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I want a vice presidential debate top level post.
So JD Vance sounded pretty good here overall. If you ask me, both speakers were miles ahead of their presidential candidate counterparts, which is sad. There is probably a lot that can be read from the debate, but I did want to discuss a couple moments making waves on other social media. First I will mention I was surprised to hear JD Vance support nuclear energy, and I will also mention a lot of people were probably unhappy with how he handled the gun control/mass shooting question. But back to the two I wanted to mention
The first such moment originated from a fact check:
Tim Walz responds to his statement, and then a debate moderator comes in with this:
I will cut it off there to not balloon this post. You can read the transcript here.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Next up, the January 6th and failure to concede the election:
Once again, there is more to this exchange than that. I said earlier that they had good performances, and I'll go further here and say that JD Vance had a pretty great night. I'd never heard him speak before and he sounded very well spoken, very well informed, and brought up many issues that I so dearly wished that Donald Trump would have brought up, like specifically naming the asylum system and mentioning the partial birth abortions allowed in Minnesota (I noticed Tim Walz's denial was not fact checked). That is to say, JD Vance is competent and might have won against Kamala Harris, representing a return to civil debates and "normal" politicians, despite the "weird" allegations.
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again. That is very powerful ammo for the other side. And it's far from the only ammo. I am very disappointed with the rhetoric Trump throws around. His lashing out against Taylor Swift reads as totally pathetic. And it is sad to see someone with as much talent as JD Vance have to try to slip around all this crap coming at him, from both Tim Walz, the debate moderator, and untold amounts of unhappy people on Twitter.
My favorite "fact check" of the night was on the Climate Change question. The moderator asked a question which included a reference to Donald Trump calling climate change a "hoax." Both candidates gave answers, neither of which supported Trump's "hoax" framing; Walz argued against it and Vance avoided it. Then the moderators "fact-checked" Trump, who was only there in the moderators' own words. It was truly bizarre execution of a pre-planned fact-check and exposed the lie of no moderator fact-checking.
(Interestingly. I'm having trouble finding a quote in which Trump calls "climate change" a "hoax." This biased article (https://democrats.org/news/donald-the-denier-donald-trump-has-repeatedly-called-climate-change-a-hoax/) claims that he has 'repeatedly' called it a "hoax," but only produces one quote in which he refers to the "global warming hoax," which is arguably different as the term was changed to fit a broader definition. And then there's this earlier article where he directly says it might not be a hoax: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-climate-change-not-a-hoax-but-not-sure-of-its-source.)
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I was reminded of an old Scott Alexander post about how to handle the culture war. It was basically have two different elections, one election is just for the culture war and one election is just for hard policy stuff. And don't allow people to vote in both.
It was one of those "out-there" ideas that get tossed out so you can just think about things from a new perspective. But it seems it was prescient in a way. What we have with this latest election is almost that exact division. Where the presidential candidates are almost pure culture war outgrowths. And the Vice presidential candidates are these policy oriented wonks.
This one? Not by Scott though.
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This is why I like Canada's constitutional monarchy. It lets people personify the country and worship its head of state without necessarily endorsing the current policy leader.
Canadian elections are almost all culture war nowadays, though...
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Have you read Eastman’s thoughts on the election? I find it compelling that the constitution mandates state legislatures decide how to run elections and the executives in many states abrogated that power unto themselves as part of a Covid emergency action.
What’s the remedy there except to get the legislatures to explicitly endorse an election outcome?
This is a great law geeks' question. The key issue is the interpretation of the Constitutional text "as the legislature thereof may direct" (which appears in the Constitution in reference to both House elections and selection of Presidential electors). The conventional view is that this has the same meaning as "as the laws thereof may direct" - i.e. that state election laws are ordinary state laws which can be amended or abrogated in all the usual ways set out in a state constitution including gubernatorial veto, judicial review by state supreme courts, amendment by initiative and referendum and (relevant here) temporary override in an emergency properly declared by the Governor. The strong form of the conventional view is (consistently with most in-state state-law cases) there is no federal remedy in an election case unless a federal law or the federal Constitution has been violated (as happened in Bush v. Gore.
The alternative view, referred to by law geeks as the "Independent State Legislature" theory, is that "as the legislature thereof may direct" is a delegation of federal authority to the two (or one in Nebraska) houses of the State legislature that is independent of their normal legislative power stemming from the state constitution. In this view state election laws are actually delegated federal laws, amending them by initiative or abrogating them by state-court judicial review violates the federal Constitution, and it is the job of federal courts to ensure that they are followed to the letter.
As a matter of original public meaning, the conventional view is obviously correct. Gubernatorial vetoes of state election laws were routine in the founding era, and a number of states entrenched their election laws by amending their state constitutions.
In terms of how it fared at SCOTUS, the ISL theory loses 4-3 in Bush v. Gore (Rehnquist, Thomas and Scalia join a concurrence saying that ISL required a de novo review of the Florida Supreme Court's interpretation of Florida election law, the four liberals reject it, Kennedy and O'Connor don't reach the issue). A weak version of ISL loses 5-4 in a 2015 Arizona redistricting case with Scalia, Thomas and Alito joining a Roberts dissent. Roberts distinguishes between "normal" limits on state legislatures like gubernatorial vetoes and state court judicial review and a scheme like the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission where a state amends its constitution to remove an aspect of election law from the regular legislative process altogether.
So as of 2020 the ISL theory is potentially winning, in the sense that conservative justices have tended to endorse it, and it hasn't been rejected yet by a majority-conservative court. But as a matter of law - of original public meaning of the Constitutional text, SCOTUS precedent, and long-standing practice - it is borderline-frivolous. Texas v. Pennsylvania (the last-ditch 2020 election lawsuit in which Eastman was heavily involved, designed to invoke original SCOTUS jurisdiction) was based on ISL, and SCOTUS denied it 7-2 on standing grounds (with no justices reaching the merits).
We finally see a cleanish ISL case with Moore vs Harper in 2021. The case concerns a North Carolina gerrymander, which the NC Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional on state constitutional equal protection grounds. The strong version of ISL loses 6-2 (most people report it as 6-3, but Alito dissented on mootness and didn't join the substantive part of the dissent), with the Roberts majority implying and the Kav concurrence making explicit that they do not endorse the strong form of the conventional view - the federal courts can intervene to correct an incorrect state court decision in a state-law elections case in a way in which they can't in, say, a state-law tort case.
So where does that leave the Eastman theory that the 2020 election was invalid because of improper use of emergency powers to allow easier postal voting during the pandemic? Well it puts it back to the states. "Is this use of gubernatorial emergency powers valid as a matter of the state constitution?" is exactly the sort of question state supreme courts exist to resolve. Unfortunately, some of the key swing state supreme courts punted. The one I am familiar with is Pennsylvania, where the state courts ordered the potentially invalid postal votes to be segregated, and then mooted the case when there weren't enough of them to affect the result. But had SCOTUS reached the merits Texas v. Pennsylvania, it would presumably have ruled in favour of Pennsylvania on the grounds that the appropriate remedy was in state court.
