>I’m not entirely sure what game the administration is even playing with this. My best guess, though, is that Trump wants to throw his anti-Communist Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American supporters a bone.<
There's probably some of that. But these guys are really attracted to and fascinated by violence like moths to a flame, and they're obsessed with projecting macho toughness 24/7. Seriously. Hegseth won't shut up about how he's rescuing the warrior ethos from the clutches of woke leftists (in reality he's likely reducing the effectiveness of the military via both naked politicization, and by narrowing the Pentagon's potential talent pool). Anyway, Venezuela is low-hanging fruit in terms of being able to throw our weight around and produce news footage of US munitions blowing shit up and killing people. Same with troops on the streets. Same with changing DOD to Department of War (did you know the Nazis did that, too, in 1935?). Ditto their threats to conquer Greenland and Canada.
One of the most ghoulish moments of this administration was when JD Vance chuckled and said he wouldn’t want to be a fisherman off the coast of Venezuela right now
Coincidentally, I was reading an old (January 2025) Christian Science Monitor in my office cafeteria this week. There was an article about tracing fentanyl into the US - so not cocaine, but a big problem in the US. The article said that little is coming to the US by ship. The Coast Guard has had to revive people with Narcan more often than they have seized fentanyl or the chemicals needed to make fentanyl. It is mainly being driven over our southern land border, and the vast majority of people hauling it are American citizens.
The article also said that one of the most effective organizations to detect and intercept trafficking is the IRS's Criminal Investigation unit because of their expertise in following things like money apps and cryptocurrency. But I don't think the Administration is funneling money that way.
That and Stephen Miller frothing at the mouth about “you are nothing! You have nothing!!!” at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service the top two moments in the category “Trump administration officials doing their best to sound like cartoon villains”
I don't recall hearing that he was bullied. People did hate him, though (for obvious reasons). They'd even give him a platform to act like a jackass, which he used.
It was announced yesterday that Trump has an “annual” check up on Friday at Walter Reed and then is off to the Middle East. Lot to unpack here but the big thing to note is that Trump had a “routine” check up already this year.
I don’t want to go down the “is Trump dying” rabbit hole. But I really don’t think it’s too hard to see that he’s physically and mentally deteriorating. You don’t have to be a conspiracist you can just note that men around his age can really start declining and often fast. Like we literally just saw this with the last President.
Point being, while the “invade Canada and Greenland” and “gin up fake prosecution” against Comey are likely his doing, I think we need to see anything that’s actually policy related as him being mostly checked out on (tariffs being the exception as it’s clearly his way of getting bribes and he has this weird obsession going back 40 years).
Upshot? Think we underestimate the extent all this anti immigration stuff is Stephen Miller. And if your read anything he has said or written since basically the age of 16 you know he is straight up true believer white nationalist bigot. Not, circa 2020 “you didn’t know this word an Oberlin professor just made up, you’re racist” but like White Citizens Council would have welcomed him with open arms in the 50s and 60s if it wasn’t for the fact he’s Jewish.
When you realize most anything policy related, Trump is likely even more checked out on than 2016-2020, makes sense that most of the big immigration calls are being made by the actual Gollum figure who Trump has as his right hand man.
I agree with the last point. Miller and Vought are basically co-presidents right now, with Miller making policy on immigration, domestic troop deployments, and other big showy issues while Vought is in charge of government nuts and bolts. Miller is in some ways worse than a "normal" white nationalist in that a "normal" white nationalist is primarily motivated by his belief that racism is good and right, while Miller is more motivated by his awareness that racism is wrong and evil, which to him is good because he has an affirmative and conscious desire to inflict evil on others.
I think the existence of Stephen Miller should forever cause us to doubt the popular liberal-left idea that oppressed or formerly oppressed peoples are inherently good.
My guess is he's just a sociopath. Sociopathy pops up in every demographic. It just expresses itself in different ways depending on the host's underlying background, talents, and interests. In this case it happened to show up in a guy who was pretty smart and interested in politics. So instead of becoming a run-of-the-mill violent criminal or a fraudster or even a serial killer, he became this.
What is going on in his head is ugly vicious hate. He obsessed with hate. Likely brought on by living as middle class for a few years. The only positive thing about hate is that is so harmful to the health and longevity of the one doing the hating.
>>Point being, while the “invade Canada and Greenland” and “gin up fake prosecution” against Comey are likely his doing, I think we need to see anything that’s actually policy related as him being mostly checked out on<<
I really don't know what to think about this question. The one area of Trumpology in which I tend to differ from Yglesias is: he seems to hold Trump's powers of reasoning and overall administrative command in higher regard than I do. I really doubt how much Trump is driving the minutiae of administration policy. In my mental picture of Donald Trump, I see a man as POTUS who:
(1) is highly motivated by: protecting himself from harm by the law or opposition.
(2) is highly desirous of exacting revenge for anything and everything (from real threats like attempted prosecutions, to bullshit like the jokes of comedians).
(3) is highly motivated by riches.
(4) is a bully and liar (boy is he a liar!).
(5) valorizes a mythological era of American greatness (say, the 1950s) when the US didn't buy so much junk from foreigners, and was a lot whiter.
(6) REALLY thinks tariffs are a cure all, and the sure-fire way to get us back to 1955's conditions.
(7) thinks getting injections of cash into the US Treasury by non-traditional means (pay to play, export licenses, punitive tariffs etc) somehow is an economic win for the US economy as a whole.
(8) is a white ethnonationalist who—egged on by the vastly more intellectualized Stephen Miller—wants a lot less immigration.
(9) doesn't possess a scintilla of respect or admiration for the country's deep democratic ideals.
(10) is cynical to the point of blind stupidity.
MInd you, a lot of the above comports nicely with the goals of revolutionaries like Vaught, Miller, Vance, Bannon and so on. But a lot of the policy specifics (and the long term goals those specifics are designed to achieve) are the work of the latter. Not the president himself. I get the vibe that he's mostly a useful idiot for the MAGA Maoists: I doubt Trump has some kind of overarching, grand vision for where he wants to take the country. I doubt he wants to take the country anywhere. He simply wants to satisfy his own wants, needs, obsessions and desires. And the Presidency of the United States of America just happens to be the best vehicle to accomplish this.
The one true talent Trump has had for his entire life is knowing how to read a crowd. The crowd could be tabloid reporters in the 80s, casino investors in the late 80s, WWE crowds in the late 90s or GOP voters from 2011 to now.
Everything else? I guess you could call pure shamelessness in his lying a "talent". Think a big reason other politicians can't get away with as much as he can is even the slimiest of politicians usually have some scintilla of shame when it comes to obviously blatant lies.
I'm with you that Matt ascribes a level of forward long term thinking and strategic foresight to Trump that is just not there based on everything we know about him.
One of my "hot takes" for about 10 years is that Trump is actually an electoral loser. I feel pretty sure in 2016 a Marco Rubio wins the popular vote by say 2-3%. Look at the margin of victory for all "out" parties in 2024. Seems very clearly inflation was the driver across the world for incumbent parties losing elections and yet he eeks out a popular vote victory (I understand that there was some pretty big shifts in voting patterns among Latino voters for example, but you read takes from the last year (including from Matt), you'd think DJT had an 1984 style landslide).
No one on our side wants to say it because again it suggests Dems don't need to do anything again to win elections or could result in way too much complacency on our side of things, but Trump really is the luckiest human being of our lifetimes (including in politics) and I don't think it's wrong to see how much of his "success" is blind luck including by accident finding the most electorally efficient voting coalition possible.
I tend to think that Trump made a deal with Satan himself a long long time ago, and he's getting in every last bit of shenanigans he can get away with until he checks out - unless the deal was for unnatural long life - then we're cooked!
Add the overwhelming desire for a Nobel prize: I think that's why he's going to the Middle East. Whether he "knows what he's going to die of" or not, anyone in our age bracket thinks about death. A Nobel would make the EOL stage a lot more bearable, maybe.
So my question is, do Nobel Peace prize winners also have to exhibit good character or general virtue in addition to some accomplishment that further peace? This is probably a question about history, since Nobel committees' deliberations are secret.
A guy I play flag football with compared me to Stephen Miller because I'm both bald and Jewish (although I'm not 4"10). Like, thanks, bro - for comparing me to the modern day Joseph Goebbels.
There was a tweet I saw today along the lines of, "Crazy that Trump is both the primary cause of, and maybe the last thing preventing, this country's decline into fascism"
Biden's aging seemed pretty linear to me. Why everybody suddenly decided to remember 2020 Biden as being sharp as a tack I'll never understand. We knew he was old as hell when we elected him, and he already misspoke constantly even relative to VP Biden (not because of dementia, but it was because of cognitive slowdown combined with his existing speech issues.)
This. “Is it fascism?” is a tiresomely explosive Discourse-buster, so let’s set that aside. But there’s undeniably a *parallel* in the fascination with violence as a cleansing and modernizing force.
I'd say, at this point, the U.S. is being governed under a system of soft authoritarianism. Whether that turns into *hard* authoritarianism depends, in my view, on whether free and fair elections still take place. I'd guess we're still going to have free and fair elections, but I'm not as confident as I was six months ago. And, as Matt suggests, there's also the possibility of open defiance of the Supreme Court. Who knows what our judiciary will look like by the spring of 2029, even if a Democrat becomes president?
So another possibility is that we avoid a full-blown transition to something like mid-20th-century Spain, but the structural damage created by Trumpism takes a couple of decades or more to unwind—he effectively haunts us from the grave via ironclad control of the judiciary. Needless to say, a Democratic comeback in 2028 won’t mean all that much if MAGA still controls the Senate; nor does such a comeback mean the GOP itself won’t recapture the White House in 2032.
Perhaps we’ve entered a period of lurching back and forth between MAGA lunacy and bland normie liberalism. But if that’s the case, the latter—courtesy of its feckless nature—won’t be able to repair the accumulated rot, and the United States will surrender its role as preeminent global power. America has enormous reserves of inherent strength, but those reserves aren’t infinite or inexhaustible.
The Supreme Court would rather give up some of its power rather than risk open defiance. Which makes the birthright citizenship case a really scary moment for the rule of law. You couldn’t ask for a plainer text in the 14th amendment, but if they just say that, they tempt Trump to ignore them.
I have a very dim view of SCOTUS, and fully agree with you they will roll over rather than risk defiance. I think birthright citizenship might be the one place the court stands up to Trump, or more accurately finds mildly against him.
Birthright citizenship, and changes to it, are abstract concepts, not concrete actions. Trump wouldn't actually have to stop doing something he wants to or, or start doing something he doesn't. His reaction wouldn't be anything like what it would be if they told him he couldn't send the Guard t Chicago, couldn't fire workers, couldn't withhold funds, etc. If anything it might be the case where everyone points and says see, the Court still works, and of course he doesn't defy them.
I've gotten a fair bit of pushback when, like you, I've argued the Court will rollover rather than risk defiance. My question for those folks now is where besides citizenship do you think SCOTUS will hold some sort of line? Lower courts with all sorts of appointees have issued stop orders only to be overturned by SCOTUS. That means either all these other previously learned jurists have suddenly lost the ability to apply facts and precedent, or something very different is happening with SCOTUS.
Presidents up until now have not believed they had the legal ability to do what Trump is doing. So were they all mistaken before, or is SCOTUS treating Trump differently? What's the important case you think he'll lose that shows the Court still believes it's Supreme?
>My question for those folks now is where besides citizenship do you think SCOTUS will hold some sort of line?<
What I HOPE for is that they'll hold the line on (1) tariffs and (2) birthright citizenship, but I have no idea if they'll do either, and I'm inclined to think the chances are slim they'll buck the White House on #1 (they might punt by saying: Congress can change the law anytime it likes).
I agree this case is scary, and I agree the plain text is clear to reasonable people (though the right has a number of fancy lawyers who will claim otherwise). I've been assured that birthright citizenship won't be overturned, not even by this particular SCOTUS. But one thing that gives me pause is my perception that the one dynamic that makes a Trump-friendly decision more likely is the impact on the political fortunes of the Republican Party. That's in part why I believe Roberts brokered the ACA-saving decision in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012): he calculated striking down Obamacare would hurt the GOP in that year's election.
Anyway, it's arguable that ending birthright citizenship will hurt Democrats (in terms of voter demographics) more than Republicans, so...
The court of supreme catholic supporters of birth, pedophiles, theft from the living, bought and paid for by rich (three of the women members excepted), little to no world experience, trampling on democracy to pursue their demented vision of religion and freedom.
I like to think that if they were going to defy SCOTUS on the birthright decision, they would have already started to defy the lower courts that have kept the executive order on ice. But they haven’t. In fact I don’t think they’ve even sought an emergency stay through the shadow docket.
Knock on wood, but everything about the government’s posture in this case suggests that they don’t expect to win on the merits. They got universal injunctions trimmed a bit, that’s enough.
Eh, obviously agree on the first point (which is why, from what I've heard, DoD is still being used in communications to Congress). I think it's really too cute by half though to try and pretend that the Secretary of Defense loses his positional authority (granted to him by the Senate) just because he's decided to give himself a nickname. Would sending a memo with no letterhead at all and just his signature make it invalid? I think you'd have a hard time convincing anyone of that but maybe this is explicitly outlined in law somewhere that I'm not aware of.
But if he directs the “Department of War” to do some action without clarifying DOD is equivalent in the message then the legal authority becomes contestable because he is acting not as the Secretary of Defense but the Secretary of War title assigned by executive fiat.
Official messaging has been very clear that his title as "Secretary of War" is an alternative title to Secretary of Defense, even if all the public bluster has been that they've changed the name.
Let them play soldier and hope we survive to once again have sane people on the court, in congress and a president that does not stink in body and thought.
Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China is chuckling under their breath as they watch us spend our military lust on Central America as they plan their eventual Pearl Harbor Moment for us in the Pacific.
The really dark interpretation is "get military personnel used to killing innocent but unsympathetic people [foreigners who can be semi-plausibly accused of being terrorist drug smugglers] as a prelude to getting them to kill American citizens, such as protesters, who oppose the Trump regime."
I very much hope this isn't the case. I remember, before the election, Milan posted "my friend is in the Army and he's a Trump supporter, but he told me he'd resign if he were ever ordered to fire on his fellow citizens" and I hope this friend is representative (the "would resign rather than shoot Americans" part).
This is a good point, and frightening. Where would we be if not for Trump's obsession with winning the Nobel peace prize? (Maybe at war with Iran already)
I just want to be able to do my job in peace. No economically illiterate tariffs that keep fucking with prices and item availability (the glut of summer-season shit we still have sitting around heading into fall, bought up in advance due to forward-looking planning on the non-walked-back rates...you don't wanna know). No pretextual deportations of our veteran truck drivers (sure is totally coincidental how pre-2025, they were 90% latino, and now are 100% Sikhs). No crankish crackdown on mRNA respiratory vaccines (the waves of sickness will continue until morale improves + god I'm sick of masks). No transforming the entire US economy into a leveraged bet on AI (my company 401k can't diversify away from that gamble).
It's just so damn tiring and none of us get paid enough to deal with this crap. Like, yeah, democracy's nice and all, I feel sad in some abstract sense for the suffering minorities, my pride as an American is in sorry shape. But at the end of the day, once one cuts through all the high-minded principles of heaven and earth in Horatio Kain's philosophy *sunglasses*, it's these quotidian concerns that motivate me most. Why anyone would want to throw away the comfort of normal ordinary times to LARP as a revolutionary (of one persuasion or another) is beyond me.
My grandma, who lives in Poland, won't be able to send packages to me and my son at all, because Polish post office stopped all shipments to the US in retaliation for Trump getting rid of the de minimis exemption.
It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but she so enjoyed sending little treats to myself and her great-grandson, and now she won't be able to do it anymore. Just another example of Trump screwing things up for regular people.
Come for the assault on democracy. Stay for the policy awfulness. I'm honestly not sure which I find worse. I know the high-minded response is "democracy" but for me it comes down to the question of which is more repairable. Like, South Korea was a dictatorship for quite some time. Very bad! But the people running that country delivered high quality governance in a lot of respects. So there was little damage to repair once democracy was restored. The country was in good shape. Or imagine if Singapore were to fully democratize. Nobody would be saying the new democratic government has to undo years of mismanagement.
We're on path to be a lot more like Mexico, The Philippines or Argentina in terms of policy mismanagement.
People who chose the bowl of excrement over the bowl of plain oatmeal (because the oatmeal was too bland and woke) now realize that excrement is in fact bad for you? Who could have foreseen this!
Even if I hated politics in the Bush years, I never actually felt exhausted by it once the initial shock of 9/11 and the Iraq War's start faded over time. I even dated a Republican for the majority of that time. And that was still not a healthy time for our politics.
Unlike Bush's GWOT which you could escape if you lived in America and didn't listen to Fox News, live in Iraq, or fly on an airplane, there's no way to get away from Trump. Partly that's about technology but mostly it's about his unwillingness to let even the smallest opportunity for chaos get away from him. I mean look at all the parks he's shut down. Even the weather service is being f*cked.
When I was a young adult 40 yrs ago the boring machinery of supply chains (aka “making things work”) was far closer to the surface in every daily transaction. Making modern JIT supply chains and online purchases work so well today (most of the time) means hiding incredibly complex workings so no ordinary person even realizes they’re there, or how fragile they are. What replaces that day-to-day visibility people used to have? Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t know how anything works.
Interesting comment. It reminds me of the famous quote from Trotsky: “You may not care about the dialectic, but the dialectic cares about you.” Sometimes one can’t avoid political developments, even if one wants to. I don’t mean yearning for revolution or vengeance or cleansing. Sometimes the war comes, whether one wants it or not. The US as a collective had a chance to avoid this, and it did not make that choice. The second election of Trump has turned out to mean that things will not be ok.
LARPing as a revolutionary is much more fun than supply chain management. Many of us find it hard to care that passionately about quotidian things when surviving is so easy.
