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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   23640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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MAGA is the most corrupt political movement in my lifetime in the US. It might be the most corrupt movement in US history, though I'm not sure how it would compare to some of the stuff in the Gilded Age. Republicans deflect the open corruption of Trump by presuming (mostly without evidence) that "all politicians do it, Trump is just honest about it!!!" Then they go off on something like Hunter Biden or Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.

And Dems don't care that much either, as they'd rather focus on hallucinations like Trump raping children with Epstein. The corruption might appear in the laundry lists of grievances they throw out against Trump, but it's hardly a motivating factor for most.

This might actually be true about MAGA.

Now imagine how insufferable the opposing party’s candidate and campaign would have to be for nearly 80 million people to overlook the flaws of a corrupt, narcissistic, petty billionaire.

You're not wrong. I also think wokists are vile.

The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.

The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.

This has been my personal hobby horse since November 2016 when Trump's victory caught me square in the jaw. As someone who firmly believed that diversity was our strength, it seemed to me that obviously the right thing to do was to seek to understand those who thought so differently like me and my ilk that they were willing to vote for someone like him, but it's been depressing to see that most of my side are firmly in the camp of "their sins justify ours; in fact, when you think about it, our sins are actually virtues, because they're directed at the Bad Guys." I enjoy beating the meat as much as any other guy, but I think I'm fatigued of beating a dead horse at this point.

Well put! It really sucks to see both sides engaged in an arms race to see who can be worse. At least have a little bit of introspection and be willing to say "that thing our side is doing is bad, and although I don't support the outgroup, we still shouldn't do that".

Selective rigor is not a marginal problem that you have the luxury of ignoring.

It really sucks to see both sides engaged in an arms race to see who can be worse.

This is a war. How do you expect a war to operate?

[EDIT] - My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.

If you offer people a choice between "laws are enforced against you, laws will not be enforced against your enemies" and "laws will not be enforced at all", some people will choose the former and some will choose the later. The people who choose the former will die out, and you will be left with only the people who choose the latter. When this happens, the problem is not that people aren't upholding the law, the problem is that there is no law to uphold. A lot of people, myself included, believe this is the situation we find ourselves in. Appealing to the majesty of the law is not going to shift us, because we do not observe majesty of the law, but rather fractal deceit. You can think such an assessment is foolish in the extreme, but at some point you should probably consider explaining why it is foolish. Just for starters, I note that Trump does not appear to have used the FBI to censor conversation of and cover up evidence of his alleged corrupt activities, as we now know the previous administration absolutely did. In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"

My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.

Thank you for this, not just for the compliment but the longer post as well that makes for a far better discussion point.

My overall philosophical retort is this post.

To this point specifically, I'm not appealing to the "majesty of the law". I agree that if one side is selectively enforcing rules against you while exempting themselves, then unilaterally disarming is suicidal. I essentially said that in the hypocrisy post, that some hypocrisy is justified when refusing to reciprocate leaves you permanently disadvantaged.

But the point where I disagree is the jump from "the outgroup abused power" to "there is not law to uphold" or "our side now gets a blank check and none of our sins count" as I've been effectively hearing from MAGA apologists on this site and on others. Most of Trump's corruption doesn't directly advantage MAGA as a movement, and in fact does some amount of harm. MAGA as something other than just a Trumpist personality cult would be stronger if everything else was the same, except that Trump didn't sell off pardons. There would be some momentary discomfort as the right had to undergo self-criticism, but it would emerge stronger for it. The fact that it mostly refuses to do so is a cancer that eats it from the inside.

My position isn't "never fight back", it's that people should be very clear about what counts as fighting back, and not trying to launder every act of corruption as defensive necessity. If the claim is "the law is already dead", then the burden is on you to explain why a specific escalation improves the situation rather than just helping to bury it.

In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"

Yes! Or rather I'd frame it as Trump not losing points in this instance while Biden would have.

This would carry more weight if Trump's approval wasn't cratering and we didn't have an endless parade of clueless swing voters saying they thought he was just going to use his inflationary policies to lower egg prices. Trump benefited tremendously from gentle, sanewashing media coverage during the election. It's example #1,032,548 of people getting suckered by the most embarrassingly transparent conman. They really ought to have known better, but it's not evidence of much but the fact that most people aren't very discerning.

Yeschad.jpg. Trump is, at the level of personal character, one of the worst people to hold high public office - anywhere in the democratic world - in my lifetime. (I'm not considering his political views here - would you rather buy a used car from Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, or let your daughter work in their office?). The MAGA GOP who nominated him are bad people who should feel bad. The Democrats who failed to beat him are culpably incompetent and should also feel bad. Within the Democratic Party, I would say that the fixers who fixed the 2016 primary for Clinton and the people who concealed Biden's cognitive decline during the 2024 primary rise to the level of bad people.

The MAGA GOP who nominated Trump against Kamala Harris and the anti-white, anti-male coalition should feel bad? I sort of feel bad. I wish he wasn't such a reckless sociopath. I just don't feel as bad as I would if Kamala had won.

I think your comment nicely captures the moral asymmetry that occurs in anti-Trumpers when they start blaming people for supporting him. It happens constantly. The GOP are labeled as both wrong and bad, whereas Democrats were just wrong. Good people, but wrong. Democrats have their goodness to fall back on.

If you look outside the Western bubble, the social views of even moderate Republicans are quite liberal compared to average citizens of most non-Western nations. In other words, if Trump supporting Republicans are bad people because they fall short of elite Western progressive norms, something like 85% of the globe falls into the bad person category. That's right. The vast majority of world's people are bad, except for the Western liberal-progressive.

People have a deeply flawed choice to make between a couple bad options. One is Trump/Nigel Farage and the other is a group whose driving force is fundamentally at odds with the ideals that make a country a country, and whose end goals align more with creating economic zones with no shared memories, or obligations, or culture, or concern for what it means to be a citizen.

We have sociopaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to make a society empathic, and we have empaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to a make a society sociopathic. The gamble is that a society can survive a bad man more easily than it can survive a ruling class that no longer believes the society is real.

You are entitled to accuse me of motivated reasoning here, but the point I am making is symmetric. I have not claimed that MAGA are bad people because they have right-populist political views, I claimed they were bad people because they repealed the character floor for political leadership, arguably in 2016 and uncomplicatedly in 2024. My continued presence on the Motte should be a signal of good faith - if I believed that right-populists were per se bad people, why would I still be here?

