The U.S. government shutdown has halted pay to the TSA, but not ICE, so ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports[1]. If you fly to the U.S., starting Monday apparently, the first think you're likely to see is masked gunmen giving you the eye.
The TSA is responsible for more than just airports. As someone with family who works (worked) on port security in the maritime division, I would argue that Chesterton's Fence [0] applies here just as much as anywhere else.
Many of us were alive when the TSA was created. It's not a mystery why it's there. (Mostly so politicians could say they did something to improve air travel security.)
The Coast Guard has long been responsible for port security. TSA does administer TWIC, the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, which is a biometric identification system go access to secure port facilities.
Yeah, it was actually a lot of fun. I worked in a port-related area and often we would just cruise around the port and look at the ships. If it looked cool we would yell loudly and ask if we could come aboard. The seamen were usually thrilled to show us around their massive ships and would often invite us to a barbecue. With the introduction of the ISPS all of that was over in an instant.
It shouldn't be defunded, because as stupid as it and the 2001 politics that spawned it were, anything MAGA will replace it with in 2026 would be way worse.
Depends on what defunded means... if it means pay/control shifting from a Federal agency to local, then yes.
Maning, airports / municipalities should be funding this. If airports were in control the the user experience, I bet you would see a lot better outcomes.
I feel like "form your own private paramilitary organisation with minimal oversight, then expand their reach by having them take over the operations of other government departments" has been done before somewhere, as part of a larger plan.
This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.
Hey, tone doesn't translate well over text, they did not use anu tone tags, and I'm already terrible at reading tone in the best of times. Lol, can you really blame me for at least asking? Haha.
I dunno, it is the most obvious nazi reference I've ever seen. Personally I feel like tone does translate well over text, although it's proportional to the speakers' familiarity in how to do it whereas for verbal communication it comes through without effort.
Nothing wrong with asking of course. But maybe it's useful data that it was, in fact, obvious.
Yeah, I was aiming for irony but I should probably have added /s at the end there. It's definitely in the mid-late chapters in any "how to install a fascist regime" handbook.
Enter the country and you interact with CBP and that hasn't changed. CBP agents are the ones who murdered the legal observers in Minneapolis so there's that.
TSA checks bags for commercial airlines which is a service that should never have been nationalized.
They rebranded to the department of war but its not a war. We definitely don't want war, but we want all soldiers to be warriors. Still not warmongering.
It's the only thing he knows. Declare victory, never admit losing anything, ever.
"Dobias later said that young Trump “always had to be number one, in everything. He was a conniver, even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do
anything to win” (D’Antonio, Never Enough, 43)."
They're referencing Trump's constant insistence that we won or are currently winning. He never, ever admits defeat or concedes any ground, everything is a victory, nothing is a loss. Trump also famously said (paraphrasing) "We're gonna win so much, we'll be tired of winning".
Yes, they are flooding the zone with many alternative explanations so that they're both all deniable, and all accessible to anyone who finds just one of them convincing. This is a strategy.
Would the current state of affairs qualify for cancelling the mid-terms? Is that overly cynical?
Not in the US, not a US citizen or voter. My suspicion is the answer is "no, but it is not a given that a competent supreme court which looks likely to overturn the WH exists, if they say they want to do this"
Hopefully that is reassuring. Worryingly I would like some sense of confirmation but in any case I expect a declaration it's not a valid real result because that's what happened before, counts not withstanding.
The US does not have a legal avenue for cancelling elections regardless of circumstances without a constitutional amendment. It cannot happen under any conditions or circumstances.
To do so would basically be an open announcement of dictatorship and - more than we have already - the end of rule of law and a likely civil war.
This is just more victim fear being pushed so (mostly Christian) conservatives can claim to be the victims, once again, as they colonize another people/land.
All the people who decided to stay in the Middle East even when the second carrier group was en route, and then thought they were news worth enough to get on camera and comment about there being no commercial flights out of there.
That's the strategy of Project 2025, make all the nice things we have much worse and broken so there's no choice but to scrap and start over. While they're in charge, of course.
Very few other people have Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way that connects the various extreme factions of the American right.
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
The extreme factions of the right are a very small portion of the electorate. They generally don't decide elections beyond the primaries and generally turn out in favor of the right regardless.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
25-33% of the electorate is no small fraction. There's a group of people who have been consistently supportive of this government's policies since 2016. Take any policy survey, and the fraction that supports the right-wing side of action always amounts to a consistent 25-33% of the votes.
While being largely correct, looking at his popularity misses the forest for the tree.
