Decoding The Right’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (4-17-25)

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

01:00 I read in the FT that Trump is halfway to instituting a police state
02:00 FT: Trump is halfway to making America a police state, https://www.ft.com/content/4c4b0f14-3e85-4436-94de-204d3f518f3c
03:00 Will Trump revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status?
https://ncofnas.com/p/with-amy-wax-for-and-against-tds
08:00 George Friedman on How Geopolitics Drives Trump’s Tariffs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0YJSEMy0sc
16:00 Nathan Cofnas: With Amy Wax: For and against TDS, https://ncofnas.com/p/with-amy-wax-for-and-against-tds
25:00 No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers, https://www.amazon.com/No-Trade-Free-Changing-Americas/dp/0063282135
45:00 What is the left and right? https://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2025/04/what-is-left-and-right.html
57:00 Michael joins to discuss right-wing TDS, https://x.com/Michaelmvlog
1:25:00 Josh Blackman: Remember When The Obama Administration Pressured Baker Hostetler To Drop Its Representation In House of Representatives v. Burwell?, https://reason.com/volokh/2025/03/13/remember-when-the-obama-administration-pressured-baker-hostetler-to-drop-its-representation-in-house-of-representatives-v-burwell/
1:30:00 How Democrats use NGOs to accomplish the agenda they can’t capture via politics, https://nypost.com/2025/04/14/opinion/how-democrats-used-ngos-to-end-run-voters-and-democracy/
1:36:00 Big Law Seems To Be Winning The Narrative War Against MAGA, https://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2025/04/big-law-seems-to-be-winning-narrative.html
1:44:00 New Parents – SNL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ryBqgkOw4U
1:45:00 Medication Ad – SNL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ3jwffRn10
1:48:30 President Biden’s Cognitive Issues in 2024: A CHARLIE ROSE Global Conversation with Chris Whipple, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQzy14CImqw
1:51:20 DTG: Back in the K-Hole, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/special-decoding-back-in-the-k-hole
2:01:30 Naomi Klein: It was Neoliberal Capitalism all along!, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/naomi-klein-it-was-neoliberal-capitalism-all-along
2:12:40 Give Trump credit for changing his mind, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wi-OS9rpYc

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Amy Wax Calls Out Nathan Cofnas, Richard Hanania For Their TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome)

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

Watch here.

I support Trump overall (I think his 2020 election denial was a horrible thing that incentivized the January 6 riot and that killed all of my enthusiasm for Trump until his indictments in 2023 when Trump regained my enthusiasm) but I recognize there are many valid criticisms of what he says, what he does, and how he says and does things.

My biggest concern about Trump II was lack of competence.

April 14, 2025, Michelle Goldberg writes for The New York Times:

[S]everal 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.”

Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)

Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”

My friend Nathan Cofnas (Substack) had such an impressive track record of careful scholarship, but with regard to Trump over the past month, he’s gotten sloppy in his social media posts. He writes April 11: “Many people (including me) had high hopes about Trump, and it’s tough to face the fact that, after 10 years, the dream is over.”

This might be my biggest difference with Nathan over Trump: I never had a dream about Trump. I expected him to do some of the things that he talked about (such as restricting immigration, changing trade policies to benefit American workers, and to push back against the left’s excesses such as DEI). I judged him against the alternatives. He was less effective than I expected in his first term, and more effective in his second term. The only major American politician I’d rather have as president than Trump is JD Vance. Because the world is complicated, Trump or anyone else I favor may be a disaster.

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How much are American law firms off-shoring jobs?

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

Grok says:

Scale and Trends: Offshoring in the legal sector involves tasks like legal research, document review, contract management, and paralegal work, often sent to countries like India due to lower labor costs (savings of 10-40%). A 2023 article notes that while offshoring is increasing, it’s not as widespread as in industries like IT, with law firms focusing on repetitive, high-volume tasks. The legal process outsourcing (LPO) industry was estimated to generate $640 million in 2010, with projections to reach $4 billion by 2015, though recent data is scarce.