When revolutionary politics move from position taking to street violence, that calculation changes fast.
American cities will price more stable than Paris during the revolution because few are hungry or cold.
This may sound surprising, but employee hourly rates are revenue, not profit. Yes, I make more now than I did during 2020, when locust swarms would come in daily to buy everything that wasn't nailed down. Yes, I make *a lot* more now than I did during 2019, when things all told were pretty chill and life was normal-ish. (So strange to think of Trump 1.0 as a series of non-barking dogs, in hindsight. Much more a farce than a tragedy.) But these times that we live in remind me of back in the day when I was juggling three jobs seven days a week. You can bet the dollars were rolling in! So much of those paychecks went towards higher "maintenance" costs though...it became too much of a Red Queen's Race. The key difference is that it was voluntary; once I got the opportunity to go full time with my current employer, I was quite happy to drop the other two jobs, and the resulting pay cut was significantly less than a naive on-paper calculation would assume. Nevermind the quality of life improvement. My god, shaving three hours off my regular commute...
Now it's not voluntary, and I can't get away from these external developments far outside my control. I already wrote how it fucks over grocery. Go back to home nursing in a Section 8 complex? Yeah, after covid + crime spike, that's not gonna happen. Go back to academic grant-writing? Uh, yeah, bad news on that funding front! Dust off that programming certificate? Outdated, and AI eats junior devs' lunch anyway. All of these jobs pay more now than six years ago, relatively a ton more for retail...and all of them are so, so much harder too. Maybe for the right sort of scrappy upstart hotshot, the higher pay pencils out as a worthy compensation for The New Normal. For this crusty veteran of a high-turnover chaotic store who's really starting to feel her age...if pay is up 30% but each workday is 75% more work than before, then is that really enough to be worth it? I just don't know, man.
It’s sad and frustrating to see how few people care about Trump’s authoritarianism, and the degree to which we seem to be going through an inverse 2020 where even the most insane ideas are embraced by a lot of people without the pushback you’d expect given the ideas in question are harmful AND stupid. (Which is something I also found frustrating in 2020, just with different ideas). It is also disorienting to see the degree to which “normal” people are embracing these ideas. Instagram lets you see what content your friends like. In the last week I’ve seen a smart, affable, educated guy liking Tucker Carlson’s new 9/11 conspiracy content. I saw an old college friend liking a pro-Nazi post (and it was pro-Nazi; there was no ambiguity. I reported it but apparently it no longer violates any Meta guidelines).
It’s like there is a weird sense of paralysis where since everyone is online and comfortable we’re in a “Wall-e” type situation where everyone is generally willing to still around throwing stones on the internet. Even in Trump’s case, while what he’s doing is bad he’s just still just sending the troops to go to cities to walk around; he’s not murdering anyway, and he seems to want Comey to have to go through a bunch of legal nuisances but he’s not throwing him out a window or anything. Even Democrats, while angry, aren’t mad or scared enough to try to make common cause with people who don’t agree with them on every issue.
I’m not sure how long this center can hold. At some point, unless we get much better political figures, these troops are going to stop just standing around and we will have a full blown all out crisis. But even if a modern day George Washington appeared I doubt he’d get much traction in a society where a (small, I know, but growing) percentage of the country now admires Hitler.
A recession/stock market bubble popping might just wake some folks up. The underlying economic nuts and bolts are weakening, we have an enormous debt sucking away productivity increase, and the global anxiety barometer, gold, is now gliding past $4,000. Trump can break out the printing press to assuage people but we're near the magic debt/GDP ratio where that stops working.
I don't think you're wrong, but it's concerning that apparently a critical mass of Americans are fine with blatant corruption, authoritarianism, etc as long as it is associated with a good economy. Especially since while we might (or might not) be heading into a recession now, at some point the economy will be good again and whoever is the lucky party in charge then will very likely use that as a mandate to do whatever they want.
"we have an enormous debt sucking away productivity increase"
Yeah, but the problem is neither party (nor the voters) actually want to do anything about that. Because it's going to require cuts to entitlements and higher taxes (and not just on the rich)
“I saw an old college friend liking a pro-Nazi post (and it was pro-Nazi; there was no ambiguity. I reported it but apparently it no longer violates any Meta guidelines).
I’m not sure how long this center can hold.”
You’re not the center. You are a radical who wants to abridge the free speech of others.
True, the problem is not the existence of Nazi content, it’s that Republican politicians are constantly injecting Nazi content straight into their eyeballs on Twitter
I think the blueprint needs to be to follow how Muriel Bowser and the DC government handled the situation. The federal government really does have much more of an on the books mandate in the district yet everyone kept their heads cool, welcomed the "help" in theory, and held the line on a few things like replacing the chief of police, until the situation de-escalated into a boring and uninteresting farce. The worst thing you can do in this situation is force a battle you can't win.
Governor Pritzker could end the justification for sending in ARNG soldiers if he had the Illinois State Police go into Chicago and arrest anyone interfering with lawful ICE operations. He hasn’t done that, and likely won’t, because of some combination of wanting to protect illegal aliens from the law and because he believes prolonging his pissing contest with the president will help him politically.
I think one can have deep issues with ICE's conduct in Chicago without thinking the mission of arresting undocumented immigrants is per se illegitimate. It was only a few days ago they did an overnight raid of an apartment building where they broke into the homes of citizens, left them handcuffed outside for hours, pointing guns in the faces of children, etc.
I don't disagree with your point about the politics being awkward, but your comment is very close to saying that ICE is acting legitimately. It is not acting legitimately. Even if you have literally 0 concern whatsoever for undocumented people, the way that our citizens are being treated by these thugs is an affront to their dignity.
This is more or less where I am. People illegally in the US should be deported; that's pretty much just base level functionality for a nation-state. But I'm not sure that's actually the goal of ICE at this point. So much of what we're seeing seems to be immigration enforcement as a pretext for various sloppy displays of force: ICE driving around pointing pepperball guns at people, masked officers marching around, seeming random detentions.
It's totally reasonable to focus on border enforcement and deporting criminals rather than looking for arbitrary law abiding people to deport from the interior. That's an acceptable "base level functionality for a nation state".
Perhaps, but Pritzger has not so far done "force" as much as Chicago's existing policy of "If you want to do federal law enforcement, you're going to do it yourself." You can definitely argue that he should encourage local cops to help ICE, but not doing so is a legal and political response. Separately, I think it's reasonable to argue that any give would be taken as an invitation to do more, as it has proven to be for universities, businesses, and anyone else who plays nice with the administration on its overreaches.
Yea in every city where it has happened it has been a stunt designed to try to provoke as many left of center people or politicians as possible to take the side of (i) people in the country illegally or (ii) to a lesser degree criminal or severely anti social people, over the side of order and law enforcement. It is a fight that we will never win and the only way to get Trump to back down is to refuse to have it, and definitely not to give him the spectacle he so deeply desires.
I prefer to pretend that episodes IV, V, and VI are the only ones that exist. And the Star Wars Holiday Special. Those all existed in a universe where the Gungan had been genocided, and no one mentions them in polite company.
Being in Chicago, it is hard to say what exactly is “lawful” when heavily armed and masked thugs (and I mean that in the true sense of the word) roll through the city in unmarked minivans just picking decent, everyday people off the street with no warrant and no explanation.
If they were actually getting real criminals, you know we would hear about it. It’s the tamale lady, the car wash employees, the line cooks that are getting dragged into minivans. And any decent human being, used to living in a first world country with rights, is rightly disgusted that these masked, anonymous thugs in unmarked rental vehicles are kidnapping people in broad daylight.
But honking, yelling and recording leads to tear gas thrown into a dense neighborhood right next to an elementary school in session.
So really, what is lawful right now?
I sympathize with this post as I did not join the march downtown yesterday fearing it would be the same tone deaf leftist bullshit. And sure enough, media pictures show signs of Palatine and LGBTQIA+. So I don’t know what to do either and agree it has to be peaceful and respectful. But it’s only a matter of time until some ICE thug gets shot. It’s what they want and eventually they’ll get it.
What’s the issue with the video? You think it’s AI? Are ice agents not all masked, dressed like they’re in falujah, and rolling around neighborhoods in minivans. As you can see they have their own sycophantic fuck boys recording everything. They’re not hiding from it.
If dems were able to respond to Trump strategically and in a way that didn't split voters 60/40 with them on the 40 side, Trump wouldn't be president now. Dems are beholden to their base, and the base wants a fight, even if they will lose. Probably especially if they will lose.
Are there any lawful ICE actions happening at the moment? Is it lawful for domestic law enforcement to be unidentified? Was it lawful to raid that apartment building without any warrants?
(These are real questions, I don't know the answers.)
I read that if they’re going after someone who has an order of removal, then no warrant is necessary. I am not aware of a legal prohibition on face coverings. Are you?
I think the appropriate response is for the city to keep doing what it's doing (which is to say nothing outside of court) while reps from the Chicago theatre scene follow National Guard troops around singing "Springtime for Hitler," and I will keep thinking that until it happens.
I worry / think about two things: 1) Is the Democratic brand so inherently tarnished that it can’t actually win, even if magically perfect candidates appeared for each race? 2) what we know about countries that have turned back from authoritarianism is that the movements that do that successfully usually center around a new or ‘third’ angle - meaning they do not follow the contours of the current left/right debates. (For example by focusing on law and order that includes a strong anti-corruption message). What does that tactic look like in modern America and who is working to bring that about?
I also worry about this. MY is one of the few pundits with a big-ish platform I see who really seems to get just how bad the brand is. Even as Trump's support erodes on this or that, including key issues like immigration, support for Democrats is even lower. It's still unclear to me nearly a year out from Trump's re-election that the party leadership is actually grappling with it. The current crop of people in charge of the Democrats may never figure it out and yet they also appear to be unwilling to fire themselves.
Ezra Klein seems to get it too, and has an even larger platform. But he also has a much gentler touch, so I'm not sure how much he's doing to wake people up to the crisis.
very much agreed. They just keep yelling Trump is bad, without actually working to get the votes of people like me who agree Trump is bad, but just don't trust the Dems on basically anything.
Abundance could be one such angle. It needs to be coupled with moderation on immigration, law and order, and trans issues however - without such moderation all else is lost.
If I were running as a Democrat I’d simply say Joe Biden was wrong on immigration. We need to protect our borders. But we don’t need a bunch of masked men running around our streets with badges acting like they are Dirty Harry. Joe Biden is a failed President and running against his failures is fair. Democrats need to do it. Trump called out Republicans and it worked.
That is also compatible with moderating on immigration. What's not compatible is shrugging your shoulders when a million people flood across the border with dubious asylum claims and then get housed at taxpayer expense until their cases are heard. The groups have demanded Democrats hold out for a comprehensive immigration bill, but there are probably bipartisan solutions to a better immigration system, even without amnesty for DREAMers.
1. Like it or not, there is a political limit to immigration, thus we should rebalance the allocation of visas within that limit more towards highly skilled workers to increase the benefit of immigration to the US economy/treasury and reduce the strain on local/state government resources. That doesn't mean we have zero low-skill immigration, just that it isn't the near-entirety of the inflow as it is today.
2. Higher skilled immigration will likely allow for more immigration, as it's more popular, which is a good thing if you want abundance. For this to work the immigrants have to have the same employment rights as Americans though, they can't be indentured servants like H1B which creates many of the same backlash dynamics as low-skill illegal immigration does.
The conventional thing about how immigrants do jobs that Americans "won't" never seemed that persuasive to me. Of course, there's no job Americans won't do; at most they'd want more money to do it. Can we quantify that?
Rough model: 14 million illegal immigrants. Say 70% are able to work. Say 90% of them are going to be doing low-skill blue collar jobs. The "fair" all-in average wage of a low-skill blue collar job is, say, $45k. Say an illegal immigrant will do a job for 40% less than "fair", and a legal immigrant will for 20% less.
So the savings to US employers from having an illegal workforce is... 14M*70%*90% * $45k * 40% = $159 billion. (Halve that if you legalize everyone).
That's not nothing, but it's just over 0.5% of US GDP.
Yes, the concentration is going to vary a ton across industries, so if every illegal immigrant was deported tomorrow there'd be huge effects in some sectors with knock-on effects elsewhere. But if it happened gradually enough for businesses to hire and train new people, I really don't see how it would be catastrophic.
Try doing farm labor... It sucks and is terrible. You'd need to be paying white collar wages to convince most citizens to do it. The type of Americans best suited to it are ICE recruits in 2025.
The best you can say about farm work is if you hang on for a bit you may get moved into a supervisor role that doesn't suck quite as much. An appealing prospect for someone that's still making money in USD to send home but not for natives.
One formula I like for this is an expanded student visa that has explicit provisions for English competency, a US civics test focused on the good aspirational stuff, a path to permanent residency (dependent on good grades/no arrests) and is only available to colleges with a greater than 25% admission rate (sorry Ivies).
If we want expanded stable immigration it has be explicitly attractive to US citizens interests and sensibilities
Why would we explicitly limit this to less selective colleges, thereby explicitly selecting for not-the-best immigrants?
Immigration is already good for US citizens, and as global working age populations start to shrink, countries will have to compete for immigrants and the countries that are explicitly nationalistic as opposed to focusing on win-win will lose out. Why would immigrants go to a country that explicitly said it doesn’t care about them at all except only insofar as they benefit existing citizens, if they had other options?
One it's good anti-elite politics, two there actually is a zero sum competition for admission to the most selective schools, three the colleges that have lower admissions rates are the ones facing worsening enrollment issues and be the most helped by foreign students, and four it may incentivize some selective schools on the edge to expand seats.
I would happily take the bet that it would not be hard to fill those visas, especially with a path to permanent residency.
" explicit provisions for English competency, a US civics test focused on the good aspirational stuff, a path to permanent residency (dependent on good grades/no arrests) and is only available to colleges with a greater than 25% admission rate (sorry Ivies)."
Why do we need this stuff? You think people are trying to study in the United States because they don't want to study English and are interested in bringing sharia law to this country or something? I remember the Korean dude who could hardly speak English on my dorm floor. He was the nicest guy, and living up to stereotypes, he kicked my ass all over calculus class.
He was probably also spending tons trying to learn English, but often progress there can't really be perceived until years have gone by. He may also have been more proficient in reading English than in speaking.
(The Korean who lived in the basement in my grad school, who also tended to avoid conversation, provided the rest of us with the valuable cultural lesson of learning what kimchi in the making smells like.)
Not everyone who gets a student visa is a legitimate student who is excited to learn English. Some just see it as an immigration backdoor to work illegally.
"is only available to colleges with a greater than 25% admission rate" Terrible idea. International students who pay the full sticker price subsidize tuition for less affluent domestic students.
Yes, and I wrote above that's going to be the most useful for less selective and less wealthy schools as the college age demographics get worse, and why I am saying to create an expanded program. The percentage of US students who go to those most selective institutions is small.
Also, this gives moderately selective schools an incentive to not chase an ever lower admission rate for clout and pricing power.
I think the iron law of modern politics is that mass irregular (asylum, etc.) and/or illegal immigration begets increasingly far right and authoritarian politics. In this moment even 'abundance' isn't worth it, though I think Joachim is probably right that if the Democrats ever retake power they can and probably should be able to get away with loosening things up on certain types of skilled immigration.
This take always feels like kind of victim blaming. Why not blame the authoritarianism on the people implementing the authoritarianism and take away their power to do so? Which immigration might help with over the long run? Maybe they are too powerful and the only thing we can do is appeasement but that doesn’t feel like a good solution in the long run because it’ll just invite more of this kind of “meet our policy preferences or we’ll become authoritarian” type blackmail.
It is not victim blaming to accept that in our (and basically every other) established democracy the people don't want it. They've said so over and over again, to the point that opposing it I think is itself a kind of anti-democracy. And the nice thing about democracy is that we can always revisit the issue down the road, which has happened before with immigration in America.
But if the choice is between saying no to every single asylum seeker but staying a democracy versus trying to continue to accommodate mass unskilled third world migration and losing it then the answer is easy.
There are more countries than the UK, and frankly, to the extent immigration was intra EU it always struck me as a pretty dumb own goal, even for immigration hawks. That aside though look at how Reform is doing in the polls, in large part due to the fact that instead of getting the hint from Brexit successive governments cranked up non-European immigration to the point of putting the country on the brink of national crisis.
My point is basically every country has an immigration backlash even if it's totally regular immigration. The median voter has views on immigration that are extremely economically counterproductive. Liberals like to tell themselves that there's an electorally credible compromise that will preserve the "good" parts of immigration while cutting down on "disorder" but I don't really see any wealthy country that has succeeded in cutting down on immigration related "disorder" while preserving the economic benefits.
For fun, I asked ChatGPT which force (abundance zoning/restrictive immigration) would be stronger on net on home/rent prices over various periods. Here's what it came up with (edited for clarity).
For 0–3 years the dominant force is immigration crackdown due to lower demand which causes prices and rents to drop modestly
For 3–7 years, the result is more mixed with supply constraints showing up due to labor shortages, but prices flatish overall.
For 7–10 years, Permitting reform likely stronger force pushing net prices down further — but only if labor or automation fill the gap
I'm not exactly sure how the AI thinks the automation angle plays out, but who knows. Maybe Elon's robots? (I personally doubt it in 10 years)
but abundance isn't primarily an agenda about pricing, it's about having more stuff. The price of housing can easily be reduced by inducing long term population reduction and keeping the housing stock stable but this would clearly be bad.
As a resident of a red state, I don't think DC types fully appreciate how complete the right wing media takeover has been in non-urban areas. Go to a small town and Fox News IS the news. So it really doesn't matter what policies you put forward, you're going to get branded as a communist by the only sources of information these people see.