Trump is very much a symptom, not a cause. He is simply the kind of personality most fit for the media environment.
The media environment on the right has essentially eschewed journalistic standards for political and economic velocity.
Fringe theories get introduced during podcasts, which then get brought up by guests on Fox. Members of the government point out that the news media is talking about fringe theory X, which then gets repeated by the news media. Eventually the government opens up an investigation or creates a task force to address the issue.
It is not that people don’t come up with objections or counter narratives on the right, it’s just that they don’t get platformed.
Verification is the expensive part of journalism. If you eschew verification. You can be more efficient. Today the right is simply the more “efficient” political consensus manufacturing machine.
This is foundation upon which the rest of the events occur. This is why there will always be space for another character to appear.
Many liberal people think he is an abberation, they would gladly return back to "normal". The point is, he is a symptom of a larger unaddressed sickness, there is no return to business as usual, it will only return far worse.
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
Having somebody less incompetent, senile, and corrupt at the helm may not make things "magically go back to normal," but it's a step in the right direction. Necessary but not sufficient.
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
>Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
It's that a significant number of Americans are mean, selfish, racist, arrogant, and delight in the victimization of those they perceive as belonging to an outgroup.
2/3 of your electorate either voted for him (meaning they liked what they saw) or were sufficiently unbothered by him to not vote (meaning they were more or less okay with Trump).
These crocodile tears about how "we were bamboozled" are just that. It was plainly obvious to the rest of us looking in from outside, even before his first term but certainly after, that he was exactly the person he is now, and fully two thirds of American voters accepted this.
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
Today is MAGA, yesterday it was the "Tea Party" faction, before that it was something else, and tomorrow there will be another.
Every time there's a cycle of fringe-right blowing up in popularity, pushing an agenda and flaming out, it's still the same people they're appealing to who are voting for them.
The main problem with your thinking is that you fail to realiZe that a lot of conservatives criticism of Trump is that he is too weak on the things he promised to be hard on.
They want MORE ICE, more cuts to government programs, more police.
America has neglected working class people for decades. The economy has shifted from supporting earning income to make a decent living, to protecting assets (bail outs etc.) Trump tapped into this and tricked these people into electing him, bringing along right wing or whatever they are.. and they got hold of power. Don't think numbers are there for this culture war crowd to stay in power unless they hitch a ride with someone.
(edited: typo)
You know what else would make everything worse? A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
But hey, it's not like they funded and backed a bunch of theocratic fanatics who committed a mass atrocity in Israel and provoked a war that destroyed Gaza or anything, right? Or that they were exporting massive quantities of drones to Putin for him to use to murder Ukrainian civilians, right? They were nice guys, and the 35K protesters they murdered deserved it, right?
We should have just let things keep rolling the way they were. It was all going so well, and at no point would the regime that was actively inciting terrorism all over the world for the last 47 years be a threat if they got nukes on the ICBMs we now know they had been a problem. I mean, heck, those missiles they shot at Diego Garcia were just fireworks, purely for decorative purposes, right?
The HN bubble is truly grand. My college girlfriend was the daughter of parents who fled the Ayatollah in 79. You people on here think everyone shares your values and worldview, and that the mullahs in Iran are rational actors. They are not. They are part of a specific sect of Shiite Islam that truly believes that bringing about an apocalypse is a desirable thing. It's such a foreign concept to you that you dismiss it as fantasy and misinformation. But it's real. And you simply lack the life experience to know it. You've never seen entire masses of people infected with the radical religious mind viruses that those of us with firsthand experience with religious fundamentalists have seen.
Imagine the Branch Davidians in Waco with nukes, and you start to scratch the surface of what this would look like if you let it play out.
> A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.
Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.
Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.
The narcissism of small differences on full display here.
There isn't a single "red state" in the US that requires women to cover their heads and bodies in public or executes people for speaking out against the "regime".
But you pretend like that's the case, while acting like Iran was just minding their own business when they have exported terror for decades, along with drones being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. I mean, I guess supporting Ukraine was soooo 2022-23, and now we're on to the new fashion trend of supporting the people helping to murder them because "orange man bad."
I did assume you were being hyperbolic when writing it, but yes. I would think that anyone looking at the state of the US right now may see "A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes" as referring to it.
Totalitarian: hyperbolic, but the state of the executive branch over the last couple of decades is moving things in that direction. And clearly one could say this to make a point.