Job Impact: There’s no precise count of offshored legal jobs, but the broader U.S. legal sector employs about 1.18 million people (as of September 2024), with lawyers making up the majority. Estimates suggest that less than 10% of U.S. jobs across industries are vulnerable to offshoring, and legal jobs are less affected than manufacturing or IT due to the need for U.S.-specific legal knowledge and ethical concerns. Still, some sources project that 10-20% of service support jobs (e.g., paralegals, administrative roles) could move overseas in the next decade.

Firm Behavior: Larger law firms and corporations are the primary adopters, using offshoring to reduce costs and offer competitive pricing. Smaller firms (98% of U.S. law firms have fewer than 20 attorneys) are less likely to offshore due to concerns over quality, security, and client confidentiality. For example, some firms avoid offshoring patent work due to U.S. export restrictions and risks of intellectual property theft.

Ethical and Regulatory Context: The American Bar Association and several state bar associations (e.g., New York, California, Florida, Ohio) have approved offshoring since 2006-2009, provided firms ensure ethical compliance, supervision, and client confidentiality. This has facilitated growth but also highlights ongoing concerns about quality control and unauthorized practice of law.

Counterpoints: Some argue offshoring’s impact is overstated. A 2019 New York Times piece noted that fears of a white-collar job “apocalypse” from offshoring didn’t materialize, with many jobs staying domestic or shifting within the U.S. Additionally, automation and AI (potentially automating 44% of legal tasks) may pose a bigger threat to legal jobs than offshoring.

How much will AI lead to job reductions in American law?

Grok says:

Goldman Sachs (2023): Predicted that 44% of legal tasks could be automated using AI, implying significant potential for job displacement, particularly in roles involving repetitive tasks like document review, legal research, and contract analysis. If applied to the U.S. legal sector, which employs approximately 1.18 million people (as of September 2024), this could theoretically affect over 500,000 jobs, though not all would be eliminated outright.

Deloitte (2020): Estimated that 39% of legal jobs could be automated, suggesting a similar scale of impact, with a focus on routine and administrative tasks. This could translate to roughly 460,000 jobs potentially affected, though many may be transformed rather than eliminated.

Forrester (2024): Forecasted that nearly 80% of jobs in the legal sector will be “significantly reshaped” by AI, affecting roles like paralegals, associates, and administrative staff. While not all reshaping equates to job loss, this suggests a broad transformation, with some roles at higher risk.

Socius (2024): Noted that 14% of workers across industries have already experienced job displacement due to automation or AI, with legal roles among those affected. In May 2023, 3,900 U.S. job losses (5% of total job losses that month) were directly attributed to AI, though specific figures for the legal sector were not isolated.

Qualitative Perspectives:
Harvard Law School (2025): Interviews with AmLaw100 firms indicated no immediate plans to reduce attorney headcounts due to AI. Instead, firms anticipate maintaining or increasing staffing levels, with new roles like data scientists and AI engineers emerging. However, this optimism may not extend to support staff or smaller firms.

Thomson Reuters (2024-2025): Reported that AI could save lawyers 4 hours per week, equating to 200 hours annually, potentially generating $100,000 in new billable time per lawyer. This suggests productivity gains may offset job losses for attorneys, but support roles like paralegals face higher risks.

OECD Report (2024): Highlighted that tasks like legal research, contract analysis, and due diligence are particularly vulnerable to automation. While AI is expected to augment rather than fully replace lawyers, routine legal support roles may see significant reductions.

Roles Most at Risk
AI is likely to disproportionately affect roles involving repetitive, data-intensive tasks:
Paralegals and Legal Assistants: Tasks like document review, e-discovery, and basic research are highly automatable. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects slower growth for paralegal jobs (1% annually through 2032) compared to lawyers (8%), partly due to automation.

Administrative Staff: AI-driven tools for scheduling, billing, and case management reduce the need for clerical roles.

Junior Associates: Entry-level tasks like drafting initial briefs or conducting basic research are increasingly handled by AI, potentially reducing demand for first-year associates. However, firms note that AI outputs still require human oversight, preserving some roles.

Factors Mitigating Job Losses
Several factors suggest that AI may transform rather than eliminate most legal jobs:
Human-Centric Tasks: Roles requiring judgment, empathy, creativity, and client interaction (e.g., negotiation, mediation, strategic advising) are less susceptible to automation. Lawyers focusing on these areas may see increased demand.

