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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 drivers licences and that nearly 200,000 drivers more could be effected by the reinstitution of English language proficiency 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?
I would say all of the above, plus the fact that non-domiciled CDLs/chameleon carriers were much less of an issue in Trump's first term.
Like many things to do with immigration, it seems that non-domiciled CDL requirements were systematically not enforced by certain states post-2020, resulting in rapid growth of a previously obscure category of license (A non-domiciled CDL is a CDL issued to someone who doesn't live in the issuing state.). Illinois, for example, went from issuing 300 non-domiciled CDLs in the year 2020 to issuing 5,000 of these per year in 2024 and 2025, with non-domiciled licenses comprising 40% of all licenses issued in 2025.
Toss in the vibecession and a handful of viral fatal accidents involving non-domiciled CDL holders and you suddenly have enough people aware of the issue and angry about it to lobby for a crackdown.
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I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."
Edit: as if to reward me for making this poast, this just crossed my feed - tl;dr the Admin changed the definition of "harm" in the Endangered Species Act such that you're allowed to build things even if it might disturb some rare fruitbat or gecko.
I have been wondering: for all the drama going on with frontier AI models in the world of digital security, I have to think there are some interesting red-team/blue-team ways to apply those to laws and regulations. Some of the big lawfare shifts we've seen in the last decade or so ("did you know we could just have all the border crossers say the shibboleth asylum and we have to let them in indefinitely until we can give them a hearing?") seem to have come from novel readings or applications of existing rules. It'd be at least interesting (and I haven't tried) to prompt those same models for what corners of the tax code could be abused --- or in reverse, to provide feedback to Congress and regulatory rulemakers --- to promote less-direct outcomes. It's not hard to imagine "hey Claude, let's figure out the most pathological case to bring to trial to make SCOTUS rule my desired direction" actually working.
The problem is less figuring out the ideas to sue over and more building out the necessary infrastructure and legal precedent to get those ideas before the Court. Believe me, there are many, many lawyers already working around the clock to bring these issues before a historically receptive SCOTUS. The thing is, unless you're a state suing another state, you can't just take your case to SCOTUS. It's a multi-year slog of trials and appeals that you have to successfully complete at least 2-3 times (SCOTUS won't hear a case if there isn't a disagreement between at least two circuit courts of appeal) before you even have a shot of getting on their docket. And even then it's a moonshot, with only a tiny percentage of petitions making it to briefing and argument.
The legal activists have good ideas coming out of their ears, but bringing an issue from Zero to SCOTUS, even with the best lawyers in the world working on it, is a ten-year process involving millions of dollars and dozens of skilled professionals working in perfect sync. And those skilled professionals are already making use of AI at least as aggressively as anyone else in the legal field. Maybe there's still some low-hanging fruit that AI can help them more effectively target, some subtle new way of speaking directly to the concerns of five different justices at the same time, but for the most part the bottlenecks are funding and court capacity, not lack of clever strategems.
I think you're right that legal activists aren't really limited by ideas today. But as an example, how will the APA notice and comment regime survive AI-generated slop comments? My understanding is that a lot of it today ends up as boilerplate copy-and-paste letter campaigns: if every commenter writes a unique letter, review will presumably be more involved. Or actively using AI to generate as many novel arguments for/against a proposed rule as possible to exhaust the review process. I'm sure the government side will start using AI to review comments, but I wouldn't expect them to be ahead of the public on their processes.
Require that people who wish to submit a comment do it in person at any post office. The comment has to be recorded on-site with the government supplied equipment, as audio-video, audio only or typed in on a kiosk-mode computer. It wouldn't stop someone reading or retyping AI slop, but it'd slow it down considerably. It would also have the benefit of cutting down the activist spam by requiring a bigger time investment.
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There are guys in the various successors to DOGE working on, shall we say, more prosocial variations of this. The red-teaming is definitely going to happen in the legal field, but it's not going to work unless you have hard-nosed legal realists actually taking those arguments before a court (i.e. deciding which arguments will actually work and which courts will be friendly to them).
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Interesting to think about.
In some ways, the Left is very fast to react. There's a new cause or outrage of the day, and by the evening everyone knows it's the issue of the day; new ones can replace it whenever it's decided.
But there isn't really a central committee actually deciding what to do, and it's not some highly sophisticated ecosystem of policy or issue entrepreneurs performing decentralized decision making. Instead, it's a strongly centralized coordination mechanism, driven not by people but instead some messy combination of what ideological faction is ascendent and what plays best on social media. People on the ground level might come up with interesting ideas, but they've got to go through a host of different groups' veto points to even have a chance of taking off. E.g. this is why the Left has pretty much given up on having a meaningful platform on any AI policy besides AI bad performativity: a platform requires meaningfully engaging with it and its implications, and, since it will gore all oxes, engagement with it will run into endless vetos. So, most you get are shallow responses of boo AI because of water usage or shredding books or whatever.
The Right, on the other hand, is a madhouse of maniacs of different stripes: there is no central coordinating mechanism, and the only thing most people on it have in common with each other is a hatred of the Left. That means there's no real shared policy plan coming from on high, but it also makes for a much more open space for people to contribute ideas. A smart person on a Left worries about alienating X, Y, and Z before they even start thinking how to approach a social or economic issue; but, on the Right, there is no prescribed golden path, and so individuals can be genuine policy entrepreneurs.
(Musing here on a weakly held idea, but maybe there's something there.)
The way I characterize it is that the "madhouse of maniacs" on right all agree that the left is trying to eat the goose that lays the golden eggs and must be stopped. Sometimes they think the left is trying to do this out of malice, but mostly they think it's just sheer foolishness.
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Every time I meet an intelligent person who cares deeply about a particular policy area, I tell them the same thing: go to the right and become their guy. The left (and the GOPe/Tories/etc.) are just not interested - $bad_policy is that way for a reason and many people's jobs depend on it staying that way - but the populist right probably has no idea what they want in $policy_area, and if you can come in, be the man with a plan on $policy_area, and be a team player otherwise, you have a chance utterly unprecedented in living memory to make a change actually happen.
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This is kind of what I was getting at with "the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but doing it now is still something worthy of praise" and I'm suddenly wondering if you and I might not be in some of the same group chats.
I wonder how many Mottizens secretly know each other in real life but will never make the connection because none of us are stupid enough to tell our coworkers about the Motte. I'm growing increasingly convinced that I've shared office space or attended happy hours with at least a couple of you.
Wearing a t-shirt that reads “it’s okay to be white,” “Islam is right about women,” or “despite being 13% of the population…” to my next company happy hour to see if any Mottizens approach me. What could go wrong?
No, wear a t-shirt saying 'there is a leviathan shaped hole in the hock'.
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If you see me at Butterworth's wearing the secret Mottizen symbol, tap me on the shoulder and I'll get you a drink.
The Pug and Trusty's are more my scene, or at least were when I was spending more time in DC. ;-)
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News bandwidth. If Trump did all of these things on day one there's only a limited amount of excitement/liberal tears that it could be milked for. Then you'd spend 3.9 years wondering what those lazy oafs are doing or think the threat is gone and you go longer need radical response.
Dripping it out over four years shows that the enemy is active and that they are fighting the fight.
Don’t underestimate the power of institutional inertia. People get upset when the President can’t do things because he isn’t acting like a monarch, but will quickly decry him as a fascist with kingly aspirations whenever policy diverges from voter preference.
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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.
Let’s be frank, both sides these days only play around the edges. How many people out there can you think of that are there at the fore, trying to come with whole new systems of thought and reimagining the entire political landscape for the 21st century?
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