The kind of whacky religiousness that you find in the US matters because of foreign policy, among other things. (There are also domestic things like right to abortion.) The US ambassador to Israel is a Zionist that talks about the Bible with Tucker Carlson as if should have any policy weight, because he believes so. There are other (Republican) politicians that say something like the US having a Biblical responsibility to support Israel.
> The narcissism of small differences on full display here.
And what is your pose, here? The selfishness of implicitly dismissing the foreign policy implications of American religious n*jobs because you don’t live in the affected countries?
Yeah it's a good thing we dismantled that regime and totally didn't empower the most extreme and radical portion of it while removing the politicians who'd tempered that and turned the population against the US and Israel.
But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?
Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?
Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.
I agree THAT ethno nationalist country in the middle east, with long-range ballistic missiles, secret nukes and a secret nuclear doctrine that hasn't signed any Non-Proliferation treaty should make everybody worried. But that country isn't Iran.
It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.
That's not what made it sound like Yoda. It was sticking "has been" at the end, and I agree there was a better choice stylistically: "Crazy how effective this admin has been at making everything worse."
On the flip side, I _think_ there's actually less and less about Epstein visible, so I think WH is winning that war. Or at least successfully postponing battles.
One of President Donald Trump’s lines during the 2016 presidential campaign was his promise that, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”
I got jumped in Italy couple of weeks ago. I was wearing a "volleyball dad" hoodie my kid bought for me but did not realize that the "volleyball dad" is etched in the middle of a large American flag covering my entire back. Luckily (for him, not me :) ) three police officers were 10 meters away walking the area dealing with apre ski drunks and restrained him. fun times
didn’t even know I was wearing it (honestly never even noticed anything other that “volleyball dad”) but rest assured I wore it every day for the rest of the trip
yes, this is exactly the kind of story one would be dreaming up to share, I think if one was to make up a non-existent story one would come up with a lot more "interesting" one that this one :)
So the presidents personal law enforcement that is tasked with racially profiling people who overwhelmingly do not pose a threat are going to now be conducting security directly from the source where millions of foreign travelers come through…hmmm…ridiculous
1. Distracting from domEstic ProblemS. StarTing a rEgIoNal war is an effective way to do that.
2. Kidnapping Maduro made the rest of Venezuela's government roll over and play fetch, they are stupid enough to believe it would have worked again.
3. Israel says jump, GOP asks 'how high'?
4. There are no negative consequences to them killing people, driving the country into ruinous debt, or blowing up the American economy through higher energy prices. The drawbacks simply don't exist.
Hegseth is a white christian nationalist with a crusades tattoo. Whatcha think the intended purpose is here? People said this was going to happen when he was nominated.
There's a christian prophecy involving israel occupying certain lands, a cow, and some other nonsense. A weirdly high number of Americans, mostly christians, believe it. There are a ton of them in the Trump admin.
The obvious and flippant answer to that would be "the parts of the world that do not have incompetent leaders". But that will only lead to the incredulous claiming that all governments are equally incompetent (yet some are more incompetent than others) and that's not a discussion I'm inclined to entertain.
People vote for the current government. I’m not sure why you would expect others’ to pay for americas internal messes, we’re already busy dealing with the external ones.
I'm American, I didn't vote for Trump, so I don't feel like it's me dealing with adverse effects of my decisions.
I did vote for Eric Adams in NYC, and while Eric Adams didn't advertise blatant corruption as part of his campaign, insofar that I can be blamed for his idiocy and bribes I will accept responsibility. I didn't vote for him the second time around and I feel foolish for voting for him the first time.
Democracy is a collective thing. Americans may strongly believe in individualism, but democracy is a collective responsibility. Its kind of a key design feature.
I guess? I mean I actively did not want this president. I actively voted for someone else. I tried to get people to not vote for him, though I doubt I was successful at that task. I suppose I do still pay my taxes and as such I'm still kind of funding this stupid unnecessary war, but I don't think it's entirely fair to judge me just because I live in a country where demagoguery appears to be in vogue.
Don't get me wrong, I know I'll deal with the consequences of other people's bad decisions here, that's just the price of democracy (or whatever the hell we have in the US), but I have a hard time accepting that it's my fault since I did what little I could to stop it.
The federal government hasn't passed a budget because the Democrats are blocking it. They feel it's worth the political gamble to cause Americans pain and that it'll turn on Trump.
The current situation has been giving me so many flashbacks. Here, my GWB-era teens had the terror threat level, and now we're lazily reimagining State Department traveling warnings as a dark slapstick version (be afraid everywhere, American!)
