Politics

Reactionary centrists rarely imagine solutions to political problems that do not involve a policy move to the right, especially on social issues. Won an election? You’ll need to give ground to govern. Lost an election? You’ll need to give ground to win next time. That this is obviously unfalsifiable doesn’t bother them in the slightest.

One of the main problems with reactionary centrism can be put in this way: Politics is about both policy and values. To use immigration as an example, the number of visas to be issued would be a question of policy, but whether a pluralist society is a good thing would be a question of values. Reactionary centrists tend to focus exclusively on policy, and sometimes they reframe issues of values as actually being about policy. Changing the policy offer is virtually the only way they can imagine a party appealing to a larger number of voters.

But values matter—not just morally but practically. Voters judge governments, and decide which politicians to trust, based on values. A party’s policies matter in part for what they tell us about their values. Politicians supporting punitive restrictions on immigration are communicating that they believe immigration is bad for the country. If those measures include making language requirements and “good character” tests more stringent, they are also communicating that they believe diversity is a threat to social cohesion, and a homogeneous society is a better one. They might deny these implications. They might not even directly intend them. But the implications are clear nonetheless, and people vote on the basis of them.

Skeptics may claim, You’ll never win voters by telling them they’re racist. But some voters are, abjectly, racist—those who tried to burn refugees alive in the U.K., for instance, or who marched in Charlottesville in the United States chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They are a minority, but a larger share of the electorate than is often imagined quietly supports them.

Our disagreement with fascism is, ultimately, one of values, and it is on that level that the rhetorical fight against fascism must be taken. Those to the left of the populist, nativist right must articulate a competing, values-based vision to give everyone else—and especially the complacent middle—a true alternative to reaction; they must offer a clear, compelling, and coherent story about what the sorts of lives we want people to be free to pursue, and what type of society we want to have to support those dreams. And part of this story will be about just how dangerous, how utterly society-destroying, the far right’s story is. What policy views people can be persuaded to support will follow this conversation, not the other way around.

I usually provide a snippet here, but the detail supporting the thesis is worth the full read. And it's a long one for Techdirt. Here are the first few grafs, beyond which things go sufficiently far into the weeds to make tick spray a good idea:

There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary.

This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.

We live in the most dangerous moment in human history—not because of nuclear weapons or climate change, though both threaten our survival, but because we are creating systems that threaten something deeper: our capacity to remain human. To make meaning. To experience genuine choice. To live lives worth living rather than optimized lives managed by algorithms and administered by bureaucrats.

And our response to this existential crisis? Magical thinking. The comfortable delusion that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that we can have technological progress without existential consequences, that we can avoid difficult choices by pretending they don’t exist.

This is not just political failure—it’s the systematic abandonment of what makes us human in the first place.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. This isn’t a nice feature of consciousness—it’s what consciousness is for. We don’t just process information like biological computers; we create significance, purpose, and value through the active engagement of our minds with reality. We transform raw experience into narrative, chaos into order, suffering into wisdom.

Rare is the piece of this length that I fully agree with. But this provides a nice, comprehensive overview of just how fucked we are.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.

These shifts reverse a four-year trend of rising concern about immigration that began in 2021 and reflect changes among all major party groups.

With illegal border crossings down sharply this year, fewer Americans than in June 2024 back hard-line border enforcement measures, while more favor offering pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.

These findings are based on a June 2-26 Gallup poll of 1,402 U.S. adults, including oversamples of Hispanic and Black Americans, weighted to match national demographics.

The same poll finds many more Americans disapproving than approving of President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration. Trump’s 21% approval rating on the issue among Hispanic adults is below his 35% rating nationally, with the deficit likely reflecting that group’s low support for some of the administration’s signature immigration policies.

Good thing he doesn't go on You Can't do That on Television.

Donald Trump hasn’t been happy with Vladimir Putin lately, and he took out his frustrations with Russia’s president this week by announcing that the United States would resume sending military aid to Ukraine. When he was asked on Tuesday who ordered the aid to be paused in the first place, Trump delivered what has become one of his go-to responses whenever he’s pressed about the chaos his administration is unleashing on the nation and the world.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The pause on aid to Ukraine was apparently ordered last week by beleaguered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who reportedly neglected to tell the White House about the move, leading to internal scrambling. Trump was asked whether he approved the pause while sitting next to Hegseth during a Cabinet meeting. The president only offered that the U.S. needs to keep sending “defensive weapons” to Ukraine because “Putin is not treating human beings right.” When asked who ordered the pause, Trump said he didn’t know. “Why don’t you tell me?” he added.

This would be far more amusing if he got slimed every time he said that.

Also, what kind of strongman doesn't know what's going on in his loyal junta?