But critically, the Eastman theory wasn't the argument Trump was actually making in November and December 2020. Trump was alleging (including in all his legal filings except Texas v. Pennsylvania) that there was outcome-determining fraud, not that there was a technical procedural irregularity. If we take Trump seriously (whether or not we take him literally), we should evaluate his core claims on their merits, not replace them with different claims that are stronger. If I had been responsible for Trump's post-election litigation strategy, I would have focussed on filing ISL-based claims in a timely and procedurally regular way (in federal district Court, with the filing fee paid). But that isn't the strategy the Trump campaign used.
Incidentally, because the Pennsylvania state law question was never formally resolved, Project 2025 suggests that a Trump DOJ should force the issue by bringing criminal prosecutions against election officials on the basis that they allowed invalid votes to be cast in violation of (DOJ's interpretation of) state law, thereby violating the civil rights of the voters whose unquestionably valid votes were diluted. This is less legally outrageous than it sounds, but the incentives created would be a disaster for American democracy.
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CNN wants Harris to win and will do everything they think they can get away with to make it happen. The same could be said of all establishment media. I'm not sure what else you expected.
I will say in response: the 2020 election was clearly and obviously stolen, and then Time bragged about "fortifying" it. It was not the first stolen election in my lifetime, and I doubt it will be the last. To see people still clutch at their pearls over this is asinine. To see it on this board is tiresome. Simply repeating that I shouldn't believe my own lying eyes, and shaming me for refusing to bow to your pressure, might work on some people, but it doesn't work on me.
And why shouldn't they run again? So you and yours don't have to see them, or hear their complaints, or address their concerns? So that the manufacturing of votes and stealing of elections can go on unimpeded?
Not that I am particularly interested in this discussion, but I guess somebody has to ask it: what do you mean when you say the 2020 election was stolen and what evidence do you have beyond some local shenanigans here and there that most certainly didn't flip the outcome?
Tangentially, IMO both sides got the response to claims of election shenanigans totally wrong, going into tribal mode rather than civic mode.
Whether or not there was actual fraud, there was pretty compelling appearance of fraud in the seemingly sychronized one-way anomolies that took place on election night. Rather than carefully investigating claims of impropriety and producing explanations that assauged concerns, the winning side took the very Trumpian approach of declaring fraud impossible in the most secure and perfect election ever held, coupled with a slate of articles condescendingly headline with the following template "No, xxxxxxxxx didn't happen, you fucking MAGA retards!" (OK, that last part was implied rather than stated directly.) It seems to me, as someone who voted for neither Trump nor Biden in 2020, that there were ample claims of shenanigans that deserved sober investigation, and sober investigation was never produced. The losers, on the other hand, thanks to grifters who saw they could profit off an atmosphere of polarized suspicion, threw every possible crazy fraud theory into the mix and then threw the stupidest tantrum in American history on Jan. 6. Trump was a terrible figurehead for a cause that could only possibly succeed with a careful and precise and civic-minded legal approach. I don't think the winners were ever capable of entertaining the best evidence of fraud and the losers were never capable of producing it.
This kind of thing deserves a really good blog post that I can't really write. everything is like this. Every election, every mass shooting, every presidential assassination attempt, the covid vaccinations, there are always unexplainable anomalies that clearly prove something's going on, even if we don't quite know what it is. Some numbers just aren't right, the times don't line up, some things are suspiciously aligned, some evidence conveniently disappears. An election security engineer at Dominion voting systems used to be antifa. (and, of course, his last name was Eric Coomer - they want you to know it's fucking with you). The numbers don't pass the statistical tests, the dem numbers spiked at the last minute, a pipe burst and they stopped counting, more people voted than were registered to vote, a van seemed to have huge folders of fake ballots ...
The thing is, the world's really complicated. Weird things happen sometimes. Pipes sometimes burst. More often than that, people make mistakes. They do the statistics wrong (if >50% of published academic papers can do it, the substack blogger 'bad cattitude' can do it too). They see a huge change in the reported number of votes on a website and think that means the underlying was changed, when the website was just wrong. They hear a second shot, maybe a third shot.
People constantly make mistakes. I do something pretty dumb on most days. I thought it was Sunday more of last Saturday than I'd have liked to (I was pretty sick, admittedly). And there are more minor mistakes, misreading a point in a paper or blogpost or doing some math wrong or misplaying in a game. And a big problem with internet politics, and especially with what people call 'conspiracy theories', is nothing forces you to notice mistakes. You don't show up at the wrong time, you don't lose the deal, the shed doesn't collapse. You just post, and if it's interesting enough it gets likes, and then a bunch of other people hear it, and it repeats itself. And then you keep making mistakes, and you don't learn how to catch them and it builds on itself. And so a thousand different reasons why the election was stolen, or why covid's not real / is still, in 2024, literally a genocide of the disabled / the vaccine is killing a million people spread and mutate across the internet.
I'm pretty sure none of the anomalies were objectively surprising or worrisome. Every one I've dug into, or seen ymes dig into, has ended up being nothing. Not responding to most of them was reasonable. Of course some of the media, and especially progressives on twitter, was unduly dismissive for poor reasons, but that happens with everything on every side. And then, uh, the president of the united states believes the theories and tries to get Pence to throw the election to the House and j6 happens. The world sure is complicated.
It's not really a moral failing to mess up a statistical test and think the election is stolen, or at least any more than every other mistake (and tbh they might all be). But it's still unfortunate.
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Couldn't agree more. And I might be unfair to @KMC, but @ymeskhout did a pretty good job attempting (and in my recollection, succeeding) to dismantle quite a few of the fraud claims to a degree I am not able to reproduce here. It just irks me when people put forth a hugely controversial claim that has been discussed ad nauseam on this forum and pretend it's an obvious matter of fact. This is a debate forum, debates should have consequences. If we all just go back to our previous claims as if nothing happened, what's the point? It just means the most stubborn win out, as opposed to those with better arguments. It's sadly a strategy some posters here employed to great effect, including our resident "revisionist".
To be clear, that last bit isn't directed at KMC. It's just something that annoyed me for a while now and I might be unfairly projecting my grievances onto him.
Yes, that's how I feel about people declaring 2020 as the most secure election ever, and saying that people who question it are not fit to hold office. My stubbornness is a reflection and response, as well as my own nature.
Cards on the table, the next two most obviously stolen elections I know of are 2004 (the other one in my lifetime) and 1960.
