Joohn Choe

Remember how Paul Ryan, Omarosa Manigault and Jeff Sessions used to all be on the team during Trump 1.0?

Remember how they all left?

Starting to feel like that now.

(Image on left from: Jason Leopold, "The FBI Redacted Trump’s Name in the Epstein Files", Bloomberg, August 1, 2025)

Nearly half of all U.S. adults believe the President was involved in Epstein sex trafficking: belief varies by race, age | Joohn Choe Get more from Joohn Choe on Patreon

Once you even start thinking about how to process its implications, that is, any way you slice it, a pretty insane place for the American conversation to be headed right now.

www.patreon.com/posts/nearly...

Reading a "yes" answer as an affirmation of Trump's guilt, at least by association, it would seem that a full 57% of 18-29-year-olds think POTUS sex trafficker, the largest majority of "yes" answers in any age group.

Majorities of people from ages 18-44 think this, in fact.

The July 25-28 poll suggests only 28% of 18-29-year-olds now think Trump is doing a good job as President, a significant decrease from the 2024 election, while only 18% think that he is not involved in crimes with Jeffrey Epstein.

The variation by age is particularly interesting in the context of a recent G Elliott Morris analysis suggesting significant decrease in Trump support among 18-29-year-olds.

The variation by race seems superficially interesting, but, when you take into account the strong correlation between race, party affiliation and yes/no answers, it starts to make sense.

Bottom line up front, about half of the country thinks the President is a sex criminal. Again.

So, there you go.

There's more interesting detail in the most recent Economist/YouGov poll data, though.

I couldn't find charts anywhere so I made them.
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just guessing by view counts & average activity level in the "long tail" (the 95% or so of users who don't get thousands of views/interactions)

I'd be surprised if there's actually a *lot* of bots on here yet

good question

no I haven't

let me know if you find something :)

could you just use the frickin' metric system please

On potential information war failures in the Israel/Palestine conflict | Joohn Choe Get more from Joohn Choe on Patreon

I'd argue Israel has "been in a continuous, generally winning information war with multiple asymmetric relationships (with adversaries as well as aid-donor states) since its inception."

And part of what happened is that as good as they are, someone screwed up.
www.patreon.com/posts/on-pot...

Stupid question, smart answer time: why is this public perception happening now, of all times?

Why weren't previous accusations of intentional starvation as a tactic of war (in 2023 no less) successful?

What made now different?

Virtually the entire recent decline is caused by significant drops (16% each) with Democratic and independent-identifying respondents; approval of Israel's actions amongst Republicans has actually gone up.

As of July 29 2025, Gallup polling data published today suggests just 32% of Americans support Israel’s military action in Gaza.

It was, in fact, a House Representative notable for groping cardboard cutouts of Trump and claiming the existence of “Jewish space lasers”, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green; and it arrives just two days after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued “there is no starvation in Gaza”.

The state of American discourse on Israel’s war on Gaza in the last week of July 2025 looks, at least superficially, like a remarkable case study in information war failure.

For the first time in recent memory, a Republican lawmaker used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.
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"I'm sorry sir, I gotta make that quota today"

What To Read, July 28 2025 | Joohn Choe Get more from Joohn Choe on Patreon

Disinformational beliefs so pervasive that they detach an entire political faction and its elected representatives from reality altogether."

Full post, free, on Patreon:

www.patreon.com/posts/what-t...

...all potentially portend the collapse of the Pax Americana, as Hal Brands argues.

To these three it seems natural to suggest a fourth supplementary and perhaps even alternative causation of international order collapse:

'...or through the collapse of respect for its guiding rules and norms.'

Respectively, the possibility of losing a war to China, the extreme rise in U.S. federal debt service costs, and Trump’s “might makes right” disruption of the basic concepts of sovereignty underlying international law...

"There are three ways that international orders collapse, according to the historian Brendan Simms quoted in Bloomberg today:

'Through defeat in war or some catastrophic failure of deterrence; through economic decline or a divergence between the order’s political and economic arrangements...'

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BlueSky: What if Twitter wasn't late-stage enshittified by Nazis

Twitter blue-check: I pay the richest man in the world a monthly fee for an imaginary product on a free service. For some reason, this makes me feel important.

Facebook blue-check: I feel like my voice is reaching more people than it does and it doesn't occur to me that it's the algorithm making me think that.

Instagram: I feel like I'm into all the latest most important developments on Instagram no one else knows about, and it doesn't occur to me that the algorithm makes me think that.

TikTok: I feel like I know the latest breaking TikTok trends no one else does, and it doesn't occur to me that the algorithm is giving me obscure randos making content that will make me think exactly that!
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I see worse stuff than this on the Ukraine war with NAFO on a Tuesday.

This is weak. Very weak stuff.

Looking at the documents Gabbard released first, then reading right-wing discourse on it, I'm inclined to agree with that. This is desperately 'texty', easily-defeated logic in prosaic little memes that no one is going to read.
www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/d...

...and given the figurative lack of quality of the noodles he's throwing at the wall to see if they stick - Rosie O'Donnell attacks, bruh really? - it looks like he's also being very stupid as well as desperate.

There's an admittedly subjective reading of Trump's actions these past two weeks that says he's increasingly desperate to distract from the central scandal of his second term...