Every Democratic politician talks a good line about party unity, building a big tent party, etc. but if there were even the hint of a viable alternative center/right-left organization (call it a party if you must) that exuded fresh energy and could get candidates on the ballot in even a handful of races initially, my guess is that the flood of Democrats departing from the party would be of biblical proportions. The basic problem is structural and procedural chokepoints in the electoral process, whereby the current parties have a stranglehold on candidate selection and access to the ballot by alternative parties, along with gerrymandered congressional districts that enable politicians to choose their voters rather than vice versa. So there’s no real motivation for the fresh political entrepreneurship that would give citizens a real sense of agency and help to start getting us past the country’s political toxicity. This isn’t anything like a direct path to your third angle, but it might help if we’d just start to talk about alternatives to the two current parties instead of continuing to chase our tails about how Democrats need to fix themselves. The real energy needs to be elsewhere now—both the Democrats and god knows the Republicans—are standing directly in the way of the changes that the country really needs. Sure, vote for Democrats in ‘26 and maybe ‘28, but strictly as placeholders as work progresses toward replacing them with a truly vital political party.
Every time a party loses, the next year or two is spent on the party will never win again. It's a two party system. It's not whether democrats will win but when they do they need (and republicans need to do this too) have put up well vetted candidates who can govern and implement. The primary system is crucial and needs to be overhauled.
Every progressive movement needs to ask itself: who is here for the right reasons (expanding the coalition, winning elections and enacting change) and who is here for the wrong reasons (making trouble, affirming their own identity as radical and different from the normies etc) and swiftly tell the latter to go hide themselves. In with strategic normies, out with wild eyed bohemians.
Oh, I've mentioned before what's going on in Portland. I can't stress enough how this is NOT 2020. In 2020, every day, the black block/antifa/whatever people would block traffic, smash windows, and otherwise harass ordinary people minding their own business. Defenders claimed "it's only a few blocks." It wasn't. This time it very much is. And to the extent they're messing with ordinary people, that didn't happen until Trump sent in the National Guard. Now in the past week, we've had anarchist traffic cops, but just directly around the ICE facility. And this whole thing really hasn't impacted the rest of the city, and definitely hasn't impacted the suburbs. So to their credit, the anarchists or whatever have taken my 2020 advice, "go harass the people you're actually mad at." If you're mad at the cops, go yell at the cops. If you're mad at ICE, go yell at ICE. Stop bothering the rest of us. So, the funny thing is that Trump is hoping this will stir something up and make news, but it really hasn't been. If I didn't have media, I'd be completely unaware anything was happening in Portland, which wasn't true in 2020.
Also the so-called COVID-19 "lockdowns" aren't in effect; people are busy! Of course you're going to get bored and get out in the fresh air to cause trouble when you've nothing to do, but that just isn't true anymore.
The extent to which people seem to believe we're in some neverending specific moment in time (sometimes 2020, sometimes slightly later) is absolutely mind boggling.
It's funny because Trump is legally within his right to defend the ICE building as far as I can tell, and supposedly I'm the target audience for this gimmick; living in the Portland burbs, not a fan of the permanent Portland protest block, and yet I can't bring myself to give a shit. This is Trump's goons versus antifa. I don't care!
This article is just another example of Trump derangement syndrome from ultra-liberal Matthew Yglesias. It’s not as if Trump has:
Launched extrajudicial killings in international waters;
Corrupted the DOJ to go after his political enemies;
Empowered a newly muscular internal security force filled with loyalists to go after brown people;
Purged the civil service of non-partisan employees;
Sent the military into US cities;
Attacked and bullied cultural institutions and institutions of higher learning;
Made efforts to purge the military and break its tradition of non-partisanship;
Used multiple means to get large media institutions to bow to his will by hiring friendly editors or muzzling critics; or
Pardoned rioters that previously sought to stage a coup on his behalf.
We can all agree that if those things happened, Republicans would stand with Democrats and impeach Trump for abuse of power.
But none of that is happening. Instead we have a President proudly advocating for Real Americans (TM) while the stock market is at an all-time high. Also, what about Biden, Obama and Hillary?
If it is any comfort, Glenn Greenwald type civil libertarians are genuinely sounding the alarm now. The resistance wouldn’t just be libs. GG recently did a Reason debate arguing for the Resolution “**Resolution: President Trump’s deportation policies generally violate key civil liberties as set forth in the U.S. Constitution.”**
He went to bat for Kilmore Abrego Garcia harder on due process grounds harder than most immigrants rights activists, at a time when most center left types were telling Dems to back off the issue. He’s been shrieking in his own way about sending immigrants to El Salvador without due process, criticized Venezuela killings, deporting students for Israel criticism etc. etc.
Yeah sorry, Greenwald has been laughably, demonstrably, predictably wrong about Trump over the previous nine years and he of all people doesn't get a pass. Radley Balko has been far more consistent (and correct) about all of the civil liberties violations.
lol whole point of the post is for Ds to be more chill and big tenty. If you’re going to expand the tent to resist Trumps abuses on specific issues, you’re going have to form alliances to resist him on specific issues. GG is not going to turn into a D anytime soon, but that’s why it’s even more valuable when he engages in criticizing Trump’s specific abuses to his much more establishment skeptic psycho audience.
I don't know if he is "far" left, but I think he is on the left in the sense that he strongly values egalitarianism and individual liberty, though I don't get the sense that he cares very much about economics one way or the other.
He mainly differs from normal liberals insofar as his diagnosis for why there is isn't enough individual liberty in the world is that it all flows from the existence of the United States, whether because the US is simply too powerful or because it is simply in the US' DNA. So to him, the solution is to undermine the US and make it less powerful. Any ally in that fight is on the side of good, even if that country is itself on the far-right, just as Stalin was on the side of good when he was fighting Hitler. So even Putin is an authoritarian who invades neighboring countries and murders dissidents, he is on the side of good because he's an enemy of the US and that's the most important issue. Trump is bad and deserves to be criticized, but the last thing he would want to do is replace Trump by going back to the standard American postwar political establishment. That establishment was the fount of evil in the world *and* they did what they did in a smart, sustainable way. Trump is destructive for the US in his badness, so he is good for the world relative to the old establishment.
That's a good description of his belief system as far as I understand it. I find it hard to see why this would appeal to people living in the US. How is undermining the US and supporting authoritarians abroad like Putin supposed to result in individual liberties in the US? What's the mechanism? I also don't see how supporting Russia as it conquers other countries is supposed to increase civil liberties abroad. This seems very much like "zombie" or "vulgar" leftism that has failed to notice that Russia is no longer left-wing in any measurable sense and has an imperialist Christian nationalist xenophobic government. I could see some sense (if one had Greenwald's belief system which I do not share) in supporting North Korea or China or Vietnam, which ostensibly still have Communist ruling parties, but supporting Russia doesn't make any sense at all from a "left" perspective, since Russia is not on the left. As far as I can tell, Greenwald is not pro-China or North Korea or Vietnam in any real sense.
His late husband was a leftwing congressman in Brazil, he firmly supports Corbyn and in the period 2010-2015 appears to have regularly spoken at Marxist conferences.
I don't care about people's spouses. Corbyn seems like a confused fossil. There's nothing left-wing about supporting imperialist Christian nationalist xenophobic governments like Russia or murderous religious fanatics like Hamas. 2015 was ten years ago. He seems to have changed his positions since Trump was elected.
If he actually says people should vote for Democrats, I will happily welcome his support. Criticizing Trump is far from enough when I guarantee he will be pouring cold water on the idea of voting for Democrats when push comes to shove.
"This guy who said Trump wasn't so bad is now saying he's real bad now" is a much more valuable asset than "this guy who consistently said Trump sucks says Trump still sucks."
This is basically a non-sequitur, but I don't understand the "get a pass" sentiment.
Either Greenwald is wrong, or he is right. Or he is confused. Or whatever. But I always see this bizarre "well, the thing he is saying now isn't important, what i care about is what he used to say, and ooh boy, what he used to say was garbage! so he must be wrong now!".
It has completely broken everyone's brain this psychotic attachment to the "who" rather than the "what" of ideas. Who gives a shit what someone used to say? What are they saying now? Does it make sense to you or not? What could a "pass" even mean within the context of being an adult having an adult conversation about ideas?
It's the difference between someone like Andrew Sullivan (who looked at the mounting evidence of a catastrophe of the Iraq War and offered a very public and thorough mea culpa) or Jennifer Rubin (who was a standard Republican pundit until Trump came along and saw him for what he was). Greenwald has been nothing more than a useful tool for right wing media his entire career, and is either willfully ignorant of this or is in on the grift. Either way, he forfeited any credibility he had years ago and nobody should be taking him seriously until he owns up to why he's suddenly decided to reconsider his past positions.
And he’ll go right back to screeching about Democrats the second they’re elected. Who cares what Greenwald thinks. He’s a terminal contrarian with no principles.
That’s fine, the priority is beating Trump and you need to expand the tent, you can still have disagreements later. Greenwald has a large audience, credibility for defending civil liberties for decades, and credibility with at least some people who might tilt towards Trump.
Yes the fact that he will never be a full time ally and the fact that he has a MAGA sympathetic audience is what makes him criticizing Trump’s policies so much more useful.
IMO this kind of work where GG argued and actually made MAGA friendly pro-mass deportation Saagar Enjeti change his mind about sending immigrants to El Salvador makes it more valuable in resisting Trump than anything resistance Dems can do: https://youtu.be/a02N5aPj_kY?si=PeoZw8jGmmVGcdBj.
Dems are going to need the kind of Bernie to Trump horsheshoe youth voters who watch shows like Breaking Points. It’s is a v gettable swingy audience: pro-choice, anti trans, anti-woke, pro social welfare spending, ambivalent on Ukraine spending and especially anti-Israel spending. If you can’t win these v gettable voters, you can’t win the next election.
There’s a lot of hardcore MAGA types who aren’t gonna change their mind because of what Greenwald says, or even what Tucker says. There’s also a lot of persuadable Rogan listener types who voted for Trump because they were against woke and inflation, and “this guy is actually really bad on free speech and cost of living” seems like a good pitch for them!
Yes. Plus Rogan himself apparently gets his news from Greenwald types, all these shows are very incestuous, and GG is the ultimate darling of anti-establishment media, where he bridges divides between left wing and right crankery.
I once heard GG say he takes inspiration “from Bill Kristol, who went from advocating to put women in prison for abortions to now doing anti-anti-trans advocacy. He hopes to study how neocons behave like “parasites” who adopt the social position of the whatever party they hope to infiltrate so they can permanently inject themselves into a coalition. then they start spreading their true agenda of hawkish foreign policy. Which is why, Bill Kristol will identity as non-binary goat as long as we drop bombs abroad.” GG then laid out how he hopes to employ the same playbook by gaining trust by championing free speech grievances on both parties so that he can then introduce people to the many crimes of security state agencies and American foreign policy establishment. The whole AmericaFirst agenda and Israel skepticism in horseshoe trans-partisan sense kind of shows how much he’s actually succeeded.
If you’re going to expand the tent to resist Trumps abuses on specific issues, you’re going have to form alliances to resist him on specific issues. GG is not going to turn into a D anytime soon, but that’s why it’s even more valuable when he engages in criticizing Trump’s specific abuses to his much more establishment skeptic psycho audience.
Yes that’s why him criticizing Trump to his MAGA audience makes it even more valuable. Those swingy audience members are the voters whose minds you want to change. This kind of shit is more valuable than anything any resist lib could say: https://youtu.be/a02N5aPj_kY?si=PeoZw8jGmmVGcdBj
Sure, well, as long as we’re litigating the past, I wish he had done more screeching about his civil liberties principles during Trump’s first term. But if he’s doing it now, rad!
What’s most valuable is that he doesn’t argue from the lib sensibility of centering the humanity of immigrants, he argues from civil liberty violations standpoint. Essentially arguing that big government wants to take away your rights by slowly expanding definitions of the groups of people the government is allowed to mistreat. I wish more Dems did this instead of repeating talking points from immigrant rights groups
I listen to the Reason podcast. They still can't do this without spending a ton of their time throat clearing to maintain their anti-anti-Trump cred. They can criticize Trump, but only with an explicit or implicit "but Biden and Kamala would have been worse" which I consider to be idiotic to a discrediting degree.
What’s most valuable is that he doesn’t argue from the lib sensibility of centering the humanity of immigrants, he argues from civil liberty violations standpoint. Essentially arguing that big government wants to take away your rights by slowly expanding definitions of the groups of people the government is allowed to mistreat.
I remember when people didn't try to score cheap points on the internet with decades-old whataboutism and were able to deduce that things that look similar can in fact be very different
Local law enforcement doesn't have to enforce immigration law -- that is the Fed's job. But if the federal agents cannot do so because of a lack of local law enforcement around protests that prevent ICE from doing their job, then sending in the troops to provide that support seems fine to me.
Step 1: send federal police to enforce the law in a heavy handed and often illegal way. Arrest citizens for filming you, gas bystanders, shoot anyone fleeing you, just really go to town
Step 2: call any protests against said illegal activity “terrorism”
Step 3: claim that you need the military to fight the “terrorists”
Step 4: John from Fl cheers you on because he was born yesterday and also didn’t read the column today
Sending in the National Guard in natural disasters to help is one thing but we have to be careful about how we deploy them for political reasons (and pretty anything Trump does is politically/personally motivated). Kent State has not left my memory of that aspect of Nixon's failure.
Using the National Guard for local law enforcement purposes is clearly a "in case of emergency, break glass" situation and there is no situation like that currently in America.
What's interesting is there is a clear opening for red state Democratic candidates to get in the game (as today's post alludes to) by making this specific point. But this requires specifics on how to pivot right on immigration in red state elections; lecturing left-wingers for being unserious (especially after they've successfully moved the party leftward) is much easier than that.
In some sense, that ultimate decision of which faction to gore has to be made by politicians in the arena for elections, not by party intellectuals. And so party intellectuals avoiding a clear fight until the opportunity is visible might be the politically wiser thing to do, even if it's intellectually unsatisfying.
There’s two sets of noxious pollutants making such arguments these days:
1. The former republican who moved away from their party since 2016 but hasn’t had the brains (like, say, The Bulwark) to figure out that their former party and their political views were the problem and to renounce them. You can usually see them soft-promoting the former National Review line of “well, yes, what Trump did was bad…but look over there, a Dem!”
2. Those that may have been aligned with Dems but who had their brains permanently broken by the 2020-2021 craziness (generally over trans issues, but some over other “woke” nonsense. Some went full antivax/MAHA) who haven’t figured that the world has moved on and are gleeful to see “their side” dishing it out. It’s a classic case of letting parochial derangement blind one to the bigger picture.
Now, the usual response from that lot will be some variation of “hurr this is why trump won/you specifically need to cater to my feels to win in 2028” (usually cited with zero evidence). The dumber ones will screech “bluesky” and flounce. I basically classify these pollutants as being way down on the list of bad things Trump has inflicted on America.
Yes. Deploying organized violence because you don’t want to see nonwhite people around and you’re afraid they could amass political or cultural power has the same moral status regardless of the level of government you’re using to do it.
Other things constant, using the national guard to enforce immigration laws might be ok. But other things are not constant because the current President incited a mob to storm the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost. Not normalizing authoritarian style troop movements is a huge consideration in Donald Trump’s America.
Local law enforcement doesn't have to enforce immigration law -- that is the Fed's job. But if the federal agents cannot do so because of a lack of local law enforcement around protests that prevent enforcement, then sending in the troops to provide that support seems fine to me.
2. That argument is so out of the Authoritarian playbook that I am surprised that anyone falls for it, though of course some people are eager to fall for it.
3. That is not the rationale on offer. The rationale is re general crime.
Your number 3 is what has me banging my head against the wall when people are so thrilled to see the ICE agents in Chicago. Yes, there is a fair bit of crime in Chicago, but it is not the roofers, moms, and people running taco stands that, so far, ICE has gone after in Chicago, who are committing this crime. Most of the criminals are citizens who ICE does not have legal jurisdiction over.
Trump has sent all these federal resources to Memphis. And Memphis actually does have a real crime crisis! In 2023 there were more homicides in Memphis (pop. 650,000) than New York City (pop. 8,500,000). Not merely a higher homicide rate, but an actually higher raw number of homicides!
I would welcome the FBI, DEA, and ATF going in there with federal surveillance capabilities to find out who is in what gangs and make some crazy RICO busts and get so many of these violent young men and illegal guns off the streets. With a murder rate like that, temporary emergency powers really do seem warranted.
But is that what they’re doing? No. It’s all a pretext to arrest and deport productive, contributing Mexicans and Central Americans. Roadblocks to check papers and raids on taquerias.
While im not a fan of it, I’m not opposed in principle to stricter immigration enforcement. It’s what people voted for. But, at least in Memphis, that doesn’t warrant emergency powers or the full federal show of force. Perhaps it does in a place like Brownsville, Texas, where they may have been overrun with migrants during the Biden chaos; or NYC, where afaict city services have been overrun with Venezuelans. But not in Memphis, the Mexicans are just not just the problem!
That conflates ICE and the military. I am pretty much an open borders guy, at least in theory, but open borders is not the law. If the taco seller does not have legal status, then there is nothing wrong with putting him in deportation proceedings, if the law is followed.
I agree, but people who are happy that the agents are in Chicago because of crime don't understand that ICE has nothing to do with combating the crime they are actually worried about.
Protests don’t prevent enforcement, they just shame the agents. The agents are far more heavily armed than the protestors and the protestors can’t physically stop them from arresting anyone.
Is there any meaningful sense in which ICE actually can't do its job, or are they just being annoyed by protesters? The only thing that anyone is doing that has actually prevented arrests is the fact that everyone is being alerted to their presence in advance, which is a perfectly legitimate exercise of free speech.
