David Hogg plans to pull the Democrats to the left
A certain segment of the Democratic Party thinks this is the wave of the future, led by the 25-year-old David Hogg, who is vice-chair of the DNC:
The move puts Hogg, the now 25-year-old who first gained national stature as an outspoken survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, on a collision course with his own party and some Democratic House members.
Leaders We Deserve, which Hogg co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday to spend $20 million in safe-blue Democratic primaries against sitting House members by supporting younger opponents. In an interview with POLITICO, Hogg said the group will not back primary challenges in battleground districts because “I want us to win the majority,” nor will it target members solely based on their age.
The Democrats don’t have a history of primarying incumbents, but that is what Hogg is proposing. He’s not destructive enough to propose this in districts that are considered at risk, however. It is a plan to pull the party as much as possible to the left and to the young (Hogg himself is exceptionally young for his position).
DNC Chair Ken Martin is said to have differing views from Hogg, so I don’t know how this will play out.
From Hogg:
“Our base is craving dramatic change,” Hogg said. “We need to show our base we’re here to fight for them. We need to show there are younger faces stepping up.”
But Hogg did name-check two exceptions: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is 85, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who is 80. He described them as “fighters who are delivering.”
But they’ve also both drawn generational challengers — Saikat Chakrabarti, the 39-year-old former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is running against Pelosi, and YouTube influencer Kat Abughazaleh, 26, who is running against Schakowsky. Hogg said Leaders We Deserve they would not intervene in either race.
Pelosi is running again? Indeed.
James Carville had a few choice words for Hogg:
… [Carville] blasted Hogg’s actions to Chris Cuomo on News Nation: “I don’t know if I have standing, but I might give the DNC $10 to sue him. He’s a contemptible little twerp if you ask me.”
NOTE: And Nate Silver predicts that AOC will be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2028. She recently turned 35 – my how time flies! – so she’ll be old enough.
I think I’ll go with the kettle corn watching this.
But are Democrats stupid enough to run AOC?
“ outspoken survivor” as in jumped on his bike and raced to the scene of the shooting. What a dweeb.
And nate crome has long since removed all doubt
Remember how his polling could not imagine a trump win
I am very disappointed in James Carville. I really expected him to know that t-w-e-r-p is not how you spell dickhead.
I’d almost pay to see Ms Ocasio-Cortez debate VPOTUS Vance for the 2028 election.
James Carville and David Hogg are two sides of the same coin. James Carville just wants the Dems to lie about their intentions and get elected, then do what the Left wants.
Carville wanted us all treated like nazi collaborators last week now hes all on ‘maryland man’ return, he has endorsed every democrat clinton biden obama even kamala and their works
Did he oppose so called defund the police not that i noticed did he really speak up on the immigration invasion his objections are always aesthetic but he always get back in line
One of Hogg’s more recent projects was to start a bedding company to run Mike Lindell out of business. You can see what he’s accomplished with that. He’s a twit with no real skill set.
Democrats appear to be sailing between the Scylla of Hogg and the Charybdis of Carville. One can only hope they choose to head into the whirlpool and take their entire enterprise down into the depths.
Honestly, you’d think there were no intelligent women, to see the candidates Dems have been coming with. Well, Clinton was reasonably intelligent, but we’ve been on a downward slide.
He must be a full blooded Marxist, and survivor as in coulda shouda woulda almost if he was actually in the school.
I don’t think going farther left is a winning plan.
I have no doubt those who run the DNC would want to do to AOC what they did more than once to Bernie and simply finagle her out of the nomination. But do they still have enough juice to do that?
I rhink i noted miss abuzedeh the one with the kaffiyeh on her blonde locks (maybe jordanian)
Dwaz,
Sanders is a commie usurper. He only runs as a democrat for president. The party is right to screw him over.
AOC wins hands down. Unfortunately she is a 5-4 crybaby hysteric so Vance will have to avoid looking like a bully.
Chakrabarti the subanda bhose fan (i dian fascist) was reputedly cortez brain trust such that it exists and was alleged to have committed fraud so she really fits in the dem bench
Honestly, you’d think there were no intelligent women,
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Martha Griffiths is long dead.
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Pat Schroeder is dead.
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Dianne Feinstein was ruined by her long sojourn in Congress and is now dead.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s intelligence was devoted to making the world worse.
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Elizabeth Holtzman is an aged fanatic
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Carol Bellamy has been employed time and again running NGOs and is therefore suspect.
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Martha Layne Collins is bearing down on 90.
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Outside the realm of politicians one must note that Katherine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall had opinions. They were absolutely lovely. They are also dead.
Bernie did not have the votes in 2016.
Of course David Hogg hopes to pull the Democrats to the left. The Left plays the Long Game.
Think back to where the Left was in the early sixties. The anti-war movement was a tiny group of protesters, the Civil Rights movement was larger but just taking off. Likewise second wave feminism. Gay rights, TG, forget about it. The Beat movement was centered in a few enclaves on the coasts. Hippies didn’t exist.
Yet the Left grew stronger and stronger. There were setbacks, of course, but by 2020 they had captured the Democrat Party, the Deep State, the Legacy Media, Academia, Hollywood and the White House.
The Left doubles down. It doesn’t back down. The Democrat Party, whatever remains of it, is must go to war and defeat the Left to set a new course.
My guess is that doesn’t start to change until they lose big in 2028, if then.
AOC is to 2028 as Trump was to 2024. Both candidates were/would be (i) plausible winners; and (ii) the other party’s best chance of winning.
Communism explained.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/fb_img_1744129328972.jpg?w=866
If you are a meme fan, check Sarah Hoyt’s blog on Fridays.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2025/04/12/let-them-eat-memes/
Bring your own popcorn.
Oh good, I wish Hogg every success in that effort. May he and those who are in agreement reap all that they deserve.
Pat Schroeder is dead. – Buried in her Bunny Suit ( that she wore it on the Great Wall is a testament to her intelligence?)
I told my Wife it will AOC and Crockett.
John Guilfoyle on April 17, 2025 at 5:30 pm said:
“I’d almost pay to see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez debate VPOTUS Vance for the 2028 election.”
My thoughts, exactly!! and if by some chance AOC did win, we would all be paying big time!
Art Deco on April 17, 2025 at 6:16 pm said:
“One of Hogg’s more recent projects was to start a bedding company to run Mike Lindell out of business. You can see what he’s accomplished with that. He’s a twit with no real skill set.”
But per TR, he is in the ring and playing the game. By age 35 or 40 he might have gained enough “knowledge” from his failures to finally succeed. Something about getting wiser via the experience of bad past judgements, etc. But whatever his young liberal heart is telling him now, he will probably never be wise enough when older to have a real head.
Wendy K Laubach on April 17, 2025 at 6:44 pm said:
“Honestly, you’d think there were no intelligent women, to see the candidates Dems have been coming with.” While Art Deco provided a number of names I did not really recognize, the only name I keep coming up with is Donna Brazil for some reason, and of course she has integrity problems from her past. I suppose there still are a few women Dem congress critters or governors who might make a decent play for power.
