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Can we just deport him? And no I am not talking about a Somalian, but Alexander Ovechkin. He just appeared in a Russian political ad. When asked why he did that he replied, “I’m Russian, I support my country”. But here’s the thing the west and to a lesser extent the US is at war with Russia. Undeclared and without ground troops, but we are contributing financing, seized Russian assets, and have and probably still provide intelligence to the Ukrainian side. I think supporting a foreign government at war with America is perfectly fine grounds to deport someone.
The counter argument and I think a reasonable opinion for letting him stay is that cultural exchange makes peace easier. So there are solid grounds for letting him stay. I probably take the opinion that letting him play hockey in the US is better for US foreign policy than deportation.
From a cultural war perspective I would love Trump to deport him and make the lefties who “support Ukraine” make arguments for why Ovechkin in ICE shackles is a bad thing. Meh “free speech”. I did the AI thing and it sounds like he doesn’t have US citizenship but if he did he would make a perfect test case for denaturalization. Declaring yourself to have loyalties to a foreign government at war with the US seems absolutely perfect for denaturalization.
Also, nice culture war on Trump is a Russian agent by deporting a Russian. And it fits with the meme “we need them for the sports ball team”.
He’s just a perfect test case for deportation since his politics are against the US left instead of their Hamas adjacent friends who a broad swath of the left supports.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it assumes progressives are obligated to acknowledge every inconvenient truth and fairly integrate it into a coherent system of beliefs about Trump or conservatives in general. In reality, the opposite is true: they pick a preferred narrative, and then cherrypick facts to support it, while ignoring the facts that don't.
So if Trump did deport a Putin-supporter, then the left would not begrudgingly acknowledge that Trump isn't as much of a Putin booster as they claimed he was. They'll first try to spin it in a different way to make Trump look bad (“Trump doesn't just hate brown people, he hates free speech too!”, “Trump deports star athlete over political speech!” or as a last resort “experts say Ovechkin deportation designed to distract from Trump's own Putin connections”) and if they feel like they can't spin the event to fit their narrative convincingly, they'll just bury the story, and it won't be mentioned at all the next time Trump deports a Mexican felon.
This does sound like most progressives to me. It also sounds like most everyone else to me. Do you think progressives are unique in this?
I might be persuaded that elite progressives are more that way than elite conservatives but I'm not sure.
Sure, most people operate this way, with the possible exception of the world's most principled rationalists (read: annoying nerds that have no influence on public debate whatsoever). But saying only that suggests a false balance between the two sides of the political spectrum.
The reality is that progressives control public debate. They control the overwhelming majority of institutions, from news organizations, to multinational corporations, to NGOs, to academia, to the judicial system (up to the Supreme Court perhaps), to websites like Wikipedia and reddit. They gatekeep what news makes it to the front page and stays there to be talked about by normies. They form an implicit coalition to filter out facts that are inconvenient to the progressives, but not to conservatives.
In practical terms that means conservative politicians like Trump have very little incentive to harm people that oppose the goals of the progressive coalition (as Ovechkin seems to do by supporting Russia over Ukraine), even when those actions would theoretically reflect well on Trump, because the progressive coalition will ensure Trump never receives any credit for it.
Yes, thanks, that's the sort of nuance I was hoping someone would delineate.
A lot of the time when I push back here it's not because I disagree but because I want to see the finer structures of someone's thought, to compare notes.
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Uniquely blatant. Most people do that to some degree or other, but most people also feel some discomfort when they do it. There's an unease, a vague awareness that they're doing something wrong, that they're actually losing. To the extent that I think I'm pretty good about that sort of thing, it's because that feeling of unease hits hard, and makes me feel nervous and paranoid, like I've forgotten a project due tomorrow. I suspect something similar affects many of the people who end up on The Motte.
A lot of progressives/leftists seem to just not give a fuck. I think it's partially downstream from the Primacy of Consciousness that fills so much leftist/progressive epistemology. What is reality anyway, man? Reality is in the eye of the beholder, it's all in your head and words anyway, so why not reject your words and assert my own? The more charitable angle is a kind of faith in institutions. Sure, I might not have an answer to your facts, but some professor somewhere does, for sure, and they'll prove me right.
I felt this in the recent kerfuffle over Trump, where Democrats are pretending to believe that Trump unironically asked Iran to blow up San Diego and Los Angeles.
There's no possible logical way to come to this conclusion but it's the approved message.
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