You can't do politics without meeting good people sincerely pursuing political goals you do not share, or good people with different political views to you because they don't understand the issues, or (very occasionally if you are smart enough to be a Motteposter) good people with different political views to you because you don't understand the issues. My social circle contains Brexit supporters in both the first two groups, for example. I have less experience meeting MAGA normies, but I have spent enough time in red states to know that most Republicans, and even most Trump voters, are not evil.

But "Men as dishonest as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" used to be one of the things 90% of citizens agreed on. (So was "Men as uncouth as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" but I care about that a lot less). It isn't obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath. Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot weren't. Nigel Farage isn't. (Admittedly Boris Johnson is one.) I know Richard Hanania has a theory for why populism always leads to kakistocracy, but I think it proves too much.

I wish there had been a way to make legible to progressives just how much moral authority they would be squandering with some of us by going all-in on trans issues. I just can't care about condemnation from the weird alien species that didn't call that shit stupid from the jump.

You're affirming my priors.

Look, usually for such a low effort boo-outgroup post I'd just give you a warning, or maybe even let it pass depending on obnoxious and how deep in the thread it is. But I meant what I said-- you are a sockpuppet who just created this account, you are probably a ban evader, and when I look at your comment history, it's mostly just you being a jerk.

I'm sure you'll be back with another account, but this one is done.

But there is not, because progressives believe their moral authority is self-sustaining. (Hence zero attempt by them to fix things; if "it was everyone else's problem" is rewarded electorally, they'll be correct.)

You say it's arguable they were bad after 2016, while others probably claim they were bad after 2020 or 2024. Much of the mainstream blue tribe had already decided that people who dissented from certain social issue orthodoxies were morally suspect, not just wrong. That mattered because once the “bad” label was attached from ordinary disagreement, millions of people understandably stopped believing the mainstream was judging them in good faith. The anti-Trump crowd had made their decision to leverage moral condemnation even before they became the anti-Trump crowd. Sure, more people have become convinced that Trump supporters are bad people, but the social issue purity tests had begun way before that. That "bad" label attached itself to of millions of people before Trump was even a candidate. Were they 2 bad after 2016, and 3 bad after 2024?

I have a mixed circle of friends too. Half of my closest friends are liberal to liberal-progressive. Most of them avoid discussing the subject entirely and I watch what I say.

It may not be obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath, but I think the explanation is pretty apparent. Our institutions, media, universities, and social media helped create a synthetic moral consensus about which views were acceptable and which weren't. That consensus made ordinary conservative politicians susceptible to the same purity tests. The only individuals left willing to cut against the consensus and say what others felt were individuals who were already ostracized, or who simply just didn't give a fuck, or who were naturally disagreeable. In came Trump (a disagreeable narcissist who didn't give a fuck about playing by the rules), and later Elon (an Aspergian who is nearly impervious to social pressure).

The character floor for political leadership was repealled on February 12th 1999, and wasn't it "the right" that voted to repeal it, but rather the same affluent liberals now complaining about their opponent's "lack of character".

Nor do I believe that Trump is "a reckless sociopath" or at least not any more so than Clinton or Obama were, rather he is simply not beholden to the pretenses of affluent liberals. You are trying to criticize him for not being "a proper gentleman" when not being a proper gentleman is a core component of his appeal.

That seems like a fully generalizable counterargument. "Imagine how bad the IDF must have been in Gaza around 2007 for the Gazans to elect that band of murderous thugs called Hamas as their government". "Imagine what the wife must have said to her husband to drive him to kill and dismember her".

Yeah, people make comparative choices, and people who disagree (usually redditors) often contort those into moral endorsements. In this case, the comparative choice of voting for Trump is being analogized to supporting Hamas or a man murdering his wife and dismembering her.

usually redditors

Unkind, unnecessary

I don't think "preferring one candidate over another" is generalizable to "murdering someone."

I don't know how you can say this with a straight face when the last President blanket pardoned his own son for more than a decade of crimes.

He even did it preemptively, pardoning him for actions he could have taken in the future, all the way to the end of the Presidential term.

That same son made millions on bogus board positions in Ukraine which were obviously bribes. Ukraine which blew up into a war during that President's term, and where billions of dollars have been thrown down a black hole.

So, there's a really high bar for corrupt political movements.

millions

Single digit millions. The highest serious estimate I have seen is that the whole "Biden crime family" operation netted $10-20 million. Two orders of magnitude less than the Trump family's buckraking. Also an order of magnitude less than Clinton family buckraking or the various financial scandals of the Hastert-DeLay paedoCongress, so I don't think you can claim that the Bidens were unusually corrupt by the standards of pre-Trump American politics.

I think the problem is that so many types of grift have been conflated.

  1. Trump financially exploiting his own supporters (crypto, SPACs, trump media, trump sons promoting bullshit products and companies, trump steak type stuff). The left and never-trump republicans spoke about this far, far too much. Nobody cares when a fool is parted from his money by the leader he worships.

  2. The usual bribes for friends and family members, as happened with eg Biden and as happens with Trump and his sons joining the boards of various startups that want some funding or regulatory allowance or serve a particular foreign interest or whatever.

  3. The Saudi/Gulf money. Strong connections to the GOP for many decades. The Bush family were close. The Kushner fund. I don’t think there’s anything particularly new here.

  4. The Trump self-promotion. Random third world countries touting future TRUMP hotels, TRUMP casinos and so on. This is venal but it ties into Trump’s brand, which has always been multi asset and fully integrated. The president making casino deals while he’s on diplomatic business, and rolling the two into one arrangement is on brand and expected, his supporters don’t care and there was every expectation he would do this before being elected.

  5. Specific, “third world” style direct extraction of public funds with no fig leaf. This is where, for example, an African oil minister directly siphons a cut of every oil deal into a personal Swiss bank account. Or where the Lebanese ex central bank chief allegedly took a tiny cut of every transaction they did and had it diverted to a personal account for decades. Trump has arguably engaged in this with eg the current 1.78bn slush fund ‘deal’, and there are smaller but numerous previous examples.

The problem is that if you’ve spent years whining about 1-4, reporting 5 carries less weight.

