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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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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,

That's not my premise at all, nor is it my response.

My response is more "don't fight your enemy on ground where you can't win". You're saying that if Trump were competent he would fight the entrenched interests on their terms. My response is that fighting entrenched interests on their own terms is actually pretty stupid, and that their are paths to winning other than "remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter".

To illustrate, at no point in 19+ years of warfare was the Taliban in any position to contest US air superiority over Afghanistan. The Taliban still ultimately won that war though because they didn't even try to fight us in the air, instead they chose to fight us in box-canyons and back-alleys. I am telling you that there are people in Trump's administration who think like this and I am holding up the DoT's audit of Diver's Licenses as an example of what "back-alley fighting" looks like in this context.