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Popping filter bubbles and picking up the Tuna Cans.
None of these stories on their own really warrant a top level post but taken together I feel like they both illustrate a trend and serve as a coda to my January post on "Tuna Cans" and how the Trump administration might be able to more effectively deliver on it's campaign promise to combat Immigration.
Last week the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding a 2022 rule that prohibited US Customs and Immigration Services from considering an immigrant's use of Medicaid and other public benefits when deciding whether or not to renew their visa or grant them legal resident status. The usual suspects at NBC, CNN, the New York Times, Et Al are trotting out their usual tripe about "women and minorities hardest hit" but to me the most galling thing is that this rule existed in the first place, and that it wasn't quashed a year and a half ago. That said, while the best time to plant a tree (or repeal a bad law) is 20 years ago, doing it now is still something worthy of praise.
In the wake of Nick Shirley's expeditions to Minneapolis and LA, the Department of Health and Human Services has that announced that 199 million dollars a year allocated to the state of Minnesota and 860 million dollars a year allocated to the state of California has been frozen pending those states provide positive evidence that individuals and business originally slated to receive those funds actually exist and are not just a PO-box in a strip mall somewhere.
At the same time Vice President JD Vance and Interim Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced a "crack-down" on H1B visa fraud four days after Microsoft announced that it would be laying off 4,800 employees while simultaneously applying for permission to import over 2,000 foreign workers.
Meanwhile Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to quietly do his job, announcing that the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial divers licences and that nearly 200,000 drivers more could be effected by the reinstitution of English language pruriency requirements that had been relaxed by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx under Obama back in 2016. The American Trucking Association is naturally angry about this complaining that the constricting workforce coupled with proposed crack-downs on "chameleon carriers" and rulings like Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".
Again I reiterate my position that more often than not it isn't the big headline grabbing stories that have the greatest impact but rather the things that happen quietly behind the scenes and that is why I feel obliged to signal-boost these sorts of stories.
I support these things but what mechanism causes the administration not to do them immediately?
For instance, with the English language requirements for the trucking licenses, they were in power from 2017-2021 and could have done it then, and they could have done it last year too. Are they too busy? Do they not know about the regulations until someone brings it to their attention? Is it very difficult to change regulations like these and therefore they wait for an opportune time to do it?
Trump could have pardoned everyone in J6 on his way out of office, and not done it after banking on winning 2024 (of which there was no guarantee) and doing it after taking office again, after those defendants suffered much monetary and jail time punishments. There are so many things Trump could be doing to fulfill his promise of financial access (under the misnomer of fighting against "debanking"). Etc. I agree with the other commenter when I say it's just incompetence.
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It genuinely feels like incompetence. Not just on behalf of the administration but the entire right wing.
The conception on the right has been that the government does stuff that's bad, the private sector does stuff that's good, and the civilians are just honest spectators whose souls move at the mercy of the government and the whims of the free market, preferably also under the guidance of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.
The left wing, to use these general terms, has in the meantime tried to integrate all of these things in a single ideological package. The markets, the government, the public perception of reality. It's all constantly being synchronized. You get a single ideological block with its own moral narratives, ingroup/outgroup distinctions and everything else. Which turns into a complete worldview. Call it 'Cultural Marxism', call it 'woke', call it 'the post war consensus' or the liberal moral order. Whatever it is, whatever permutation you come across, it's unapologetic, ruthless and consistently self serving. It knows exactly who is friend and who is enemy. What is right, what is wrong.
There is no such force on the right. The closest we've gotten to synchronization is Musk buying twitter, and Musk and Trump being friends. But that alliance was fragile at best since there is no shared worldview between them. 'Free market good' isn't a worldview. 'Government spending bad' isn't one either. In fact it's at best quaint and at worst stupid when your actual ideological enemies are using the 'free market' to push their worldview. Or using the government to fund and protect their foot soldiers.
The right doesn't know friend from foe. It doesn't know what's right and wrong, good or bad. Right wing media figures sometimes brag that the only active and engaging political and philosophical discourse happening in modernity happens on the right. Claiming that the left has become too insular and self absorbed to afford meaningful discourse. And that might be true, but that's also why the left can win and the right seemingly only lose. And no, calling your activist groups 'feds' isn't a worldview either.
There's no racist dragnet trying to identity non-white scammers, because over half the right thinks racism is evil. So instead of getting a clear and concise picture on the ground from coherent right wing activists or media about all the ways the world is wrong according to a dogmatic right wing worldview, we have to rely on the perfect storm of aspergers and autism to incidentally uncover the racist reality of the Somalian scam economy. Meanwhile, the entire left mobilizes without effort to proclaim that incidental racism is racism nonetheless. And that everyone involved is an evil racist. Except the scammers, of course. Peace be upon them.
The right has no ethos. And despite the smugness from the right, it's a land of those the left kicked out.
Yeah this is why the right can only, cut taxes for the rich, or bomb the middle east. That's literally all they ever do. They are absolutely horrible at using state power and usually deeply unserious or unsystematic.
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