“ The patrolling agents were rammed by vehicles and "boxed in by 10 cars," according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
“DHS said the agents were unable to move their vehicles and got out of the car. According to DHS officials, one of the drivers of a car boxing them in had a gun, which the agency said was a semi-automatic weapon. DHS said the agents opened fire, striking the driver, who they said is a woman.”
It's worth pointing out that DHS' version of this story has been contested by the woman's attorney. Thus far DHS has refused to release the bodycam footage publicly but the attorney claims it refutes most of their version of the story, including the fact that while the woman had a (legal) gun in her car, at no point was it brandished or leveled at ICE agents and there's no reason to think they were even aware of its existence.
The only things that are confirmed about this story (and as far as I am concerned, claims by DHS at this point should be treated with 0% confidence unless accompanied by actual evidence) is that the woman and another driver followed the ICE agents in their van while honking their horn at them. Reckless driving is bad, but there's still no evidence of the more salacious claims about her driving at them or boxing them in. We also know that the ICE agents taunted her before shooting her 7 times, seemingly despite the woman posing no threat (even the government now admits she did not brandish the weapon).
This is why we'll probably never know the answer to your question, except as a collection of anecdotes. We do, know, however, that Apple removed ICEBlock from the Appstore.
Can you pre-register now what for you is a "red-line" that the government could cross that would cause you to oppose the government on civil liberties/Constitutional grounds?
I already think Trump crossed the red line by using missiles to sink boats off the coast of Venezuela. There is no Congressional authority for this, they pose no imminent threat and are in international waters. Impeachable, in my view.
Also if he uses troops to do local law enforcement beyond supporting ICE and protecting federal buildings. (DC is different, which is federal land and has complicated local/federal relationships). Impeach.
If court orders are clearly violated or ignored. Impeach.
This is all after the fact that his actions around the 2020 election results were disqualifying, in my view.
But sending in troops to support ICE when they are being actively thwarted and local law enforcement isn't acting...that is fine with me.
If the NYPD announced tomorrow that they will no longer arrest murderers, that would be a) an entirely legal decision, not in violation of any court order and b) a very bad thing, and a reasonable basis for some sort of federal intervention.
Guess we need to send the 82nd and 101st Airborne to Mississippi, it has the lowest solve rate in the nation. Clearly the cops there are refusing to arrest murderers and other criminals.
There's an old xkcd or something about how analogies don't have to involve things that are identical in every respect to be valid, but I can't find it now alas.
You’re right, but what did Emerson say about a foolish consistency? Federal pre-emption is good when it’s good and bad when it’s bad. Moral reasoning defies a cookbook, sadly, but that’s part of being human.
Fetterman is wrong about that but it's fine to have votes that don't split on perfectly partisan lines. It used to happen all the time and the fact it stopped happening is a negative sign for the health of the system.
The key point is to back the party on key procedural votes, as long as they do that we should be more tolerant of departures on various topics.
Edit: to be clear, what I'm saying is that a Democrat has to support the Democrats in controlling the agenda and the floor, confirming nominees, chairing committees, etc. So Schumer, not Thune. That is and should be the key ask, not that they take a certain position in any specific issue debate.
The question is whether Fetterman is Manchin or Sinema. Should we tolerate his departing from Democrats on many votes because he's the best we can hope for in Pennsylvania, or could he be replaced with a Gallego-like alternative?
I don’t think Fetterman would vote to cut, and I think he would vote to expand, safety net programs, which is far and away the most important federal issue to me, and basically the main litmus test I would hold to being a Democrat in good standing. Even abortion is less critical to me and I’m as pro-abortion (not pro-choice, many aren’t fit to be parents and shouldn’t get a choice) as they come.
So while I don’t love some of Fetterman’s position-taking as senator, particularly on Israel, he’s a Democrat until he votes for a leaner safety net, and I’m happy to have him in my tent.
“if resistance is smart and disciplined” …. If only. It’s not just that marchers must not break windows. It’s also that center-left districts cannot continue to elect hard left candidates. One Mamdani is worth a thousand thrown bricks.
The mayor of NYC is usually a Democrat so if they're a disaster that's usually bad for the party. That's why it's important for everyone here to put aside their reservations and root for him to be a success. I'm sure that's what's going to happen.
Correct, his decisions on Rikers and NYPD look like the way way bigger deals than "will there be six money-bleeding public grocery stores" or "will there be a few free bus routes."
Wait until he starts goobering it up. I'll be shocked if he's any better than DeBlasio, and when hundreds of millions of dollars go missing in some pet project, he's going to be on a much bigger stage than DeBlasio was.
no one outside NYC and terminal media addicts ever cared about DeBlasio or his scandals. I was talking to plenty of republicans in that era and while I heard lots about NYC being full of crime and homeless people and whatever I never once heard someone bring up DeBlasio specifically. You guys are just way overrating how much normal people care about who the mayor of NYC is and what he is getting up to at any given moment.
You’re making the same mistake that “resist Libs” made in 2017 (including to an extent me). Basically the “boy who cried wolf” problem.
People like me turned the alarms up about Trump to like 100. And looking back, there really was a lot we got right (remember how absolutely corrupt everything about the Trump hotel was in DC?). But the country chugged along…basically fine. In fact, the economy was actually probably the best it had been since pre 2008 and possibly since the late 90s. So for that 5% of swing voters or 10% of Republicans who were Trump skeptical (and maybe voted libertarian) they looked at the situation and said “everything seems kind of fine”. I don’t think we give enough credence to why he won in 2024 to this dynamic
Point being, it’s basically impossible for Mamdani to have the negative impact that is most strident critics claim is going to happen. In large measure because the position of mayor of NYC is way less powerful then people think. However much I think “rent freeze” or getting rid of gifted tracking for kindergartners is bad policy the short term impact at the very least is muted. So you leave yourself open to the charge “you said Mamdani was going to be a disaster. And instead, everything is basically fine”.
I agree actually. I've been pretty on board with the idea that Presidential speeches or persuasion tactics don't really work well despite what Aaron Sorkin tells you (pretty sure Matt was the first person to tell me this years ago). But having Biden be basically a "D" due to a combo of age and him never being the greatest on the stump I actually think mattered here.
Having said that. Look at the BLS job revisions. It seems like job growth was pretty "meh" in comparison to what we thought summer/fall of 2024. Combine lackluster job growth with recent inflation and maybe a Dem loss in the presidential election seems less of a surprise.
I laugh so hard every time one of my fellow Trump-supporting Floridians claims New Yorkers are going to flock to Florida because of Mamdani. 90% of the ones who moved to Florida during COVID moved back after spending one July in Florida.
The panic over Mamdani is an elite bubble phenomenon. Real people genuinely do not care about this, they think the fact that everyone is talking about the mayoral race in NYC is insane.
Images of riots are, in fact, much more viscerally concerning to normal people than the idea that someone the news media identifies as a radical is winning a local election somewhere, and only the sort of person who is in the 90th percentile of caring about electoral politics could think otherwise.
From 1993 through 2013 we had 20 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg. The last 12 were Accidental Mayor DeBlasio and Mayor McSwagger Adams. The first two were not Democrats. Yes, if you go back further you can get your “usually” card validated, but with regard to recent memory it doesn’t fly.
My narrow view is that Mamdani could cure cancer, Manna could fall from the sky, and every day could be vacation, and his presence nevertheless will be tied to his historic statements and positions and used to swing purple districts. “Everything is fine” won’t penetrate (and everything in fact, IMO, won’t actually be fine).
I don’t think MTG has hurt the GOP brand all that much. She’s hurt it, but not all that much. And that’s someone who continues to make crazy statements, which Mamdani might not do.
Respectfully disagree. I don’t propose to know what “real people” care about. I only know that Republicans have a DC trifecta and that safe blue districts electing hard left candidates moves the needle in purple/swing districts. I just want Democrats to regain control of the national government. Mamdani’s election — in my very humble and hopefully incorrect view —will hurt that possibility.
“Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” Purple district Democratic candidates don’t benefit from running a “national campaign” against MTG (or Candace Owens or whoever). Equivalent Republican candidates have successfully run “against” AOC, Bernie, Omar, etc. I truly wish you were correct, but I believe otherwise.
Every year that goes by the US further devolves into alternate reality bubbles fueled by the engagement algorithm. We’re in serious danger of discovering that democracy can’t survive social media.
The way Republicans are behaving is so post modern, reality is entirely subjective to them. It’s all narrative fictions and trying to nihilistically wield power.
I think the best thing normal liberals can do is show up to every demonstration in force. The more 50-year-olds there are in the streets, the less oxygen there is for radicals and opportunists to start trouble. Having gray-haired people all around you just kills the mood for that kind of thing. It makes it a profoundly uncool place to be. Bring the corniest signs you can think of.
You can’t, really. In France, home of many a protest, they do two things: security checks at the entrances to marches for improvised weapon materials, and prior to protests unions preemptively say “we know there will be anarchist idiots, because we have no control over that, and we’re telling you that they don’t represent us in any way, shape or form.”
Lafayette: Look, we need to make sure protests are peaceful. Artisans, shopkeepers, that sort.
Mirabeau: And small businesses. Small businesses are the key, to peaceful protests and economic growth.
Lafayette: ok ok, and we need to have checks. No gunpowder, no muskets, no scythes pikes clubs, and none of those idiots with cannons. Can you imagine bringing a cannon to a protest. Sheesh. L16 is going to flip out.
George: Now you listen to me you wimps. We march on city hall. We depose the assembly. We march to the Tuileries Palace. We depose the residents. And we reign. Max, recite one of your revolutionary speeches and drill some sense into them.
Lafayette: But the swiss guards, and the numerous national guards!
Max: They are not loyal. They have been called to duty against popular will. La vertu et la terreur. La vertu et la terreur.
George: And ultimately, it's not the muskets or the cannons. Joseph G, show them your new contraption.
Joseph: no no, it's not my design. It's Louis over here. You see, you place the neck like so, and drop this like so, and voila, decapitation.
George: Joseph Guillotine, you excel yourself.
Joseph: no no no, it's not my invention. Please, my family name, please no.
Look at the anti-abortion/pro-life movement. They have major protests, all over the country, multiple times a month, and have for decades. And there are some violent anti-abortion activists. BUT the protests are NEVER even slightly violent.
No guarantees obviously, but organize and recruit such that an overwhelming number of normies show up? No Kings this summer here in Seattle was a LOT of people and perfectly disciplined.
We're also providing new ways to be "cool" while protesting: playing perky music and dancing to it, dressing up in funny costumes, Emergency World Naked Bike Rides, etc. So peer pressure.
The ones doing the real work and showing up probably also have other tactics that I don't know about, especially at night.
(Other suggestions here so far seem to betray a lack of experience with mass urban protests.)
Three things, and they all fall on the organizers. First, screen participants as best you can. Set the expectations up front. Second, in the US, follow your god-damned permitted plan. The whole point of applying for and obtaining a permit is to keep your protest on Constitutionally protected grounds. Breaking from the plan tells the shitheads in your ranks that further deviations-like lighting shit on fire-will likely go unchallenged by the organizers. And third, be very realistic about who is part of your event. A lot of people looked very stupid when they didn't consider that many of the people who are protesting the police are, in fact felons-whose "bad encounters with the police" happened because they were felons.
Yeah, mass protests aren’t the type of things that can be controlled from higher ups like some kind of hierarchy. Public protests are inherently unpredictable. You don’t have the power to give orders that everyone who shows up has to follow.
I think the key thing I'd push is management which can kick folks out and a firm statement to the effect of 'if you want to participate, you need to be brave enough to show your face, not hide behind a balaclava.' The latter is harder due to the lingering left 'we should wear masks everywhere' post-cogif paranoia.
*In Defense of Looting* is really a remarkable book, a sort of ethical anti-matter. One of the arguments is literally “looting is fun.” I had to put the book down and 1,000-yard stare for a good 10 minutes.
Tells you something about the epistemics of the time. Glad we seem to be a bit better now.
>I’m not entirely sure what game the administration is even playing with this. My best guess, though, is that Trump wants to throw his anti-Communist Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American supporters a bone.<
There's probably some of that. But these guys are really attracted to and fascinated by violence like moths to a flame, and they're obsessed with projecting macho toughness 24/7. Seriously. Hegseth won't shut up about how he's rescuing the warrior ethos from the clutches of woke leftists (in reality he's likely reducing the effectiveness of the military via both naked politicization, and by narrowing the Pentagon's potential talent pool). Anyway, Venezuela is low-hanging fruit in terms of being able to throw our weight around and produce news footage of US munitions blowing shit up and killing people. Same with troops on the streets. Same with changing DOD to Department of War (did you know the Nazis did that, too, in 1935?). Ditto their threats to conquer Greenland and Canada.
One of the most ghoulish moments of this administration was when JD Vance chuckled and said he wouldn’t want to be a fisherman off the coast of Venezuela right now
Oh, gosh. I didn't see that. That is horrifying.
Coincidentally, I was reading an old (January 2025) Christian Science Monitor in my office cafeteria this week. There was an article about tracing fentanyl into the US - so not cocaine, but a big problem in the US. The article said that little is coming to the US by ship. The Coast Guard has had to revive people with Narcan more often than they have seized fentanyl or the chemicals needed to make fentanyl. It is mainly being driven over our southern land border, and the vast majority of people hauling it are American citizens.
The article also said that one of the most effective organizations to detect and intercept trafficking is the IRS's Criminal Investigation unit because of their expertise in following things like money apps and cryptocurrency. But I don't think the Administration is funneling money that way.
That and Stephen Miller frothing at the mouth about “you are nothing! You have nothing!!!” at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service the top two moments in the category “Trump administration officials doing their best to sound like cartoon villains”
I don't know how Miller managed to get any experience at SaMoHi from outside a locker.
Isn't that supposedly his origin story? Like the stereotypical school shooter who got bullied when he was younger.
More recommended reading! The Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-jockcreep-theory-of-fascism
Miller clearly fits the Creep archetype.
I don't recall hearing that he was bullied. People did hate him, though (for obvious reasons). They'd even give him a platform to act like a jackass, which he used.
https://lamag.com/politics/stephen-miller-samohi-oral-history/
He'd write stuff like this: https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/letters/Letters-2002/MARCH_2002/03_27_2002_Political_Correctness_Out_of_Control.htm
Until the AOC thing this week, I didn’t know he was a short guy.
AOC thing?
It was announced yesterday that Trump has an “annual” check up on Friday at Walter Reed and then is off to the Middle East. Lot to unpack here but the big thing to note is that Trump had a “routine” check up already this year.
I don’t want to go down the “is Trump dying” rabbit hole. But I really don’t think it’s too hard to see that he’s physically and mentally deteriorating. You don’t have to be a conspiracist you can just note that men around his age can really start declining and often fast. Like we literally just saw this with the last President.
Point being, while the “invade Canada and Greenland” and “gin up fake prosecution” against Comey are likely his doing, I think we need to see anything that’s actually policy related as him being mostly checked out on (tariffs being the exception as it’s clearly his way of getting bribes and he has this weird obsession going back 40 years).
Upshot? Think we underestimate the extent all this anti immigration stuff is Stephen Miller. And if your read anything he has said or written since basically the age of 16 you know he is straight up true believer white nationalist bigot. Not, circa 2020 “you didn’t know this word an Oberlin professor just made up, you’re racist” but like White Citizens Council would have welcomed him with open arms in the 50s and 60s if it wasn’t for the fact he’s Jewish.
When you realize most anything policy related, Trump is likely even more checked out on than 2016-2020, makes sense that most of the big immigration calls are being made by the actual Gollum figure who Trump has as his right hand man.
I agree with the last point. Miller and Vought are basically co-presidents right now, with Miller making policy on immigration, domestic troop deployments, and other big showy issues while Vought is in charge of government nuts and bolts. Miller is in some ways worse than a "normal" white nationalist in that a "normal" white nationalist is primarily motivated by his belief that racism is good and right, while Miller is more motivated by his awareness that racism is wrong and evil, which to him is good because he has an affirmative and conscious desire to inflict evil on others.
I think the existence of Stephen Miller should forever cause us to doubt the popular liberal-left idea that oppressed or formerly oppressed peoples are inherently good.
What is going on in this guy's head?
My guess is he's just a sociopath. Sociopathy pops up in every demographic. It just expresses itself in different ways depending on the host's underlying background, talents, and interests. In this case it happened to show up in a guy who was pretty smart and interested in politics. So instead of becoming a run-of-the-mill violent criminal or a fraudster or even a serial killer, he became this.
What is going on in his head is ugly vicious hate. He obsessed with hate. Likely brought on by living as middle class for a few years. The only positive thing about hate is that is so harmful to the health and longevity of the one doing the hating.
>>Point being, while the “invade Canada and Greenland” and “gin up fake prosecution” against Comey are likely his doing, I think we need to see anything that’s actually policy related as him being mostly checked out on<<
I really don't know what to think about this question. The one area of Trumpology in which I tend to differ from Yglesias is: he seems to hold Trump's powers of reasoning and overall administrative command in higher regard than I do. I really doubt how much Trump is driving the minutiae of administration policy. In my mental picture of Donald Trump, I see a man as POTUS who:
(1) is highly motivated by: protecting himself from harm by the law or opposition.
(2) is highly desirous of exacting revenge for anything and everything (from real threats like attempted prosecutions, to bullshit like the jokes of comedians).
(3) is highly motivated by riches.
(4) is a bully and liar (boy is he a liar!).
(5) valorizes a mythological era of American greatness (say, the 1950s) when the US didn't buy so much junk from foreigners, and was a lot whiter.
(6) REALLY thinks tariffs are a cure all, and the sure-fire way to get us back to 1955's conditions.
(7) thinks getting injections of cash into the US Treasury by non-traditional means (pay to play, export licenses, punitive tariffs etc) somehow is an economic win for the US economy as a whole.
(8) is a white ethnonationalist who—egged on by the vastly more intellectualized Stephen Miller—wants a lot less immigration.
(9) doesn't possess a scintilla of respect or admiration for the country's deep democratic ideals.