Miguel cervantes on April 17, 2025 at 8:19 pm said:
“Chakrabarti the subanda bhose fan (i dian fascist) was reputedly cortez brain trust such that it exists and was alleged to have committed fraud so she really fits in the dem bench”
And if he is going from advisor for a NY district rep to a candidate in SF, CA, then isn’t that the core definition of carpet bagger?
@ Neo: ” [AOC] recently turned 35 – my how time flies! – so she’ll be old enough.”
So 38 in 2028, just under Vance’s current 40 (soon to be 41). On that basis it would be hard to argue she is still too young, but I have come to the conclusion we really ought to amend the Constitutional requirement for presidential age to at least a “seasoned” 45 to 55, for today’s modern world. In the 2016 race I still thought Rubio and Cruz were “not quite yet ready” in their mid 40’s – men with promise but possibly just “flash in the pan” type politicians and leaders until they had had and demonstrated longer and wider experience. Maybe they have now proven me wrong, along with Vance and DeSantis. A major plus for the latter two is their ability to handle the media. I suppose both Rubio and Cruz have also gotten better at that skill, too?
AOC is to 2028 as Trump was to 2024. Both candidates were/would be (i) plausible winners; and (ii) the other party’s best chance of winning.
Bauxite:
Can you explain (ii) with reference to Trump?
He won decisively in 2024 mostly because Americans liked his platform, not his personality.
My impression of Donna Brazile is that she may be the least mendacious person in elite Democratic politics. When she got involved in big time Democratic politics, you still had a critical mass of Democratic politicians who were not sociopaths.
I have a suspicion that AOC’s performance in surveys is a function of name recognition. (Which does not say much for the respondents, to be sure).
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If you look at the line up of candidates to which Democratic primary voters did not give a second look in 2020 and the line up of those who were somewhat competitive, and the eventual winner, you can see the Democratic primary electorate is a collecting pool of idiots. Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, and Hubert Humphrey and the men they defeated could be critiqued. They were not idiots or sociopaths and few if any of their principal opponents were such. We got from there to here due to the moral decay of the professional-managerial class.
huxley – If you’re going to say that Trump won decisively because people liked his platform, you have to say the same thing about Obama in 2008 and 2012. Both of Obama’s victories were more decisive than Trump’s victory in 2024. In 2012, Obama won 332 electoral votes and 51.5% of the popular vote. Compare and contrast to Trump’s 312 and 49.8% last time around. Then compare to Obama’s 365/52.9% in 2008. I know this is heresy around here, but Trump’s 2024 victory most closely resembles Biden’s victory in 2020 (306/51.3%).
The short answer is that none of those candidates won decisively, except for Obama in 2008 and that certainly none of those candidates won decisively because people liked their platform. (2008 was a special case.) Every single president in the last 20 years has taken office, behaved as though the public had fully endorsed their platform, lost at least one house of Congress and (more often) both in the midterm, and then promptly handed the White House back to the other party. (Except Obama, who benefited in 2008 from people’s reluctance to throw out the first African American president and his own successful demonization of Romney and Ryan.)
A much more plausible explanation for the past twenty years is that the public has been repeatedly “throwing the bums out,” looking for someone who can deliver results. At the same time, the extremes of both parties have gone insane, nominating extreme candidates or goading previously mainstream candidates into using the power of the presidency to launch the whole country on ideological flights of fancy that would have been unthinkable in the 20th century.
Then we throw the bums out. Wash, rinse, repeat. And I think it will continue until the strains on the Constitutional structure are too much and something breaks, or one party seizes the opportunity to run on and govern under a “normalcy” platform a la Harding/Coolidge and becomes the majority party for a generation.
Whoever the Democrats nominated in 2024 was going to be saddled with Biden’s record, making any GOP nominee a plausible winner. Democrats best chance in 2024 was to run against Trump, who, recall, was the candidate that they wanted the GOP to nominate last year.
Same thing in 2028. Whoever the GOP nominates in 2028 is going to be saddled with Trump’s record, making any Democratic nominee a plausible winner. Republicans best chance in 2028 will be to run against AOC.
(And regarding Trump’s platform – Trump’s governance in the first three months of his administration is considerably different than his first term. As a matter of fact, before January the most common defense of Trump against accusations that he was going to, well, launch a global trade war or begin deporting people without process is that he didn’t do that the first time around. Well, as the Clintonistas used to say, that’s no longer operative. I think there are a lot of 2024 Trump voters who believed that they were voting for the version of Trump that we saw from 2017-2019. I guess we’ll see.)
Hillary is calling out to “people of good conscience.”
Would she even know what “good conscience” is, what a joke*
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/hillary-clinton-calls-americans-conscience-stand-against-deportation/
or one party seizes the opportunity to run on and govern under a “normalcy” platform
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Deporting illegal aliens, ending the embezzlement of public funds to finance sorosphere agitators, ending censorship over the internet, ending the Pritziker family’s efforts to use federal agencies to promote genital mutilation, and containing China is the ‘normalcy platform’.
Art Deco – Keep telling yourself that. It’s the same thing that Democrats told themselves when Biden took office.
Another tome from CC™. CC™ somehow fancies that President Trump’s imigration actions are unpopular with the voters and that Federal Circuit Judges should run that national policy. Due process indeed and a threat to Constitutional governance? The Maryland Man must return? In the CC™ universe, no matter what, The Great Orange Whale must be vanquished.
Oh noes…anyways
Art Deco – Keep telling yourself that. It’s the same thing that Democrats told themselves when Biden took office.
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Try not to be too self-indicting.
and they drove the country, into the ground, using mostly cortez and chakrabarti’s game plan, the green nude eel, that the Possums like Cassidy allowed to become law, thanks to Manchin and Sinema,
My sole national representative in my small state of Vermont, Becca Balint, is hopelessly Marxist. I write her on occasion, perhaps just to let her know that there are still some sane folks who live in her state. Any thoughts on how to break through to someone of this ilk? Or am I wasting my time writing?
@huxley
Bauxite can explain, just not well, honestly, or consistently. Because they have achieved the significant feat of doublethinking themselves into the ground on the Great Orange Whale and have been for a long time. Which is why Bauxite started with their conclusion (Trump Bad, Trump Worst Possible Option) and their incentives (not wanting to eat crow and admit when they had been wrong), and worked backwards to try to justify that with a bunch of text that doesn’t hold up on close scrutiny or given their prior conduct.
And if anyone disagrees with their conclusion, Bauxite assumes they are part of a Trump Cult who cannot criticize Cheeto or otherwise disregards the statements.
It’s one reason why they suck so utterly fucking much when it comes to this subject. They can’t acknowledge or take onboard valid criticism, and often don’t even address it.
Like how we see from the cowardly, chickenshit, dishonest “No U” response to Art Deco. Because Bauxite can’t actually address those points (or if I’m more generous “won’t”, which in practice amounts to the same basic thing), let alone why Trump has been more effective than most Presidents in recent history for the conservative cause.