Indeed, particularly given that ICE agents are going to be deployed to airports. Their penchant for killing civilians and otherwise violating civil rights only to lie about their actions hardly seems like a good fit for airport security duties they haven’t been trained to perform.
Iran's source is the one who said they did it in the first place :facepalm: and it was confirmed by UK
As soon as they felt like denying it would be better for them they did and took down https://en.mehrnews.com/ where it was published. Unless you say mehr was defaced and the news were planted by Mossad
The U.S. government shutdown has halted pay to the TSA, but not ICE, so ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports[1]. If you fly to the U.S., starting Monday apparently, the first think you're likely to see is masked gunmen giving you the eye.
No thankyou.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cede0qyvqz3o
Would anyone argue that the TSA, Theatre Security Agency, shouldn’t be defunded?
Replacing it with nothing in an orderly fashion? Probably a good move.
Replacing them with ICE as a political gesture? Not so much
The TSA is responsible for more than just airports. As someone with family who works (worked) on port security in the maritime division, I would argue that Chesterton's Fence [0] applies here just as much as anywhere else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Many of us were alive when the TSA was created. It's not a mystery why it's there. (Mostly so politicians could say they did something to improve air travel security.)
Well, and it did do something - make the experience more consistently mediocre. Which is indeed something.
Previously, some airports were even more of a nightmare, and others were actually pleasant.
Ports had no security before 2001? What does TSA do there?
Ports did indeed have very little security before 2001 (compared to now). See ISPS code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Ship_and_Port_Fa...
The Coast Guard has long been responsible for port security. TSA does administer TWIC, the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, which is a biometric identification system go access to secure port facilities.
Yeah, it was actually a lot of fun. I worked in a port-related area and often we would just cruise around the port and look at the ships. If it looked cool we would yell loudly and ask if we could come aboard. The seamen were usually thrilled to show us around their massive ships and would often invite us to a barbecue. With the introduction of the ISPS all of that was over in an instant.
There's an argument for that, though I think replacing it with Trump's basically-unregulated private military is pretty concerning.
This isn’t that.
It shouldn't be defunded, because as stupid as it and the 2001 politics that spawned it were, anything MAGA will replace it with in 2026 would be way worse.
Depends on what defunded means... if it means pay/control shifting from a Federal agency to local, then yes.
Maning, airports / municipalities should be funding this. If airports were in control the the user experience, I bet you would see a lot better outcomes.
> If airports were in control the the user experience, I bet you would see a lot better outcomes.
Would you? It's not like I have a choice of which airport to fly out of.
Maybe New Yorkers have options, but for the rest of us, there is only one that is an option.
I feel like "form your own private paramilitary organisation with minimal oversight, then expand their reach by having them take over the operations of other government departments" has been done before somewhere, as part of a larger plan.
This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way.
And that's stopped them?
We know the answer. Whats stopping ebola or a hurricane from over running everything?
It has. (Unless you're being sarcastic, in which case I'm not surprised it went over my head. Lol.)
of course they were
Hey, tone doesn't translate well over text, they did not use anu tone tags, and I'm already terrible at reading tone in the best of times. Lol, can you really blame me for at least asking? Haha.
I dunno, it is the most obvious nazi reference I've ever seen. Personally I feel like tone does translate well over text, although it's proportional to the speakers' familiarity in how to do it whereas for verbal communication it comes through without effort.
Nothing wrong with asking of course. But maybe it's useful data that it was, in fact, obvious.
Yeah, I was aiming for irony but I should probably have added /s at the end there. It's definitely in the mid-late chapters in any "how to install a fascist regime" handbook.
It will be so much fun to watch the World Cup from outside the US...
Remember to use a pirate stream.
Yeah! That will be even better!
> So ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports
It's even more disgusting than that:
"Tom Homan: ICE officers will not assist with airport security scanning amid TSA staffing shortage"
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/5795316-homan-ice-...
I can't tell what's supposed to be disgusting about this unless you stopped reading past the inflammatory headline.
Enter the country and you interact with CBP and that hasn't changed. CBP agents are the ones who murdered the legal observers in Minneapolis so there's that.
TSA checks bags for commercial airlines which is a service that should never have been nationalized.
It would really be amazing if the end result of all of this is the post-9/11 DHS finally gets reverted back to what we had before.
An amazing start.
Some airports started allowing bottled water already. We'll be back to pre 9/11 levels in 40 or so years.
Has there been any official WH note on the need for this war, yet? Or objectives?
They rebranded to the department of war but its not a war. We definitely don't want war, but we want all soldiers to be warriors. Still not warmongering.