If the crypto and SPACs were just about ripping off Trump's own supporters, I would agree with your point re. 1. But with all of 1, 3 and 4 the problem is not that Trump is getting paid, it is that some of the people paying Trump are smart enough to know what they are doing, and we can assume that they are getting something in return. But we don't know what is being sold, and in some cases (especially the crypto) we don't even know who it is being sold to.

One example where we do know is that Trump changed his views on the Tiktok ban around the time Tiktok investor Jeff Yass invested in the Truth Social SPAC. That moves the SPAC from scamming his own supporters to accepting bribes from a proxy for a Communist dictatorship.

Nobody thinks the Saudis deal with Jared Kushner is purely commercial. The question is whether this is a tip for his work on something which benefits both Saudi and US interests (presumably the Abraham accords), or whether it is a bribe for some piece of as-yet secret work which benefits Saudi interests and hurts US interests. Even if it is a tip, the dollar amount is so much larger than the customary and reasonable gift given in that kind of situation that it would be improper under conventional business or political ethics. When Eric Trump announces the groundbreaking on Trump Hotel Durkadurkastan, we don't know if it is a purely commercial transaction, a tip, or a bribe. (But we do know that the Durkadurkastanis see this as a distinction without a difference).

In addition, all five of your points involve dollar amounts which were 1-2 orders of magnitude higher under Trump than under previous corrupt presidents. For me, this is absolutely critical, although I agree that the average swing voter is innumerate and doesn't care. I don't think the Saudis paid Jared Kushner a few hundred million dollars* for a small favour, whereas people were willing to pay Hunter Biden a few hundred thousand dollars just to set up some meetings.

* My estimate of the NPV of the management fees on the $2 billion investment over the life of the fund, assuming the standard 2-and-20 fee.

Here’s my read of this:

  • Dollar amounts aren’t really a good indicator here. If someone paid Hunter Biden $2m it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid him $20m. Maybe Hunter felt that the former figure was the most he was willing to accept without embarrassing his father. It doesn’t really say anything about the services provided or resources available.

  • The really big money is kind of arbitrary. Kushner is unlikely to lose much more than many comparable managers the Saudis do business with, who also charge under a broadly comparable fee structure. Unlike a fully fake job or classic bribery / facilitation payment, there isn’t necessarily an absolute or even guaranteed relative loss on the actual capital spent.

  • Most people who think they can get something out of Trump lose. This is a truth through his entire career. Say what you will about him, he has screwed the screwers every single time. Countless well-educated, conniving types have tried to play him and they’ve all lost, throughout his business and political career. The man has a combination of natural instincts, zero loyalty and zero honor. The concept of a favor owed (by him) is anathema to his identity. Those who try to do business with him almost never win, whether the enterprise is a success or failure.

Pardoning his son was easily the most despicable act in Biden's presidency. But it was not a Tuesday. There is no long and proud tradition of Democratic presidents handing out preemptive pardons like candy.

With Trump, a pardon of some fraudster in exchange to cash (or investment in his shitcoins, which amounts to the same thing) is mostly a Tuesday.

Nor do I think it is sound to insinuate that the support of the Ukraine in the war was a reaction of Ukrainians buying access to Biden through his son. A lot of countries support Ukraine, not all had a president's son on some shady board of directors.

Supporting Ukraine was totally in character for US foreign policy between 1950 and 2005. To my knowledge, Ukraine does not even have a well-funded lobby organization to bribe congressmen to vote for military aid, unlike some other country which received 10G$ a year during a conflict viewed slightly more controversially in the Western world. But AIPAC makes a bad case to argue that the Dems are the party of corruption because MAGA's support for Israel's military causes makes Biden's look modest.

It is well known that there was a bit of a swamp in DC. Big donors would probably not be willing to spend on PACs if the politicians were all unwavering loyal to their ideas and the will of the people. There is certainly a revolving door between policymakers and the industries which they regulate. Nobody believes that a politician paid as an advisor for some company is really giving advice worth his salary.

To try a slightly unhygienic metaphor, if DC was a swimming pool it would be well known that people sometimes piss in it. When Biden pardoned his son for any and all crimes, that was akin to standing on the pool's side and openly pissing into it.

But what Trump is doing is getting up to the topmost board of the diving tower, pulling down his trunks, squatting at the end and letting turd after turd drop in the pool.

Pardoning his son was easily the most despicable act in Biden's presidency

Pardoning his son was one of the few human acts Biden did as president, and he shouldn't have lied about it.

All the other political pardons were despicable.

If that would have been the only way to prevent his son from being locked up in federal prison due to malicious prosecution for as long as MAGA would hold power, I might agree with you.

But my general take on the finances of the Biden family is that they would probably have managed to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver and rent him a room in the outskirts. It seems unlikely that Trump would have offered Canada sufficient concessions to get them to extradite him, "we lowered our tariffs by ten percent but in turn we got Hunter Biden" would not play well with his voters -- they were never chanting about locking him up the way they were about Mrs Clinton. Sure, Trump would probably have wasted a few millions of taxpayer money to charge him with everything on the book, but in the end he would have been a target of opportunity rather than Trump's white whale.

Biden feeling the need to do anything about Hunter was a clear vote of no confidence in the US justice system. That is already a pretty damning signal to send by the president. But the fact that he did not pick the option available to most Americans in a similar situation -- exile -- is a hundred times more damning still. It is basically saying

Fuck equality before the law. I am president Biden, and I will not get on a plane to see my son for Chrismas like he was some Iranian or Chinese exile, like he was some commoner. If the price I need to pay for my convenience is to make it common knowledge that laws don't apply to the rich and the powerful (to the degree that anyone was still doubting that after Epstein), it is a price I will pay gladly.

Basically, every one of the millions of anti-ICE protesters has more balls (irrespective of gender identity) than all of the Biden family put together. They know that the eye of Sauron could fall on them at any minute and they could charged with making a false statement to a bank a decade ago, and that they would not have a powerful daddy who would pay Trump a bribe or make some deal getting them favorable prison conditions.

A great president would say that if the government imprisoned the innocent, then the right place for their innocent son would be to be imprisoned with his fellow countrymen. A decent president would send his son to comfortable exile -- about a million times less harsh than what random penniless political refugees or Assange have taken upon them to escape unjust punishment. Only a despicable president would refuse to make any trade-offs with regards to the signals he sends to his people.