It’s ironic because Bauxite makes some valid points, both in general and on rarer occasions about Trump in particular. But carrying that through is apparently beyond them. Hence the gaslighting (like when I caught them bullshitting about statistics that the GOPE had better Get Out The Vote programs than Trump did because of vote percentage, while ignoring how GOTV is about raw vote numbers and how the left had to do even more to move votes to match that; the excuse is no longer tenable after 2024 but that kind of gives you the idea), evasion, and so on.
yes vermont was infested by too many new yorkers thats how you get the likes of Commisar Sanders, and a possum governor like Douglas,
Pat Schroeder seemed ridiculous then, but now compared to the likes of the bugeyed secretary of state, well shes an improvement, all of these people had their inception in ’74 with the bete noire from San Clemente, whose main fault imho was not being ruthless enough,
Of course between the Deep State pentagon who was at
odds over the China embrace (which was probably correct in retrospect) and Mark Felt, who knew Marks like Woodward with great ease,
as my friend Clarice reminds me,* these special persecutors have always played dirty and possums like Howard Baker have always obliged them
*she handled the appeal of a minor official who got tangentially involved in Watergate and reversed the charge
on the fullness of time, we see they have never had anything to offer, except pain and heartache, but some seem to have learn the lesson again and again,
Eh, Bauxite is a Swamp Creature, and the last 50 years of GOPe theater and leftward ratchet is exactly what he wants. Of course he will never accept Trump or those who voted for him. Trump is messing up the system of Team Red/Team Blue kayfabe and appropriations for the connected that Swamp Creatures depend on to pay the mortgage.
The lead-up to 2016 was blue sky territory for the Democrats. They had years to come up with a real candidate, particularly someone younger who could energize them against Trump. But they ended up with Crooked Hillary, after cheating Bernie Sanders out of a nomination he would have likely won (and proceeded to lose the general yugely because he’s an idiot).
And again in 2020, it was even more of an open playfield for them. They had tons of candidates, and surprisingly, some of them were not horrible. I thought Andrew Yang wasn’t awful, despite his ludicrous plan for universal basic income. Tulsi Gabbard was also an honest, intelligent and principled liberal, and we all know what happened to her. Despite all these candidates, they went with someone even older than Trump, again forgoing entirely the youth and vigor aspect (although hardly anyone has Trump’s vigor, despite him approaching 80). Biden was already deep into dementia, and it was clear they recognized this by having him run for President in seclusion.
In 2024, they ended up with the worst major party candidate in my lifetime, and perhaps much longer, with a running mate that was arguably even worse. Harris is an idiot, but Walz is a repulsive idiot.
Now the Democrats are back in blue sky land. They can focus on someone new, find someone with some real accomplishments, and maybe even some charisma (Does anyone remember Bill Clinton? History has been kind to him because of how much worse his successors have been.)
And yet, they are doubling down on every bad thing and every bad candidate and idea they’ve had for the last decade. And if Biden weren’t clearly on death’s door, mentally if not physically, I have no doubt they would Weekend at Bernie’s him yet again. Carville has said as much (about the party sticking bad candidates), and yet, he’s going to the mat over this Garcia El Salvador thing, showing he’s too deep into lala-land himself. He used to be smarter than that.
How much worse can they get? I mean, I like having the Republicans in charge. Well, I like having Trump in charge. The Republicans themselves are pretty useless with a few exceptions. But it’s good to have a competitive and vigorous opponent to challenge the party in power with real ideas and reasonable alternatives.
If it weren’t for the absolute lock the left has on the media, academia, and most of industry, Trump’s approval rating would be 20-30 points higher, and the Republicans would sweep everything for a generation. The absolute clown show the Democrats are running right now is only making this worse.
JD Vance is the heir-apparent for 2028, and he’s got many of Trump’s strengths, and few of his weaknesses. All the possible Democrat candidates I hear talked about are 50 IQ points beneath him with embarrassingly thin resumes. Do they not understand this? Why do they keep picking the absolute worst people in the party to run for high office?
Ty Rex:
Wasting your time if you think it will change her actions on anything. Not wasting your time if your goal is to vent and/or be counted. If you know other conservatives in the state you might try to organize a writing campaign so the number of such letters she receives is higher. But it won’t change what she does.
turtler – It’s fascinating that, in a post criticizing me for purportedly not “carrying through” my reasoning you fail to address even a single substantive point from my comment. Very telling.
Ummm, the donkeys want Trump, Musk and anyone Trump adjacent dead. I wouldn’t work for Trump without the assurance that my family and I will be safe from future retaliation because the donkey party will actually be destroyed.
They tried to kill Trump. Their rank and file openly want the other side dead. Here in stupidville, we have university instructors physically attacking students.
Their shit head judges are channeling Henry Fonda in Fort Apache.
Keep your hands and feet inside the car. It is going to be a wild ride and the world could be a much different place by November ‘26.
@Bauxite
Quit while you’re behind and get back to eating crow. I’d even split the crow with you on some things like Ukraine if you were willing. But apparently not.
So let’s go back through this, and why you are fundamentally not reasoning but rationalizing.
This is what we call fucking delusion writ large, as we went through. It requires believing that not only would some Republican/Conservative candidate be more likely than Trump to eek out a win in 2024, but that LITERALLY ANY Candidate would have been more likely to do so.
This is to put it lightly fucking deluded and objectively, obviously false. And on some level you seem to understand that fact because you spend so much time trying to spin, do damage control, and explain away that which fundamentally can’t be explainable. In large part because you wound up getting humiliated so with the results of 2024 after crowing, posturing, insulting, and on occasion gaslighting us here.
Which is why I no longer will make the mistake of assuming you are making this conclusion in good faith, but are lying about it. Whether it is to yourself as well as to us or just to us is frankly irrelevant to me. You’ve had this irrational, illogical, unfactual bias pointed out to you multiple times before, including by our site’s host. But still, you Persist.
But to those keeping score at home: AOC is not and never has been a self-made woman, even in comparison to the Drumpf. Both have had powerful patrons, teachers, and inheritances it is true, but AOC is utterly dependent upon the far left machines in the cavern of the Democrats such as the “Justice Democrats” and the DSA in order to have or keep her post. Which is why as far as we can tell she literally answered a casting call for new candidates and thus ran, taking office in a safely left leaning jurisdiction of a safely left leaning state.
This is not comparable to the Donald. No matter what you think of him, he ultimately dallied with politics largely on his own dime and with his own credit, constructed more than one team to help mastermind his elections and political strategies (which is one reason why giving him flak for poor staffing choices or trust is so valid because the buck ultimately stops with him), and fought almost all of the established political machines in both parties, on top of attempts to literally criminalize and demonize him.
Things I note that Bauxite again gave short shrift to and generally resorted to “Skirt too Short” bullshit victimblaming coupled with “That would never happen to another Conservative/Republican or their choices!” and when pointed out that yes, yes it absolutely fucking had, “It would never have stuck to another Conservative/Republican candidate like it did to Trump.”
Which even if it were true (and that’s dubious at best and probably false given the malicious prosecution of others) does fuckall to address the other points for or against Trump, such as his work on eroding the blue collar base of the Dems or countering their propaganda like few others. To say nothing of saying “Adios” to Abrengo Garcia or making inroads with new allies like India and the East African non-Islamists.