Excuse me, it's an "excursion", not a war.
This war is not a war. Not a.war war. Just a "war". No war has been declared.
It's a special operation
We already won. Are you tired of winning yet?
I keep reading this, is it meant to be a joke? What is being won?
It's the only thing he knows. Declare victory, never admit losing anything, ever.
"Dobias later said that young Trump “always had to be number one, in everything. He was a conniver, even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do anything to win” (D’Antonio, Never Enough, 43)."
They're referencing Trump's constant insistence that we won or are currently winning. He never, ever admits defeat or concedes any ground, everything is a victory, nothing is a loss. Trump also famously said (paraphrasing) "We're gonna win so much, we'll be tired of winning".
It identifies as a special operation and people should just respect that.
20 or so far, there is a new one each day
Yes, they are flooding the zone with many alternative explanations so that they're both all deniable, and all accessible to anyone who finds just one of them convincing. This is a strategy.
And all of them different from the last and/or contradicting each other at times.
It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Probably spaghetti.
All I know is we are accomplishing them and we'll be done in 3 weeks to 3 years. Also, this isn't a woke war, which I was worried about.
Would the current state of affairs qualify for cancelling the mid-terms? Is that overly cynical?
Not in the US, not a US citizen or voter. My suspicion is the answer is "no, but it is not a given that a competent supreme court which looks likely to overturn the WH exists, if they say they want to do this"
AFAIUI, elections in the US are not run by the federal government but by the states.
Trying to cancel elections seems like it'd be a lot harder than in other countries.
Hopefully that is reassuring. Worryingly I would like some sense of confirmation but in any case I expect a declaration it's not a valid real result because that's what happened before, counts not withstanding.
The US does not have a legal avenue for cancelling elections regardless of circumstances without a constitutional amendment. It cannot happen under any conditions or circumstances.
To do so would basically be an open announcement of dictatorship and - more than we have already - the end of rule of law and a likely civil war.
You are more confident about this than I am. Let's revisit this comment in December.
I truly hope you are proved right by history, but I'm concerned.
December's too soon. Let's revisit it in January, after the new Congress is seated... or not.
I didn't say they wouldn't actually try / do it. Just being clear that the US does not define any legal avenue whatsoever.
Is this an orange, purple, or magenta threat level?
Approaching ultraviolet, invisible to the naked eye but still very much a threat. “there is no war, only excursions.”
This is so non-specific to be meaningless.
Like actually tell us what you know so we can make useful decisions about our safety.
> Like actually tell us what you know so we can make useful decisions about our safety
"Americans abroad should follow the guidance in security alerts issued by the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate."
This is just more victim fear being pushed so (mostly Christian) conservatives can claim to be the victims, once again, as they colonize another people/land.
My first thought: You don't say?
Right? What kind of person does not follow the news but subscribes to the State Department notifications?
All the people who decided to stay in the Middle East even when the second carrier group was en route, and then thought they were news worth enough to get on camera and comment about there being no commercial flights out of there.
"Americans", do they own the entire American continent?
They certainly behave as if they do.
Crazy how effective at making everything worse this admin has been.
That's the strategy of Project 2025, make all the nice things we have much worse and broken so there's no choice but to scrap and start over. While they're in charge, of course.
Showing that government doesn't work by making sure government doesn't work.
Project 2025 and the Trump administration is the most success ant-growth movements have ever had.
Horseshoe theory
Trump is but a symptom of an underlying sickness. Things won't magically go back to normal after he dies.
Very few other people have Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way that connects the various extreme factions of the American right.
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
The extreme factions of the right are a very small portion of the electorate. They generally don't decide elections beyond the primaries and generally turn out in favor of the right regardless.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/why-republicans-can-win-with-t...
25-33% of the electorate is no small fraction. There's a group of people who have been consistently supportive of this government's policies since 2016. Take any policy survey, and the fraction that supports the right-wing side of action always amounts to a consistent 25-33% of the votes.
You're going to have to define extreme right with those percentages. You think 25-33% of the electorate is extreme right?
Definitely MAGA, even if not violently far right.
While being largely correct, looking at his popularity misses the forest for the tree.
Trump is very much a symptom, not a cause. He is simply the kind of personality most fit for the media environment.
The media environment on the right has essentially eschewed journalistic standards for political and economic velocity.
Fringe theories get introduced during podcasts, which then get brought up by guests on Fox. Members of the government point out that the news media is talking about fringe theory X, which then gets repeated by the news media. Eventually the government opens up an investigation or creates a task force to address the issue.
