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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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This year has delivered a nonstop string of humiliations for MAGA isolationists as Trump has increasingly turned towards military measures. A few days ago Tucker Carlson claimed Trump captured Maduro for the explicit purpose of legalizing gay marriage in Venezuela (???). Tulsi Gabbard has arguably had it even worse, as her 2019 opening speech for her presidential campaign criticized Trump's flirting with regime change in Venzeula and Iran, yet she happily serves in the Trump administration and even supports Trump's policies. A report by Bloomberg today states that she was actually excluded from meetings discussing the Venezuela op, with her Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position jokingly being recast as "do not invite". Presumably the rest of Trump's team thought she might leak the details, or even commit outright treason by informing the Venezuelans beforehand.

It's hard to have principles when the MAGA movement is a cult of personality with an extremely narrow window of what's deemed acceptable to criticize Trump for. Over the coming few years I expect more MAGA isolationists to debase themselves with positions that are basically "actually interventionism is fine as long as it's Trump doing it, after all it hasn't turned into an Iraq-tier disaster yet."

  • -16

This is reminiscent of the Obama era.

Obama campaigned on a paradigm shift from Bush and the forever wars in the middle east. The reality was a surge in Afghanistan, a dirty war in Syria and the destruction of Libya. Most likely Obama was genuine and did not want Dick Cheney style interventionism in 2008. Once he took power the party establishment made sure medical insurance companies could continue to enrich themselves and the military industrial complex kept marching on. By 2011 Obama had his groyper moment with occupy wall street.

Trump was probably genuine with MAGA. Then he got captured by the mainstream republican establishment and he is now going to blow up the deficit with more spending on the military industrial complex. He is going to go all in on big brother government with palantir and integrate 30 million Venezuelans into the US empire.

It will be interesting to see if we get a right wing occupy movement. Occupy was neutered by the great awokening and by shifting the focus from real issues to distractions. Unfortunately it wouldn't surprise me if the Maga base get distracted in a similar fashion.

What are you on about. Pissing away the last 70+ years of soft power is in no way mainstream republican policy (for all their faults).

(that is to say, Venezuela could well have been GOP capture if it happened in isolation, but repeatedly threatening to invade your allies because you looked at a mercator projection and thought Greenland is actually that big is fairly obviously just Trump being a retard)

Greenland is actually that big. I mean, it's not as big as a Mercator projection would have it, but it's BIG. Over 158,000 square miles ice-free (and if you believe the climate change people, this will increase dramatically), almost as large as California. Over 677,000 square miles total, larger than Alaska

(And Trump is trolling about taking Greenland forcibly from Denmark, which I guess counts as being a retard.)

Just like he was previously trolling about Venezuela?

Did someone say he's trolling about Venezuela?

Nybbler claims that Trump is trolling about invading Denmark (as if "haha he's actually not pissing away every drop of American soft power and dismantling their entire alliance structure for some kind of gain, he's just doing it because he feels like it" was some kind of own). I am saying (implying) that if this was actually the case, we should expect him to have been trolling the last time he talked about starting a war for no tangible reason.

I am saying (implying) that if this was actually the case, we should expect him to have been trolling the last time he talked about starting a war for no tangible reason.

I absolutely disagree with this part, which is why I'm asking if you seen anyone claim he was just trolling about Venezuela. If not, that's evidence against your theory.