Our elections are insecure. The Democrats appear to have benefited from that insecurity, and are obviously preventing necessary and reasonable methods to increase security. Until there is some contrition from the left, and concessions on election security, I will continue to be stubborn, and continue to insist it was obviously stolen, if to no other purpose than to remind people that it is not settled and there is no consensus.
Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
How was the 2004 election stolen by the Democrats?
I never said it was stolen by the Democrats.
It was the Ohio electronic voting machines that stole it for Bush.
Ah, given your repeated emphasis on how democrats need to apologize, I interpreted you as meaning they stole that one too
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None of those people are on this forum.
Sure, but that's different from claiming that Publius obviously fucked her.
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The best evidence I have is the midnight flip is forex markets.
All of it is local shenanigans, and it absolutely swung Georgia and Arizona at a minimum. If you're not interested in that, then so be it.
elaborate?
The night after the election, or early in the morning, the dollar plunged. It flipped from expecting a Trump win to expecting a Biden win. This happened at the same time as the midnight ballot counting that restarted after kicking out neutral observers, which I referenced in Georgia as the Freeman/Shaye debacle. It was also occurring in Philadelphia, I recall.
My interpretation was just that the markets were wrong, as they are sometimes, and didn't correctly take into account different arrival rates of different sources of ballots. I don't find that surprising, markets in new / infrequent things aren't that efficient and are often wrong. The people setting the prices are human, and humans need practice to get good at things. Markets in stocks are somewhat efficient because there are many stocks and many people trading them for a long time, and even then...
I think this isn't indicative, really. Election day was a day, and a lot of things happened on that day, including dozens of claimed frauds, so the drop would've happened after one fraud. I don't think this is a particularly strong rebuttal but it's what I think
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I'm interested. Please present the best evidence you have.
If you don't already believe the Ruby Freeman/Shaye Moss story in Georgia, I can't help you. That was the most blatant fraud I've ever seen, caught on camera.
For Arizona, if you'd like to sit through five hours of hearings, you may.
If you'd prefer a summary, the most damning fact is primarily that all the voting systems used the same passwords for all accounts. There were ballots with duplicated serial numbers, ballots with missing serial numbers, 74k ballots returned with no record of being sent, 11k vote cast by voters who only appeared on voter rolls in December (probably a subset of the 74k), 4k registered voters who registered after the cutoff, 18k voters who participated and then were immediately removed for ineligibility, ballots printed on the wrong paper, and to top it off, no count of the votes found and tabulated, or comparison to the official count.
You mean this case where the investigation found no wrongdoing? Or do you think the FBI are in on it too?
You mean the FBI that hosed down the roof of the building where the Trump shooter was shot, the very same day? The FBI that, combined with the CIA, were responsible for the bullshit 'investigation' of the Kennedy assassination?
No they weren't in on it, but hell yes they're the fixers. Their job is to come in, clean up, and present a tidy package to the public. I take that as a given.
The FBI is not to be trusted, ever, on anything. Certainly not anything that would stand to benefit or harm Trump, the only true threat to FDR's Imperial Deep State since Nixon.
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I've never heard about the story beyond a passing mention. I've debated a fair few election skeptics, but they each pluck their own pet theory out of the gish gallop so it's always something new. All I see on the Ruby Freeman/Shaye Moss story on Google is Giuliani losing a defamation suit against them, and being asked to pay a ludicrous sum. Is there a site (preferably neutral) that summarizes it better in your eyes?
I don't really want to watch 5 hours of hearings in any cases.
Upon Google searching it, I find the audit itself was highly controversial for being directed by a partisan firm. I plugged the 74k claim into Google, and found a deluge of articles saying the claim is just wrong, that the claimed discrepency comes from confusing that EV32 and EV33 files aren't meant to be full records of all ballots that have been sent, but rather:
I cannot find any followup from the other side. Do you have an article (again, preferably neutral) that has a response?
No, there's nothing neutral under the sun. I have partisan sources and partisan people writing partisan things.
OK, sure, "nothing is neutral", but do you have any evidence or sources that have a reputation for doing good work that you can provide? As in, people who aren't just broken clocks fishing for an answer they want, regardless of what reality might show?
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I think all media wants their preferred candidate to win because it will make them the most money. Establishment media cares only about lining their coffers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news/
Left-leaning news outlets do better under Republican administrations. Right-leaning outlets do better under Democrat administrations. If the bottom-line was the primary driver, CNN and MSNBC would be pushing for a Trump win.
it's principal agent problem all the way to the top. The mistake often done in these kinds of discussions is assuming that the news reporter or the editor and journalist in the news room cares about the bottom line of the corporation. The only ones that do are the CEO and the bean counters in the finance room; everyone else cares about other things (ideology) as it isn't their job to make sure their business is profitable enough to make payroll.
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So that we don't lose again, pretty much. I've said my thoughts on Trump in another post: it's not just the election claims, it's everything. I don't understand why some people are so attached to him. He scares the hoes.
With a partisan media on their opponent' side, Trump supporters believe that anyone they can get through a primary that isn't actually working mostly for the other side will be cast in a way that scares the hoes. Trump's affectations are protecting him, they're not liabilities. In MMORPG parlance, he's a tank; he's such a big juicy target that his opponents can't help but focus all their fire on him, but he's also uniquely good at shrugging it off.
If Trump wasn't their number 1 obsession, and Vance was the most important target they had, couch fucking insinuations would be some of the least vile things the media would be saying about him.
My problem with that is that Trump is not just affecting Trump, he's affecting any Republican out there by pressuring them to align with him. If they do, they endorse all the utterly stupid statements he makes and have to defend them, or slip out of questions about them somehow. If they don't, they're weakening the party and lose support from MAGA diehards. JD Vance really couldn't answer properly on the "was the election stolen" question. He couldn't outright say he thinks it's stolen, and he couldn't say that Trump is wrong on this. Trump has forced his own side at large to confront similar conundrums.
This will not end after Trump wins or loses. This will hang over every Republican Party member who endorsed Trump for the rest of their careers. And the ones that didn't endorse Trump have to shut up about their Trump supporting friends get screwed over in the media, showing themselves as weak in the process.
He should not have run again.
This kind of thing is not a result of Trump being uniquely bad for the Republicans, it's a result of a partisan media using this tool, forcing to confront conundrums, in a single direction.
A fair media would at every opportunity, at least as often as they ask Republicans about the 2020 election, ask every Democrat how it's somehow acceptable that the sitting president be, at least for months, months during which the rest of the world keeps happening, as senile as the man everyone saw in Biden's last debate.
And that's just one example, you can find gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements for every politician, and if not you can find people they've endorsed or publically approved of that have such gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements that you can then put the politican's nose in. You can find far-left terrorists that are close friends of Obama, an honest to goodness Klan leader that Biden considers "a mentor", for the same Biden a record of voting against the progressive politics he now claims to espouse,etc... These are not liabilities for these people not because they have been satisfactorily answered, but because the mainstream media shield them from these questions instead of asking them. If they crop up in right-wing media, the mainstream media will rush to write excuses and rationalization (often as "fact-checks") for them.