(10) is cynical to the point of blind stupidity.
MInd you, a lot of the above comports nicely with the goals of revolutionaries like Vaught, Miller, Vance, Bannon and so on. But a lot of the policy specifics (and the long term goals those specifics are designed to achieve) are the work of the latter. Not the president himself. I get the vibe that he's mostly a useful idiot for the MAGA Maoists: I doubt Trump has some kind of overarching, grand vision for where he wants to take the country. I doubt he wants to take the country anywhere. He simply wants to satisfy his own wants, needs, obsessions and desires. And the Presidency of the United States of America just happens to be the best vehicle to accomplish this.
The one true talent Trump has had for his entire life is knowing how to read a crowd. The crowd could be tabloid reporters in the 80s, casino investors in the late 80s, WWE crowds in the late 90s or GOP voters from 2011 to now.
Everything else? I guess you could call pure shamelessness in his lying a "talent". Think a big reason other politicians can't get away with as much as he can is even the slimiest of politicians usually have some scintilla of shame when it comes to obviously blatant lies.
I'm with you that Matt ascribes a level of forward long term thinking and strategic foresight to Trump that is just not there based on everything we know about him.
One of my "hot takes" for about 10 years is that Trump is actually an electoral loser. I feel pretty sure in 2016 a Marco Rubio wins the popular vote by say 2-3%. Look at the margin of victory for all "out" parties in 2024. Seems very clearly inflation was the driver across the world for incumbent parties losing elections and yet he eeks out a popular vote victory (I understand that there was some pretty big shifts in voting patterns among Latino voters for example, but you read takes from the last year (including from Matt), you'd think DJT had an 1984 style landslide).
No one on our side wants to say it because again it suggests Dems don't need to do anything again to win elections or could result in way too much complacency on our side of things, but Trump really is the luckiest human being of our lifetimes (including in politics) and I don't think it's wrong to see how much of his "success" is blind luck including by accident finding the most electorally efficient voting coalition possible.
I tend to think that Trump made a deal with Satan himself a long long time ago, and he's getting in every last bit of shenanigans he can get away with until he checks out - unless the deal was for unnatural long life - then we're cooked!
Too ignorant and narcissistic to understand or have shame.
Add the overwhelming desire for a Nobel prize: I think that's why he's going to the Middle East. Whether he "knows what he's going to die of" or not, anyone in our age bracket thinks about death. A Nobel would make the EOL stage a lot more bearable, maybe.
So my question is, do Nobel Peace prize winners also have to exhibit good character or general virtue in addition to some accomplishment that further peace? This is probably a question about history, since Nobel committees' deliberations are secret.
“…do Nobel Peace prize winners also have to exhibit good character or general virtue..?”
Well, Yasser Arafat got the award, so I think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”
You can add Henry Kissinger to that list.
Or Mother Teresa.
A guy I play flag football with compared me to Stephen Miller because I'm both bald and Jewish (although I'm not 4"10). Like, thanks, bro - for comparing me to the modern day Joseph Goebbels.
That's a key thing... I'd almost go as far as to venture that Trump is the *least* evil part of the regime.
Miller absolutely is a fascist; I sometimes hesitate to give Trump that label but I've never heard anyone dispute it in Miller's case.
There was a tweet I saw today along the lines of, "Crazy that Trump is both the primary cause of, and maybe the last thing preventing, this country's decline into fascism"
Biden's aging seemed pretty linear to me. Why everybody suddenly decided to remember 2020 Biden as being sharp as a tack I'll never understand. We knew he was old as hell when we elected him, and he already misspoke constantly even relative to VP Biden (not because of dementia, but it was because of cognitive slowdown combined with his existing speech issues.)
This. “Is it fascism?” is a tiresomely explosive Discourse-buster, so let’s set that aside. But there’s undeniably a *parallel* in the fascination with violence as a cleansing and modernizing force.
I'd say, at this point, the U.S. is being governed under a system of soft authoritarianism. Whether that turns into *hard* authoritarianism depends, in my view, on whether free and fair elections still take place. I'd guess we're still going to have free and fair elections, but I'm not as confident as I was six months ago. And, as Matt suggests, there's also the possibility of open defiance of the Supreme Court. Who knows what our judiciary will look like by the spring of 2029, even if a Democrat becomes president?
So another possibility is that we avoid a full-blown transition to something like mid-20th-century Spain, but the structural damage created by Trumpism takes a couple of decades or more to unwind—he effectively haunts us from the grave via ironclad control of the judiciary. Needless to say, a Democratic comeback in 2028 won’t mean all that much if MAGA still controls the Senate; nor does such a comeback mean the GOP itself won’t recapture the White House in 2032.
Perhaps we’ve entered a period of lurching back and forth between MAGA lunacy and bland normie liberalism. But if that’s the case, the latter—courtesy of its feckless nature—won’t be able to repair the accumulated rot, and the United States will surrender its role as preeminent global power. America has enormous reserves of inherent strength, but those reserves aren’t infinite or inexhaustible.
The Supreme Court would rather give up some of its power rather than risk open defiance. Which makes the birthright citizenship case a really scary moment for the rule of law. You couldn’t ask for a plainer text in the 14th amendment, but if they just say that, they tempt Trump to ignore them.
I have a very dim view of SCOTUS, and fully agree with you they will roll over rather than risk defiance. I think birthright citizenship might be the one place the court stands up to Trump, or more accurately finds mildly against him.
Birthright citizenship, and changes to it, are abstract concepts, not concrete actions. Trump wouldn't actually have to stop doing something he wants to or, or start doing something he doesn't. His reaction wouldn't be anything like what it would be if they told him he couldn't send the Guard t Chicago, couldn't fire workers, couldn't withhold funds, etc. If anything it might be the case where everyone points and says see, the Court still works, and of course he doesn't defy them.
I've gotten a fair bit of pushback when, like you, I've argued the Court will rollover rather than risk defiance. My question for those folks now is where besides citizenship do you think SCOTUS will hold some sort of line? Lower courts with all sorts of appointees have issued stop orders only to be overturned by SCOTUS. That means either all these other previously learned jurists have suddenly lost the ability to apply facts and precedent, or something very different is happening with SCOTUS.
Presidents up until now have not believed they had the legal ability to do what Trump is doing. So were they all mistaken before, or is SCOTUS treating Trump differently? What's the important case you think he'll lose that shows the Court still believes it's Supreme?
>My question for those folks now is where besides citizenship do you think SCOTUS will hold some sort of line?<
What I HOPE for is that they'll hold the line on (1) tariffs and (2) birthright citizenship, but I have no idea if they'll do either, and I'm inclined to think the chances are slim they'll buck the White House on #1 (they might punt by saying: Congress can change the law anytime it likes).
I agree this case is scary, and I agree the plain text is clear to reasonable people (though the right has a number of fancy lawyers who will claim otherwise). I've been assured that birthright citizenship won't be overturned, not even by this particular SCOTUS. But one thing that gives me pause is my perception that the one dynamic that makes a Trump-friendly decision more likely is the impact on the political fortunes of the Republican Party. That's in part why I believe Roberts brokered the ACA-saving decision in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012): he calculated striking down Obamacare would hurt the GOP in that year's election.
Anyway, it's arguable that ending birthright citizenship will hurt Democrats (in terms of voter demographics) more than Republicans, so...
The court of supreme catholic supporters of birth, pedophiles, theft from the living, bought and paid for by rich (three of the women members excepted), little to no world experience, trampling on democracy to pursue their demented vision of religion and freedom.
I like to think that if they were going to defy SCOTUS on the birthright decision, they would have already started to defy the lower courts that have kept the executive order on ice. But they haven’t. In fact I don’t think they’ve even sought an emergency stay through the shadow docket.
Knock on wood, but everything about the government’s posture in this case suggests that they don’t expect to win on the merits. They got universal injunctions trimmed a bit, that’s enough.
This case is not relevant to the general trend of outrageous supplication to an obviously corrupt “unitary” presidency.
DOD can only be renamed by Congress. Any document or order only referring to the Department of War should be treated as not having an legal validity.
If we’re talking about illegal assertions of executive power to do things that only Congress can do, there’s a lot of others above this one.
Eh, obviously agree on the first point (which is why, from what I've heard, DoD is still being used in communications to Congress). I think it's really too cute by half though to try and pretend that the Secretary of Defense loses his positional authority (granted to him by the Senate) just because he's decided to give himself a nickname. Would sending a memo with no letterhead at all and just his signature make it invalid? I think you'd have a hard time convincing anyone of that but maybe this is explicitly outlined in law somewhere that I'm not aware of.
But if he directs the “Department of War” to do some action without clarifying DOD is equivalent in the message then the legal authority becomes contestable because he is acting not as the Secretary of Defense but the Secretary of War title assigned by executive fiat.
Official messaging has been very clear that his title as "Secretary of War" is an alternative title to Secretary of Defense, even if all the public bluster has been that they've changed the name.
Let them play soldier and hope we survive to once again have sane people on the court, in congress and a president that does not stink in body and thought.
Seriously.
All this analysis of these people as if there’s a lot of strategy here is just wild.
Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China is chuckling under their breath as they watch us spend our military lust on Central America as they plan their eventual Pearl Harbor Moment for us in the Pacific.
Simply insanity for the US to take the eye off the ball like we're doing!
The really dark interpretation is "get military personnel used to killing innocent but unsympathetic people [foreigners who can be semi-plausibly accused of being terrorist drug smugglers] as a prelude to getting them to kill American citizens, such as protesters, who oppose the Trump regime."
I very much hope this isn't the case. I remember, before the election, Milan posted "my friend is in the Army and he's a Trump supporter, but he told me he'd resign if he were ever ordered to fire on his fellow citizens" and I hope this friend is representative (the "would resign rather than shoot Americans" part).
This is a good point, and frightening. Where would we be if not for Trump's obsession with winning the Nobel peace prize? (Maybe at war with Iran already)
I just want to be able to do my job in peace. No economically illiterate tariffs that keep fucking with prices and item availability (the glut of summer-season shit we still have sitting around heading into fall, bought up in advance due to forward-looking planning on the non-walked-back rates...you don't wanna know). No pretextual deportations of our veteran truck drivers (sure is totally coincidental how pre-2025, they were 90% latino, and now are 100% Sikhs). No crankish crackdown on mRNA respiratory vaccines (the waves of sickness will continue until morale improves + god I'm sick of masks). No transforming the entire US economy into a leveraged bet on AI (my company 401k can't diversify away from that gamble).
It's just so damn tiring and none of us get paid enough to deal with this crap. Like, yeah, democracy's nice and all, I feel sad in some abstract sense for the suffering minorities, my pride as an American is in sorry shape. But at the end of the day, once one cuts through all the high-minded principles of heaven and earth in Horatio Kain's philosophy *sunglasses*, it's these quotidian concerns that motivate me most. Why anyone would want to throw away the comfort of normal ordinary times to LARP as a revolutionary (of one persuasion or another) is beyond me.
I just tried to ship a package from Taiwan to the US and it’s a much more complicated process with fedex now because of the tariffs
https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/1n08arx/taiwan_postal_system_no_longer_shipping_packages/
My grandma, who lives in Poland, won't be able to send packages to me and my son at all, because Polish post office stopped all shipments to the US in retaliation for Trump getting rid of the de minimis exemption.
It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but she so enjoyed sending little treats to myself and her great-grandson, and now she won't be able to do it anymore. Just another example of Trump screwing things up for regular people.
Yeah. My ex has a boutique clothing line as a side business and their getting rid of de minimis has basically fucked it for the foreseeable future
Come for the assault on democracy. Stay for the policy awfulness. I'm honestly not sure which I find worse. I know the high-minded response is "democracy" but for me it comes down to the question of which is more repairable. Like, South Korea was a dictatorship for quite some time. Very bad! But the people running that country delivered high quality governance in a lot of respects. So there was little damage to repair once democracy was restored. The country was in good shape. Or imagine if Singapore were to fully democratize. Nobody would be saying the new democratic government has to undo years of mismanagement.
We're on path to be a lot more like Mexico, The Philippines or Argentina in terms of policy mismanagement.
>It's just so damn tiring and none of us get paid enough to deal with this crap.
I feel like by 2024 people forgot just how exhausting 4 years of Trump were. We're only 9 months into his 2nd term and people already feel it again.
People who chose the bowl of excrement over the bowl of plain oatmeal (because the oatmeal was too bland and woke) now realize that excrement is in fact bad for you? Who could have foreseen this!
Most of those people still don't realize I think.
Those of us who do now get to understand how people living in Iraq felt in 2003. Wrong place, wrong time, not much can be done...
According to guidance from the department of Health and Human Services it's not that bad.
Is it better or worse than juice from a decomposing whale carcass? Asking for a friend.
Even if I hated politics in the Bush years, I never actually felt exhausted by it once the initial shock of 9/11 and the Iraq War's start faded over time. I even dated a Republican for the majority of that time. And that was still not a healthy time for our politics.
Unlike Bush's GWOT which you could escape if you lived in America and didn't listen to Fox News, live in Iraq, or fly on an airplane, there's no way to get away from Trump. Partly that's about technology but mostly it's about his unwillingness to let even the smallest opportunity for chaos get away from him. I mean look at all the parks he's shut down. Even the weather service is being f*cked.
So much this.
When I was a young adult 40 yrs ago the boring machinery of supply chains (aka “making things work”) was far closer to the surface in every daily transaction. Making modern JIT supply chains and online purchases work so well today (most of the time) means hiding incredibly complex workings so no ordinary person even realizes they’re there, or how fragile they are. What replaces that day-to-day visibility people used to have? Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t know how anything works.
"App-ification" of the modern world has ruined us. People think leaving a negative review is sufficient to stop bad things.
“ hiding incredibly complex workings so no ordinary person even realizes they’re there, or how fragile they are.”
Many such cases.
Interesting comment. It reminds me of the famous quote from Trotsky: “You may not care about the dialectic, but the dialectic cares about you.” Sometimes one can’t avoid political developments, even if one wants to. I don’t mean yearning for revolution or vengeance or cleansing. Sometimes the war comes, whether one wants it or not. The US as a collective had a chance to avoid this, and it did not make that choice. The second election of Trump has turned out to mean that things will not be ok.
LARPing as a revolutionary is much more fun than supply chain management. Many of us find it hard to care that passionately about quotidian things when surviving is so easy.
When revolutionary politics move from position taking to street violence, that calculation changes fast.
American cities will price more stable than Paris during the revolution because few are hungry or cold.
If you’re talking about the comfort of the time before the recent tariffs, then yes you do get paid enough to deal with this crap.
This may sound surprising, but employee hourly rates are revenue, not profit. Yes, I make more now than I did during 2020, when locust swarms would come in daily to buy everything that wasn't nailed down. Yes, I make *a lot* more now than I did during 2019, when things all told were pretty chill and life was normal-ish. (So strange to think of Trump 1.0 as a series of non-barking dogs, in hindsight. Much more a farce than a tragedy.) But these times that we live in remind me of back in the day when I was juggling three jobs seven days a week. You can bet the dollars were rolling in! So much of those paychecks went towards higher "maintenance" costs though...it became too much of a Red Queen's Race. The key difference is that it was voluntary; once I got the opportunity to go full time with my current employer, I was quite happy to drop the other two jobs, and the resulting pay cut was significantly less than a naive on-paper calculation would assume. Nevermind the quality of life improvement. My god, shaving three hours off my regular commute...
Now it's not voluntary, and I can't get away from these external developments far outside my control. I already wrote how it fucks over grocery. Go back to home nursing in a Section 8 complex? Yeah, after covid + crime spike, that's not gonna happen. Go back to academic grant-writing? Uh, yeah, bad news on that funding front! Dust off that programming certificate? Outdated, and AI eats junior devs' lunch anyway. All of these jobs pay more now than six years ago, relatively a ton more for retail...and all of them are so, so much harder too. Maybe for the right sort of scrappy upstart hotshot, the higher pay pencils out as a worthy compensation for The New Normal. For this crusty veteran of a high-turnover chaotic store who's really starting to feel her age...if pay is up 30% but each workday is 75% more work than before, then is that really enough to be worth it? I just don't know, man.
It’s sad and frustrating to see how few people care about Trump’s authoritarianism, and the degree to which we seem to be going through an inverse 2020 where even the most insane ideas are embraced by a lot of people without the pushback you’d expect given the ideas in question are harmful AND stupid. (Which is something I also found frustrating in 2020, just with different ideas). It is also disorienting to see the degree to which “normal” people are embracing these ideas. Instagram lets you see what content your friends like. In the last week I’ve seen a smart, affable, educated guy liking Tucker Carlson’s new 9/11 conspiracy content. I saw an old college friend liking a pro-Nazi post (and it was pro-Nazi; there was no ambiguity. I reported it but apparently it no longer violates any Meta guidelines).
It’s like there is a weird sense of paralysis where since everyone is online and comfortable we’re in a “Wall-e” type situation where everyone is generally willing to still around throwing stones on the internet. Even in Trump’s case, while what he’s doing is bad he’s just still just sending the troops to go to cities to walk around; he’s not murdering anyway, and he seems to want Comey to have to go through a bunch of legal nuisances but he’s not throwing him out a window or anything. Even Democrats, while angry, aren’t mad or scared enough to try to make common cause with people who don’t agree with them on every issue.
I’m not sure how long this center can hold. At some point, unless we get much better political figures, these troops are going to stop just standing around and we will have a full blown all out crisis. But even if a modern day George Washington appeared I doubt he’d get much traction in a society where a (small, I know, but growing) percentage of the country now admires Hitler.
A recession/stock market bubble popping might just wake some folks up. The underlying economic nuts and bolts are weakening, we have an enormous debt sucking away productivity increase, and the global anxiety barometer, gold, is now gliding past $4,000. Trump can break out the printing press to assuage people but we're near the magic debt/GDP ratio where that stops working.
