BA Porter

Remember the moral panic about safetyism? Trigger warnings? Snowflakes? Well, its actually happening in Texas.

The simple statement I have been shouting into the ether every week since 2016:

This only stops when the handcuffs come out.

I have no idea how we are ten years in now and courts and judges have still not gotten there. The judicial system is failing us.

"We are the ones we've been waiting for."

I don't know if AOC should run or not, but I DO know that "I will curtail myself now in the hopes that whatever comes around next time might be better or more realistic" is a loser's game.

Don't wait. Just do the Next Most Right Thing, always.

And, typically, it is not the mold-breakers who age up into the "their turn has arrived" candidates later. It's not usually the minorities or gadflies who get much credited for seniority or resumes. Think Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or hell Ralph Nader if you like. You go from celebrity to boxed in

Presidential election history is littered with "wait your turn" candidates. And they are often successful!

But winners—generational candidates—are just as often bolt from the blue or juniors. Obama. Trump. Clinton. JFK. Etc. "Not experienced enough. Mere babies or neophytes!"

You wait, you build a resume, but you also accrue compromises, deals, "looked good at the time" votes, factions you piss off, history (real and apocryphal).

And, as important as anything, you dull the alchemy of wished-on potential. You go from a hope to a resume. It's a different energy.

And Barack himself mostly felt the same way! "I haven't really accomplished anything yet maybe I should wait"

But, a few key advisors said "Listen. People are excited about the idea of you being president. Don't take that for granted, or assume it will alway be there for you want it."

The entire Clinton machine—by far the dominant party force at the time—got Big Mad about it (some still are to this day), despite the fact that Bill had been the definition of an upstart "your chance is your chance" guy. "You've got to be like Dole, Gore, Kerry, Lieberman, Hilary, McCain...wait"...

After his 2004 convention speech and Senate election, Barack Obama started getting significant presidential buzz. A LOT of establishment Dems and the professional political wonk class—and his own instinct—told him chill out, put in the work, build a resume, you're a junior Senator wait your turn...

Posted just for you then, ty. Talking into the ether, but I think about this kind of thing a lot. Turns out military history has a weird lot to teach about why achieving immediate objectives by any means is often not worth the cost of corroding the social compact that makes civilization possible.

A nation the size of America is always going to have immigrants. Many, many immigrants—there is literally no such thing as zero immigration, no nation in history. And if you're choosing to teach them that the United States government cannot be trusted, that is bad for all of us.

You want immigrants to report murders, for instance. You want immigrants who get infectious diseases to go to doctors. You want them to not run from the police. You want their kids to not grow up illiterate. You want people accepted to come here to not disappear when they arrive. And so on.

Creating an environment where immigration authorities cannot be trusted to be good faith actors may result in some extra deportations, but at the cost of giving immigrants any reason to give any government actors any faith or credit ever. The consequences of which are...awful.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about perfidy lately in the context of ICE and DHS.

Yeah, maybe jumping on some poor Nicaraguan dude who shows up to immigration court inflates your collar numbers and gets him out of the country, but ideally you really want immigrants showing up for court dates.

People like Pete Hegseth often disparage or treat rules of war like technicalities imposed on soldiers by pansy beurocrats, but in fact it was the soldier class who insisted on those rules to protect against fake-tough shortsighted idiot armchair commanders like Hegseth endangering everybody.

If you dress your soldiers up as Red Cross workers, for instance, then you are suddenly validating the enemy just shooting Red Cross workers.

If you start shooting people for surrendering, you're just disencentivizing surrender. You'd prefer people to feel like surrender is an option.

It's a war crime, in fact. Enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and insisted on by every professional military in the world, and we hold to it whether the enemy does or not.

And the reason why is fairly simple. If breaking faith is permitted or tolerated you'll never be able to appeal to good faith.

There is this concept in warfare called perfidy. Basically, while it might achieve some short term objective, breaking faith, even with enemies—by say pretending to surrender or dressing your soldiers up as Red Cross medics or asking to negotiate then shooting the negotiators who show up—is verboten

Thirty years of concern. Never enough courage.

Like, I fully admit naivety on my part must play a role here, but as a Gen Xer for a huge part of my life expressing this POV would have marked you as a fringey racist weirdo people in polite society would dunk on and ostracize.

It's still crazy to me that the richest person in the world and the president of the united states are just openly white supremicists now.

Immigration attorneys are saints. Just exhausting, soul-crushing, tireless, thankless work, and they do it just because somebody has to. They are heroes, in my book.

Not sure who needs to hear this but the voter fraud rate is a mere 0.000003%. Anyone telling you otherwise is making shit up so they can take away your right to vote.

Weird how shit becomes impossible the second Democrats have an election to win.

Oh well! Probably won't think too hard about it.

I feel like I should point out that Democrats beat Trump in an election in 2016, had four years in charge of the Department of Justice, and decided it would look uncouth to go after him.

This was the same strategy they employed in 2008 and 2012.

Gallup will no longer measure presidential approval after 88 years Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after more than eight decades doing so, the public opinion polling agency confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday. The company said starting thi…

Totally normal democracy we have here, 10/10, no notes

thehill.com/homenews/med...

I want every single person to remember that Barack Obama Joseph Biden Bernie Sanders Harry Reid Nancy Pelosi Chuck Schumer and likely every nominee for president in 2028 will tell you we should move on.

Honest question: Why should she fear consequences?

A subset of this are the "journalists are rotten!" people who fail up into journalism only to realize they liked being famous way more than they like doing journalism, which sucks and is hard.

Bari Weiss Olivia Nuzzi James O'Keefe Ann Coulter again yadda yadda

Ann Coulter Ben Shapiro Tucker Carlson Matt Gaetz Sarah Palin Marjorie Taylor Greene yadda yadda yadda