Of course, Trump generates his fair share of those conundrums, but I don't see him as unique this way. The volume at which people are asked to defend them is a function not the amount or heaviness of these conundrums, but of who holds the microphone.
And to be clear, the answer to pretty much all of these conundrums is the same, it's something everyone in politics knows, and everyone savvy outside of it knows, but that cannot be said out loud or else you create gigantic weak spot for your enemies to attack. It's that politics is in large part a competitive team sport and to get anywhere in it sometimes you just have to put being a team player ahead of personal beliefs, truth or your constituents. Of course the moment any politician admits it his opponents will jump at the chance to lie that they're different "Well, I would never put my party before my constituents!"
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Even keeping it to the 2020 election, why was no one who claimed that 2020 was "the most secure election in history" asked for the data on which that statement was based? By what metrics, and how do those metrics compare to past elections? Or was that claim based on partisan wish fulfillment and yet accepted as fact because we don't like the people claiming otherwise?
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You're right. I still think Trump shouldn't have run, but this is no longer one of the reasons why.
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Personally, I'm attached to him because he's an honest-to-god political outsider, and the hoes he's scaring are the uniparty, the deep state, the military industrial complex, or whatever you want to call it. FDR's imperial legacy. The Federal Bureaucracy.
He broke the GOP in twain and then picked up the pieces. This is an unmitigated good, in my opinion, because before he came the GOP was the party of the Iraq War.
He's also the only one to take the majority stance on immigration, and say it out loud.
There are many, many reasons to be attached to Donald Trump, and they are due to his uniqueness. Vance may be a suitable replacement, but there are few likely candidates, making Trump all the more precious.
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Not that it changes anything but this was CBS.
It doesn't change it, really, but I appreciate the correction. CNN might have slightly more reputation to protect.
oh interesting - I view CBS much more positively than I do CNN.
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Temporary Protected Status and Asylum are different legal protections, with different criteria and processes. More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to? I am under the impression it refers to people in the United States without a legal status that permits them to remain. That very literally does not include people with TPS (like the Haitians in Springfield have). if "illegal immigrant" includes even people who have legal permission to be here, what precisely are the boundaries? Are there green card holders who are "illegal immigrants?"
It's also kind of funny to hear Vance complain about the CBP One app since it was launched in... October 2020 by the Trump administration!
Forget election denial claims. What ought to be disqualifying is his statement that he would not have counted the lawfully cast electoral college votes. Nobody should be Vice President who cannot affirm the simple fact that the Vice President's role is ministerial, a fact Republicans would instantly discover if Kamala Harris acted otherwise.
He’s using it not as a legal term but as a meta description. Arnold Kling outlined in The Three Languages of Politics that most political language is not for convincing opponents but rather for rallying those on the edge of the tribe, reminding them of why they’re in the tribe:
In this case, Vance is describing the meta-category of people who find a way to systematically skirt the usual requirements for citizenship or residency, naming it for the central case while describing an edge case. Anything which looks like a back-channel or backdoor into the US for a steady flow of non-Americans is in this big-tent category. It smells like sabotage, a subversion of the Congressionally-passed immigration and naturalization processes by which people from other nations become legal citizens with full privileges.
For some in this category, it looks like claiming asylum, getting their deportation hearing deferred a year, getting some money from the US taxpayer, and then never showing up.
For others, it’s seeking refuge because their home country is crappy, if not specifically in a state of emergency. For the conspiratorial mindset, this is the time to check intelligence operations in that country and see if the deep state did something like assassinate a head of country to get refugees to flow to America.
That's fine, but if he wants a meta-descriptor he should be probably not use one containing a word which is strictly false in relation to the group he is trying to describe.
I’ll agree to that as soon as advocates for these people return the unadorned word “immigrant” to its rightful place as a synonym of “naturalized citizen”.
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Isn't the distinction Vance was making that the immigrants entered the U.S. illegally and then TPS retroactively changed that status, temporarily, to legal?
But if you read the article, it says that the app's functions have been expanded under Biden to do things like grant parole to illegal immigrants! https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cbp-one-overview
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"TPS does not eliminate the effect of [an] unlawful entry.” (Sanchez v. Mayorkas (2021) 593 U.S. 409) It, similarly to DACA/DAPA, just temporarily waves a magic wand over otherwise-unlawfully-present migrants because the executive believes that extenuating circumstances make repatriation a bad idea at the moment. Worse, the Biden Administration is affirmatively facilitating the importation of well north of a million migrants who have no reasonable avenue to U.S. citizenship or even long-term work authorizations through the unprecedented expansion of a "parole" authority from the early 50's.
So technically yes, these people aren't "illegal immigrants" in the classic sense of the term; there are legal fig leaves justifying the government's failure to remove them. However, they certainly are not modal immigrants, i.e. people who intend to and are authorized to permanently remain in the U.S. and who in due course will become citizens. Instead, the law has shifted in order to find ways to putatively bless the importation of a millions-strong second-class-citizen helot class entirely dependent upon the whims of the state and their employers. Heckuva job. sarcastic clapping.
I feel like one obvious difference between DACA/DAPA and TPS is that TPS is Congressionally authorized (by the Immigration Act of 1990) while DACA and DAPA are purely executive action. The TPS program is also not limited to people who initially lacked a lawful status like DACA and DAPA are. The Sanchez decision is limited to unlawful entries. If you were in the United States lawfully when you were granted TPS you can still get permanent resident status like anyone else here lawfully for an extended period of time.
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JD Vance basically won the debate. He was bogged down by being tied to Trump’s dumber ideas, but he won nonetheless by running rings around Walz. He clearly knew what he was talking about, too, with comments like the CBP one app.
Walz lied about project 2025, but that’s to be expected. Vance pinned him on after birth abortion but I wish he could’ve called him out on Amanda Thurman.
Overall I think lots of Americans would be much happier if it were a Walz-Vance élection. The moderators were clearly biased but less so than the Trump-Harris debate. And I think the most lasting moment from the debate will be Walz’s gaffe where he claimed to befriend school shooters.
People here keep saying Democrats “lied about Project 2025.” What are they actually saying about it? What has Trump said, other than “not knowing the guy?”
I think if you take Trump seriously but not literally, or just assume that he doesn’t have many plans to choose from, he’s probably going to end up picking a very Project-approved slate. Kind of like the Federalist Society list of justices. He’s never had any problem delegating before.
Yes, I have no trouble believing that project 2025 will be very influential in a Trump admin. ‘Trump’s project 2025’ is a lie- it literally isn’t from Trump, wasn’t commissioned by Trump, and the implication that Trump endorsed everything therein is false- but it’s not a whopper, more of a stretcher.