It is not that people don’t come up with objections or counter narratives on the right, it’s just that they don’t get platformed.
Verification is the expensive part of journalism. If you eschew verification. You can be more efficient. Today the right is simply the more “efficient” political consensus manufacturing machine.
This is foundation upon which the rest of the events occur. This is why there will always be space for another character to appear.
> Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way
If Trump is the most charismatic political personality America has to offer...
Did someone say they would?
Many liberal people think he is an abberation, they would gladly return back to "normal". The point is, he is a symptom of a larger unaddressed sickness, there is no return to business as usual, it will only return far worse.
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
Most people think Trump is the lynchpin, when in fact, its his masters that decide what happens next.
Even if he was, a lot of things have been destroyed that will take a lot longer to rebuild. Notably, trust.
It would delay things, he has a "charisma" that his followers look like.
But it's true he is a symptom.
He is not a symptom he is an actor that is playing a part in a script. He is manipulated, bullied, and blackmailed into submission.
Having somebody less incompetent, senile, and corrupt at the helm may not make things "magically go back to normal," but it's a step in the right direction. Necessary but not sufficient.
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
>Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
It's that a significant number of Americans are mean, selfish, racist, arrogant, and delight in the victimization of those they perceive as belonging to an outgroup.
2/3 of your electorate either voted for him (meaning they liked what they saw) or were sufficiently unbothered by him to not vote (meaning they were more or less okay with Trump).
These crocodile tears about how "we were bamboozled" are just that. It was plainly obvious to the rest of us looking in from outside, even before his first term but certainly after, that he was exactly the person he is now, and fully two thirds of American voters accepted this.
Has been the case for decades:
http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
Today is MAGA, yesterday it was the "Tea Party" faction, before that it was something else, and tomorrow there will be another.
Every time there's a cycle of fringe-right blowing up in popularity, pushing an agenda and flaming out, it's still the same people they're appealing to who are voting for them.
The main problem with your thinking is that you fail to realiZe that a lot of conservatives criticism of Trump is that he is too weak on the things he promised to be hard on. They want MORE ICE, more cuts to government programs, more police.
It will be a lot harder to convince voters when he's gone... if the US still has elections
Why wouldn't it?
Trump has assured us there will be no need for them. I believe him. He lies a lot, but not about his own ambitions.
Could you enlighten the class as to what you believe the underlying sickness is?
America has neglected working class people for decades. The economy has shifted from supporting earning income to make a decent living, to protecting assets (bail outs etc.) Trump tapped into this and tricked these people into electing him, bringing along right wing or whatever they are.. and they got hold of power. Don't think numbers are there for this culture war crowd to stay in power unless they hitch a ride with someone. (edited: typo)
You know what else would make everything worse? A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
But hey, it's not like they funded and backed a bunch of theocratic fanatics who committed a mass atrocity in Israel and provoked a war that destroyed Gaza or anything, right? Or that they were exporting massive quantities of drones to Putin for him to use to murder Ukrainian civilians, right? They were nice guys, and the 35K protesters they murdered deserved it, right?
We should have just let things keep rolling the way they were. It was all going so well, and at no point would the regime that was actively inciting terrorism all over the world for the last 47 years be a threat if they got nukes on the ICBMs we now know they had been a problem. I mean, heck, those missiles they shot at Diego Garcia were just fireworks, purely for decorative purposes, right?
The HN bubble is truly grand. My college girlfriend was the daughter of parents who fled the Ayatollah in 79. You people on here think everyone shares your values and worldview, and that the mullahs in Iran are rational actors. They are not. They are part of a specific sect of Shiite Islam that truly believes that bringing about an apocalypse is a desirable thing. It's such a foreign concept to you that you dismiss it as fantasy and misinformation. But it's real. And you simply lack the life experience to know it. You've never seen entire masses of people infected with the radical religious mind viruses that those of us with firsthand experience with religious fundamentalists have seen.
Imagine the Branch Davidians in Waco with nukes, and you start to scratch the surface of what this would look like if you let it play out.
> A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.
Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.
Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.
47 years? What a convenient sounding number. Wonder where you got it from.
I honestly thought you were talking about the US in your first paragraph.
The narcissism of small differences on full display here.
There isn't a single "red state" in the US that requires women to cover their heads and bodies in public or executes people for speaking out against the "regime".