Biden wasn't really the center of a political movement though, and I think Democrats were a lot more willing to call him out for things like the Hunter pardon. At most, I saw people quietly understanding of Biden breaking with principle to protect family, though I still got the sense there was general disapproval for the pardoning on the Left.

As a third party voter, I have been disgusted by both parties, but I really do think the dynamic is that Obama and Biden did X, and Trump is doing X^2, as /u/lollol put it. It creates a weird dynamic, because I'm happy to condemn them all and say that Trump is still worse in most cases (even if his actions aren't totally unprecedented), but it feels like a lot on the Right are in the position where they both need Trump and are happy that he's punishing the people that they hate, and so they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."

The reason you believe that Trump is doing x^2 is because of a dishonest and biased media environment. It is not because Trump is worse.

they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."

Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.

You Are Still Crying Wolf.

I mean, the Trump crypto scandal and conflict of interest web related to it alone dwarfs literally each and every similar corruption scandal of the Biden administration put together, just on the basis of plain facts of the people and timing involved...

It kinda hard to take "You are crying wolf!" seriously when said wolf has finished off half of the sheep and is starting to eye the shepard.

I mean, did he not start another retarded middle eastern war, another retarded trade war, put a retard in charge of HHS, blow the deficit into the stratosphere? On top of that, he's doing his level best to raise gas prices past peak biden, and beat bidens record on inflation.

Those are all real, undeniable facts. I don't think the "biased media" is sneaking out at night and changing the price at the gas station or launching bombing raids on Iran.

put a retard in charge of HHS

You are, of course, referring to the person that abolished minimum age recommendations for trans hormone treatments and surgeries, right?

I wanted RFK in office, and I wanted the trade war, so if that's a wolf, then sign me up, I love wolves now. No, the wolf is the fascist strongman that has never come, not MAHA or Chinese tariffs.

The Iran war is Israelf leading the US by the nose, again, still. I would love an anti-Israel president, but not so much that I'll support and anti-white candidate.

The deficit. Ha, what a fun joke. Nobody gives a shit about the deficit, and we've barely pretended in the last ten years. Also funny that Harris would somehow be different, or better, on the deficit. That's just baked in, nobody will ever vote to stop giving away free money. That's simply the failure of Democracy. Given that, I'll take what I can get elsewhere.

The dishonest media only cares about this shit when it's Trump in charge, then they get completely silent when Democrats are in charge. So yes, all your stuff is real, and it really gets blown out of proportion when it makes Republicans look bad, and it gets smothered when it makes Democrats look bad. That's the media bias I'm talking about, and that's the crying wolf.

You Are Still Crying Wolf.

I am not "still" crying wolf. I didn't really start being truly, deeply worried about Trump until April 2025.

Before that, I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad, that despite the weekly outrage articles from the mainstream media, he had mostly governed as any Republican would have. But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.

Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.

I mean, I commented this a year ago.

I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad

Trump 1 really wasn't that bad. A core message of Trump's 2024 primary campaign was that Trump 1 not being that bad was a mistake that only Trump 2 could fix.

FWIW, I read Trump as a wolf after his response to the 2020 election results.

The big problem is that the rest of the world has to suffer due to Trump 2. If he was only destroying his own country by now I'd long since have made peace with the fact that the US is a democracy getting the government it deserves and it is not for the rest of us to save it from itself. A bit like those nature documentaries where no matter how terrible the thing which is happening, the cardinal rule is that you don't intervene. But alas we don't have that luxury.

I suppose we are in agreement then. The democrats do not have any moral high ground to criticize Trump, and given how eagerly every single institution in the world threw themselves behind the Democrats and against Trump, it's not just the Democrats who have eroded their own high ground. Everything, every criticism, turns into a partisan complaint, and can be dismissed as partisan complaint because there is no other ground on which to complain.

But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.

Yeah, almost as if four years of bullshit lawfare will change a man. Almost as if eroding your credibility to attack your enemies might empower those very same enemies, and remove any restraints they once had.

For me, I don't want someone to govern as a republican. I learned in July 2024 that everyone to the left of Le Pen considers themselves interchangeable, so I've taken them at their word. There is no center, there is only pro- and anti- migration. It's hard for me to care about anything outside of this, and any criticisms I have of Trump come from where he has strayed from this core issues (like in Iran).

In other words, I cannot spare this man. He fights.

everyone to the left of Le Pen considers themselves interchangeable

It's incredible to me that you can write this with (presumably) a straight face. Really? Really? The infamously prone to squabble center, left, and far left? Consider themselves interchangeable? What? I presume you're talking about the assassination attempt but I not only don't see what specifically you'd be referring to but also fail to see how this translates to "there is only pro- and anti-migration" as if the two things are directly linked.

The infamously prone to squabble center, left, and far left?

In the sense that there's a rounding error of liberals that are really, truly willing to oppose progressives and leftists, they're interchangeable. They squabble, absolutely, but no one to their left is an enemy.

They'll fire a Mexican construction worker for making the OK sign, while thinking odious weasel Hasan Piker is the future of the party. Racism is fine as long as it has a progressive gloss. Advocating for violence is okay as long as it has a progressive gloss. Having a full-on Nazi tattoo and saying women are responsible for getting raped is peachy if there's a D next to your name, but god forbid Elon move his arm in a silly way.

And if massive fraud by and benefiting their client groups is discovered.... move to cover it up

I do not think the Matthew Yglesias wing of the Democrats see Hasan Piker as the future of the party.

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Please, tell me what conclusion I am meant to draw when competing parties conspire to not contest elections so that they, between them, keep out a third party.

What that looks like to me is everyone to the left of Le Pen in agreement that they're all substitutes for one another, that they're all functionally interchangeable, and that it doesn't matter if it's communist or centrist.

The infamously prone to squabble center, left, and far left?

Yes, the fact that they're infamously prone to squabble, yet worked in perfect synchronicity when it mattered, reinforces my conclusion. If they were really different, they would have squabbled, but they're not, and they were faced with a genuine threat, so they dropped the game and played serious.

I presume you're talking about the assassination attempt

I'm talking about the French Election in 2024, which is why I mentioned Le Pen by name.