The truth is that Kamala Harris covered most of the bases that AOC would have as a Presidential Candidate and actually is better than her in most of those except for unvarnished left wing radicalism (which tends not to play well in Generals when undisguised), youth, LEO Credentials, and having a less fucked up marriage/family situation. She was older, more experienced (for a given verdict of that), more connected (in more ways than one, hello Mr. Brown), and believe it or not more intelligent. And still she lost.
And as we now know it was not particularly close.
I’d reckon there are more genuine AOC loyalists or at least supporters than there are Kamala loyalists, but the proportions are still marginal even within the metric of the wider Donk coalition. and some of the best ways to fight them are doing what Trump does by hammering her wider “The Squad” coalition by highlighting their radicalism, criminality, stupidity, racism, and in at least one case possible incest (PROBABLY not but “merely” immigration fraud, but ey, hell if I know what the Omar/Elmi family does behind closed doors).
But Bauxite can’t actually make these kinds of comparisons or assessments, because they are reliant upon treating Trump as far more sui genersis than he actually is or was. Which is also why you see metric craptons of special pleading in an attempt to rationalize their predetermined conclusion and more reaching than some drowners.
Because in several ways this is the intellectual and argumentative equivalent of a drowning person reaching for a life raft. Bauxite’s stance has long been predicated on the idea that Trump was the weakest of the Republican candidates for office in 2020 and 2024, in spite of how this very obviously did not hold much merit in lieu of the voter tallies and shares. While up until the actual election this was at least somewhat grounds for debate, now it isn’t because Bauxite’s position is basically that “Generic Republican” or really ANY Republican would have done at least as well as Trump did in 2020 and 2024.
Which is fucking absurd when you start arguing that Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Nikki Haley, and others would be able to replicate or improve the inroads Trump has made into the likes of Black Men, Hispanic Men, the rust belt, and so on. That Trump would force many unions with heavily leftist leadership to either endorse him or stay neutral due to sheer grassroots FERVOR from their dues paying members in support.
But that’s the thesis Bauxite has run with. It’s the thesis he has run with for the past several years. It is a fucking deluded, stupid thesis that has outlived any pretense or justification it has to be treated seriously or civilly by me seven times over, but that’s what it is. And when you phrase it like this you can see how abjectly deluded it is.
Which is one reason why Bauxite doesn’t frame it like this. Does not have the basic courage to try and go “I believe Nikki Haley or Mitt Romney or the like would be able to get the Teamsters to shut up and break with years of precedent by refusing to endorse the Donks in the Presidential Race.” All the more jarring considering even freaking TRUMP failed to obtain such results in 2016 and 2020, let alone anyone else, which is an argument against there being some kind of unique Special Uber Trump Magic that he can Just Do. But acknowledging that would mean dealing with the questions of what made 2024 different from 2020 and 2016, or 2012, or the rest. As well as what didn’t make it different.
Lengthy preamble aside, let’s dive into the meat of the “argument”, such as it is.
Firstly, to those of you keeping track at home, this is Bauxite making an explicit logical fallacy, that of a false dichotomy. That if we conclude Trump won from popular approval of his platform in 2024, we HAVE to- HAVE TO – concede that Obama won because people liked his platform in 2008 and 2012. “Without evidence” the kneejerk reaction from secondhand exposure to MSM talking points almost makes me want to add.
This is not merely illogical, but absolutely motherfucking stupid and ignorant to even claim for a couple important reasons and would be even if it had been true.
And what’s really important for this is that we can be pretty sure it’s objectively false, because we have abundant reason to believe that the particular things that drove Obama to decisive victory had far less to do with his platform or people liking it than with other factors.
Starting with likeability.
You know, the very fucking thing huxley was addressing with the statement “mostly because Americans liked (Trump’s) platform, not (Trump’s) personality.”
Go on, pick up any given likeability poll from 2007 or 2011 and compare it to that in say 2015, or 2019, or 2023. See how much Obama scored on the likeability scale compared to Trump. I’ll wait.
Actually no I won’t, I’ll throw a few in for reference precisely so that Bauxite can’t try to dodge out of the way by claiming I’m not providing any sources.
https://www.pollingreport.com/obama_fav.htm
https://www.pollingreport.com/trump_fav.htm
Obviously these are polls, often unreliable or wrong and frequently outright rigged to have a given result. But they are nevertheless what we have on offer.
And they consistently show that Obama has had a favorability halo effect for almost his entire term, buoyed consistently by favorable press, dirty tricks, and a host of others. Usually by several dozen percentage points.
So from the fucking start we have truly vast evidence to rip a hole through Bauxite’s “If voters elected Drumpf because they liked his platform, they must have liked Obama’s platform more” Bullshit explanation. Indeed, I’d cautiously say that this is significant evidence to utterly debunk that particular flavor of horseshit explanation.
Indeed, in general Trump’s policies have been more popular than he has, while Obama or at least the idea of Obama has been more popular than Obama’s policies has.
Which goes on to explain a bit about our next points.
Secondly: As Bill Whittle pointed out when discussing leftist talks of leftist bias in media coverage and its effects on voting as far back as the 2004 election, with it mentioning media bias being worth as much as 15% on behalf of Kerry (Kerry, Swiftboated Old White Heinz Golddigger and Troop insulter, not Obama) in 2004.
https://billwhittle.com/no-more-headwind/
Go on, shift the polling figures or the election results 15% against Obama or in favor of Trump. Or even 7%, to cut the perceived advantage by more than half. See what results you’ll get.
I’ll wait.
Thirdly: Perhaps the biggest stake through the heart of Bauxite’s alternative explanation for Obama’s victory (when he is not flat out engaging in special pleading such as “Obama’s special” without actually trying to do much to explain how or why) that the public must have liked Obama’s platform even more than Trump’s, is simple fact that Obama never fucking ran on a single united platform.
Oh sure, he had his official DNC Platform out there, and I could pull it up if I gave enough of a shit. But that’s at best half of what he actually ran on, and was at best half or less than half of what he actually believed, as shown by his refusal to endorse gay marriage.
Because to those of us with functional memories of the 2008 and 2012 election seasons, we’ll know that Obama engaged in massive triangulation and lying out of both sides of his mouth to at least two different constituencies in order to make it. While this is most evident when comparing his primary campaign rhetoric (where he ran to the left of most of the party and especially Clinton and wound up pulling them along in his wake trying but failing to catch up) and his general campaign rhetoric (where he ran towards the center as much as he dared) it also becomes obvious when you look at what he said during any given campaign, and how dependent he was on a ruthless, unscrupulous, well heeled political machine (probably more than one) and slavish, unethical press to carry water for him and help get out his narrative.