New Roles and Upskilling: AI adoption is creating demand for tech-savvy roles like AI tool managers, data analysts, and legal technologists. Firms are investing in training to integrate AI, potentially offsetting losses.

Client Demand: The legal sector has seen steady growth due to increasing regulatory complexity and litigation. AI may enable firms to handle larger caseloads, maintaining or increasing staffing needs.

Ethical and Regulatory Constraints: Bar associations and ethical guidelines require human oversight of AI outputs, limiting full automation. For example, the California State Bar warns against over-reliance on AI, ensuring lawyers remain integral.

Comparison to Offshoring
In your previous question, you asked about offshoring in American law firms, which is estimated to affect a small but growing number of jobs (likely thousands, concentrated in support roles). AI poses a potentially larger threat:
Scale: AI could impact 39-44% of legal tasks, compared to offshoring’s estimated 10-20% of service support jobs over the next decade.

Cost and Speed: AI offers faster, cheaper automation (e.g., document review in minutes) compared to offshoring, which involves human labor and oversight costs.

Scope: AI affects a broader range of tasks, including those not typically offshored (e.g., drafting briefs), but offshoring is limited by concerns like confidentiality and quality control.

Uncertainties and Limitations
Adoption Rates: Only 50% of law firms have dedicated AI teams, and many remain cautious due to ethical, security, and cost concerns. Smaller firms (98% of U.S. law firms) may lag in adoption, slowing job displacement.

Economic Dynamics: Firms may reinvest AI-driven savings into growth, creating new legal or tech-related roles. The BLS projects 8% growth in lawyer jobs through 2032, suggesting resilience.

Historical Precedent: Past predictions of AI-driven job losses in law (e.g., 2010s) overestimated impacts, as employment grew faster than the broader workforce.

Conclusion
AI is likely to reduce certain legal jobs, particularly paralegal, administrative, and junior associate roles, with estimates suggesting 39-44% of tasks are automatable, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next decade. However, the legal sector’s reliance on human judgment, regulatory constraints, and growing demand may limit outright job losses, with many roles transforming or shifting to new areas like AI management. Compared to offshoring, AI’s impact is broader and faster, though both target similar support functions.

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Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, as the daughter of alcoholic Pat Summerall, understands what you can and cannot control. (57)

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, as the daughter of alcoholic Pat Summerall, understands what you can and cannot control. (57)

Trump vs Big Law

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

I’m fascinated by Trump’s war on America’s leading institutions.

* David Lat: On The Need For Diverse Viewpoints In Big Law
* Why Should I Care About Big Law?
* The Trump vs Big Law Power Struggle
* Does Jones Day lean conservative?
* Big Law vs Conservatives
* Constitutional Law Professor Josh Blackman: Remember When The Obama Administration Pressured Baker Hostetler To Drop Its Representation In House of Representatives v. Burwell?
* How does niche construction help us understand the operations of Big Law?
* Trump vs Big Law
* Big Law’s Self-Serving Claims
* Big Law Seems To Be Winning The Narrative War Against MAGA

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Decoding The Pundits

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

The hosts of the podcast Decoding the Gurus developed the Gurometer, which is “not a scientific instrument, not a psychometric scale, not a revolutionary theory.” Rather, it’s a fun analysis developed by psychologist Matt Browne and cognitive anthropologist Chris Kavanagh.

By guru we refer to the standard definition of “an influential teacher or popular expert” but our specific focus tends to be the subset of gurus who make liberal use of ‘pseudo profound bullshit’ referring to speech that is persuasive and creates the appearance of profundity with little regard for truth or reference to relevant expertise. The recurring characteristics identified collectively trend towards negative traits, so a high score on the gurometer could be regarded as identifying ‘bad’, potentially exploitative gurus who produce ersatz wisdom: a corrupt epistemics that creates the appearance of useful knowledge, but has none of the substance.

1. Galaxy-brainness is an ironic descriptor of someone who presents ideas that appear to be too profound for an average mind to comprehend, but are in truth reasonably trivial if not nonsensical. Gurus often present themselves as fonts of wisdom, and it is an all-encompassing kind of knowledge that tends to span multiple disciplines and topics.