It’s the contents of project 2025 which are lies. Like no, it does not include building a national database of pregnant women to prosecute miscarriages as abortion. If it did democrats would be able to point to the section and paragraph number, and quote specific wording. Democrats are just making up awful sounding bullshit because nobody’s going to go read through 900 pages of legalese to fact check it.
This article is relevant: PROJECT 2025 WILL KILL YOUR DOG
Choice quotes:
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From the 2025 Mandate For Leadership Page 455 and 456:
Sure there isn't a literal "every state should have report every pregnant woman to the feds" merely "every state should have to report how every pregnancy ended to the feds." If you think the latter wouldn't be used to prosecute alleged violations of a federal abortion prohibition you're a fool.
What federal abortion ban? There won’t be one under Trump, although it’s not totally implausible he could try to standardize pregnancy related health reporting procedures.
That is the whopper- Trump doesn’t want to ban abortion on the federal level, the democrats are arguing that he wants to create this totalitarian system for enforcing a policy he doesn’t want.
Project 2025 already believes they don't need a further ban. The Comstock Act already arguably bans mailing drugs used for abortion. It even calls it out indirectly on Page 459:
Trump wouldn't need to sign any further laws to effectively end abortion nation wide, in their view.
Back in the very recent past when the Comstock Act was enforced and the president did not fail his oath to uphold the laws of the country so blatantly, abortion happened all over the place. It does not prevent abortions from happening in states where abortion is legal. It would prevent organizations from using the mail to ship abortion drugs directly to the home of someone in a state where it is illegal.
The most recent Comstock Act conviction was a child-porn conviction in 2021. The Comstock Act remains in force today, unless repealed by Congress.
Project 2025 is only calling for a very narrow enforcement of the Comstock act, despite there being a stronger interpretation that would make medication abortions more difficult (though surgical abortions cannot be stopped through Comstock. Comstock does not restrict shipping gloves and forceps/). Project 2025 is only asking that the federal government enforce the federal law that would prevent mail-order abortion so that the states that have banned abortion can enforce their laws.
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Lack of high-quality data on an important women's health procedure is another indication of how the patriarchy doesn't take women's issues seriously.
I'm not a mod but can we avoid in general solo ironic statements like this (and this )regardless of their humor factor, in such discussions? In the spirit of writing what you mean.
(I wrote the linked comment)
That's fair. The Democrats' repeated insistence on referring to "Trump's Project 2025" is so transparently ridiculous, It makes me want to post the Jesse Pinkman, "he can't keep getting away with it," GIF. It somehow causes me great despair that the Democrats found this phrase which sounds ominous, and for that reason alone will keep on saying it, despite the fact that anyone who stops to think about what they know about Trump would find it wildly implausible. It just seems so cynical to me.
That's what I was trying to express, but I agree that it's better to not fill the forum with sarcastic comments
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I kind of unironically agree with what he said. Don't know if Controls was ironic or not, but I have seen pro-life women who often argue this way.
Maybe he wasn't being ironic. Typically "the patriarchy" isn't used around these parts unironically, but I may be misunderstanding.
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That it is Trump's plan for his second term. It is not Trump's plan, neither in the sense of Trump creating it nor Trump endorsing it.
But surely we can agree Trump's thinking has been influenced by his careful study of the 922-page publication from the Heritage Foundation describing Project 2025, and/or the back-and-forth discussions he engaged in with its authors on policy matters prior to its being released.
I... think this is satire?
I just find the whole Project 2025 association so absurd because I actually followed the Democrats' advice and "google[d] Project 2025", which led me to the discovery of the project's 922-page book. And to claim that Donald Trump, of all people, actually read this book, well... is there any person in America who could believe it? As Loquat says in his comment, people invent all kinds of fantastical stories about Trump, but the idea that he would read a book? You've got to be kidding.
Well, I don’t think trump’s thinking was influenced by it because I don’t think Trump has coherent thoughts on policy. The less catchy version would be that the people staffing a future Trump administration would be influenced by the agenda outlined in project 2025. I don’t think that’s far off from what’s being said, is it?
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I've heard all manner of claims about Donald Trump, but I've never heard anyone accuse him of being the sort of man who'd carefully study a 922-page document on governance.
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By the way, I also enjoyed this exchange, which I forgot to mention in the original post. My enjoyment was purely because of @naraburns's writeup on the subject:
What's funny to me is that Tim Walz actually got the story wrong, didn't he? Amber Thurman didn't die in any journey back and forth, she failed to go to the hospital for an infection and died in a hospital in Georgia. What an incredible lie. And it makes me wonder about the other examples he mentioned earlier.
Yes, it seems like every case I have seen as demonstrating the effects of overturning Roe v. Wade has been misrepresented in some way. Inspired by your comment, I looked up the Amanda Zurawski case that Walz cited in the debate. In their ruling on Zurawski v. Texas, the Texas supreme court wrote:
So the current rhetoric coming from Democrats on abortion is certainly very misleading, with Kamala Harris claiming that women need to be in the middle of bleeding to death in parking lots in order for doctors to provide treatment. In very general terms, it's fair to say that if there were no abortion laws at all, then doctors would not even theoreticallly have to worry about being prosecuted for breaking those laws. But in every single abortion case I have seen cited as an example of the disastrous consequences of Dobbs, doctors either were grossly negligent (Amber Thurman), or at best, believed that the law restricted them in ways that, properly interpreted, they were not restricted at all.
I definitely want the law to be clear, but I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of the supposed "misunderstandings" about what the law prohibits are driven by opposition to the law.
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Well yeah. Joe Biden lied constantly throughout the 2020 and 2024 election cycles. He never, or rarely, got called out on it. And now the lies continue, only it’s only ever the republicans that get “fact checked”. And now they’re trying to “ban misinformation” online. Does anyone really not see how transparent this all is?
I think what's most remarkable is after 40+ years of having a reputation for having a problematic relationship with truth, Biden got rehabilitated into some sort of Washingtonian "I cannot tell a lie" figure. And people actually went along with it! I've said it before, but I'll say it again. It wasn't until TDS that I really understood Orwell's "We've always been at war with Eastasia" chapter. I remember reading that, and thinking he was just being cartoonishly over the top. But apparently I owe Orwell an apology. I never should have doubted him.
I thought “Ministry of Love” was over the top long ago as well. I too owe him an apology.
Ok no one else is asking so I'll ask. How so? Would you care to clarify or expand on this?
Oh, sure. Sorry wasn't trying to be opaque.
The Ministry of Love is of course the organization that tortures and re-educates wayward citizens. It seemed to me the first time I read it like a deliberately absurd exaggeration to name something the literal opposite of what it is, but "reasoning from names" seems like a common strategy.