And while to some degree this is fairly typical for most candidates (including Trump) and especially for Democrats or Leftist candidates, it was exceptionally virulent in Obama’s case. And this becomes very clear when you remember most Democrat candidates do not have personally authorized books with publisher’s notes declaring they were born in British East Africa (and thus at best questionably eligible for the Presidency) for years on end until someone did due diligence and noticed what a problem this would be. Even most Chicago Machine politicians do not have sealed divorce settlement papers unsealed and leaked to the press with a time and virulence that “conveniently” destroyed their political rival. Most Democrat candidates were not able to get away with this level of race baiting and division and unashamed ties to Black Supremacist groups on the national stage. And most Democrat candidates would not even have been able to get most freaking Mexican Illegals to vote for them had they known he was responsible for Fast and Furious the gun leakage to the Mexican cartels.
And that is to say nothing of common disabilities that affected most leftists or democrats, or what would have affected them. For instance, how well the “Bush Lied, People Died” groupies would have held up had the CIA hacks that wrote there was no “direct” link between Saddam and Osama been put under oath and forced to acknowledge that the “indirect” links included Saddam funding Osama’s son in law, father in law, and several terrorist groups like Abu Sayyaf that were directly sworn to Osama. Or the “No WMD found” crew if they had to look over the old WMD that was disposed of.
Suffice it to say, Obama was fortunate. Not just in his own skills and image and prodigious ability to dissimilate, speak out of both sides of his mouth to different audiences (sometimes at the exact same time), and manipulate, but also in his allies and enemies. But even that would probably have run into trouble had the public been exposed to what his history and platform actually were, and had he been forced to answer under oath how much he knew about the claim about being born in British East Africa by his publisher and when he knew it.
In any case, Obama owed at best a fraction of his support to any given platform. He owed far more of it to the general feeling of “good vibes” he and his lapdogs in the media gave off, as well as the systematic coverups of almost all contrary info. Say what you will about Trump, but he’s had trouble covering up his own follies and misdeeds, and thank God for that.
A few issues with this.
Firstly: Define “more decisive.” Because in terms of things like political paradigm shifts and especially migration of voter bases, it’s likely Trump’s were more.
Secondly: This ignores that at the time Obama’s were some of the most decisive electoral victories in US history, especially in terms of raw numbers of votes, and certainly in the last couple decades.
“Hi, I’m Bauxite.
I uncritically believe vote tallies from places like Milwaukee, lands of greater than 100% turnout in several wards (That then often have to be bumped down from outright impossible to “merely” practically impossible-for-the-US to avoid justifying investigation and auditing even to blind people).
I also uncritically believe the official voter tallies for California and do not at all see any reason why a loony left wing dominated state with an impotent Republican party on almost every level, that is ground zero for illegal immigrants from Mexico (which Trump made a center of his campaigns) and which is the home state of the Dem first Vice President and then Frontrunner, would ever artificially inflate the vote tallies in order to try and deny a Republican Party candidate a popular vote victory or a popular vote 50%+ absolute majority even after no path for electoral victory was possible.
The question is: am I, Bauxite, a fucking idiot, or do I merely think the people reading this are?”
The problem with this particular brand of idiocy is manyfold.
A: Trump got more votes in both 2024 and 2020 than Obama ever did, and indeed you have to go back to 2016 in order for that to change (where Obama outscored him). Again, going by the official figures. Which points to the peril of trying 1-1 comparisons, especially on percentage points, because otherwise Obama would be underwater.
B: The late post-call votes for California alone makes up every bit of the distance between Obama’s percentage points results and Trump’s, and then some. And the official statistics for California (especially in terms of popular vote results) have held almost static on the Presidential races since 2008. Whether it’s Hawaiian Jesus versus the Maverick, Hawaiian Jesus versus Romney, Biden versus Trump, or Trump versus Kamala: About three to four and a half million more Dem pop votes in the official results than Republican.
And this invariably either made up a significant portion of the popular vote gulf between Dem popular vote victories and Republican results, or closed said gap in the case of Trump’s victory.
In particular with McCain’s 2008 results (which are the weakest of the Republican results in this, whether nationwide or in Cali, that we’re looking at among the last five elections), the Cali Popular Vote margins make up MORE THAN ONE THIRD of the Gulf between McCain’s popular vote results and Obama’s for the ENTIRE COUNTRY.
In the likes of Romney, it’s more than half of the just under 5 million popular vote gulf. For Trump 2016, it’s more than the entire sub-three million vote deficit, ESPECIALLY when you realize that 2016 California is one place where Trump actually underperformed in terms of ratios and got beaten by an above four million vote deficit in California (which is one of the stronger arguments for Trump having lost).
And even in 2020, that year where apparently some other Power originating from Heaven (even if I don’t think they still reside there) decided to give us Biden, thine most popular and vote-getting POTUS candidate in American historuh, not only would the normal 3-4 million vote deficit in Cali be more than half of Trump’s nationwide popular vote deficit, but he actually improved his voter turnout results from 4.4 million to about 6 million. It’s just that Biden was JUST THAT AWESOME he nearly improved on Obama’s best result in the state by about a third to clinch an unheard of 11 million vote result in California.
I think you can probably guess my opinion of that and why I am not inclined to put too much weight upon the exact percentage point of Dem voter turnout.
Especially since it was apparently it was still not enough, since after Biden the Savior was unjustly forced to recuse himself for the Good of the Country, Kamala in spite of (or because of) being a native daughter, got two million fewer votes in California than Biden and about a million above Obama’s best statewide results. While Trump clawed ahead a few thousand more votes in the state, though those are such rounding errors that it might be explainable by Dem vote fraud machines fulfilling quotas to remember to make a few fake votes for Trump.
So what do we have to learn for this?
Firstly: The negative explanatory value of “BUT TRUMP” isn’t ZERO, but it’s not significant or decisive when it comes to things like vote tallies. in particular the gulf of three to four million votes in California (with a huge impact on the overall) massively widened, then slightly shrank, then moderately widened, then supposedly vastly widened, then shrank vastly. Almost all predicated upon Dem votes officially tallied rather than Republican results.
So apparently the Dem political machines have something to do with things.
Secondly: If I’m supposed to believe that Dem voter fraud or related manipulative or unethical methods are not “good” for at least two million votes per presidential election over the last decade, I’m going to laugh at you as only an expat Californian can.
Thirdly: The positive explanatory value of “But Trump” isn’t absolute but not only exists, it generally outweighs the negative explanatory value by a lot. In the face of fairly consistent and extremely adverse factors (weak stateside Republican party, powerful and entrenched Donk stateside party, massive amounts of illegal immigrants, weak enforcement of the law, weak voter integrity) Trump improved on his vote tally with every election in the state in absolute numbers, and in relative numbers with every election outside of 2020.
See above.
Heresy is one thing, dumbassery is another. This is dumbassery.
Especially when you remember that percentage points of the vote and thus electoral college votes are not truly independent factors, but are the result of a bunch of stateside popular vote contests being decided.
And statistically, the popular vote contests for 2020 are marked by literally unprecedented amounts of popular vote counts on both sides, but especially by the Dems for a candidate that was acknowledged to be weak and fairly senile, but which were conveniently focused very narrowly on a mixture of strong left wing fortresses like California or crucial swing states, and particularly Dem machine dominated urban areas in said swing states. Which also carried over into a distinct dearth of coattails.