When discussing the influence of corporations in the legislative process, and their coordinated efforts to send their opponents to prison, sometimes I fear that I sound like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat. Conversations like this often veer into the territory of conspiracy theories, secret societies, and dark figures gathered around oak tables. The truth is not nearly as sexy. Ag-gag became law through what can only be described as the good ol’ boy network.

In Utah, State Representative John Mathis opened an ag-gag hearing by gesturing to the animal agriculture industry in attendance. “It’s fun to see my good ag friends in this committee,” Mathis said, “all my good friends are here.”

In Idaho, after the ag-gag law passed, industry lobbyists praised the close relationship between politicians and business.

“I think it was another outstanding session where agriculture got a lot of help from the legislature,” one said. “That’s due in no small part to having a lot of people in the legislature who are still very closely tied to agriculture and the industry.”

Such buddy-buddy relationships grease the political wheels. And when industry calls in a favor, they get a quick response. In Kentucky, for example, the Humane Society exposed Iron Maiden Hog Farm. It went viral and became a national story, with news outlets revealing that sick and dead piglets were being ground up and fed back to their mothers. The media called this “piglet smoothies.” The next month, a proposal to outlaw farm investigations was included in what was previously a piece of animal welfare legislation.

Aren't these the same folks who say "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide"?

In early June, The Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on non-government websites), the Post‘s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues—overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as “gay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.”

The headline over the story didn’t mince words: “Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist.”

Identified from a database obtained by the Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.

Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised.

I'm reminded of a likely apocryphal tale of the copyeditor who dutifully changed Enola Gay to Enola Homosexual to conform to then-current AP Style.

But bluntly, I don't think near enough attention is being paid not only to [insert colour of your choice here]washing but also to the mounting attempts to literally erase history. If you're cheering for that, you're not a conservative, and you sure as fuck aren't a patriot.

You're a useful idiot. Have fun losing Medicaid.

If you can't win on policy, change the rules!

Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, has been accused by political opponents of trying to “fix” next year’s midterms in favor of Republicans after he announced a plan that would see a wide-scale redrawing of the state’s congressional districts.

The move was contained in Abbott’s list of priorities for the upcoming legislative session published Wednesday. It features several items related to the deadly Hill Country flooding that killed at least 120 people and left dozens more missing, including instructions for lawmakers to look at early warning systems and improving disaster preparation.

But Abbott’s directive to redraw congressional maps, which the Texas Tribune reported on Wednesday, was in response from a Trump administration demand for more Republican seats to preserve or expand the party’s narrow House majority, has angered Democrats.

In a statement, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee called the move “an attack on democracy”.

A fired Justice Department attorney has provided Congress with a trove of emails and text messages to corroborate his claims that a controversial Trump judicial nominee — top DOJ official Emil Bove — crudely discussed defying court orders.

Reuveni was a career lawyer at DOJ until he was fired this spring after he told a judge that the administration had mistakenly deported an immigrant in violation of a court order. Then, last month, Reuveni sent a 27-page whistleblower letter to the Judiciary Committee accusing Bove of saying that DOJ may need to rebuff court orders that might hinder Trump’s deportation agenda. According to Reuveni, Bove told colleagues that they might have to consider telling the courts “fuck you.”

... Boasberg ordered that planes containing the men, whom Trump deemed “alien enemies” under a wartime law, be turned around, if necessary, and in any event that the men not be handed over to the Salvadoran government.

Just prior to Boasberg’s decision, Justice Department officials worried that the effort might be stopped by a court. That’s when, according to Reuveni, Bove uttered the “fuck you” line.

After Boasberg’s decision, Reuveni sent a text message to an unidentified colleague referring back to Bove’s alleged comment: “Guess we are going to say ‘fuck you’ to the court. Super,” he wrote. The colleague responded: “Well, Pamela Jo Bondi is. Not you.”

The messages show that in the hours after Boasberg’s ruling, Reuveni repeatedly relayed to colleagues that the immigrants covered by the judge’s order should not be turned over to El Salvador. And he later expressed concern that they seemed to have been handed over anyway.

In one of the newly-disclosed emails, the acting head of Justice’s Civil Division, Yaakov Roth, told Reuveni and other officials that the men were unloaded based on legal advice given by Bove. The email indicates Bove said it was OK to do so because the flights had left U.S. airspace before Boasberg, who initially delivered his order orally, followed up with a written order in the court’s electronic docket.

Boasberg, an Obama appointee, has rejected that interpretation of his orders and found probable cause to initiate contempt proceedings over potential defiance of his rulings. That process has been halted for now by an appeals court.

from The Hill:

The three-judge D.C. Circuit panel was split 2-1. The two Trump appointees, Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, ruled for the administration. Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee of former President Obama, dissented.

In which Mars-in-Theory🦋 goes into how 'common sense' and similar discussion terminating cliches are fascist and merely exist to maintain and prop up the status quo.

I expect this to have broad bipartisan support and to pass with little opposition.