I ask Grok to apply the Gurometer to various pundits:

* Richard Spencer
* Victor Davis Hansen
* Matt Walsh
* Luke Ford
* Mark Levin
* Curtis Yarvin
* Auron MacIntyre
* Douglas Murray
* Tucker Carlson
* Jordan Peterson

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Decoding Dennis Prager – Short Version

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager Biography Condensed My Dennis Prager Story

April 14, 2025, I asked Grok to rewrite my lengthy essay and it said:

Dennis Prager’s Epistemic Blind Spots: A Guru’s Harmful Influence

Dennis Prager, talk show host, author, and founder of PragerU, has built a career teaching right from wrong, cloaked in moral clarity. Yet his epistemology—his approach to knowing what’s true—is deeply flawed, often prioritizing narrative over evidence, charisma over rigor. This epistemic corruption, as Google AI defines it, occurs when a knowledge system sacrifices truth for agendas, like cherry-picking data to fit a story. When Prager manipulates knowledge for personal or ideological gain, he misleads his audience, sometimes with deadly consequences. While I’ve admired Prager’s insights on happiness and ethics—and credit him for giving me purpose during dark times—his distortions demand scrutiny.

The Good and the Harm

Prager’s appeal lies in his ability to simplify complex issues into digestible truths, offering a moral compass for those feeling lost. His PragerU videos, with their concise conservative takes, resonate with millions seeking clarity in a chaotic world. Personally, from 1988 to 1994, bedridden with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I found solace in Prager’s tapes. His fight for “God-based ethics” gave me a mission, a virtual father figure when I felt disconnected from my own. As Christine Emba wrote in the Washington Post (July 10, 2023), fandoms can buffer an atomized world, and Prager’s community was my lifeline.

But this strength—his ability to weave a “tapestry of meaning,” as Grok described in March 2025—has a dark side. Prager’s certainty sacrifices nuance, distorting reality. His dismissal of COVID-19 vaccines as harmful (Oct. 24, 2022) exemplifies this. Despite overwhelming evidence—studies showing vaccines saved millions globally—he claimed they do “more harm than good” for those under 50, citing unverified VAERS data. This isn’t skepticism; it’s epistemic sabotage, ignoring peer-reviewed research for contrarian clout. By advocating unproven therapeutics like ivermectin (Nov. 15, 2022), he fueled distrust in institutions, potentially costing lives. The New York Times (Feb. 2022) reported vaccine hesitancy linked to misinformation contributed to thousands of preventable deaths.

Similarly, Prager’s political hyperbole—like equating Democrats to Nazis (Oct. 31, 2022)—inflames division. Pew Research (2020) shows such rhetoric deepens partisan mistrust, eroding social cohesion. His claim that “the Left has been working to destroy this country for a century” (Dec. 19, 2022) isn’t just exaggerated; it’s a conspiratorial narrative that paints half the population as evil, ignoring the evolutionary roots of political differences. Left and right, as Predisposed (2013) argues, are adaptive responses to different survival needs—neither inherently malicious.

The Guru’s Playbook

Prager fits the guru archetype, as anthropologist Chris Kavanagh outlined on Decoding the Gurus (July 18, 2023): a charismatic figure claiming unique insight into cosmic struggles. His confidence in his “perfect pitch” for logic (Jan. 1, 2024) and assertion that his instincts mirror the Torah’s (Oct. 3, 2022) reveal a narcissism that blinds him to error. Grok noted (Mar. 15, 2025) that gurus thrive on attention, and Prager’s self-aggrandizement—calling himself “one of America’s most original thinkers” (Still the Best Hope, 2012)—fits this mold. His PragerU, while not a profit-driven scam, amplifies his brand, with bought views (evident in erratic YouTube spikes) inflating its reach.

His rhetoric leans on grievance-mongering, framing conservatives as victims of a malevolent Left. Claims like “the greatest of all freedoms, speech, is disappearing” (April 4, 2023) exaggerate reality—America’s First Amendment protections remain robust compared to most nations. His conspiracies, from questioning the JFK assassination (June 19, 2023) to alleging the CDC serves Big Pharma (Nov. 15, 2022), lack evidence but fuel distrust. As Kavanagh notes, gurus use “pseudo-profound bullshit” to sound wise, and Prager’s sweeping statements—like “if truth is allowed out, there is no left” (Dec. 12, 2022)—collapse under scrutiny.