Les Republicains, i.e. the remnant of the traditional French centre-right, did not consider everyone to the left of Le Pen interchangeable. They refused to withdraw from three-cornered left-LR-RN second rounds where they were in third place, did not endorse either side in two-way left-RN runoffs, and allowed individual LR politicians to endorse FN candidates in such cases. That is how you behave if you think the left (not just the communist left, but a broad left alliance including communists) is as obnoxious as Le Pen.

Even Macron's liberal Ensemble did not withdraw from three-cornered left-ENS-RN contests where the left candidate was a communist.

I don't think that the communist left, the non-communist left, and the liberals forming a popular front against "fascists" means that they consider themselves interchangeable - it just means that they think Le Pen counts as a fascist. If Le Pen really was a fascist, then forming a popular front against her would be the right thing to do according to all three groups' stated values.

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It'd be trivially easy to provide some links so we can make an objective comparison over some directly comparable figures for the 'corruption' that has occurred 'in our lifetime.'

I bet an LLM could put together the data in <5 minutes.

Is there a reason you don't even do that sort of effort when you seemingly have such a passionate belief in the claim?

Just wondering.

My personal bugbear is the $Trump meme coin which is exceptional for the scale x blatantness.

One of the big issues surrounding talks of corruption is that people have excessively expansive views of what is considered "corruption" when it comes to their outgroup, often devolving to little more than "they're doing something (anything) I disagree with". But I can't recall anything that comes close to what Trump did with the memcoin.

I think it is at least fair to define "corruption" as something that explicitly involves using one's political authority, which the people 'entrusted' to you, for personal enrichment in a way that is actively detrimental to your constituency. Which differentiates it from 'merely' "shady business practices" that one would find in the private sector.

I don't think anyone can truly level 'corruption' charges at politicians or government officials who publish tell-all books. But there are clearly ways to use that as an avenue for corruption.

And when it comes to the insider trading, I'm not sure I'd call it 'corrupt' to make trades on your own investment account when you know legislation has passed that will likely cause market movements in a certain direction. I WOULD call it corrupt to influence the passage of legislation specifically to improve your own portfolio.

Maybe we can't disentangle those enough to matter.

Now, I'm less tolerant of the practice of "hey donate X million dollars to my family's non-profit org and I'll make some solid efforts to get that favorable bill passed."

Trump sort of skirts this definition at times because he clearly has his personal/business identity... which is 'separate' from his political identity. But he certainly borrows the aura from his political authority as a means of boosting his business interests.

Here's a few actions of his that I could consider corrupt:

(But I remember Biden's pardon and commutation spree in his last weeks in office, so there's some broader context to consider)

  • Directing government contracts to Friends or family members in a way that explicitly skips the normal process and/or inflates the costs.

  • Using Governmental agencies to prosecute business rivals or silence otherwise lawful critics.

What's kind of funny is that Trump does like to initiate lawfare against his opponents, but he more often just sues them like any private citizen would instead of getting some random gov't agency to go after the targets of his ire.

What sort of actions has he taken that might fit well with such a list?

The 2 I'd cite for a list that Trump is going above and beyond are:

  • Giving pardons to people who have helped him in one way or the other, like the Binance founder as well as Trevor Milton
  • Hosting multiple private events for holders of the Trump meme coin, essentially doing what Republicans accused Hunter --> Joe Biden of doing, but doing it far more directly and at greater scale. Also enacting crypto-friendly legislation that Trump would personally benefit from.
  • Refusing to divest from his businesses while President, which has been common practice for Presidents for a while now, and which causes conflict-of-interest issues to pop up constantly.

But then a lot of it comes from the laundry list of other things he's doing. Other politicians might skirt around things that are similar, but I can't name any other single politician that has as many as Trump. Things like:

  • Accepting a luxury jumbo jet from Qatar, after signing favorable deals with them including billions/trillions in economic commitments and giving them an unusually strong security guarantee.
  • Many of the deals his sons are doing, trying to implicitly profit from the fact that their father is the POTUS.
  • Using pardons to assist political allies like the J6 rioters, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner, and Paul Manafort
  • Charging the Secret Service at Trump properties well above normal government rates, meaning taxpayer money flowed into the President's business because of his official protection needs.

What makes it hard for me to care about the meme coin is that crypto is inherently speculative. The coin itself is not worth anything, and in order to cash out for real money, someone needs to want buy the coin from the hold co. If stupid people want to give Trump money by buying his shitcoin that's their choice. I don't think the government needs to be in the business of telling individuals which worthless investments they can make. I've seen some reporting that its used as a monetized access channel but is that any different than normal political bribery, "donate to my super-pac, give my failson a board seat and I'll have you over for dinner"

I don't think it should be reduced to "stupid people falling for an obvious scam". It seems to have been a vehicle for bribes.

But anger at this is either just TDS or weird edge case rules lawyering. People are "ok"* with the former ways of taking bribes so outrage over this new and improved way of taking a bribe (that is in some ways far more visible) is just special pleading

*: People are ok with it in that they accept that its a common practice, they might dislike it but because its accepted practice they aren't outraged by it. Having arbitrary rules on how a bribe can be taken is just that: arbitrary.

People are not in fact OK with the current method of "bribes" but more to the point I've literally never had a conversation about modern bribery in US politics that didn't end with someone conceding "oh yeah well actually those rules on the books actually make at least a half decent amount of sense". People's perception of how bribery works (even a good chunk of otherwise smart and informed people) almost always involves a pretty inaccurate mental model that doesn't represent the facts as we know them.

"People are okay with nudity when there's a fig leaf covering the genitals, but are outraged when the leaf isn't there!"

The meaning of nudity is that there's no fig leaf covering anything and, as such, someone being okay with fig leaf covering the genitals isn't being okay with nudity, they're being okay with something close to nudity but isn't nudity. Corruption, on the other hand, is something that exists mostly orthogonal to what is or isn't covering it (there's certainly an appearance component of corruption, where the mere appearance of corruption is corruption in itself, even if, in actuality, behind closed doors, everything is on the up and up, but I don't think that's relevant in this case).

I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.