I don't think you're wrong, but it's concerning that apparently a critical mass of Americans are fine with blatant corruption, authoritarianism, etc as long as it is associated with a good economy. Especially since while we might (or might not) be heading into a recession now, at some point the economy will be good again and whoever is the lucky party in charge then will very likely use that as a mandate to do whatever they want.
I couldn't agree more, it's very concerning.
"we have an enormous debt sucking away productivity increase"
Yeah, but the problem is neither party (nor the voters) actually want to do anything about that. Because it's going to require cuts to entitlements and higher taxes (and not just on the rich)
People have been saying "the whole economy is a fiction and it's about to pop" for 50 years so I'm not sure we can rely on that happening.
“I saw an old college friend liking a pro-Nazi post (and it was pro-Nazi; there was no ambiguity. I reported it but apparently it no longer violates any Meta guidelines).
I’m not sure how long this center can hold.”
You’re not the center. You are a radical who wants to abridge the free speech of others.
True, the problem is not the existence of Nazi content, it’s that Republican politicians are constantly injecting Nazi content straight into their eyeballs on Twitter
I think the blueprint needs to be to follow how Muriel Bowser and the DC government handled the situation. The federal government really does have much more of an on the books mandate in the district yet everyone kept their heads cool, welcomed the "help" in theory, and held the line on a few things like replacing the chief of police, until the situation de-escalated into a boring and uninteresting farce. The worst thing you can do in this situation is force a battle you can't win.
Governor Pritzker could end the justification for sending in ARNG soldiers if he had the Illinois State Police go into Chicago and arrest anyone interfering with lawful ICE operations. He hasn’t done that, and likely won’t, because of some combination of wanting to protect illegal aliens from the law and because he believes prolonging his pissing contest with the president will help him politically.
I think one can have deep issues with ICE's conduct in Chicago without thinking the mission of arresting undocumented immigrants is per se illegitimate. It was only a few days ago they did an overnight raid of an apartment building where they broke into the homes of citizens, left them handcuffed outside for hours, pointing guns in the faces of children, etc.
I don't disagree with your point about the politics being awkward, but your comment is very close to saying that ICE is acting legitimately. It is not acting legitimately. Even if you have literally 0 concern whatsoever for undocumented people, the way that our citizens are being treated by these thugs is an affront to their dignity.
This is more or less where I am. People illegally in the US should be deported; that's pretty much just base level functionality for a nation-state. But I'm not sure that's actually the goal of ICE at this point. So much of what we're seeing seems to be immigration enforcement as a pretext for various sloppy displays of force: ICE driving around pointing pepperball guns at people, masked officers marching around, seeming random detentions.
It's totally reasonable to focus on border enforcement and deporting criminals rather than looking for arbitrary law abiding people to deport from the interior. That's an acceptable "base level functionality for a nation state".
“…your comment is very close to saying that ICE is acting legitimately”
Broadly speaking, they are. More to the point, in the ways they aren’t the legitimate response is legal and political, not through force.
How can you recommend Pritzker assist them at all when they are actively abusing citizens with impunity?
“How can you recommend Pritzker assist…”
I’m not. I am saying Pritzker should enforce Illinois law.
That would involve arresting ICE agents, because they are breaking quite a few laws. And doing that will lead to a crisis. No thanks.
Perhaps, but Pritzger has not so far done "force" as much as Chicago's existing policy of "If you want to do federal law enforcement, you're going to do it yourself." You can definitely argue that he should encourage local cops to help ICE, but not doing so is a legal and political response. Separately, I think it's reasonable to argue that any give would be taken as an invitation to do more, as it has proven to be for universities, businesses, and anyone else who plays nice with the administration on its overreaches.
I am not suggesting that he help ICE, only that he uphold Illinois law.
Yea in every city where it has happened it has been a stunt designed to try to provoke as many left of center people or politicians as possible to take the side of (i) people in the country illegally or (ii) to a lesser degree criminal or severely anti social people, over the side of order and law enforcement. It is a fight that we will never win and the only way to get Trump to back down is to refuse to have it, and definitely not to give him the spectacle he so deeply desires.
Trump just sits there and says, “Good. Good. Let the hate flow through you.”
The core problem is the hate. Too many Americans have lost the ability to respectfully disagree.
See, now you can do a good Star Wars reference. Several months ago I did one and it flew over your head.
To be fair, it was a *prequel* reference, so I guess that's somewhat understandable.
I prefer to pretend that episodes IV, V, and VI are the only ones that exist. And the Star Wars Holiday Special. Those all existed in a universe where the Gungan had been genocided, and no one mentions them in polite company.
"And the Star Wars Holiday Special."
So we have Itchy but no Jar-Jar. I can dig it.
What, no Thrawn Trilogy?
Being in Chicago, it is hard to say what exactly is “lawful” when heavily armed and masked thugs (and I mean that in the true sense of the word) roll through the city in unmarked minivans just picking decent, everyday people off the street with no warrant and no explanation.
If they were actually getting real criminals, you know we would hear about it. It’s the tamale lady, the car wash employees, the line cooks that are getting dragged into minivans. And any decent human being, used to living in a first world country with rights, is rightly disgusted that these masked, anonymous thugs in unmarked rental vehicles are kidnapping people in broad daylight.
But honking, yelling and recording leads to tear gas thrown into a dense neighborhood right next to an elementary school in session.
So really, what is lawful right now?
I sympathize with this post as I did not join the march downtown yesterday fearing it would be the same tone deaf leftist bullshit. And sure enough, media pictures show signs of Palatine and LGBTQIA+. So I don’t know what to do either and agree it has to be peaceful and respectful. But it’s only a matter of time until some ICE thug gets shot. It’s what they want and eventually they’ll get it.
“picking decent, everyday people off the street”
Oh? Tell me more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/illinois/s/biQTd6bI6s Oh Thank You Brave ICE Agents for Keeping Us Safe!!!
I don't consider reddit a credible source. Except for r/IdiotsTowingThings/. those folks do good work.
What’s the issue with the video? You think it’s AI? Are ice agents not all masked, dressed like they’re in falujah, and rolling around neighborhoods in minivans. As you can see they have their own sycophantic fuck boys recording everything. They’re not hiding from it.
I think you can probably look this up.
I did. Nada.
I don't believe you.
If dems were able to respond to Trump strategically and in a way that didn't split voters 60/40 with them on the 40 side, Trump wouldn't be president now. Dems are beholden to their base, and the base wants a fight, even if they will lose. Probably especially if they will lose.
Are there any lawful ICE actions happening at the moment? Is it lawful for domestic law enforcement to be unidentified? Was it lawful to raid that apartment building without any warrants?
(These are real questions, I don't know the answers.)
That depends on where and what you mean by "at the moment."
Seems pretty clear that I mean here in the US, now, at the current moment.
I read that if they’re going after someone who has an order of removal, then no warrant is necessary. I am not aware of a legal prohibition on face coverings. Are you?
I dunno, but I'm also not aware of a legal precedent for masked law enforcement in the US. Are you?
That is correct and brings us to an interesting party question; do Democrats believe in nullification of federal enforcement?
The interesting thing is this question began to be floated not with the Trump presidency, but with DHS Secretary Mayorkas under the Biden presidency.
“…do Democrats believe in nullification of federal enforcement?”
Everyone is, when it suits their preferences.
If you think Trump wouldn't send more soldiers then you are mistaken. Appeasement never works with him.
I said nothing at all about appeasement.
I think the appropriate response is for the city to keep doing what it's doing (which is to say nothing outside of court) while reps from the Chicago theatre scene follow National Guard troops around singing "Springtime for Hitler," and I will keep thinking that until it happens.
I worry / think about two things: 1) Is the Democratic brand so inherently tarnished that it can’t actually win, even if magically perfect candidates appeared for each race? 2) what we know about countries that have turned back from authoritarianism is that the movements that do that successfully usually center around a new or ‘third’ angle - meaning they do not follow the contours of the current left/right debates. (For example by focusing on law and order that includes a strong anti-corruption message). What does that tactic look like in modern America and who is working to bring that about?
I also worry about this. MY is one of the few pundits with a big-ish platform I see who really seems to get just how bad the brand is. Even as Trump's support erodes on this or that, including key issues like immigration, support for Democrats is even lower. It's still unclear to me nearly a year out from Trump's re-election that the party leadership is actually grappling with it. The current crop of people in charge of the Democrats may never figure it out and yet they also appear to be unwilling to fire themselves.
Ezra Klein seems to get it too, and has an even larger platform. But he also has a much gentler touch, so I'm not sure how much he's doing to wake people up to the crisis.
very much agreed. They just keep yelling Trump is bad, without actually working to get the votes of people like me who agree Trump is bad, but just don't trust the Dems on basically anything.
Abundance could be one such angle. It needs to be coupled with moderation on immigration, law and order, and trans issues however - without such moderation all else is lost.
If I were running as a Democrat I’d simply say Joe Biden was wrong on immigration. We need to protect our borders. But we don’t need a bunch of masked men running around our streets with badges acting like they are Dirty Harry. Joe Biden is a failed President and running against his failures is fair. Democrats need to do it. Trump called out Republicans and it worked.
It’s gonna be pretty hard to get abundance without more immigration.
Depends on which immigration. Legal, controlled immigration of skilled workers is compatible with moderation on the immigration issue.
You also need immigrants to clean houses and such, or Americans will have to, which goes against the idea of abundance.
Yes, I don't really understand the push to limit immigration to highly skilled people when we have a lot of need at the lower end of the scale.
That is also compatible with moderating on immigration. What's not compatible is shrugging your shoulders when a million people flood across the border with dubious asylum claims and then get housed at taxpayer expense until their cases are heard. The groups have demanded Democrats hold out for a comprehensive immigration bill, but there are probably bipartisan solutions to a better immigration system, even without amnesty for DREAMers.
1. Like it or not, there is a political limit to immigration, thus we should rebalance the allocation of visas within that limit more towards highly skilled workers to increase the benefit of immigration to the US economy/treasury and reduce the strain on local/state government resources. That doesn't mean we have zero low-skill immigration, just that it isn't the near-entirety of the inflow as it is today.
2. Higher skilled immigration will likely allow for more immigration, as it's more popular, which is a good thing if you want abundance. For this to work the immigrants have to have the same employment rights as Americans though, they can't be indentured servants like H1B which creates many of the same backlash dynamics as low-skill illegal immigration does.
The conventional thing about how immigrants do jobs that Americans "won't" never seemed that persuasive to me. Of course, there's no job Americans won't do; at most they'd want more money to do it. Can we quantify that?
Rough model: 14 million illegal immigrants. Say 70% are able to work. Say 90% of them are going to be doing low-skill blue collar jobs. The "fair" all-in average wage of a low-skill blue collar job is, say, $45k. Say an illegal immigrant will do a job for 40% less than "fair", and a legal immigrant will for 20% less.
So the savings to US employers from having an illegal workforce is... 14M*70%*90% * $45k * 40% = $159 billion. (Halve that if you legalize everyone).
That's not nothing, but it's just over 0.5% of US GDP.
Yes, the concentration is going to vary a ton across industries, so if every illegal immigrant was deported tomorrow there'd be huge effects in some sectors with knock-on effects elsewhere. But if it happened gradually enough for businesses to hire and train new people, I really don't see how it would be catastrophic.
Try doing farm labor... It sucks and is terrible. You'd need to be paying white collar wages to convince most citizens to do it. The type of Americans best suited to it are ICE recruits in 2025.
The best you can say about farm work is if you hang on for a bit you may get moved into a supervisor role that doesn't suck quite as much. An appealing prospect for someone that's still making money in USD to send home but not for natives.
$45k is minimum wage here
Since we are very close to full employment the people hired to replace the people we deport will have been doing other work.
One formula I like for this is an expanded student visa that has explicit provisions for English competency, a US civics test focused on the good aspirational stuff, a path to permanent residency (dependent on good grades/no arrests) and is only available to colleges with a greater than 25% admission rate (sorry Ivies).
If we want expanded stable immigration it has be explicitly attractive to US citizens interests and sensibilities
I would love to require all elected officials to pass a civics test.
Why would we explicitly limit this to less selective colleges, thereby explicitly selecting for not-the-best immigrants?
Immigration is already good for US citizens, and as global working age populations start to shrink, countries will have to compete for immigrants and the countries that are explicitly nationalistic as opposed to focusing on win-win will lose out. Why would immigrants go to a country that explicitly said it doesn’t care about them at all except only insofar as they benefit existing citizens, if they had other options?
One it's good anti-elite politics, two there actually is a zero sum competition for admission to the most selective schools, three the colleges that have lower admissions rates are the ones facing worsening enrollment issues and be the most helped by foreign students, and four it may incentivize some selective schools on the edge to expand seats.
I would happily take the bet that it would not be hard to fill those visas, especially with a path to permanent residency.
" explicit provisions for English competency, a US civics test focused on the good aspirational stuff, a path to permanent residency (dependent on good grades/no arrests) and is only available to colleges with a greater than 25% admission rate (sorry Ivies)."
Why do we need this stuff? You think people are trying to study in the United States because they don't want to study English and are interested in bringing sharia law to this country or something? I remember the Korean dude who could hardly speak English on my dorm floor. He was the nicest guy, and living up to stereotypes, he kicked my ass all over calculus class.
"Why do we need this stuff?"
Because it should be basic requirements. Even if 99% of the people are already doing it.
It's like saying to get a drivers license you should be able to see to drive.
He was probably also spending tons trying to learn English, but often progress there can't really be perceived until years have gone by. He may also have been more proficient in reading English than in speaking.
(The Korean who lived in the basement in my grad school, who also tended to avoid conversation, provided the rest of us with the valuable cultural lesson of learning what kimchi in the making smells like.)
"Why do we need this stuff?"
Not everyone who gets a student visa is a legitimate student who is excited to learn English. Some just see it as an immigration backdoor to work illegally.
"is only available to colleges with a greater than 25% admission rate" Terrible idea. International students who pay the full sticker price subsidize tuition for less affluent domestic students.
Yes, and I wrote above that's going to be the most useful for less selective and less wealthy schools as the college age demographics get worse, and why I am saying to create an expanded program. The percentage of US students who go to those most selective institutions is small.
Also, this gives moderately selective schools an incentive to not chase an ever lower admission rate for clout and pricing power.
I think the iron law of modern politics is that mass irregular (asylum, etc.) and/or illegal immigration begets increasingly far right and authoritarian politics. In this moment even 'abundance' isn't worth it, though I think Joachim is probably right that if the Democrats ever retake power they can and probably should be able to get away with loosening things up on certain types of skilled immigration.
This take always feels like kind of victim blaming. Why not blame the authoritarianism on the people implementing the authoritarianism and take away their power to do so? Which immigration might help with over the long run? Maybe they are too powerful and the only thing we can do is appeasement but that doesn’t feel like a good solution in the long run because it’ll just invite more of this kind of “meet our policy preferences or we’ll become authoritarian” type blackmail.
It is not victim blaming to accept that in our (and basically every other) established democracy the people don't want it. They've said so over and over again, to the point that opposing it I think is itself a kind of anti-democracy. And the nice thing about democracy is that we can always revisit the issue down the road, which has happened before with immigration in America.
But if the choice is between saying no to every single asylum seeker but staying a democracy versus trying to continue to accommodate mass unskilled third world migration and losing it then the answer is easy.
Yeah, if you want to save democracy you have to practice it.
The voters made the choice. They would rather have authoritarianism than illegal immigration. What's your plan for making authoritarianism impossible?
The Pre-Brexit immigration everyone got mad about was all totally legal as part of the European Common Market.
There are more countries than the UK, and frankly, to the extent immigration was intra EU it always struck me as a pretty dumb own goal, even for immigration hawks. That aside though look at how Reform is doing in the polls, in large part due to the fact that instead of getting the hint from Brexit successive governments cranked up non-European immigration to the point of putting the country on the brink of national crisis.
My point is basically every country has an immigration backlash even if it's totally regular immigration. The median voter has views on immigration that are extremely economically counterproductive. Liberals like to tell themselves that there's an electorally credible compromise that will preserve the "good" parts of immigration while cutting down on "disorder" but I don't really see any wealthy country that has succeeded in cutting down on immigration related "disorder" while preserving the economic benefits.
Disorder meaning doing enough to control the borders to suppress support for right-populist parties.
What? Not at all. A huge chunk of the abundance agenda is simply permitting reform
Say you get all the permitting reform you want. Who is going to actually build the houses?
For fun, I asked ChatGPT which force (abundance zoning/restrictive immigration) would be stronger on net on home/rent prices over various periods. Here's what it came up with (edited for clarity).
For 0–3 years the dominant force is immigration crackdown due to lower demand which causes prices and rents to drop modestly
For 3–7 years, the result is more mixed with supply constraints showing up due to labor shortages, but prices flatish overall.
For 7–10 years, Permitting reform likely stronger force pushing net prices down further — but only if labor or automation fill the gap
I'm not exactly sure how the AI thinks the automation angle plays out, but who knows. Maybe Elon's robots? (I personally doubt it in 10 years)
but abundance isn't primarily an agenda about pricing, it's about having more stuff. The price of housing can easily be reduced by inducing long term population reduction and keeping the housing stock stable but this would clearly be bad.
Yup. That’s what I’ve been saying. If we have a housing crisis we should be importing construction labor to drive down sector wages
Puerto Ricans
Yep, this is a platform that could potentially get my vote against someone like Trump
As a resident of a red state, I don't think DC types fully appreciate how complete the right wing media takeover has been in non-urban areas. Go to a small town and Fox News IS the news. So it really doesn't matter what policies you put forward, you're going to get branded as a communist by the only sources of information these people see.
