This is Trump’s strategy too. Make a brutal enough example of a few universities, or law firms, or immigrants, or other countries’ economies, and the rest will comply in advance. Like Trump said in his West Point commencement speech recently: "As much as you wanna fight, I’d rather do it without having to fight. I just wanna look at them and have them fold.”

Reminder: Ender Wiggin is not a fucking hero.

Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.

A few weeks? Try a few months. Or years. I think Trump is fine with bad headlines for months on end.

The positive interpretation is: Trump’s confident that he’s right. He’s confident America will be better off under his tariff plan. OR he’s confident he can use tariffs to force trade deals that benefit America and exploit the rest of the world. And he knows voters have short memories. As long as the economy is strong in fall 2026 he can take credit for it and give Republicans overwhelming electoral victories at the federal and state level.

The negative interpretation is: Trump doesn’t care about public opinion because he doesn’t think elections are going to matter anymore.

Either way, what the media and the voters think about tariffs now doesn’t matter to Trump. Trump does what Trump wants and the rest of the world submits to him. It’s everything he’s always wanted.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

You spelled “pay bribes and walk free” wrong. Tate set up shop in one of the most corrupt countries in the world for a reason.

not give him credit for anything other than putting on his pants each morning

Conservative media doesn’t even give him credit for that much. Or haven’t you heard the rumors Biden has advanced dementia and his team of handlers have to dress him before leading him to public appearances?

I mean, given how the White House handled Reagan’s Alzheimer’s symptoms in the last years of his presidency, it wouldn’t be outside the bounds of possibility. But still…

I think the center right is more like “Don’t say it out loud yet, we don’t have enough public support.”

When it comes to Republicans, I don’t think there’s actually a divide between moderates and radicals. There are the people who want to impose a Handmaid’s Tale authoritarian theocracy right away. Then there are the people who also want a Handmaid’s Tale authoritarian theocracy but think they don’t have enough public support for revolution and want to gradually move America further to the right by taking over school boards and sabotaging liberal public institutions and so on. The destination is the same, only the strategy differs.

Yes. In Republican eyes what you said is literally correct.

The long-term goal of Republican leadership is to ban all abortion from the moment of conception, ban all hormonal birth control (because it can prevent implantation of a fertilized embryo and therefore cause abortion), and return the question of whether to ban condoms and other barrier methods to the states.

Republican leadership realizes the American people don’t support a complete abortion ban.

Republican leadership believes the American people are wrong and it’s their responsibility, as Christian leaders, to protect the innocent children of America and impose a complete abortion ban anyway.

And Republican leaders know if they go hood off and call for a complete abortion ban they’ll lose power in the backlash and abortion will become even more normalized.

So they’re gradually restricting abortion rights while heavily pushing right-wing propaganda to children and teenagers - fucking PragerU is partnering with the Florida and Oklahoma Departments of Education to produce videos for school children, did you know that? - in order to shift the cultural consensus away from abortion is a right and towards abortion is a sin so that future generations of Republican leaders can complete their work and impose a total abortion ban.

So, yes, the Republican leadership is very much aware that what they need is marketing. They know abortion bans are unpopular. They’re walking a fine line, trying to work towards a highly unpopular policy goal while still protecting their legislative control of Congress and the states, knowing their control of government would be at risk if the American people realized their actual policy goal.

And so you have Republicans talking about “pro-baby policies” now. Because who doesn’t love babies? That sounds like WIC and infant nutrition programs and daycare and better neonatal care and all those good things that Democrats support. Hard to tell that the Republican is actually talking about forcing women to give birth to babies dead in the womb and babies with fetal defects incompatible with life, but that’s the state of the national dialogue in the year of our Lord 2023.

What I’m getting from that is:

(1) Wikipedias editors don’t want to use racists as sources for articles.

(2) The author thinks refusing to give equal time to fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence is a surrender to “woke ideology” that will kill Wikipedia in the long run.

Yawn.