As well as several results where we had super octogenarians voting in disproportionate numbers and several dem machine dominated cities like the aforementioned Milwaukee turning in initial counts that often had constituent parts with greater than 100% voter turnout, and later the “merely implausible” Italian-election-level voter turnout wildly at odds with turnout elsewhere in the state.
And that’s before we get into things like suspect law changes, the lockdowns (and cooking the books on such), and so forth.
Suffice it to say, if these results had turned up in one of the Russian occupied areas of the Donbas, in Subsaharan Africa, or in East Asia we’d have some very pointed things to call them and probably some unflattering references to the local government. But 2020 was the most securest and stablest elections in historiiiuuh.
And then came 2024, by far the most decisive and clearcut conservative Republican electoral victory on the Presidential level in 20 years.
Short and wrongheaded, as I mentioned before. As I said: the public by and large went in to 2008 and 2012 liking Obama or at least the idea of Obama plus what (little) they had heard of him from the usual sources. That was not really the case with Trump, or at least nowhere near the same level. Hence the likeability ratings gap, which Trump has only made inroads to closing lately.
I’m not saying huxley is right and it was allll down to Trump’s platform (certainly he has the ability to appeal to inspire several to fanatical loyalty in his cause and others to abandon the left, but he is also subject to fanatical hatred or repulsion, as we have seen). But trying to claim this was a mirror of Obama’s campaign and is appeal and that no alternative interpretation is possible was fucking dishonest, stupid, and incompetent for the reasons and evidence I mentioned.
Firstly: That’s not true. I realize Bauxite is reliant upon being a gaslighting little bitch and ignoring evidence that does not favor their choice hobby horse interpretations, but some of us were old enough to remember 2000 and 2004, among others. Dubya never could or would “behave as though the public had fully endorsed their platform”, in no small part due to not being able to, after all coming in to the Oval Office due to a squeaker that came down to lawfare in Florida (and which many of the left still lie and demonize him over), and a more decisive but still slender result in 2004. That as well as the shadow of 9/11 meant he was quite solicitous of trying to gather opposition support for several of the flagship projects he was involved in, such as No Child Left Behind (what a disaster that was), the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and so forth. Which generally came back to bite him due to things like the compromise Iraq Intel Report that managed to do things like obfuscate Saddam’s ties to Al Qaeda using weasel words.
Likewise Trump, for all of the attempts to paint him as a take-no-prisoners uncompromising son of a gun like he likes painting himself as (and has acted significantly closer to in the second term) has often been very cogent of the fact that he’s had to co-habitate with both the non-and-anti-Trump factions of the Republican Party and the Dems. Which helps explain many of his actions (especially during the first term) such as stumping for candidates he did not necessarily like (such as Kemp, who has received his support no less than twice) and not following through on his promise to “Lock Her Up” regarding Clinton.
Precisely two candidates – and really one – to get into the White House in the past 20 years have “behaved as though the public had fully endorsed their platform”, and longtime readers of this blog will know exactly the “man” we are talking about. I’m pretty damn sure Bauxite has enough functioning grey matter to know this as well, given the flagrant contempt of Congress exercised by Obama and Biden minions as well as the rhetorical “I have a pen and a phone” BS, but if Bauxite cannot draw a false equivalence between Bush and Trump on one side and Obama and Biden on the other, their argumentation gets that much weaker.
Thirdly: It’s false on a much more basic level. Bush and Obama were both contiguous two termers. Neither “hand(ed) the White House back to the other party” after his first term. And even Bauxite trying to play bullshit, dishonest word games by leaning on the “20 years” wording like a drunk man leaning on a post for support in an attempt to artificially ignore the 2000 election for the purposes of this sophistry cannot change the basic fact that the Republicans retained control of the White House in 2004 and both Chambers of Congress for most of this period depending on line-crossing until 2008 (with a clean sweep by the Donks). Ditto with Obama, who had the Dems gain control over both chambers twice only to lose them each time but who held on through two terms.
This is important for a few reasons.
A: While Bauxite wants to try and insist that 2008 was oh so Speshul and employ special pleading for Obama, and on some level that’s true, in many ways Obama was much less special than Bauxite is making him out to be, at least in terms of electoral trends. Obama did many things, much of which due to his special pixie dust of race, charisma, personal appeal, and political machinery and sleaze, but he could not match even Dubya and Cheney on holding down the House (literally) and Congress. Likewise, most Presidents in this time span were two termers, including Trump, with the big question being if they held the terms continuously as they did, as Bush and Obama did.
These are important ways in which Obama did not break with the patterns and norms of electoral politics but fell into them. (If only he did so in other ways, we might lament, given his “radical transformation” agenda).
Secondly: If it doesn’t feel like the Republicans had control of both chambers for much of the period in question, it’s probably due to a bunch of things, starting with the margins being legitimately slim and thus prone to sabotage or defection (hello McCain), and also due to fairly indecisive or impotent leadership by Republican legislative leadership. But they still point to much less chaos than what Bauxite is implying.
Thirdly: With this in mind, it’s pretty obvious why Bauxite – who has burned much of their credibility and goodwill trolling about the Great Orange Whale on behalf of the exalted legacy of the GOPe – is trying to peddle this particular line of bullshit and “Obama was Different! Special! (TM)”
Because Obama faced off against Maverick McCain (the archetypical defector and backstabber among leftist/centrist Republicans), and Mitt Romney, heir to a dynasty of left-to-center leaning liberal Mormon republicans as shown by his father, and while we can question if McCain was truly a creature of the GOPe outside of his personal rule in Arizona, Romney certainly was. And the results were – to put it mildly – disappointing and speak for themselves even in comparison to Trump.
Which shows how Bauxite has to try and spin these results and the relevant ones away. Especially since I and several others have been hammering on him for the failures both in absolute terms and in relation to Trump for literal years by this point, and an honest assessment of those charges shows they hold true.
If you have the law on your side, bang on the law. If you have the facts on your side, bang on the facts. But since Bauxite has neither, he has to bang on the table in the hopes others misremember the events of these years as much as he does.
Which is why the edifice starts to collapse when someone actually does a deep dive like this to show certain unpleasant facts for Bauxite’s narrative, such as Obama’s greater reliance on perceived charisma and personal (some might say cultish) likeability than Trump or how the presence of two termers for most of the period un question belies the simple narrative. While I’m sympathetic to Neo in arguing the GOPe and the Congressional leadership like McConnell were not as inactive and impotent as they’re often remembered to be, the fact remains that there was nothing like Scott Pressler the gay man who upended Pennsylvania politics receiving nationwide support, and there was great squandering and abuse of the Tea Party.
This is not to say that Trump was or is perfect and has never screwed up. VERY MUCH THE OPPOSITE. But he has made better use of the grassroots than his predecessors in actually expanding the party.
Which is why Bauxite has to stick his head in the sand and ignore it.
Plausible if you’re an idiot who does not recognize how in general, electoral retention of control for Congress and the White House outside of the major Presidential elections has been pretty stable, with upsets generally coming either during the elections or in between-election line crossing or replacements.