See, e.g., "antifa just means anti fascism -- why would you oppose that?" or "why would you oppose 'inclusion' initiatives, you worthless bigot?" or "a disinformation governance board makes you nervous? what, you want incorrect information to spread unchecked?"
It's a common trope that to name something is to wield power over it, for instance Adam names creatures in Genesis, demons keep their true names secret in much of fantasy, and there are plenty of folklore beliefs about the power of a true name.
The inverse also seems true to me. If you can't properly name a thing then you can't control it. Giving something reprehensible a benign-sounding name seems to really short-circuit something in our brains. It becomes difficult to even reason about it properly I think.
Orwell had a deep understanding of how language can manipulate people and I shouldn't have doubted him.
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Pretty much agreed with you on everything. Like you said, I like them both a lot better than the actual presidential candidates. But I guess being VP gives a little more space to breathe and avoid the media frenzy. Vance is obviously smarter, but Walz is more likeable and relatable to average voters. The moderators were obnoxious with the interrupting "fact checks" and loaded questions ("you have one minute to explain how to fix the economy"). But I suppose that's normal for a presidential debate in the current year. At least we got to see a little bit of actual policy debate.
One moment that stuck out to me was when the moderators asked a doom-and-gloom question about climate change, and both candidates were like "yeah I don't really care about that, we're going to focus on increasing oil and gas and manufacturing." Really showed the disconnect between the media and a politician who understands what average voters care about.
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But what if it's true?
Vance had a very good night and I thought Walz basically did fine. I thought it was a pretty boring debate, and I disagree with the idea floating around that these kinds of debates are good. (I believe you're genociding me, you believe I'm trying to kill you, but, importantly, we can come together and talk like adults about our shared values and buh-boh -- boring! I'm glad Trump destroyed this.)
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How much does JDV know about the asylum-seeking process? There's only certain situations that one can be granted asylum for (and that was narrowed recently by the Biden administration), and asylum-seekers are expected to appear in court and have a place to stay and in some cases are given ankle monitors to track their location.
The current backlog is, iirc, somewhere between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 cases. There are approximately 700 immigration ALJs ("Administrative Law Judges") working on these cases. A year ago, when the backlog was only half as large, the wait-time for a hearing was nearly four years. This translates to effectively open immigration so long as you know to mouth the right platitudes, because what is the point of deporting someone after a decade?
Monitoring like this isn't all that common - as of March of this year, only 185,000 of the over 6,000,000 asylees were in this program, and possibly as few as 19,000 were given ankle monitors. And of course, being assigned to the program is no guarantee of compliance; people just cut the ankle monitors off, and the government cares more about retrieving the tech than it does tracking down the fugitive:
Many men with monitors “cut them loose and take off,” Maria said. “Better if I stay here and follow instructions to the end.”
Two former case workers with a GEO subsidiary, who spoke on condition that they not be named because they wanted to safeguard their chances for future government employment, said it was common for ankle monitors to be removed prematurely, and people who do so are rarely pursued. That’s consistent with the 2015 DHS inspector general’s report, which found that ICE lacked the resources to chase many who abscond.
“ICE has other priorities and most likely will not look for them,” said one of the former case workers, who worked in Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi. He said that if someone did flee, the priority was recovering their ankle monitor — not tracking down the person who abandoned it. “We would visit their house and knock on their door,” the former case worker said, “and at most try to look for the GPS unit.”
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Wasn't the entire process that largely started or at least hugely expanded under the Biden administration "show up at or across the border, say the shibboleth 'asylum', and we'll have you take a number for your court date. Conveniently that's years down the line due to the volume in cases, so we'll let you loose to show up then, and let you apply for am multi-year work permit once your case has been pending 150 days, but nobody is going to look at any details within that time anyway. Here's a list of government-funded NGOs that can provide for you during that time".
That's hardly "certain situations" and only very loosely "expected to appear." Charitably, it sounds like a well-meaning policy to help people fleeing oppression amid an overcrowded system, but I see why it's opponents characterize it as opening the floodgates and shrugging at the idea that any effort could be put into it.
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"In some cases" doing a lot of work here. I do not believe in the slightest that most asylum seekers that come to be in the US and get handed their court date are tracked at all.
The logistics of it are just not possible. You can't put a fresh hundred of thousand people a year under proper house arrest every year.
For comparison the total prison population of the entire United States is like 2 million people, only 32k of which are under CPB or ICE custody.
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Can I go a layer of meta here?
How much attention to politics to you pay where you
Were surprised that Vance supports nuclear power
Haven’t heard Vance speak before
?
Are you an American voter, or overseas or something?
I am fairly interested in politics and I have even read Vance's book
I've never heard him speak before last night.
I don't watch TV news or listen to talk radio, so that probably explains it.
What was your takeaway from last night after hearing him speak for the first time?
The only thing I can say is that I think I expected him to have a stronger accent.
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I'm not entirely sure why this matters, but I read The Motte pretty regularly, as well as /r/moderatepolitics. Occasionally I will check Tracing Woodgrains's twitter, otherwise, I pretty much let all my political information seep in through The Motte, reddit, or Discord. I don't click on articles often, and I very seldomly watch videos. I am pretty disappointed by the amount of left wing partisan links that get posted to /r/moderatepolitics. If you have any other forums where intelligent people talk about politics, I'm all ears.
Yes, I'm an American voter. I'm in the Midwest, Illinois-but-not-Chicago.
I was just curious to see a window into a bubble I’m not a part of is all.
I think it’s easy to assume that the rest of the world is similar to your own world and hearing from people having different types of experiences is really helpful.
For instance: in my social feeds, IRL circles etc. it is a given that Vance is pro nuclear, and while most people haven’t listened to every interview he has given, most everybody have listened to him speak a little, and mostly have seen stuff like his all in summit interview.
What are some general beliefs you have about what conservative voters care about?
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This reminds me of my previous post on the brutal NPR fact check of Trump.
Really though, I think it was a poor choice by Vance to even remotely accept the frame as a "fact check". His answer is excellent and correct. When speaking to me, I will hear "fact check" in this context as meaning "pedantic bullshit that's irrelevant to the core claim". I will hear his explanation of how these migrants have become technically temporarily legal, and think, "exactly, the fact that this has a veneer of legality is the core problem, we must stop this". But yeah, other people still believe that a media "fact check" is actually just them checking the facts, so I think it would have been smarter to say something like, "you agreed to not argue with Governor Walz and I about our statements".
My stance on January 6 and the quality of the 2020 election has already been articulated at length. I think it's politically unfortunate that the more popular position is that January 6 was a calamity and that the 2020 election was good and fair. I suspect that Vance's honest position is much closer to mine that Trump's, which is that the 2020 election was bad and unfair, but not exactly "stolen". Either way, he's kind of stuck because he can't directly contradict Trump, but also doesn't want to say very unpopular things. I'm not sure what I would say in his spot. I suppose pretty much the same things - his opponents egged on riots all through 2020, insist on keep elections insecure so we can't actually trust them, and want to censor anyone that questions the quality of elections. Maybe that's a losing position, but it's one that I do sincerely believe is basically accurate.