But you pretend like that's the case, while acting like Iran was just minding their own business when they have exported terror for decades, along with drones being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. I mean, I guess supporting Ukraine was soooo 2022-23, and now we're on to the new fashion trend of supporting the people helping to murder them because "orange man bad."
I did assume you were being hyperbolic when writing it, but yes. I would think that anyone looking at the state of the US right now may see "A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes" as referring to it.
Totalitarian: hyperbolic, but the state of the executive branch over the last couple of decades is moving things in that direction. And clearly one could say this to make a point.
Theocratic: A slight stretch, but mostly yes.
Long range ballistic missiles: check
Nukes: check
Israel has killed more civilians than Russia and Iran combined.
I don’t think your concern for civilian casualties is genuine.
The kind of whacky religiousness that you find in the US matters because of foreign policy, among other things. (There are also domestic things like right to abortion.) The US ambassador to Israel is a Zionist that talks about the Bible with Tucker Carlson as if should have any policy weight, because he believes so. There are other (Republican) politicians that say something like the US having a Biblical responsibility to support Israel.
> The narcissism of small differences on full display here.
And what is your pose, here? The selfishness of implicitly dismissing the foreign policy implications of American religious n*jobs because you don’t live in the affected countries?
was this copy/pasted from a post from 30 years ago or was it typed up from scratch?
You certainly built a large strawman out of one sentence.
Hey, you forgot “they hate us for our freedoms” in your propaganda spiel.
Yeah it's a good thing we dismantled that regime and totally didn't empower the most extreme and radical portion of it while removing the politicians who'd tempered that and turned the population against the US and Israel.
But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?
Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?
Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.
I agree THAT ethno nationalist country in the middle east, with long-range ballistic missiles, secret nukes and a secret nuclear doctrine that hasn't signed any Non-Proliferation treaty should make everybody worried. But that country isn't Iran.
It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.
Agreed. But also why are you speaking like Yoda?
They're not; they're speaking colloquially: this is the word "It's" omitted from the beginning.
---
*EDIT*: Corrected word. Lol.
That's not what made it sound like Yoda. It was sticking "has been" at the end, and I agree there was a better choice stylistically: "Crazy how effective this admin has been at making everything worse."
Didn’t even strike me as weird phrasing. Or rather: strike me as weird phrasing it did not.
"It's," perhaps?
Yeah, nope, you're right. Not sure why my brain thought "The". Haha. I blame on the roughlu 2½ hours of sleep I got last night. Yay insomnia!
There is a worldwide consensus that the American State should exercise increased caution.
On the flip side, I _think_ there's actually less and less about Epstein visible, so I think WH is winning that war. Or at least successfully postponing battles.
I am tired of winning.
winning what?
One of President Donald Trump’s lines during the 2016 presidential campaign was his promise that, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”
https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2016/user-clip-too-much...
Trump says US is 'winning so much' in longest ever State of the Union - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQUGjRtq-M - February 25th, 2026
Hence the joke, "I am tired of winning." as the situation continues to rapidly degrade through policy choices. So much winning, it's too much.
I got jumped in Italy couple of weeks ago. I was wearing a "volleyball dad" hoodie my kid bought for me but did not realize that the "volleyball dad" is etched in the middle of a large American flag covering my entire back. Luckily (for him, not me :) ) three police officers were 10 meters away walking the area dealing with apre ski drunks and restrained him. fun times
Crazy does and crazy do. Be vigilant and try not to set these people off. There's no rhyme or reason, some people are just faulty in the head.
Sorry that happened to you, Italy has not been a safe place for tourists long before this administration.
What did the attackers say to you that told their intention was to harm you for having an American flag?
r/thathappened
oof I would not wear an American flag outside the country. We've hurt too many feelings. Like any good American though, a Canadian flag works.
I find avoiding legible and most "graphic" clothing, period, works great.
Plus it usually looks better.
Not sure why you need any flag on you.
>Like any good American though, a Canadian flag works.
Please don't do this.
didn’t even know I was wearing it (honestly never even noticed anything other that “volleyball dad”) but rest assured I wore it every day for the rest of the trip
people*
Didn't happen
yes, this is exactly the kind of story one would be dreaming up to share, I think if one was to make up a non-existent story one would come up with a lot more "interesting" one that this one :)
A small price for demonstrating that our El-Douche is always right and a stable genius.
So the presidents personal law enforcement that is tasked with racially profiling people who overwhelmingly do not pose a threat are going to now be conducting security directly from the source where millions of foreign travelers come through…hmmm…ridiculous
What the fuck was even the intended purpose of starting this war in Iran? Like in their mind, what was the best case scenario?