This becomes very clear if you look at the big picture overall.
https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Congress_elections,_2020
Look at the “Historical Party Control” bit.
Once again, Bauxite is hoping nobody will check their work. Unfortunately for them, I did.
Obviously most voters generally are looking for candidates that will deliver results (even if those results would be “lack of results by gumming up the system”), and there’s been a general erosion in trust and approval for government over time, but incumbent and bully pulpit advantages have generally made control of the system rather durable to sudden shocks. If that’s started to change, we need to ask why and look elsewhere. And while Trump and the grassroots revolution he has come to be the face of aren’t the entire story by a long shot, they are a major part of it.
Seeing this load of victim blaming bullshit from Bauxite while they have egregiously lied and gaslit to try and pretend recent history was very different from what it actually is, I’m reminded of a quote by one of the Church Fathers, Saint Anthony the Great of Egypt:
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us’.”
That Bauxite is suffering under *provable fucking delusions that are unmoored from reality* should be evident from a close examination of their comments here alone, such as claiming election results that were different from the alleged patterns (and I’m not even talking about 2020), as well as other things such as trying to claim Romney’s GOTV campaign which objectively got fewer votes out than Trump’s was better because it managed to obtain a higher share of the total. But I think this should underline it.
And I’m not even the biggest fan of Trump, and even less so of many of the people he has surrounded himself with. I don’t trust Musk or Vance. I outright despise Sacks. Seeing so many Yarvinites or Techbros in high position is worrying for me.
But the idea that “the extremes of both parties have gone insane” is a delusional cope that ignores a very basic fact that is nevertheless provable by careful analysis and parsing of the evidence: That the “extremes of both parties” did not go insane at anything like the same time or rate, and are nowhere near equally insane.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2015/10/study-democrats-moving-left-faster-than-republicans-moving-right/
In short: there were always nutjobs, insane fanatics, extremists, and loons in both parties and their vicinity. Even in the supposed halcyon days before 9/11, David Duke ran for Republican office in Louisiana repeatedly through the 1970s and 1980s, Obama climbed the greasy pole of Dem Cook County politics while retaining his ties to unrepentant terrorists, Bernie Sanders was making a sizable name for himself in Vermont politics, and the Clintons were the Clintons.
But Obama was special in an important way. He greatly accelerated the process of radicalization and insanity by helping to push the Dems far to the left, and helped lead the racial wings to basically consume the center. When Hillary ran again in 2016 she did so largely by imitating Obama. As did Biden in 2020 and 2024. And so you saw the Dems split largely between the new radical status quo, holdouts like Shapiro and so on who would not have been so out of place in the party back in the 1980s, and even more radical goons like the Squad and Justice Democrats who argue Obama didn’t go far enough fast enough.
It was largely in response to this that the Republicans began shifting right even further than they did, and even then the “insanity” has not been anything like equal.
The attempt to paint this kind of false equivalence with Bauxite of all people among the golden voices of moderation is enraging, false, and provably false. It’s classic demonization, and I don’t have to be a member of the Trump Cult to object to it or see what it’s trying to do.
And like the original movie form of gaslighting, it’s easy enough to debunk. By having outside witnesses point to the shifting gaslighting, point to the gaslighter, and tearing down their lies, pretenses, and falsehoods. And then, in a juster world, we point to the abuser and laugh. Mocking them so.
You, Bauxite, are an incompetent liar and a gaslighter. You are reliant on spinning a fable with at best tertiary resemblance to reality. You would honestly like us to pretend that Obama and his ilk are of comparable insanity to Trump. You would like us to pretend the American Public for the past 20 years was much more angry and “throw the bums out” than the evidence indicates they actually were. Your narrative is about flattering yourself and demonizing those you disagree with, not trying to diagnose the problem accurately or find the truth.
And for that you deserve to be mocked.
Plausible enough and ironically there is stronger evidence for both possibilities than you are prepared to admit (because as I showed before, control over Congress Chambers and the White House has generally been much stabler in between elections than you’ve been prepared to admit). .
And once again we have Bauxite trying to act as if the prior years were just a hallucination or bad dream (nevermind how had the election gone the other way we’d still have a bunch of January 6th Political Prisoners and others). That we are supposed to believe that Biden’s record (the one that was remorselessly glossed up and made prettier by not just the most visible liars of the MSM but also the book cookers in Federal bureaucracy) was such a public net negative that it made ANY Republican candidate likely to win.
And that means ANY. Including the likes of Haley or presumably Jeb Bush. And that Trump was the very weakest of the weak sisters.
This is absurd and always has been. It requires believing that Nikki Haley not only had the theoretical capability to but the CERTAINTY of making comparable inroads to Black and Hispanic men in the Dem base as Trump. And indeed, if Bauxite were to HONESTLY remember the discussions on here of the last few years, there was open question on if ANY Republican candidate could win in 2024 due to the institutional power and political machinery of the Donks.
When you phrase it as such and remember, the edifice of Bauxite’s “Anyone but Trump” BS caves in under the weight of its own absurdity and contradictions and how it runs headfirst into evidence it cannot explain. The fact that Bauxite has remorselessly banged on this particularly deluded gong for the past several years and continues to do so even after the utterly unorthodox, potentially transformative verdict of 2024 is jaw dropping.
And yet, Bauxite persists. I suppose that level of commitment to a fever dream is almost impressive. But when you’re even less moored to reality than Hindraker (who at least could wake up and smell the coffee of 2024 and acknowledge how very unusual and seemingly unlikely the results were even with Biden, Harris, and Obama’s legacy) due to a greater commitment to hunting the Great Orange Whale, it’s absurd and self-destructive.
Nice story Oracle, shame you have a proven track record of shitting the bed even harder than I do with false and baseless predictions.
Now, could Trump’s track record be so catastrophic that any Donk in 2028 could be a likely winner? Sure. And I have seen some worrying signs before and criticized him on it such as over Ukraine, and on having a nakedly incompetent and possibly sabotaging attorney argue about the MS-13 goon and claiming he was ‘mistakenly deported” before the GODDAMN SUPREME COURT.
But I don’t know that. And if Bauxite were honest, neither do they.
But if Bauxite were honest, they wouldn’t have made the posts they have on this thread. Or many of the posts they’ve made peddling bullshit over the past several years.
And I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the gradual inroads Trump has made into the likes of California and the Black and Hispanic male votes are “records” that most Republicans would envy and desire to be “saddled” with IF they hold true as they have over the last few elections and several years.
But Bauxite isn’t going to address that, because Bauxite has not been in the business of addressing inconvenient facts, arguing on the merits of claims, or making substantial points in this thread. Bauxite is acting with dumb, blind, knee-jerk reactions, logical fallacies, and false equivalences. Trump 2024 = AOC 2028. How? Why?
Bauxite can’t answer that shit honestly, because an honest assessment of their records makes the comparison risible due to how incompatible it is. So just throw the claim out there. “Source; I made it the F*** up.”
And expects the rest of us to tolerate their nonsense.
