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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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With that in mind consider the possibility (just the possibility) that the current administration is not as stupid and incompetent as so many like to imagine it is, and instead is operating within constraints and frameworks you may not have considered.

I have seriously considered this possibility and it just doesn't comport with how the administration actually acts. When the administration succeeds, such as when they removed Maduro, it's not something that requires competence on the part of the administration themselves, they just have to give the word, because conservatives already wanted Maduro gone and the US military's already the best in the business. But when anything requires competence on the part of the admin, especially things like Liberation Day, DOGE, they're just poorly executed and don't particularly accomplish their stated goals or any obvious secret ones.

trying to fight them is not a winning move ... how do we remove the maximum number of Illegal immigrants while staying within the bounds of both our capabilities and principles?

If this is true then you've already lost! Your premise is that anything you do that actually removes enough illegal immigrants to matter by your values, to cause the real changes to the American economy and society, by your values will be blocked by business interests who don't like those changes. And your response to that is - how can we remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter, but we still feel like we're doing something? Why even bother at that point? I don't think the premise is correct, a lot of things are possible, things happen today that didn't seem very possible a few decades ago. I think it's possible a more competent Trump could succeed with mandatory e-verify, and also possible that he could fail, and that Trump mostly just doesn't care enough about generic illegal immigrant laborers (as opposed to criminals from insane asylums in the Congo) to take the risk, and also is acting through the lens of an entertainer and e-verify just isn't good TV.