1. Distracting from domEstic ProblemS. StarTing a rEgIoNal war is an effective way to do that.
2. Kidnapping Maduro made the rest of Venezuela's government roll over and play fetch, they are stupid enough to believe it would have worked again.
3. Israel says jump, GOP asks 'how high'?
4. There are no negative consequences to them killing people, driving the country into ruinous debt, or blowing up the American economy through higher energy prices. The drawbacks simply don't exist.
It's all upshot, zero downshot.
Hegseth is a white christian nationalist with a crusades tattoo. Whatcha think the intended purpose is here? People said this was going to happen when he was nominated.
There's a christian prophecy involving israel occupying certain lands, a cow, and some other nonsense. A weirdly high number of Americans, mostly christians, believe it. There are a ton of them in the Trump admin.
Remove Epstein from the news cycle?
why are common people paying for the incompetence of a gvt.
to not be political this lies at the heart of principles, morals, meritocracy
values that the current gvt lacks & things that drove america forward.
That's because the common people voted for the incompetent. Not being political either, of course.
In what part of the world does the populace not suffer for the incompetence of their leaders? St. Petersburg? Ramallah? Port Au Prince?
The obvious and flippant answer to that would be "the parts of the world that do not have incompetent leaders". But that will only lead to the incredulous claiming that all governments are equally incompetent (yet some are more incompetent than others) and that's not a discussion I'm inclined to entertain.
I happen to agree with you on that point.
People vote for the current government. I’m not sure why you would expect others’ to pay for americas internal messes, we’re already busy dealing with the external ones.
Because it's the government they voted in. Typical American take. Wanting no responsibility for the adverse effects of your decision.
I'm American, I didn't vote for Trump, so I don't feel like it's me dealing with adverse effects of my decisions.
I did vote for Eric Adams in NYC, and while Eric Adams didn't advertise blatant corruption as part of his campaign, insofar that I can be blamed for his idiocy and bribes I will accept responsibility. I didn't vote for him the second time around and I feel foolish for voting for him the first time.
Democracy is a collective thing. Americans may strongly believe in individualism, but democracy is a collective responsibility. Its kind of a key design feature.
I guess? I mean I actively did not want this president. I actively voted for someone else. I tried to get people to not vote for him, though I doubt I was successful at that task. I suppose I do still pay my taxes and as such I'm still kind of funding this stupid unnecessary war, but I don't think it's entirely fair to judge me just because I live in a country where demagoguery appears to be in vogue.
Don't get me wrong, I know I'll deal with the consequences of other people's bad decisions here, that's just the price of democracy (or whatever the hell we have in the US), but I have a hard time accepting that it's my fault since I did what little I could to stop it.
The federal government hasn't passed a budget because the Democrats are blocking it. They feel it's worth the political gamble to cause Americans pain and that it'll turn on Trump.
There you go - mystery solved.
Trump wrecks everything he touches.
Bankrupting a casino is a literal thing he did and also a pretty decent metaphor for what he's doing now.
lol.
The current situation has been giving me so many flashbacks. Here, my GWB-era teens had the terror threat level, and now we're lazily reimagining State Department traveling warnings as a dark slapstick version (be afraid everywhere, American!)
https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mi...
https://theonion.com/no-blood-for-oil-vs-exactly-how-much-oi...
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Indeed, particularly given that ICE agents are going to be deployed to airports. Their penchant for killing civilians and otherwise violating civil rights only to lie about their actions hardly seems like a good fit for airport security duties they haven’t been trained to perform.
> duties they haven't been trained to perform
Which implies they've been trained?
Fair, they haven’t. I wonder how long it will take them to use tear gas when the line at a Starbucks kiosk gets a little too long.
I fear the day when that happens.
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I travelled to the US some weeks ago and was anxious but everything turned out ok. I'm happy I don't have to go back any time soon.
When do we expect Iranians to actually attack US military bases outside the middle east? I heard there were already drones flying over bases in the US: https://wjla.com/news/local/unidentified-drones-fly-over-for...
They technically have:
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-fires-missiles-remot...
NATO says they can't confirm this Israeli claim: https://aje.news/ohi6b8?update=4425189
And Iran denies it as well: https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2035477318055985648
Makes you wonder who really did launch those missiles?
Iran's source is the one who said they did it in the first place :facepalm: and it was confirmed by UK
As soon as they felt like denying it would be better for them they did and took down https://en.mehrnews.com/ where it was published. Unless you say mehr was defaced and the news were planted by Mossad