Personal Cost and Clarity

My fandom had costs. From 1988 to 1997, Prager’s influence strained my relationship with my father, whose teachings I dismissed as flawed compared to my hero’s. I spent thousands on Prager tapes, not health, alienating friends who saw my obsession as unhinged. By 1997, I began blogging critically about his show, losing my Prager-centric social circle. This taught me a hard truth: loyalty to a guru often trumps reason. As Grok put it (Mar. 15, 2025), when family and friends anchor you, gurus become “optional extras.” I wish I’d learned that sooner.

A Path Forward

Prager’s not evil—he genuinely believes his mission uplifts. But his epistemic flaws—overconfidence, selective evidence, and narrative-driven reasoning—harm more than they help. A wiser Prager would embrace humility, engage with critics, and prioritize data over dogma. He could promote gratitude over outrage, as Alcoholics Anonymous advises: “We have stopped fighting anybody or anything.” Instead, he fuels fear, like warning of “communism coming to America” (April 4, 2023), which alienates rather than unites.

For fans, the lesson is clear: no guru has all the answers. Prager’s clarity is seductive, but truth requires skepticism, even of heroes. As I’ve learned, real meaning lies not in fandom but in relationships and reason—messy, human, and grounded.

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Is Trumpism Fascism?

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Luke Ford

Nathan Cofnas writes April 9:

Was it a mistake to vote for Trump?

If I’d known that MAGA would become a poverty cult obsessed with bringing Chinese sweatshops to the US, I would have supported DEI Kamala. However, as far as I am aware, no one (including Karlin) anticipated that Trump would declare war on every other country on earth and tank the economy for no reason. Given the information available on November 5, 2024, I think a Trump vote was reasonable. Should we not attempt to win because it’s possible that we will fail?

But there are lessons.

The problem isn’t *Trump*. It’s that the American so-called “right” has become a coalition of stupid people from across the political spectrum. At the lowest IQ levels, the left and right converge on fascism. They favor a controlled economy over the invisible hand, wisdom of the “volk” over universities and book learning, and thuggery over due process. Trump wouldn’t be able to get away with this if he didn’t have an army of @catturd2’s with the same dumb intuitions cheering him on. His future torchbearer will have to be an idiot in order to keep the MAGA coalition together, so he’ll be no better.

All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance. This is also my conclusion. The right *in its current form* attracts such low human capital that it is counterproductive for it to actually take power. What happens when a dog catches the car it’s chasing? It looks confused, jumps around for a minute, and pisses on the wheel. That’s anti-wokesters taking over the government.

I’ve been arguing that the right needs to focus on winning the battle of ideas and bringing the elites to our side. The way to do that is to refute the false empirical belief that underlies the ideology of wokism (the equality thesis). But I lost the battle to set the agenda for the right. Instead, it was decided that the only thing that matters is taking power and trolling leftists. Trump won the election, issued some executive orders, and anti-wokesters declared victory. But we are seeing the fruits of this strategy: a right that is on track to be totally discredited and cede power back to the woke.

It is still theoretically possible to turn this around. The Republican-controlled Congress should invoke the 25th Amendment, carry Trump away in a straitjacket, revoke the tariffs, and spend their political capital (which would be soaring) on important issues like deporting illegal aliens. But this is the kind of action that would be taken by smart people, not Republicans.

If you want the right to prevail in the long run, you should do everything you can to prevent right-wing political parties from gaining power prematurely. All focus should be on the Hereditarian Revolution, which we fight for in the realm of ideas, not (yet) in the ballot box.

Cofnas wrote April 4:

The term “fascist” is used as a generic insult, but Trumpism has essentially become 1920s-style fascism. The original point of fascism was to combine nationalism with socialism under the leadership of an authoritarian state. Toward these ends, Mussolini ordered job-making public-works projects and nationalist economic policies. Although it wasn’t an explicit part of the ideology, fascism was also associated with thuggery, which is increasingly the MO of the Trump administration.

