Republicans did win on their policies, which is why your side felt the need to shoot both Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk while they were explaining their policies
I think shooting a father in front of his children because he was having a discussion with college kids was actually the most brazen attack on free speech
“I built this weapon to wield against you. I will destroy you”
“Okay, but if I wrestle it away from you I will use it against you.”
“No, that’s not fair.”
We are finally seeing the first real consequences of major institutions having spent the last decade undermining the facade of liberal neutrality they at least used to claim as an ideal.
This facade actually mattered quite a lot, and even though it was obviously never entirely sincere and even though conservatives were always out numbered and often poorly represented, they at least felt like participants and stakeholders in these institutions.
During the Trump years this all went away. Conservatives were aggressively ousted, even as token voices, and the facade came down to reveal a perverse and illiberal set of political and cultural directives underneath it that were explicitly antagonistic to more than half of the country and denied them as legitimate participants in public life.
Despite this, MAGA won (again), and, surprise, surprise, do not intend on preserving the institutions that declared them illegitimate political actors. This is, in fact, MAGA’s core promise. These institutions and the norms that govern them may not go away entirely but they will not keep their current form. Appeals to liberal neutrality they enjoyed and depended on, but defected from first, are not going to save them.
The whole thing is going to be reset. Free speech and civil liberties have not gone away, and are not being suspended or selectively applied or anything like that. They still exist and are still an essential feature of American civil life under this new ordering. All of American legal and political theory that has obtained for 250 years fits very neatly inside of this reset, despite the kicking and screaming from the old institutional gatekeepers.
But no, you no longer get to run roughshod over the commons, enjoy the largesse of public resources and its infrastructure, while denying them for the rest of us.
It’s the same game, but we are now calling balls and strikes. Get used to it.
The nicest thing about this latest attempts to insist that the right-wing is uniquely violent is that everyone now understands that all these datasets are completely fake
Anyone referencing them is just clowning themselves
A quick argument against democratic socialism:
If worker-owned firms are more efficient, they needn’t be mandated
If worker-owned firms are less efficient, they shouldn’t be mandated