Every Democratic politician talks a good line about party unity, building a big tent party, etc. but if there were even the hint of a viable alternative center/right-left organization (call it a party if you must) that exuded fresh energy and could get candidates on the ballot in even a handful of races initially, my guess is that the flood of Democrats departing from the party would be of biblical proportions. The basic problem is structural and procedural chokepoints in the electoral process, whereby the current parties have a stranglehold on candidate selection and access to the ballot by alternative parties, along with gerrymandered congressional districts that enable politicians to choose their voters rather than vice versa. So there’s no real motivation for the fresh political entrepreneurship that would give citizens a real sense of agency and help to start getting us past the country’s political toxicity. This isn’t anything like a direct path to your third angle, but it might help if we’d just start to talk about alternatives to the two current parties instead of continuing to chase our tails about how Democrats need to fix themselves. The real energy needs to be elsewhere now—both the Democrats and god knows the Republicans—are standing directly in the way of the changes that the country really needs. Sure, vote for Democrats in ‘26 and maybe ‘28, but strictly as placeholders as work progresses toward replacing them with a truly vital political party.
I think people fleeing to the new party because management sucks will find that management of the new party sucks just as much.
Every time a party loses, the next year or two is spent on the party will never win again. It's a two party system. It's not whether democrats will win but when they do they need (and republicans need to do this too) have put up well vetted candidates who can govern and implement. The primary system is crucial and needs to be overhauled.
Every progressive movement needs to ask itself: who is here for the right reasons (expanding the coalition, winning elections and enacting change) and who is here for the wrong reasons (making trouble, affirming their own identity as radical and different from the normies etc) and swiftly tell the latter to go hide themselves. In with strategic normies, out with wild eyed bohemians.
Oh, I've mentioned before what's going on in Portland. I can't stress enough how this is NOT 2020. In 2020, every day, the black block/antifa/whatever people would block traffic, smash windows, and otherwise harass ordinary people minding their own business. Defenders claimed "it's only a few blocks." It wasn't. This time it very much is. And to the extent they're messing with ordinary people, that didn't happen until Trump sent in the National Guard. Now in the past week, we've had anarchist traffic cops, but just directly around the ICE facility. And this whole thing really hasn't impacted the rest of the city, and definitely hasn't impacted the suburbs. So to their credit, the anarchists or whatever have taken my 2020 advice, "go harass the people you're actually mad at." If you're mad at the cops, go yell at the cops. If you're mad at ICE, go yell at ICE. Stop bothering the rest of us. So, the funny thing is that Trump is hoping this will stir something up and make news, but it really hasn't been. If I didn't have media, I'd be completely unaware anything was happening in Portland, which wasn't true in 2020.
Also the so-called COVID-19 "lockdowns" aren't in effect; people are busy! Of course you're going to get bored and get out in the fresh air to cause trouble when you've nothing to do, but that just isn't true anymore.
The extent to which people seem to believe we're in some neverending specific moment in time (sometimes 2020, sometimes slightly later) is absolutely mind boggling.
It's funny because Trump is legally within his right to defend the ICE building as far as I can tell, and supposedly I'm the target audience for this gimmick; living in the Portland burbs, not a fan of the permanent Portland protest block, and yet I can't bring myself to give a shit. This is Trump's goons versus antifa. I don't care!
This article is just another example of Trump derangement syndrome from ultra-liberal Matthew Yglesias. It’s not as if Trump has:
Launched extrajudicial killings in international waters;
Corrupted the DOJ to go after his political enemies;
Empowered a newly muscular internal security force filled with loyalists to go after brown people;
Purged the civil service of non-partisan employees;
Sent the military into US cities;
Attacked and bullied cultural institutions and institutions of higher learning;
Made efforts to purge the military and break its tradition of non-partisanship;
Used multiple means to get large media institutions to bow to his will by hiring friendly editors or muzzling critics; or
Pardoned rioters that previously sought to stage a coup on his behalf.
We can all agree that if those things happened, Republicans would stand with Democrats and impeach Trump for abuse of power.
But none of that is happening. Instead we have a President proudly advocating for Real Americans (TM) while the stock market is at an all-time high. Also, what about Biden, Obama and Hillary?
I can't like this comment enough. Great stuff!
If it is any comfort, Glenn Greenwald type civil libertarians are genuinely sounding the alarm now. The resistance wouldn’t just be libs. GG recently did a Reason debate arguing for the Resolution “**Resolution: President Trump’s deportation policies generally violate key civil liberties as set forth in the U.S. Constitution.”**
He went to bat for Kilmore Abrego Garcia harder on due process grounds harder than most immigrants rights activists, at a time when most center left types were telling Dems to back off the issue. He’s been shrieking in his own way about sending immigrants to El Salvador without due process, criticized Venezuela killings, deporting students for Israel criticism etc. etc.
Yeah sorry, Greenwald has been laughably, demonstrably, predictably wrong about Trump over the previous nine years and he of all people doesn't get a pass. Radley Balko has been far more consistent (and correct) about all of the civil liberties violations.
lol whole point of the post is for Ds to be more chill and big tenty. If you’re going to expand the tent to resist Trumps abuses on specific issues, you’re going have to form alliances to resist him on specific issues. GG is not going to turn into a D anytime soon, but that’s why it’s even more valuable when he engages in criticizing Trump’s specific abuses to his much more establishment skeptic psycho audience.
Greenwald is a far left gay New York lawyer and ex-Guardian journalist. Him being right coded for a time is just a weird quirk of history.
It's almost as if his identity is less relevant than his actual position on issues!
There are lots of gay Republicans. I don’t think he is “far-left” in any clear sense.
I don't know if he is "far" left, but I think he is on the left in the sense that he strongly values egalitarianism and individual liberty, though I don't get the sense that he cares very much about economics one way or the other.
He mainly differs from normal liberals insofar as his diagnosis for why there is isn't enough individual liberty in the world is that it all flows from the existence of the United States, whether because the US is simply too powerful or because it is simply in the US' DNA. So to him, the solution is to undermine the US and make it less powerful. Any ally in that fight is on the side of good, even if that country is itself on the far-right, just as Stalin was on the side of good when he was fighting Hitler. So even Putin is an authoritarian who invades neighboring countries and murders dissidents, he is on the side of good because he's an enemy of the US and that's the most important issue. Trump is bad and deserves to be criticized, but the last thing he would want to do is replace Trump by going back to the standard American postwar political establishment. That establishment was the fount of evil in the world *and* they did what they did in a smart, sustainable way. Trump is destructive for the US in his badness, so he is good for the world relative to the old establishment.
That's a good description of his belief system as far as I understand it. I find it hard to see why this would appeal to people living in the US. How is undermining the US and supporting authoritarians abroad like Putin supposed to result in individual liberties in the US? What's the mechanism? I also don't see how supporting Russia as it conquers other countries is supposed to increase civil liberties abroad. This seems very much like "zombie" or "vulgar" leftism that has failed to notice that Russia is no longer left-wing in any measurable sense and has an imperialist Christian nationalist xenophobic government. I could see some sense (if one had Greenwald's belief system which I do not share) in supporting North Korea or China or Vietnam, which ostensibly still have Communist ruling parties, but supporting Russia doesn't make any sense at all from a "left" perspective, since Russia is not on the left. As far as I can tell, Greenwald is not pro-China or North Korea or Vietnam in any real sense.
His late husband was a leftwing congressman in Brazil, he firmly supports Corbyn and in the period 2010-2015 appears to have regularly spoken at Marxist conferences.
I don't care about people's spouses. Corbyn seems like a confused fossil. There's nothing left-wing about supporting imperialist Christian nationalist xenophobic governments like Russia or murderous religious fanatics like Hamas. 2015 was ten years ago. He seems to have changed his positions since Trump was elected.
If he actually says people should vote for Democrats, I will happily welcome his support. Criticizing Trump is far from enough when I guarantee he will be pouring cold water on the idea of voting for Democrats when push comes to shove.
"This guy who said Trump wasn't so bad is now saying he's real bad now" is a much more valuable asset than "this guy who consistently said Trump sucks says Trump still sucks."
You need to move past punishing past defectors.
This is basically a non-sequitur, but I don't understand the "get a pass" sentiment.
Either Greenwald is wrong, or he is right. Or he is confused. Or whatever. But I always see this bizarre "well, the thing he is saying now isn't important, what i care about is what he used to say, and ooh boy, what he used to say was garbage! so he must be wrong now!".
It has completely broken everyone's brain this psychotic attachment to the "who" rather than the "what" of ideas. Who gives a shit what someone used to say? What are they saying now? Does it make sense to you or not? What could a "pass" even mean within the context of being an adult having an adult conversation about ideas?
It's the difference between someone like Andrew Sullivan (who looked at the mounting evidence of a catastrophe of the Iraq War and offered a very public and thorough mea culpa) or Jennifer Rubin (who was a standard Republican pundit until Trump came along and saw him for what he was). Greenwald has been nothing more than a useful tool for right wing media his entire career, and is either willfully ignorant of this or is in on the grift. Either way, he forfeited any credibility he had years ago and nobody should be taking him seriously until he owns up to why he's suddenly decided to reconsider his past positions.
But, is he right? What about the actual _ideas_?
People don’t want to be Susan Collins’ed
And he’ll go right back to screeching about Democrats the second they’re elected. Who cares what Greenwald thinks. He’s a terminal contrarian with no principles.
That’s fine, the priority is beating Trump and you need to expand the tent, you can still have disagreements later. Greenwald has a large audience, credibility for defending civil liberties for decades, and credibility with at least some people who might tilt towards Trump.
Greenwald will tell his audience not to vote for democrats. He’s not an ally in any way.
If he gets Trump aligned voters to stay home or vote third party that’s good too.
Will he though?
What's the downside of finding out?
He’ll be depressing enthusiasm, no matter what he says directly, if he continues to put out this type of content: https://www.youtube.com/live/23XBOqq2Kgw?si=LlMPCupcQ4CYCf27
Yes the fact that he will never be a full time ally and the fact that he has a MAGA sympathetic audience is what makes him criticizing Trump’s policies so much more useful.
IMO this kind of work where GG argued and actually made MAGA friendly pro-mass deportation Saagar Enjeti change his mind about sending immigrants to El Salvador makes it more valuable in resisting Trump than anything resistance Dems can do: https://youtu.be/a02N5aPj_kY?si=PeoZw8jGmmVGcdBj.
Dems are going to need the kind of Bernie to Trump horsheshoe youth voters who watch shows like Breaking Points. It’s is a v gettable swingy audience: pro-choice, anti trans, anti-woke, pro social welfare spending, ambivalent on Ukraine spending and especially anti-Israel spending. If you can’t win these v gettable voters, you can’t win the next election.
If maga people were open to changing their views, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
If Greenwald contradicts Trump, they’ll just stop listening to Greenwald.
There’s a lot of hardcore MAGA types who aren’t gonna change their mind because of what Greenwald says, or even what Tucker says. There’s also a lot of persuadable Rogan listener types who voted for Trump because they were against woke and inflation, and “this guy is actually really bad on free speech and cost of living” seems like a good pitch for them!
I’d trust Rogan to make that argument more than Greenwald
We need to be wary of monolithing MAGA types just as much as any other group. (Sorry for the fake verb.)
The people Hon is talking about aren’t typical MAGA people.
Yes. Plus Rogan himself apparently gets his news from Greenwald types, all these shows are very incestuous, and GG is the ultimate darling of anti-establishment media, where he bridges divides between left wing and right crankery.
I once heard GG say he takes inspiration “from Bill Kristol, who went from advocating to put women in prison for abortions to now doing anti-anti-trans advocacy. He hopes to study how neocons behave like “parasites” who adopt the social position of the whatever party they hope to infiltrate so they can permanently inject themselves into a coalition. then they start spreading their true agenda of hawkish foreign policy. Which is why, Bill Kristol will identity as non-binary goat as long as we drop bombs abroad.” GG then laid out how he hopes to employ the same playbook by gaining trust by championing free speech grievances on both parties so that he can then introduce people to the many crimes of security state agencies and American foreign policy establishment. The whole AmericaFirst agenda and Israel skepticism in horseshoe trans-partisan sense kind of shows how much he’s actually succeeded.
If you’re going to expand the tent to resist Trumps abuses on specific issues, you’re going have to form alliances to resist him on specific issues. GG is not going to turn into a D anytime soon, but that’s why it’s even more valuable when he engages in criticizing Trump’s specific abuses to his much more establishment skeptic psycho audience.
He doesn’t want to be in the tent.
Yes that’s why him criticizing Trump to his MAGA audience makes it even more valuable. Those swingy audience members are the voters whose minds you want to change. This kind of shit is more valuable than anything any resist lib could say: https://youtu.be/a02N5aPj_kY?si=PeoZw8jGmmVGcdBj
> And he’ll go right back to screeching about Democrats the second they’re elected
Your terms are acceptable.
He’s a Putinist.
If Dems get elected and go back to censoring social media he should go back to screeching. There are other "principles" beyond party loyalty.
Sure, well, as long as we’re litigating the past, I wish he had done more screeching about his civil liberties principles during Trump’s first term. But if he’s doing it now, rad!
Yes I have very mixed feelings but imo GG did pretty well here on the Reason debate arguing against Trump’s deportation policy: https://www.youtube.com/live/23XBOqq2Kgw?si=zW6lnB_JQMVS9pr0
What’s most valuable is that he doesn’t argue from the lib sensibility of centering the humanity of immigrants, he argues from civil liberty violations standpoint. Essentially arguing that big government wants to take away your rights by slowly expanding definitions of the groups of people the government is allowed to mistreat. I wish more Dems did this instead of repeating talking points from immigrant rights groups
I listen to the Reason podcast. They still can't do this without spending a ton of their time throat clearing to maintain their anti-anti-Trump cred. They can criticize Trump, but only with an explicit or implicit "but Biden and Kamala would have been worse" which I consider to be idiotic to a discrediting degree.
I think GG did pretty well here arguing against Trump’s deportation policy: https://www.youtube.com/live/23XBOqq2Kgw?si=zW6lnB_JQMVS9pr0
What’s most valuable is that he doesn’t argue from the lib sensibility of centering the humanity of immigrants, he argues from civil liberty violations standpoint. Essentially arguing that big government wants to take away your rights by slowly expanding definitions of the groups of people the government is allowed to mistreat.
I remember when sending in the troops to enforce federal law over the objections of local law enforcement was seen as a good thing.
I remember when people didn't try to score cheap points on the internet with decades-old whataboutism and were able to deduce that things that look similar can in fact be very different
They don't even look similar! If they looked similar the National Guard wouldn't be picking up garbage in DC parks.
Local law enforcement doesn't have to enforce immigration law -- that is the Fed's job. But if the federal agents cannot do so because of a lack of local law enforcement around protests that prevent ICE from doing their job, then sending in the troops to provide that support seems fine to me.
Step 1: send federal police to enforce the law in a heavy handed and often illegal way. Arrest citizens for filming you, gas bystanders, shoot anyone fleeing you, just really go to town
Step 2: call any protests against said illegal activity “terrorism”
Step 3: claim that you need the military to fight the “terrorists”
Step 4: John from Fl cheers you on because he was born yesterday and also didn’t read the column today
Sounds bad. Let me know when we get to Step 1.
Come to Chicago and youll see
Ok we got to step 1, check back in.
Embarrassing take
When I saw the headline on Matt's piece, I wasn't sure how our local Florida Men would embarrass themselves today, but I was sure they would.
Sending in the National Guard in natural disasters to help is one thing but we have to be careful about how we deploy them for political reasons (and pretty anything Trump does is politically/personally motivated). Kent State has not left my memory of that aspect of Nixon's failure.
Using the National Guard for local law enforcement purposes is clearly a "in case of emergency, break glass" situation and there is no situation like that currently in America.
What's interesting is there is a clear opening for red state Democratic candidates to get in the game (as today's post alludes to) by making this specific point. But this requires specifics on how to pivot right on immigration in red state elections; lecturing left-wingers for being unserious (especially after they've successfully moved the party leftward) is much easier than that.
In some sense, that ultimate decision of which faction to gore has to be made by politicians in the arena for elections, not by party intellectuals. And so party intellectuals avoiding a clear fight until the opportunity is visible might be the politically wiser thing to do, even if it's intellectually unsatisfying.
Their job is to send masked thugs around town to stuff random brown people into unmarked vehicles?
I...don't remember that.
I, uh, don’t think these are analogous situations.
A real and unironic dril moment in the wild.
It's different when it's my side.
If we articulated what the differences are, would you consider them? Or are you, like John, just here for dumb dunks?
There’s two sets of noxious pollutants making such arguments these days:
1. The former republican who moved away from their party since 2016 but hasn’t had the brains (like, say, The Bulwark) to figure out that their former party and their political views were the problem and to renounce them. You can usually see them soft-promoting the former National Review line of “well, yes, what Trump did was bad…but look over there, a Dem!”
2. Those that may have been aligned with Dems but who had their brains permanently broken by the 2020-2021 craziness (generally over trans issues, but some over other “woke” nonsense. Some went full antivax/MAHA) who haven’t figured that the world has moved on and are gleeful to see “their side” dishing it out. It’s a classic case of letting parochial derangement blind one to the bigger picture.
Now, the usual response from that lot will be some variation of “hurr this is why trump won/you specifically need to cater to my feels to win in 2028” (usually cited with zero evidence). The dumber ones will screech “bluesky” and flounce. I basically classify these pollutants as being way down on the list of bad things Trump has inflicted on America.
I don't think John is generally just here for dumb dunks.
I don’t either, but he delivers a fair few and I think this was one.
I'm honestly totally unclear on what events I'm supposed to be remembering that you think you're talking about.
Yes. Deploying organized violence because you don’t want to see nonwhite people around and you’re afraid they could amass political or cultural power has the same moral status regardless of the level of government you’re using to do it.
Other things constant, using the national guard to enforce immigration laws might be ok. But other things are not constant because the current President incited a mob to storm the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost. Not normalizing authoritarian style troop movements is a huge consideration in Donald Trump’s America.
