So much could be said, but leaving that to the tag.
Oh shit I'm turning into Principal Skinner Meanwhile in HCR-land Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.” Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.” Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway. That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.” Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.” The Goldberg column is something else But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. “The vibe is shifting yet again,” Kaschuta wrote on X last week. “The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.” Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.
There seems to be a change in the air.
For Kaschuta, who lives in Romania, the promise of a more authentic, organic society, freed from the hypocrisies of the existing order, was apparently inviting. “There’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you,” she wrote on her blog. “A frontier opens up.”
Does any of this materialize/coalesce into anything that makes a tangible difference? Because I am pretty sure all the vile idiots are still going to be cheering the evil on, no matter how many 'conservative thought leaders' say otherwise. Personality cult being a personality cult and all, and not a reasoned supporting of a reasonable political leader who follows the law, and all. Trump has openly defied every court in the land including the Supreme Court. What level, what agency would be the ones to enforce a change, or court appearance? On whose authority? If not a constitutional crisis why constitutional crisis shaped?
Unfortunately there isn’t one. A mass revolt (NB: not short weekend protests) might work. But more than likely he uses the insurrection act and arrests people. Beyond that, I don’t think it’s possible. No government agency other than the executive has control of the military. And the military, contrary to what the opposition tells you is highly indoctrinated into obedience without question.
The problem isn't the vile idiots, the problem is the mushy middle letting the vile idiots cook. The mushy middle voted for vibes associated with lower inflation and deported criminals. Instead eggs are still $7/doz and the government is going to the mattresses against Temu and those guys outside Home Depot.
The National security adviser was on newsmax suggesting that siding with Abrego was siding with MS-13 and since MS-13 is “terrorist,” that’s against federal law. 1984 is best enjoyed in the fiction section….