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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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And this poor reasoning is what leads to things like Trump pardoning literal cop beaters. It's easy to say that he must just support political violence if it's done in his name, but it's more likely the man who has shown tribalistic tendencies since the start simply can not fathom that some people who support him might be bad.

That's just what loyalty is. You don't only reward people who are loyal to you when they're good people. Otherwise loyalty doesn't mean anything. You can't really pathologize that as "the man who has shown tribalistic tendencies". We're all tribalistic. That's what tribe means, it's inherent in the definition of the concept. You're just professing that your tribe requires you to misunderstand Trump's tribe.

Trump is incredibly petty and targets people with his hate and insults all the time for minor disagreements or push back and this has a genuine silencing effect. Like there's only a handful of Republican politicians who have pushed back openly on tariffs or stuff like his price controls and expansion of the executive power and and this is from the historic "free trade party" and "party of small government", and those politicians are mostly the libertarians like Rand Paul and the retiring ones like Tillis.

There is probably no politician in modern times who has been criticized as much by his own party apparatus as Donald Trump has been. To the extent that that isn't obvious in the year 2026 it's because we've now had ten years of Trump fighting and winning with officials in his own party.

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