Isn’t it actually strictly illegal?
Depends on what the judges say!
Hm, what court order are local authorities defying, necessitating enforcement by federal authorities? Because that is what happened in Little Rock.
Local law enforcement doesn't have to enforce immigration law -- that is the Fed's job. But if the federal agents cannot do so because of a lack of local law enforcement around protests that prevent enforcement, then sending in the troops to provide that support seems fine to me.
1. That is a big if.
2. That argument is so out of the Authoritarian playbook that I am surprised that anyone falls for it, though of course some people are eager to fall for it.
3. That is not the rationale on offer. The rationale is re general crime.
Your number 3 is what has me banging my head against the wall when people are so thrilled to see the ICE agents in Chicago. Yes, there is a fair bit of crime in Chicago, but it is not the roofers, moms, and people running taco stands that, so far, ICE has gone after in Chicago, who are committing this crime. Most of the criminals are citizens who ICE does not have legal jurisdiction over.
Exactly!
Trump has sent all these federal resources to Memphis. And Memphis actually does have a real crime crisis! In 2023 there were more homicides in Memphis (pop. 650,000) than New York City (pop. 8,500,000). Not merely a higher homicide rate, but an actually higher raw number of homicides!
I would welcome the FBI, DEA, and ATF going in there with federal surveillance capabilities to find out who is in what gangs and make some crazy RICO busts and get so many of these violent young men and illegal guns off the streets. With a murder rate like that, temporary emergency powers really do seem warranted.
But is that what they’re doing? No. It’s all a pretext to arrest and deport productive, contributing Mexicans and Central Americans. Roadblocks to check papers and raids on taquerias.
While im not a fan of it, I’m not opposed in principle to stricter immigration enforcement. It’s what people voted for. But, at least in Memphis, that doesn’t warrant emergency powers or the full federal show of force. Perhaps it does in a place like Brownsville, Texas, where they may have been overrun with migrants during the Biden chaos; or NYC, where afaict city services have been overrun with Venezuelans. But not in Memphis, the Mexicans are just not just the problem!
That conflates ICE and the military. I am pretty much an open borders guy, at least in theory, but open borders is not the law. If the taco seller does not have legal status, then there is nothing wrong with putting him in deportation proceedings, if the law is followed.
The military deployment is a different matter.
I agree, but people who are happy that the agents are in Chicago because of crime don't understand that ICE has nothing to do with combating the crime they are actually worried about.
Protests don’t prevent enforcement, they just shame the agents. The agents are far more heavily armed than the protestors and the protestors can’t physically stop them from arresting anyone.
Is there any meaningful sense in which ICE actually can't do its job, or are they just being annoyed by protesters? The only thing that anyone is doing that has actually prevented arrests is the fact that everyone is being alerted to their presence in advance, which is a perfectly legitimate exercise of free speech.
For example:
“ The patrolling agents were rammed by vehicles and "boxed in by 10 cars," according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
“DHS said the agents were unable to move their vehicles and got out of the car. According to DHS officials, one of the drivers of a car boxing them in had a gun, which the agency said was a semi-automatic weapon. DHS said the agents opened fire, striking the driver, who they said is a woman.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/federal-agents-shoot-woman-broadview-ice-facility/
It's worth pointing out that DHS' version of this story has been contested by the woman's attorney. Thus far DHS has refused to release the bodycam footage publicly but the attorney claims it refutes most of their version of the story, including the fact that while the woman had a (legal) gun in her car, at no point was it brandished or leveled at ICE agents and there's no reason to think they were even aware of its existence.
The only things that are confirmed about this story (and as far as I am concerned, claims by DHS at this point should be treated with 0% confidence unless accompanied by actual evidence) is that the woman and another driver followed the ICE agents in their van while honking their horn at them. Reckless driving is bad, but there's still no evidence of the more salacious claims about her driving at them or boxing them in. We also know that the ICE agents taunted her before shooting her 7 times, seemingly despite the woman posing no threat (even the government now admits she did not brandish the weapon).
This is why we'll probably never know the answer to your question, except as a collection of anecdotes. We do, know, however, that Apple removed ICEBlock from the Appstore.
“It's worth pointing out that DHS' version of this story has been contested by the woman's attorney”
No doubt the charges will be quickly dropped.
Is that story true though? Are there any other stories like it?
I dunno. The news coverage of the thing is not great.
Can you pre-register now what for you is a "red-line" that the government could cross that would cause you to oppose the government on civil liberties/Constitutional grounds?
Lots of them.
I already think Trump crossed the red line by using missiles to sink boats off the coast of Venezuela. There is no Congressional authority for this, they pose no imminent threat and are in international waters. Impeachable, in my view.
Also if he uses troops to do local law enforcement beyond supporting ICE and protecting federal buildings. (DC is different, which is federal land and has complicated local/federal relationships). Impeach.
If court orders are clearly violated or ignored. Impeach.
This is all after the fact that his actions around the 2020 election results were disqualifying, in my view.
But sending in troops to support ICE when they are being actively thwarted and local law enforcement isn't acting...that is fine with me.
Thanks for your thoughtful response
You should add the deployment of national guard resources from one state to a different state when the government of that state is opposed.
Texas just invaded Illinois.
If the NYPD announced tomorrow that they will no longer arrest murderers, that would be a) an entirely legal decision, not in violation of any court order and b) a very bad thing, and a reasonable basis for some sort of federal intervention.
What does that have to do with anything? Are police in Chicago refusing to arrest murderers?
Guess we need to send the 82nd and 101st Airborne to Mississippi, it has the lowest solve rate in the nation. Clearly the cops there are refusing to arrest murderers and other criminals.
https://projects.csgjusticecenter.org/tools-for-states-to-address-crime/50-state-crime-data/
There's an old xkcd or something about how analogies don't have to involve things that are identical in every respect to be valid, but I can't find it now alas.
But we’re asking what the analogy is even to in this case. What is the thing the local police aren’t doing?
How could that hypothetical scenario answer the question that was asked, which was about actual facts?
You’re right, but what did Emerson say about a foolish consistency? Federal pre-emption is good when it’s good and bad when it’s bad. Moral reasoning defies a cookbook, sadly, but that’s part of being human.
You can? I can't remember that, and I feel pretty old.
Even if actually winning the Senate in 2026 seems impossible (27% feels generous), it’s still significantly better to have 49 or 50 Senators than 47.
Especially when one of them is more Trump-aligned than some of the actual Republicans! https://x.com/spencerhakimian/status/1976080637116534923
Fetterman is wrong about that but it's fine to have votes that don't split on perfectly partisan lines. It used to happen all the time and the fact it stopped happening is a negative sign for the health of the system.
The key point is to back the party on key procedural votes, as long as they do that we should be more tolerant of departures on various topics.
Edit: to be clear, what I'm saying is that a Democrat has to support the Democrats in controlling the agenda and the floor, confirming nominees, chairing committees, etc. So Schumer, not Thune. That is and should be the key ask, not that they take a certain position in any specific issue debate.
The question is whether Fetterman is Manchin or Sinema. Should we tolerate his departing from Democrats on many votes because he's the best we can hope for in Pennsylvania, or could he be replaced with a Gallego-like alternative?
I don’t think Fetterman would vote to cut, and I think he would vote to expand, safety net programs, which is far and away the most important federal issue to me, and basically the main litmus test I would hold to being a Democrat in good standing. Even abortion is less critical to me and I’m as pro-abortion (not pro-choice, many aren’t fit to be parents and shouldn’t get a choice) as they come.
So while I don’t love some of Fetterman’s position-taking as senator, particularly on Israel, he’s a Democrat until he votes for a leaner safety net, and I’m happy to have him in my tent.
“if resistance is smart and disciplined” …. If only. It’s not just that marchers must not break windows. It’s also that center-left districts cannot continue to elect hard left candidates. One Mamdani is worth a thousand thrown bricks.
I think regular people are much less worried about Mamdani than about riots, in contrast to this comment section.
Especially if you don't actually live in New York.
Those poor rats
Sliwa is the only candidate with a creative solution to NYC’s rat problem.
Those rats form the foundation supporting all of Midtown!
I dunno. Sliwa sees the rats as part of the food chain. I think he’s right.
After learning about him, I love that guy
He’s a quintessential New Yorker. And he absolutely loves the city.
If he's serious about combatting rats, he needs to be talking about terriers, not cats.
But cats are an intrinsic good in a way that rat terriers just aren’t
He’s apparently not a dog lover.
He hasn't won yet, if he turns out to be a disaster it will be a major political topic and headache.
The mayor of NYC is usually a Democrat so if they're a disaster that's usually bad for the party. That's why it's important for everyone here to put aside their reservations and root for him to be a success. I'm sure that's what's going to happen.
Kind of, three of the last 10 mayors of New York were first elected as Republicans.
That's true although 2 of the 3 eventually ran for president as Democrats.
Realistically his agenda will stall in the NY state legislature
The authority of the mayor of NYC is strongest when it comes to law enforcement and education. Look for debacles in those realms.
Correct, his decisions on Rikers and NYPD look like the way way bigger deals than "will there be six money-bleeding public grocery stores" or "will there be a few free bus routes."
Wait until he starts goobering it up. I'll be shocked if he's any better than DeBlasio, and when hundreds of millions of dollars go missing in some pet project, he's going to be on a much bigger stage than DeBlasio was.
no one outside NYC and terminal media addicts ever cared about DeBlasio or his scandals. I was talking to plenty of republicans in that era and while I heard lots about NYC being full of crime and homeless people and whatever I never once heard someone bring up DeBlasio specifically. You guys are just way overrating how much normal people care about who the mayor of NYC is and what he is getting up to at any given moment.
That’s my point. Wait until Mandani starts having scandals, which he will, it’s going to be big news because he’s Mandani.
Both the comment and the comment thereon are valid.
You’re making the same mistake that “resist Libs” made in 2017 (including to an extent me). Basically the “boy who cried wolf” problem.
People like me turned the alarms up about Trump to like 100. And looking back, there really was a lot we got right (remember how absolutely corrupt everything about the Trump hotel was in DC?). But the country chugged along…basically fine. In fact, the economy was actually probably the best it had been since pre 2008 and possibly since the late 90s. So for that 5% of swing voters or 10% of Republicans who were Trump skeptical (and maybe voted libertarian) they looked at the situation and said “everything seems kind of fine”. I don’t think we give enough credence to why he won in 2024 to this dynamic
Point being, it’s basically impossible for Mamdani to have the negative impact that is most strident critics claim is going to happen. In large measure because the position of mayor of NYC is way less powerful then people think. However much I think “rent freeze” or getting rid of gifted tracking for kindergartners is bad policy the short term impact at the very least is muted. So you leave yourself open to the charge “you said Mamdani was going to be a disaster. And instead, everything is basically fine”.
I thought everything was kind of fine in '24 (ducks)
I agree actually. I've been pretty on board with the idea that Presidential speeches or persuasion tactics don't really work well despite what Aaron Sorkin tells you (pretty sure Matt was the first person to tell me this years ago). But having Biden be basically a "D" due to a combo of age and him never being the greatest on the stump I actually think mattered here.
Having said that. Look at the BLS job revisions. It seems like job growth was pretty "meh" in comparison to what we thought summer/fall of 2024. Combine lackluster job growth with recent inflation and maybe a Dem loss in the presidential election seems less of a surprise.
Sure. but all the problems are mostly mundane by modern world standards and are mostly requiring mundane solutions.
i mean now we have a bunch of problems just resulting from trump being president.
I laugh so hard every time one of my fellow Trump-supporting Floridians claims New Yorkers are going to flock to Florida because of Mamdani. 90% of the ones who moved to Florida during COVID moved back after spending one July in Florida.
The panic over Mamdani is an elite bubble phenomenon. Real people genuinely do not care about this, they think the fact that everyone is talking about the mayoral race in NYC is insane.
Images of riots are, in fact, much more viscerally concerning to normal people than the idea that someone the news media identifies as a radical is winning a local election somewhere, and only the sort of person who is in the 90th percentile of caring about electoral politics could think otherwise.
Agreed. It's a classic "view of the world from 9th avenue" take.
From 1993 through 2013 we had 20 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg. The last 12 were Accidental Mayor DeBlasio and Mayor McSwagger Adams. The first two were not Democrats. Yes, if you go back further you can get your “usually” card validated, but with regard to recent memory it doesn’t fly.
My narrow view is that Mamdani could cure cancer, Manna could fall from the sky, and every day could be vacation, and his presence nevertheless will be tied to his historic statements and positions and used to swing purple districts. “Everything is fine” won’t penetrate (and everything in fact, IMO, won’t actually be fine).
I don’t think MTG has hurt the GOP brand all that much. She’s hurt it, but not all that much. And that’s someone who continues to make crazy statements, which Mamdani might not do.
Respectfully disagree. I don’t propose to know what “real people” care about. I only know that Republicans have a DC trifecta and that safe blue districts electing hard left candidates moves the needle in purple/swing districts. I just want Democrats to regain control of the national government. Mamdani’s election — in my very humble and hopefully incorrect view —will hurt that possibility.
“Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” Purple district Democratic candidates don’t benefit from running a “national campaign” against MTG (or Candace Owens or whoever). Equivalent Republican candidates have successfully run “against” AOC, Bernie, Omar, etc. I truly wish you were correct, but I believe otherwise.
Every year that goes by the US further devolves into alternate reality bubbles fueled by the engagement algorithm. We’re in serious danger of discovering that democracy can’t survive social media.
I saw a walking around the Atlanta Beltline with a "Get off Social Media Shirt" earlier this and smiled from ear to ear. Incredible shirt: https://www.amazon.com/Get-off-social-media-t-shirt/dp/B07K8QM9NX?customId=B0752XJYNL&customizationToken=MC_Assembly_1%23B0752XJYNL&th=1&psc=1
The way Republicans are behaving is so post modern, reality is entirely subjective to them. It’s all narrative fictions and trying to nihilistically wield power.
What is the mechanism to control how street demonstrations unfurl?
Don’t defend the anarchists would be a good step but once you have a street event isn’t this basically rolling dice if violent people will show up?
I think the best thing normal liberals can do is show up to every demonstration in force. The more 50-year-olds there are in the streets, the less oxygen there is for radicals and opportunists to start trouble. Having gray-haired people all around you just kills the mood for that kind of thing. It makes it a profoundly uncool place to be. Bring the corniest signs you can think of.
This was a huge part of the problem in 2020 - the conscientious normies were all staying home due to Covid.
“A little bit of love goes a long way”
You can’t, really. In France, home of many a protest, they do two things: security checks at the entrances to marches for improvised weapon materials, and prior to protests unions preemptively say “we know there will be anarchist idiots, because we have no control over that, and we’re telling you that they don’t represent us in any way, shape or form.”
> security checks at the entrances to marches
Lafayette: Look, we need to make sure protests are peaceful. Artisans, shopkeepers, that sort.
Mirabeau: And small businesses. Small businesses are the key, to peaceful protests and economic growth.
Lafayette: ok ok, and we need to have checks. No gunpowder, no muskets, no scythes pikes clubs, and none of those idiots with cannons. Can you imagine bringing a cannon to a protest. Sheesh. L16 is going to flip out.
George: Now you listen to me you wimps. We march on city hall. We depose the assembly. We march to the Tuileries Palace. We depose the residents. And we reign. Max, recite one of your revolutionary speeches and drill some sense into them.
Lafayette: But the swiss guards, and the numerous national guards!
Max: They are not loyal. They have been called to duty against popular will. La vertu et la terreur. La vertu et la terreur.
George: And ultimately, it's not the muskets or the cannons. Joseph G, show them your new contraption.
Joseph: no no, it's not my design. It's Louis over here. You see, you place the neck like so, and drop this like so, and voila, decapitation.
George: Joseph Guillotine, you excel yourself.
Joseph: no no no, it's not my invention. Please, my family name, please no.
It's on the organizers.
Look at the anti-abortion/pro-life movement. They have major protests, all over the country, multiple times a month, and have for decades. And there are some violent anti-abortion activists. BUT the protests are NEVER even slightly violent.
No guarantees obviously, but organize and recruit such that an overwhelming number of normies show up? No Kings this summer here in Seattle was a LOT of people and perfectly disciplined.
We're also providing new ways to be "cool" while protesting: playing perky music and dancing to it, dressing up in funny costumes, Emergency World Naked Bike Rides, etc. So peer pressure.
The ones doing the real work and showing up probably also have other tactics that I don't know about, especially at night.
(Other suggestions here so far seem to betray a lack of experience with mass urban protests.)
Three things, and they all fall on the organizers. First, screen participants as best you can. Set the expectations up front. Second, in the US, follow your god-damned permitted plan. The whole point of applying for and obtaining a permit is to keep your protest on Constitutionally protected grounds. Breaking from the plan tells the shitheads in your ranks that further deviations-like lighting shit on fire-will likely go unchallenged by the organizers. And third, be very realistic about who is part of your event. A lot of people looked very stupid when they didn't consider that many of the people who are protesting the police are, in fact felons-whose "bad encounters with the police" happened because they were felons.
Yeah, mass protests aren’t the type of things that can be controlled from higher ups like some kind of hierarchy. Public protests are inherently unpredictable. You don’t have the power to give orders that everyone who shows up has to follow.
I think the key thing I'd push is management which can kick folks out and a firm statement to the effect of 'if you want to participate, you need to be brave enough to show your face, not hide behind a balaclava.' The latter is harder due to the lingering left 'we should wear masks everywhere' post-cogif paranoia.
*In Defense of Looting* is really a remarkable book, a sort of ethical anti-matter. One of the arguments is literally “looting is fun.” I had to put the book down and 1,000-yard stare for a good 10 minutes.
Tells you something about the epistemics of the time. Glad we seem to be a bit better now.
So that wasn't just a stupid article... There's a book too?
The article was about the book.