I did not react well on X:

Just as there was no Christianity 2100 years ago, there have been no fascist states since 1945.

If Trump were a fascist, people would be too scared to publicly call him a fascist.

The people who know the most about fascism are the least likely to call Trump fascist.

Cofnas: “Under the conditions of war, we reorder the economy with the single goal of destroying the enemy. How is this relevant to what we should do in peacetime, when the goal is wealth generation?”

The world is often a brutal place that requires brutal choices to maximize your chances for survival, safety and prosperity.

The number one priority for every state is survival, not wealth creation.

Cofnas: “What is your point about countries having command economies during wartime?”

When stakes are the highest, countries are the least free market/free trade and it is not because they are stupid.

Cofnas: “[P]eople don’t trade when they’re killing each other. One of the benefits of peace is that people can trade and become rich. During war, people are conscripted and forced to go to boot camp and fight in trenches. Doesn’t mean we would get rich by doing that all that time.”

Nonsense. Prior to WWI, England and Germany were each other’s number one trade partner.

Countries at war with each other often do trade with each other. The world is a complicated place. Google AI: “Yes, countries at war can and sometimes do still trade with each other.”

When countries fight for their survival during times of war, do they become free traders? No, they become command economies with protectionism. When life becomes real, countries use protection.

As we have no example of a sizeable country becoming rich without protectionism, perhaps protectionism deserves more respect. What works for a small country like Singapore during a rate time is less compelling in this discussion than the 100% result for sizeable countries.

Elites were close to 100% wrong about Trump winning the 2016 election. It happens. Economists were wrong when Trump raised tariffs in his first term without causing inflation.

What Trump II is doing is unprecedented (for good or ill). Trump is operating out where the buses don’t run no more. I hate Trump’s contempt for our allies and I hate the right’s contempt for academia and expertise and I hate the experts 100% contempt for populism.

Every advanced economy contains some capitalism, socialism, nationalism, oligopoly, democracy, and authoritarianism. No nation-state is overwhelmingly just one of these things. Every state is a mix. Dictatorships often contain considerable elements of democracy (dictator Nikita Khrushchev was pushed out in 1964) and democracies are often dictatorial (such as during covid).

There is a huge amount of nihilism among Trump supporters (and that is reflected in the Trumpist quotes in that Pavlou article), but it is usually a type of nihilism that is adaptive, as in, laugh about things beyond one’s control. Better to laugh than cry.

Describing Trumpism as fascism and maoism (it’s either/or, man, it cannot be both fascist and maoist, these are contradictory) and arguing that the low-IQ left and right meet in fascism is not a serious response to reality per anyone who has studied fascism. Left and right mean something. They have distinctive qualities. Invoking fascism to describe something that has nothing to do with fascism is weak.

You haven’t given any distinctively fascist signs of how Trumpism aligns with fascism. Socialism and nationalism along with bullying and authoritarianism are not distinctively fascist. If they were, then hundreds of regimes in history have been fascist and “fascist” has no meaning.

Left and right mean something. “The political left [supports] equality and novel ways of doing things; the right [supports] authority, hierarchy, order, and the traditional way of doing things.” Fascism was a movement of the right reacting to totalitarian communism.

Trump has shifted the culture. His executive orders are primarily important for stimulating cultural conversations. Trump has crushed DEI and affirmative action.

The Paleocons have been right about everything for at least 70 years and they have always been protectionist. Paleocons are not a low-IQ movement and Chronicles magazine is now low IQ. The Claremont crowd of pro-Trumpers is not dumb.

Putin is the most effective leader of a major power in over 80 years. He’s done more with a bad hand than could possibly have been expected.

There is nothing remotely Maoist or fascist about Trump’s policies. They might be wrong or bad, but you are dispensing Jason Stanley-tier analysis. We have zero examples of fascist states post WWII. The left can never be fascist because fascism is right-wing.

I care 100 times more about American excellence than about personal corruption among Trumpists.

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Victor Davis Hanson: Donald Trump’s Just Trade War

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Luke Ford

VDH writes for the Free Press:

Ignore the Wall Street hysteria. The president is trying to end a 50-year injustice directed at the U.S.—and to help the most overlooked Americans.