If Trump represents an existential danger to American democracy and an imminent threat of fascist tyranny, then it would be irresponsible for patriotic Democrats and all upstanding citizens to not to cheat or bend the rules in any manner they could get away with. Democrats should not hold election integrity and fairness as a terminal value--not when the stakes are this high. Besides, the amount of lies, disinformation, and election interference coming from Trump, and malefactors like Russia, is artificially boosting Trump's popularity among low information voters. If Democrats have an opportunity to put their thumb on the scales without completely invalidating the election, then it should be their duty to do so. One or two somewhat shady elections is a small price to pay for stopping Trump. The remaining question is just whether it will be enough to make a difference.
This is the death spiral though isn’t it? Responding to norm violation by violating more norms just leaves us with weaker norms overall. It’s one-step-ahead thinking.
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I don’t believe it.
Most people aren’t Raskolnikov. They don’t make decisions like this. At most, they use such a ghoulish, utilitarian calculus as a post facto justification.
No, if there was cheating, it was banal. The first thought was “hey, I can get something I want.” The second, if it happened at all, would have been “no one will notice.” That’s sufficient to explain the kind of crimes that @Walterodim suggested. Fudging counts, encouraging false statements. Voting for your dead parent.
But the “existential danger” theory proves much, much more. If you’re convinced Trump is Turbo Hitler, why are you stopping at a fake ballot? Where’s your manifesto and your one-dollar stamps? How did you suddenly become amazing at judging risk, such that no one gets caught in the act?
The Venn diagram between Trump haters, principled utilitarians, and election officials has to be vanishingly small. Perhaps that’s why he’s had such an hard time finding evidence of fraud.
I see it as more a prospiracy, and it's mostly small actions on the margin by many individuals. There are almost certainly some more bold cheaters, but I just think they must have gotten away with it. It's not like it's easy to prove, and it has recently gotten even harder. The people who are most able to investigate are uninterested in doing so, because they don't want to discover cheating for various reasons. Easier to leave the "investigation" to a bunch of wingnuts who can easily be discredited and ignored. So long as the Democrats aren't cheating too much, and they are doing it to hurt Trump, I think most of our institutions are quite happy to turn a blind eye (including a lot of Republicans). This kind of cheating is itself less dangerous than people beleiving it is happening, so it's tolerated so long as it is simultaneously denied. There are limits to this, but I think activists have gotten quite savvy about how to game these election systems.
Assassination attempts are kind of a proxy here. For every one person who is willing to try and assassinate Trump, how many are willing to cheat if a good opportunity presents itself? Probably a lot, and a lot of those people will get themselves involved in the electoral process.
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My issue with this line of thinking is that this bold part just seems incoherent to me. There's no such thing as putting one's thumb on the scales without completely invalidating the election. The thinking that it's possible to slightly invalidate the election but not completely or not enough to count for whatever enough might mean here is just pure motivated reasoning if it's coming from the party that would stand to gain from such subversion (which is to say, a Democrat who supports putting the thumb on the scale in order to get a Republican to win so as to save democracy might have some credibility in their reasoning, as well as vice versa, but not if the same sides are involved).
If we accept that being really really sure that the opposing side will destroy the whole game means that cheating is justified, then all that means is that everyone will always be, in good faith, really really sure, cross their heart, no cap, on god sure that their opponents will destroy the whole game, thus justifying their own cheating. This is the exact same sort of phenomenon as the whole "tolerance doesn't mean tolerating intolerance" leading to everyone concluding, in good faith, that [position they don't like] is some form of intolerance, so as to justify being intolerant of it.
It is pretty incoherent, which is why I doubt Democrats actually believe it.
Well. I should never underestimate the lunatic fringe, but I don’t think Twitter sloganeers have an actual plan to cheat.
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I'm confident that every election ever has had both parties' thumb slightly on the scales (why wouldn't they and how would one completely stop them?), so either no elections ever were legitimate or there is a way to slightly invalidate the election.
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Yes, I think this is a good explanation for why Democrats are fine with electoral shenanigans and blatant First Amendment violations. I couldn't have said it better myself. When people are convinced that their opponents are honest-to-god fascists, they can convince themselves that they're actually patriots for some minor foible like counting ballots received after election day in violation of black letter law or telling people that they should just list themselves as indefinitely confined so they don't need to provide ID to vote. Most of the people articulating these sorts of ideas really believe it, they really think they're the good guys saving the Republic.
Of course, much of what I said could be flipped around and also said about Republicans. The difference is that I think Republicans are far less often in a position to do actually do anything, and also much less likely to get away with it if they did. I believe Democrats cheated because, from my perspective, they all but said they would (and will). They had motive, means, and opportunity, meanwhile laws were and are being actively changed to make any kind of foul play harder to prove. It also helped that many of their most outspoken accusers, while correctly intuiting the dishonesty and shenanigans, cast around crude and ridiculous theories about how this kind of thing happens. Trump must be stopped by any means necessary. Democrats are already openly bending and buckling norms and laws of election integrity, often defying the spirit if not the words themselves, so stepping over the line into outright cheating is not a big leap. After all, Democrats are the party of outcomes, not procedure. Democrats frequently target traditional procedures and processes to be dismantled because they do not have the outcomes that Democrats support. I do not expect the side that is most in favor of completely reorganizing how elections are conducted (e.g. abolishing the electoral college) to regard the particulars of the current electoral system to be especially sacrosanct or inviolable.
The idea that the 2020 election is beyond reasonable doubt is absurd, but they have been very effective at tabooing the notion. Somehow, the 2020 election, perhaps the most obviously questionable election in recent history, is the one election that is also uniquely unquestionable. This does not inspire trust. I fully expect Democrats to cheat harder and more successfully than Republicans this coming election, but I don't know whether it will be enough.
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That's great as a normative statement, but as a descriptive one, Raskin hasn't gotten an all-expenses one-way ticket on Amtrak out of DC. There was no purge of political spaces that claimed Russians hacked the 2016 vote totals -- between a third and two thirds of Dem voters still believe it! -- and no one who complains about the 2000 election or 2004 Diebold conspiracies got booted.
This is from 2017. Amazing how much more fluid and coherent Biden's speech is. He rattles of some legal-procedural stuff there with ease that, today, he wouldn't be able to get through at all.
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Also, while I find all of those things grating, a meta principle that questioning an election means you don't get to run in future elections is a terrible set of incentives. Cheating to win becomes that much more appealing if no one in the political sphere is even allowed to say, "my opponents seem to have done a lot of cheating". A strong norm of never questioning election is only a good thing if elections are actually of unquestionable integrity.