Corruption also exists on a spectrum. A company bankrolling a congressional candidate will generally not be stupid enough to make an agreement in writing where the candidate pledges to vote in their interest. No, they are merely supporting democracy and exercising their freedom of speech rights, which seem pretty unlimited for corporate citizens as of Citizens United. When the congressman later listens carefully to the company's representative making their case, that is merely because the company is a big employer in his state, not because they are a donor, you see. It will be very hard to prove the opposite.

Other cases are more blatant. Foreign powers gifting Trump airplanes. Fraudsters getting presidential pardons in exchange for investing in his memecoins.

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Anyone who complained about Hunter Biden's exploits should also be complaining about the multiple private events Trump has held for coin holders. Instead, MAGA shows volcanic rage at the former while the latter is shunted to the realm of "hard for me to care".

Also, Trump is using the coin as a conduit to basically sell off pardons.

Yeah because MAGA folks are just tribal conflict theorists. Expecting any sort of nuanced or balanced take from them, any sort of principles, is something they shed long ago in their quest for vengeance and power. And the apple does not fall far from the tree here, the mirror behavior is the TDS or Prog folks who show volcanic rage at this but hardly care when its some progressive causes. Trying to hold either to a set of principles is futile because they have none.

A more accurate way to phrase this would be "principles are clearly not adaptive in the current sociopolitical enviornment."

This is not a mistake blues or reds are making. Principles are not, in fact, adaptive, and fixing that is not something individuals or even individual tribes can accomplish, and probably is not something that can be accomplished at all in a values-incoherent environment.

Sure, I've never been accused of having good phrasing. Other people always word things better than I can.

Are principles ever adaptive? A core part of the value of principles is that they act as a very costly signal. If it were easy to have them, or they are adaptive to an environment it wouldn't be a very good signal. People would adopt them for the adaptability. The value of having principles is that it communicates that people can trust you, and depend on you. Regardless of the shifting tides of the sociopolitical currents.

Are principles ever adaptive?

Absolutely, in a values-coherent environment.

A core part of the value of principles is that they act as a very costly signal.

Sure. What they are supposed to signal is "I am making a significant sacrifice to maintain something we both care about". But this assumes "we both" actually do care about it. Signals are for communication; you don't need signals to draw your own conclusions. If the response is "I don't care about the thing you are maintaining, and will not sacrifice to maintain it", then the question becomes whether solo maintenance is worth it (probably not), and whether solo maintenance is even possible (probably not).

People would adopt them for the adaptability.

Yes, and the result is that rule-following becomes normal and expected, and rule-breaking becomes unusual and disturbing.

The value of having principles is that it communicates that people can trust you, and depend on you. Regardless of the shifting tides of the sociopolitical currents.

Many people claim a principle of following the law. Few people will actually follow a law that demands they docilly allow a subset of their neighbors to murder them and their family with machetes. Most curious! How can we explain this inconsistency? Assuming such a law were passed legally, it would in fact be a law, so shouldn't they follow it? Don't they have principles? Well, no. Humans are human. They are not going to cooperate in upholding a system that they perceive to be ruinously hostile to their interests. Society depends on a supermajority perceiving it to be strongly positive-sum. If you want to continue to have a society, you need to maintain that perception. If you fail to maintain that perception, appeals to rules or norms or principles will not save you.

Very, very few principles are actually worth unlimited commitment. If you want a society based on principles which receive unlimited commitment, it is going to look very different than our current arrangement.

I don't really know about (or care about) crypto, so it was more than the few minutes I was willing to spend to unravel that Forbes article to understand what was going on there.

But I'll go on the record and say that generally, offering pardons to people who have made you personal money is Bad.

But I'll go on the record and say that generally, offering pardons to people who have made you personal money is Bad.

Thanks, I genuinely appreciate that. That’s the kind of thing I wish were more common.

MAGA can think Democrats are worse. They can think Republicans are the lesser evil. But at some point, if your own side does something bad, you have to be able to say so without immediately changing the subject.

That kind of logic would go a lot farther if you could start it by admitting when your side does something bad. This conversation starts with the IRS illegally leaking Trump’s records and those of a hundred of his allies and we’re supposed to quickly trot past that so we can discuss the latest Trump Bad crying wolf.

Yeah, that's one of my hobby horses. The things we argue about are very granular! No single sub-sub-sub argument is going to change someone's macro conclusions (and in most cases, they shouldn't!). Conceding a point is like folding a hand in poker. It hardly means you're out of the game, much less a career, unless you got wildly out over your skis.

Plainly absurd, you only need to look at wtf was going on with USAID and the ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar to see your statement is absurd. In fact the money was flowing for Dems propaganda and elections.

I don't think 'gay condom art' is the best metonym for 'worthless USAID spending'; if it convinces some fraction of gay people to wrap their todgers, there will be fewer cases of HIV transmission, leading to less need for funding anti-retroviral medications, which I recall many esteamed members of this forum found objectionable.

The bullshit line items were like

$5.5 million to improve the lives of LGBT individuals in Uganda, $14 million to identify LGBT leaders in Cambodia, $425,000 to train Indonesian coffee companies on how to be more gender friendly, $15 million for condoms to the Taliban

Which I'm sure none of those were real, that money went right back to the US and was used for election campaigns, and paying off the media to run hit pieces on Trump and conservatives. it was quite telling when USAID was struck suddenly the unflinching left MSM machine flinched and the amount of perfectly synchronized "gay opps" across the media landscaped plummeted. The various leftie propaganda channels were running around like chickens with their heads cut off instead of the usual lockstep perfectly manicured talking points.

damn i really chose the cheapest of the bullshit line items and everyone got to pretend that it was a meaningless amount instead of a synecdoche for a larger set of problems.

ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar

No clue what this is in reference to.

I think that is comedic exaggeration. USAID was funding similar things. Trans theaterperformances and whatnot. Raw progressive culture warring funded by my tax dollars. Also I presume graft in which a cut is kept by a non profit.

I don't want to excuse everything Trump has done by pointing to the excesses of the other side. On the other hand, now suddenly they care that Republicans (or Trumpists) are getting a taste of this.

Presumably a joke about USAID funding all sorts of nonsense and no one has really tracked through everything they did like navigating the Darien Gap, but the closest specific example is probably the Columbian trans opera.

Sure, that stuff looks like nonsense. Practically anything that goes to fund art or "culture" more broadly probably has a chance to end up funding some woke nonsense. That stuff is bad and it's good that Trump canned it.