…By 1975, however, annual trade deficits grew larger and were uninterrupted. Yet in response, American postwar free-trade policies remained mostly unchanged despite a radically changed world. Presidents mostly either ignored, discounted, or did not grasp the dire implications of the growing transference of American manufacturing overseas, and the rising importation of big-ticket items like cars and appliances as well as a flood of cheap consumer goods.

Indeed, the United States is now nearing a $1 trillion annual trade deficit—a reality in the not-so-distant past that used to worry an array of investors like Warren Buffett (“The trade deficit is selling the nation out from under us”), politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi (“The fact is that U.S.-China trade is a job loser”), and economists like Paul Krugman (“Mercantilism makes a fair bit of sense.”).

The fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing globalization should have shocked Washington policymakers out of their static, half-century trade orthodoxy and into readjusting American trade policy to ensure parity and reciprocity—especially as Chinese imports, coupled with U.S. outsourcing and offshoring, began to result in a “Rust Belt,” with an array of accompanying social and cultural pathologies.

But the 1990s exuberance of an unrivaled hyperpower America—now victorious not just in World War II but over the Soviet Union as well—created a sense of unreality in Washington.

Was it an unjustified triumphalism that tended to blind us to the potential long-term negative trends? Or perhaps our naivete was a carryover from the Good Samaritan and self-congratulatory diplomacy of 1945 that had opted for the greater good in rebuilding war-torn Asia and Europe. Such idealism resurfaced in the naive belief—shared by policymakers on both sides of the aisle for the past several decades—that the more we aided Chinese prosperity, the more it created a consumer middle class, the quicker Beijing would liberalize, democratize and, with its new affluence, rejoin the family of consensual nations.

Where did all of this leave hardworking, blue-collar Americans? Globalization had encouraged Americans to invest, offshore, and outsource abroad. As the American industrial belt stagnated, there appeared a strange strategy of compensating for lost higher-wage jobs by accelerating the importation of foreign-assembled, cheap consumer goods. If a Pennsylvania steel or appliance assembler lost his job, pension, and medical plan, at least he always had Walmart and access to Chinese imported tennis shoes and sweatshirts at historically low prices.

In reductionist terms, those tasked with directing U.S. trade policy rarely cared to calibrate the real social, cultural, and moral costs of millions losing high-paying jobs, of small communities offshored and outsourced into oblivion, of soaring opioid use, suicides, fragmented multigenerational families, and a nation increasingly dependent upon strategic materials, pharmaceuticals, and precision machinery imported from abroad—and not always from allies or neutral nations.

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Decoding Media Coverage Of Trump’s Tariffs (4-9-25)

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Luke Ford

01:00 I critique Nathan Cofnas’s critique of Trump, MAGA and the right, https://x.com/nathancofnas/status/1909937394289418679
03:00 Why is the elite media so uniformly contemptuous about Trump’s tariffs while they are wildly popular with tens of millions of Americans? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=160512
27:00 Mark Halperin on Trump’s Tariff’s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYkmNFKi2RQ
30:00 Why is the MSM so uniformly against tariffs? https://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-is-elite-media-so-uniformly.html
32:00 The left right political spectrum, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political_spectrum
1:03:30 Trump, China, Trade, and Covid, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo7OWre66wc
1:21:00 Why isn’t the elite media concerned about America’s working class?, https://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-isnt-elite-media-concerned-about.html
1:23:00 Salena Zito’s decade with Donald Trump, https://salenazito.com/2025/04/07/my-decade-with-donald-trump/
1:27:00 lol nothing matters, https://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2025/03/lol-nothing-matters.html
1:29:00 Why Trump’s Tariffs Are Popular with Many Americans, https://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-is-elite-media-so-uniformly.html
1:47:00 Steve Sailer on tariffs, https://www.stevesailer.net/p/procrastination-rules
1:55:20 How to “Build American” Right with Stephen Miran, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGeC_qtqGE
2:01:00 Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Stephen Miran on the Trump Admin’s Economic Agenda, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMB_OYqV-HE

Posted in America | Comments Off on Decoding Media Coverage Of Trump’s Tariffs (4-9-25)