If it was just questioning the election alone, it could be okay. But that is not the case. It's questioning the election, plus questioning it really hard, plus frequent misspeaks and off the cuff remarks, plus unverified claims about Haitians in Springfield, plus getting really easily baited about rally sizes, plus making inflammatory nothing statements about an hour of violence, plus running a social media site where he rants against anyone and everything and declares he hates Taylor Swift in all caps...
All of the above and more make him look really out of touch and pathetic. I will say once again that he disappointed me greatly in the last debate by failing to even mention any of the Biden policies that made immigration go completely out of control, instead just shouting about immigrants over and over again. He's unarticulate. And he's old. And his policies are either nothings that he won't be able to follow up on or they're bad. If it wasn't Kamala Harris he was running against, he would be unelectable. He deserves to lose. He is terrible. He does not represent my views except in the vaguest sense. And yet, I will still vote for him, because I despise progressive politics.
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Vance’s mistake during the "fact check" back-and-forth with the moderators was calling it a "fact check." Normies hear "fact-check" and think, "Well, it's got to be true—it’s literally got ‘fact’ in the name!" That’s where Trump would have come up with something clever to call it instead.
I predicted before the debate that Vance would come off better because the left-leaning media had set the bar too low, similar to how right-leaning media would treat Biden before his appearances until the final one. If you’ve been paying attention, it's always been clear that in terms of raw intelligence, Vance is far ahead of the other candidates. I think Vance did great—much better than Walz—but Walz did well enough that he didn’t cause any major issues, so I don’t think the needle moves much. While I believe I could have performed better than Trump in his last debate, I would be obliterated by Vance and probably lose to Walz.
As was clear with Trump last time, fiscal conservatism is dead.
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"That is a damning non answer" is hilarious coming from Walz.
Walz' response (bolding is my own):
Followed by this absolute banger from the mods;
Tim Walz is the politician you get with a highly censored and early prototype ChatGPT. You can see that he's snatching bits and pieces of talking points and stringing them together in loosely probabilistic ways, but there's no coherence. It also lacks that wonderful post-modern impressionistic word salad of both Harris and Trump.
The Democrats really love doing this. Back with Hill Dog, they chose Tim Kaine and, IIRC, leaned in to calling him "America's Dad." Walz pick reinforces something that's obvious but hard to see - the Democrat party is absolutely loathsome of effective masculinity. A squishy assistant football coach who was part of the National Guard (but never deployed) is just fine. Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude. But an actual Man with hard coded male sensibilities is a non-starter.
I think the election is mostly back to a 50/50 toss-up, with some big risks for Harris (the longshoremen strike and fallout from Helene being the first of the October surprises). What is not a 50/50 toss-up is the relative Male-Female support. Regardless of the winner, the exit polls are going to reveal a societal level bifurcation at the sex level.
Can you elaborate on the meaning of this term, as you understand it?
I understand the sentiment. When he was picked, he was largely marketed as something akin to "Americas Dad" or "Americas Grandpa" of "America's football coach". But every guy who actually has a dad, a grandpa, and played a sport thinks of him "not my dad/grandpa/coach".
Given that all of his children were conceived in some not-IVF but medical procedure it is a plausible thing to say about Tim Walz that he has never had sex with a woman. If JD Vance was in an actual locker room and wanted to win 90%+ of the votes of a football team he would have credibly accused Walz of that. And almost every guy in said locker room would have felt in in their gut that it is true.
Walz is, to use a now out of fashion insult, a fag. That is almost certainly what his high school classmates called him, its what the football players he assistant coached called him in the 90s/2000s. Culture really hasn't evolved a proper insult since the "banning" of "gay" and "fag" as insults for a male who lacks manliness. Perhaps "Walz" can become said new insult, because he does truly embody the essence of those insults from my youth.
It was my understanding that the majority of these procedures are performed when a husband and wife have been trying and failing to conceive in the traditional manner....
Yeah, but its Walz. An adult man who decided to be a teacher and founded the gay club. Saying he has weak swimmers is probably more true than saying he's never had sex, even with his own wife, but its certainly funnier to say the latter.
To paraphrase Democrats after the 2020 election, there is no evidence that Walz has had sex.
More of a "gay-people-shoudn't-be-under-constant-threat-of-violence-intended-to-force-them-back-into-the-closet" club, or a "shift-the-societal-response-to-gay-people-existing-from-violent-repression-to-minding-your-own-d*mn-business" club.
Sure, you can tell yourself that, but being actually gay wasn't a problem in the 90s or 2000s. It was faking manliness that was as far as high school kids were concerned.
Of course, there is the overreaching issue of pederasty in the gay male community that would also cause the erudite mottian to speculate.
I don't think they drew much of a distinction between those two things, or between any two non-heteronormative characteristics.
Admittedly, this may have varied between regions; some areas (the 'fly-over' states) would have been more hostile than Boston or San Francisco.
And if gay teenagers are shunned and rejected by the broader society, are they more likely, or less likely, to associate with that community?
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Are you from Saudi Arabia or something? Every authority in vicinity not only doesn't violently represses being gay, it actively promotes it.
That was not the case in the 1990s.
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Isn't that the purpose of narrative technologies like "silence is violence" and "microaggression"? As long as anything has happened in living memory that so much as made a member or "ally" of the protected group uncomfortable, the protected group is under attack (and implicitly deserves and requires additional resources for protection).
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Walz is a Elmer Fudd, as the NRA types would put it. (You can hear a groyper shout 'cuck' from the nosebleed seats.) The essential part of the critique is that if he was to be put up against the feminine imperative, made to apologize, he would give in and grovel. If he was in the Illiad, he'd be in the appendices (and be excluded from all of the abridged versions.)
The only way to be a white male in the Current Year democratic party is to be a castrato, a non-entity, and that's what he is: a non-entity.
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Of particular relevance here would be 1) Performance matters and we should respect those who perform well and at the highest possible levels 2) Explicit and implicit physical force capability are generally desirable traits in men though they must be accompanied by strong impulse control and strong moral frameworks.
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What's technical about it? He was in the navy, he was even deployed. Sure, he was only deployed for seven months. But it's not like he exclusively sat on the base. Maybe you can say that driving around kabul is not that dangerous. And since it's the navy, we shouldn't hold his homosexuality against him.
See my previous post in detail
Also,
Are we really sure about this?
For a time it wasn't. I had a buddy who accomplished the objective of eating at every pizza place in Kabul.
If that’s not hope for a cultural victory, I don’t know what is. God bless America.
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I mean are we even sure that Buttigieg was not grown in a vat? I wasn't present at his birth, personally. There's very little that we're sure of once we get right down to it.
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