In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.

$47K is quite small.

It's one memorable and culture-warry grant out of 6,000.

That doesn't help the "USAID spending was corruption" case. It highlights how insubstantial the objections are and how feeble the attempts to draw an equivalence to Trump's corruption are. The argument is, essentially, that spending money on things conservatives don't like is fraudulent and that these petty amounts are equivalent to direct abuse of office for personal gain and billions in direct self-dealing.

(Underlying all of this was the incredible mendacity of DOGE and assorted fellow travelers in their claims of finding fraud/waste, such that any individual allegation can't be taken seriously without significant additional investigation)

these petty amounts

One grant is a petty amount, but a memorable synecdoche.

Are 6000 grants a petty amount?

Is the total of Medicare fraud, home health fraud, home child care fraud, disability fraud a "petty amount"?

Nobody "serious" seems to give a shit about fraud when it happens on their team or by their favored constituencies, but I'm quite certain that all the other kinds of fraud are orders of magnitude more expensive than whatever Trump has done. His is concentrated and gaudy; the other kinds are diffuse. Cutting off a finger or two versus death by a thousand cuts.

Are 6000 grants a petty amount?

Measured against the full scope of USAID operations? Yes. More importantly, however, the claimed fraud is not in evidence. USAID money going to things you don't approve of is not fraud or corruption. Musk et al. have lived repeatedly and misrepresented (or simply misunderstood, because they're incompetent) what they found such that I am very skeptical that the bulk of these 6000 cases were even problematic, let alone genuinely corrupt. Even cases of genuine large-scale fraud were exaggerated and turned out to be significantly smaller than claimed.

By comparison, we with Trump are talking about open self-dealing and abuse of the powers of the office, all happening on an unheard-of scale.

His is concentrated and gaudy; the other kinds are diffuse.

The fundamental lie of Trumpism is that if you tolerate his personal depravity and corruption then he will fix big, systemic problems. The reality is that depraved, corrupt leaders do not make decisions in the public interest, and this only becomes worse when you allow then to openly monetize their office. Trump isn't just personally corrupt, either. He also enables and facilities corruption beneath him.

Are 6000 grants a petty amount?

But are all 6000 grants funding things as contemptible as Columbian trans operas?

Is the total of Medicare fraud, home health fraud, home child care fraud, disability fraud a "petty amount"?

Fraud is an obvious problem and isn't something most politicians would defend. It's categorically different than the type of corruption that Trump is showing.

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How many examples would you like?

$47k is as much income tax as has been withheld from me from 2018-2025. I don't think the fruit of my labor for eight years of my life is quite small, and I don't think nearly a decade of taxes extracted from me should be spent on this crap.

Eight years of my life for a trans opera in Colombia. Rooting it out isn't mendacity, it's what I voted for.

Similarly, annual estimates for Medicaid fraud are $50-100 billion per year, or the total lifetime taxes of roughly 100,000-200,000 Americans.

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to be clear, that 6,000 is for 2025, not over USAID's lifetime, correct?

Yes, good point, my understanding is that was the total number of current grants before they got slashed.

Definitely not the total number of lifetime grants.

In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.

It's one program, out of many thousands of programs. I think we can agree that it's selected for how well it fits the point. Do you believe it was an unrepresentative outlier? If it was an unrepresentative outlier, how did it get approved in the first place?

USAID's 2025 budget was 34 billion dollars, a roughly 30% increase over the 2001-2024 average of 23 billion.

What's your estimate for the percentage of that .536 trillion dollars that amounted to something between conspicuous waste and taxpayer funding of Blue Tribe partisan political activity?

Why do you think this activity required a ~33% increase in 2025 specifically?

clearly i've forgotten how to argue here and how many people will pretend not to understand things.

thank you for improving the context.

My first thought was inflation might explain a good chunk of it but the chart on wikipedia indicates the increase in USAID outpaces inflation (11.8 billion in 2001 should be equal to $21.13 billion in 2024), and also seems like USAID funds really started increasing in 2021. Also that 23 billion is the average after accounting for inflation in 2023 dollars. Wikipedia also says 2023 was an exception year with $16 billion in funds for Ukraine but even accounting for that 2023 had 43.79 - 16 = 27.79 billion which is above the average of 23 billion.

Considering under which admin USAID funding really ramped up I think it's fair to conclude it would've likely kept going up if Kama was president.

To say nothing of the multiple trillion dollar bills passed under Biden that did nothing but siphon money to leftists. In terms of scale of corruption, all of American history combined looks like amateurs compared to the modern progressive movement. They just manifestly hold an explicit "it's (D)ifferent and good when we do it" mentality and then mindkill themselves into retardation when they get asked questions like "Why does it cost $150 billion to NOT build a rail line?"

If the hand of god reached down and stripped out all corruption from America, Donald Trump would still be a billionaire and half the Democrat party would be wearing a barrel with suspenders.

The issue is that Trump is siphoning money to himself. Siphoning money to your voters is arguably part of what a politician is supposed to do. The leftist interest groups supported things that were part of Biden's political program. This is what he is supposed to spend money on. Fulfilling campaign promises and furthering the political agenda of his party.

Using your presidential authority to funnel public money to yourself and your family is clearly different, and much more corrupt. This seems to clearly be what Trump is doing with this.

If the hand of god reached down and stripped out all corruption from America, Donald Trump would still be a billionaire

Are you going to seriously claim that a guy who did real estate and development in New York City, in the 1970s and 80s, bares not a whiff of corruption?

No, he's quite open about that just being how the game was played. I'm noting that there was actual economic productivity beyond the way permits and approvals are gatekept behind donations.

multiple trillion dollar bills passed under Biden that did nothing but siphon money to leftists.

What bills are you referring to? I'm sure somewhere in the appropriations there might have been a few dozen million that got directed to progressive NGOs -- and I'd consider that a bad thing, mind you -- but nothing to the level of "multiple trillion dollar bills that did nothing but siphon money to leftists".

Why does it cost $150 billion to NOT build a rail line?

This is an issue of excessive regulation, not corruption. It's still a big problem and is a stain on California's reputation (and by extension all left-wing governance), but it's different then something like Trump's memecoin.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. Both shoveled out insane amounts of money for ostensible purposes that never materialized because all the cash was absorbed into the pockets of Democrat interest groups that donate to and organize in favor of the Democrats.

