists) there are more people with a friend or relative unfairly imprisoned than there are crime victims. I think the US would hit that point if you locked up an additional 1% of the population Bukele-style - i.e. without explicitly targetting proven repeat offenders.
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I think there's a lot of demand for this, especially among under-40s.
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Amazing news.
I just checked and the largest guns on the USS Alabama are its 16-inchers, and the width of the average male at the shoulders is... 16 inches. Most Bureaucrats should thus fit snugly in the cannons with minimal modification, and there are three batteries with three cannons in each battery, so we can really get efficient with it.
And for severely overweight bureaucrats I am happy to supply GLP-1s while they're in custody.
ChatGPT got really uppity when I started inquiring about the feasibility of this plan.
For the Judge currently hearing this read into the record at my trial, this post is a joke.
A 16 inch gun uses hundreds of kilos of propellant, you're not launching anything, you're just vaporizing people inside a tube. Ironically, I think this would be much more humane as an execution method than the 'give him a lethal injection that makes him writhe around in pain' model.
Beheading is quick, tried and true, at least if you use the French innovation rather than messing about with trained headmen. Hanging is even more traditional, a little harder to get right but not THAT much harder. All this faffing around with electricity was just because Edison wanted to score on Westinghouse; there's no real need for it. And medicalizing it was even dumber.
Yeah IMO a suitably hydraulic-powered guillotine is impossible to fuck up.
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Hispanic cultures have their own equivalent of hanging, the garrote. But, personally, I'd prefer a firing squad. It's simple and dignified.
I was thinking firing squads would be reserved for military executions.
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Injection is for the benefit of the public, not the criminal. At some point we got squeamish about visibly physical punishment, and injection sweeps all of that under the rug, making execution a bloodless, bureaucratic affair.
Yes, but as far as I'm concerned that's all a loss. Execution is brutal and should appear brutal. The question for jurors when prosecuting someone for a capital crime should indeed be something like "Am I OK with the state cutting this guy's head off". Similarly, for the execution to provide sufficient substitute for the private retribution it replaces, it should be brutal if the brutality is justified.
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And more fun for spectators.
Sell tickets we might even turn a profit.
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Bukele and Milei seem like good counterexamples at first, but...are they? What would a Bukele or Milei look like, in the US, or in a given European country? Like Trump at best, and like so much deep state roadkill otherwise, is my guess. Those are smaller countries with serious problems, to be sure, but I guess that the smaller size and lesser complexity of those countries is what makes the chainsaw approach possible in the first place.
Argentina is big and seemed to have an entrenched deep state. It's poor, sure, but that's not a structural difference.
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The fact that DOGE hit such a hard roadbloack is showing that it isn't trivial to just AFUERA large swaths of the government.
But Bukele's advice on this point seems relevant. Actually impeach and remove Judges who are otherwise obstructing valid processes or seizing power for themselves. Find some incentive to get the Legislature to actually cooperate.
And ultimately, because I believe in localism, my hope is not so much for sweeping changes from the top down. Rather, I think the quickest gains will come from state level action, or even municipal action, where the scale of the task is more comprehensible, and your enemies are more likely a handful of individuals rather than a vast, faceless institution.
If Trump and Co. can just keep the Feds from intervening, state-level actors will be better able to start cleaning out issues in their individual governments. Much like is happening with Minnesota, it seems.
Hence my ambition is only to be "Supreme Warlord of the Southeastern United States." In reality I'd be happy to be Supreme Warlord of Florida. In practice the best I can probably achieve is Supreme Warlord of my tricounty area. And my actual target would be Supreme Warlord of the city council.
Start small and with what you can actually control, then scale up or help others repeat as needed. Easier to coordinate violence at that level, too.
Local change seems critical, but the issue is that 99% of the attention of politically-interested people seems to be at the federal/culture war level, now. A debate about whether a road should be converted into a park becomes a debate of whether the pro-road people are crypto-Trump supporters. City supervisors spend hours debating whether they should pass a resolution supporting the Palestinians. Questions about how to best educate students during COVID get supplanted by questions about naming schools in a progressive way. And these abstract/cultural signifier questions are what people actually vote on even for local elections, instead of focusing on the concrete issues at hand.
I don't know if this problem is unique to your locale out what, but I'm currently working on a project with my city council and can assure you they don't give a hoot about Palestine. The only reason they or anyone would care about culture war issues is if that pressure is applied from above.
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Yep.
And of course there are trillions of dollars tied up in Federal Funding. THAT'S why everyone fights at that level, the rewards are much, much greater, and the avenues for grift are numerous.
But I still think there are some gains that can be achieved. San Fransisco is a poorly-governed quagmire, but if someone could unify a few tech giants towards the goal of reforming their local governments, fund it, and act decisively, they can probably make some headway.
At scale, principal-agent problems, coordination problems, and perverse incentives mean you can't just throw money at a problem.
But a focused institution set up with one particular goal in mind (and designed to dissolve once that goal is achieved, to avoid being skinsuited) to replace enough local officials to immediately implement a particularized agenda CAN work. There was a time in 2022 where MAGA candidates ran for school board positions and were able to get elected in most cases. Holding that victory is another matter.
The real failure mode here is that Dems/Socialists are pretty damn good at coordinating their local-level efforts with their national party, so it often ends up with you not just fighting the local party machine, but well-funded national groups, or allied entities in other states.
Hence my only real hope is Trump and Co. can keep the FedGov from backstopping their favored local candidates.
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