Just so with your point about over-regulation. If the state government instructs the agencies to devise "regulations" that siphon money away from ostensible purposes and into the pockets of allied groups that donate back to the politicians, that's actually even worse than regular corruption because it's institutionalized and on-going and metastasizes corruption towards the state in general.

Memecoin, by contrast, is piker shit that only hurts the people involved.

For what it's worth, bills were voted in by congress, the legislative body, which were voted in by voters, so at least in some sense that's the will of the people that insane amount of money were shoveled into ostensible purposes.

Here it's Trump's IRS pitting against Trump's DOJ, both under the executive, making a settlement. Not a judge ordered settlement, but the two comes to settlement (wink wink nod nod) together.

Sarah Isgur (Trump 1 DOJ spokesperson) makes a good point that the proper way would have been to "en banc" the case so that the statue of limitation is frozen. The case would have resumed when Trump is merely a citizen and not the current president, and he would have likely won because the case is pretty solid.

She commented that the judge of the case asked a legal point on how: "It is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy [the Constitution’s] case or controversy requirement.". The judge then asked that both sides submit more information to answer and make claim their position on the point she made. Then conveniently the two teams (and remember, they both work for Trump) drop the case and settle two days before the judge's deadline.

Look, if Congress pass laws to appropriate this $1.7 billion for the same purpose, there won't be an outcry because again, in some sense it flows from the will of the people. Like almost all crimes, it's how you do something that's important, not what was achieved.

edit1: "the outcry would be less justified"

and he would have likely won because the case is pretty solid.

I do not think he would have won to the tune of $1.776 billion. He hasn't alleged specific financial losses due to his tax returns being leaked, and you can't get that much money out of a jury based on pure embarrassment.

You are right and that is true. There is a motte of "they are guilty" and there is a bailey of "the consequences should be this".

What’s your opinion on the IRS illegally leaking Trump’s tax records in the first place?

I am of the opinion that we never found out the extent of the guilt/liability because the process of the law was not carried out to its conclusion when the IRS and DOJ decided to settle behind close doors essentially. No judge, no jury, and certainly no congress. All I know about the case that has been decided so far is that the leaker, Charles Littlejohn, is definitely guilty and was sentenced to the maximum sentence under the law

If I have to put a number based on vibes and information I know at the moment, let's say confidence percentage (I'm not well versed in terminology for opinion/prediction) I would say:

  1. 0%: there was an org-wide conspiracy that the entirety of the IRS organization from the top of the chain of command down to the rank-and-file organized themselves so that they can leak Trump's tax return through a contractor.
  2. 100%: Littlejohn is guilty of leaking Trump's and thousands of other high net worth individuals tax returns.
  3. <1%: there was a particular conspiracy of close-knitted people that instigated Littlejohn to be the leaker and fall guy in such a way that Littlejohn thought he had the idea of his own will and therefore they can't be implicated.
  4. 1%: there was a particular conspiracy of close-knitted people that included Littlejohn and he decided to be the fall guy and is really good at not being a snitch.
  5. 5%: IRS was negligent in the hiring and vetting of Littlejohn as the contractor
  6. 1%: IRS was criminally negligent in the hiring and vetting of Littlejohn as the contractor
  7. <5%: IRS was illegally negligent in the hiring and vetting of Littlejohn as the contractor
  8. 80%: IRS was negligent in the designing, creating, maintaining, monitoring, and auditing the processes that led to Littlejohn be able to access, download, and leak the tax returns of Trump and other high net worth individuals.
  9. <20%: IRS was criminally negligent in the designing, creating, maintaining, monitoring, and auditing the processes that led to Littlejohn be able to access, download, and leak the tax returns of Trump and other high net worth individuals.
  10. 70%: IRS was illegally negligent in the designing, creating, maintaining, monitoring, and auditing the processes that led to Littlejohn be able to access, download, and leak the tax returns of Trump and other high net worth individuals.

If I have to couch the case so far from my perspective in this forum's terminology. The motte is that "the leak was bad", and the bailey is "the consequences of the leak should be this". The laws are clear and the leaker was guilty and sentenced when it comes to his case. When it comes to the IRS case though, the process of the law was not carried out so it's all murky and easy to understand as being viewed as unjust by a certain part of the public, especially when the consequences are now being reported as:

  1. third party settlements of over a billion dollars
  2. a group of individuals are now "immune from IRS audits"

The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. Both shoveled out insane amounts of money

These shoveled money everywhere. Sure, woke leftists ended up getting some amount of it I'm sure. But Texas also got a crapton of money for being the model state in rolling out renewable energy.

If the state government instructs the agencies to devise "regulations" that siphon money away

I don't know of many, if any examples of this happening. What usually occurs is the regulations have a decent reason to exist but which probably fail a cost-benefit analysis on net, with the reasoning that the optimal number of people dying to environmental hazards is not necessarily zero. And then a lot of them get abused by NIMBYs grasping for any veto-points they can find.

Memecoin, by contrast, is piker shit that only hurts the people involved.

Trump used the memecoin to effectively sell pardons off to people.

And then a lot of them get abused by NIMBYs grasping for any veto-points they can find.

Was it here that someone mentioned that green projects run into some of the worst NIBMY obstructionism?

I wouldn't be surprised. The fact that Texas is lapping California when it comes to clean energy initiatives is a dire indictment of leftist governance at the state/local level.

The hard, reflexive Anti-Trump position tends to rely so much on “Tails you lose, Heads I win” that it barely registers to me anymore, I just assume when most people open their mouths to take these positions they’re engaging in it and I’m rarely proven wrong.

It’s a semi reliable anti-compass at this point; more or less consistently points in the opposite direction of the plain truth.

It's the opposite for me. I've never heard anything convincing from a right con about anything idological, only "X is terrible!", followed by "X didn't happen, you got mad at a fiction." followed as the moon succeeds the sun by "Well the fact that I was so easily fooled shows that X is terrible, even though it didn't happen"

Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.

Nancy Pelosi's net worth is $280 million, so if we boldly say that's all corrupt stock trades it's more like 1/6ish of the new slush fund.

mostly i think it's funny that the guy motivated by obama's mic drop is largely rerunning the obama playbook cranked up a notch.

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