On this much I agree, for better and worse. Trump in 2016 was much more conciliatory, “establishment oriented”, and inclined to at least try to play nice. Hence the slap in the face I received from seeing Hillary around the White House during those ceremonies.
That’s changed significantly, to mixed results in my view, but with generally popular results among the public.
And here we get back to another old trend in Bauxite’s abuse of this blog and those that make the mistake of reading the comments and taking what Bauxite says seriously: of signal boosting the gaslighting by the MSM and uncritically accepting its often false and sometimes “without evidence” claims at face value.
Let’s address the blatantly false bullshit of “Deported without due process.” This is a not so subtle reference to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the illegal immigrant and wife basher with “suspected” ties to MS-13 (as in, the motherfuck was quite literally arrested twice in close contact with MS-13 with vast amounts of evidence on it while wearing gang paraphernalia, the second time AFTER BEING RELEASED FROM CUSTODY PENDING DEPORTATION due to successfully arguing he could not be sent back to El Salvador due to fear of his life, with his attorneys being utterly silent about arguing about the MS-13 members taken into custody with him being MS-13 members and apparently not trying to make the argument they were not).
The claim he did not receive due process is false. Indeed, a core problem of this is that he if anything received too much due process for an illegal immigrant known to law enforcement to be committing crimes several times over. Though I would argue the failure to actually stick a conviction on his rear so publicly is one of the better arguments for this.
Prior to his deportation the argument was not that he did not warrant deportation, as the black letter law so obviously manifested. It was that he could not be deported to El Salvador due to fear of persecution or his life. Hence the 2019 ruling (that is the basis of the recent brouhaha) banning deportation to El Salvador for said fear, but which pointedly did not ban him from being deported elsewhere (though due to stasis and lack of conclusion on where else to deport a Salvadorian National in the country illegally if not TO El Salvador meant he stayed).
Apparently according to the Trump White House and DoJ, they decided to fix that. Especially since the claim that was the basis of the judicial hold on deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was no longer applicable. Say what you will about Bukele’s government or CECOT, but you can’t say that Abrego Garcia is in undue fear for his life there. Obviously he’d rather be out free, but if he couldn’t do the time he should not have done the crimes.
Now let’s address the elephant in the room and what Trump and co did wrong, and where the bullshit “without due process” claim Bauxite is parroting comes from. The DoJ Team chosen to argue this before the Supremes monumentally bungled this case, with lead attorney Reuveni making several of the claims (again, before the Supreme Court) that are so damaging and bad, such as that the deportation was a mistake or administrative error and that he did not know why Abrego Garcia was in custody.
For this he was publicly reprimanded and ultimately fired by his superiors. And for obvious reasons: his claims tanked the case before the highest court and gave ammo to critics, such as you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/justice-dept-immigration-lawyer-leave.html
Now, this actually doesn’t say anything good about Trump or his DoJ. The fact that such a legal team went to argue this before the Supremes and botched it so badly, and that no remedy to correct this was done until *after* the decision speaks to a monumental screwup and even dereliction of duty on the part of the DoJ and by extension Trump. It is damning in its own right.
But it’s damning for another reason than what you and your MSM sources want to claim. Because if you address the actual problems that Trump and co put forth an unqualified idiot to argue this before the Supremes, you’d have to address the fact that Abrego Garcia had in fact received a lot of due process, that he had forfeited legal reason to be in the US long ago, and that the reasons to prevent him from being deported to El Salvador was no longer valid.
Which is generally why the MSM and other critics that you have so obviously cribbed the notes from like the lazy, cheating student trying to cram for an exam in the morning focus on claims that it was a “mistake” (unlikely to put it mildly), that Abrego Garcia had not received due process (lol according to what measure of due process?) or that the underlying evidence for identifying Abrego Garcia as MS-13 was based on hearsay (because once you get past the first level of so of dishonest idiot “Fact Checkers” like Rolling Stone claiming he flat out was not a member of MS-13 period, you start to run into the fact that the “Confidential Informant”‘s information checked out, that Abrego Garcia was taken into custody twice in MS-13 Gang Paraphernalia, connected to other since-prosecuted suspects who have been found to be MS-13. Meaning it becomes hard to actually argue objectively he was and isn’t at least an associate of MS-13 and thus the pivot has to be that the conclusions were drawn due to hearsay or fruit from the poisoned tree).
Which seems to be flatly untrue (given how the connection was upheld by two separate courts as a matter of fact and by multiple often independent lines of evidence), and in any case would be completely irrelevant in the OTHER, equally deportation worthy charges Abrego Garcia was guilty of.
There’s actual, justified criticism to be made of Trump on this issue. But instead Bauxite lazily, dishonestly copied their homework from the MSM and regurgitated their claims. And then is stunned why people do not take them so seriously.
As for the trade war though? Trump has been fairly consistent on tariff policy and its aims for his public life. Moreover, to those of us who paid attention, he did implement several during his first term, though not as many or as radically, and many were retained during the Biden interlude. He also openly and proudly campaigned on more tariffs and in using them as a means to better the working class’s lot and to bring foreign powers to the negotiating table, which he followed through with.
There’s a lot to be said about tariffs and their wisdom or lack thereof. I personally am not sold. But that doesn’t mean I get to ignore the fact that Trump was vocal about selling them to the public. You can be honestly surprised as I was about the nature of their implementation (or non-implementation as the pauses have been), but not on the basic shape or gist if you were paying attention.
Fair, and I also believed that. And again if you pay attention there are a lot of continuities between the two. Which you’d know if you paid attention and acknowledged it. Neo certainly has. I did. We misjudged in more than one place.
But if we have failed to predict the future perfectly, that is a paltry flaw compared to your inability to *accurately predict the PAST*, as I have detailed before.
This is funny. For something utterly devoid of substance or intellectual rigor, it is surprising how much boomerang irony it has.
Firstly: We have Bauxite the Great Orange Whale Hunter, perennial Not-So-Concerned Conservative, trying to use Trump’s “surprising” comeback in 2024 against the Obama-Biden-Harris Coalition, to try to mock Art Deco for pointing to the potency of Trump and his camp. Apparently without any self-awareness of how utterly self-defeating this is.
Secondly: This ignores the fact that no, that is not what many of the Democrat powers told themselves. Which is why we saw concentrated lawfare against Trump and many of his supporters (that I note Bauxite’s stance on ranged from backhanded, grudging opposition of in the “Skirt to Short” fashion, to indifference to).
Thirdly: It ignores the inroads Trump and co made to helping to re-define normalcy in comparison to Obama and co’s. For instance on tariff and trade policy, and now trying to roll back corruption, waste, and so on in the Federal Bureaucracy and Fraud. Whether these will take is another question and they might fail catastrophically. But to not address any of them at all, and particularly those from the first term, is jarring and daft.
But as we’ve shown, it’s about par for the course with Bauxite.
And had I posted this shortly after I’d begun writing it, this would have been about where I’d stop, after maybe a few acid remarks in conclusion.
But this took a while for me to put together (believe it or not I am not an AI and actually take time to do other things). And in the meantime, apparently someone decided humiliation by irony is part of their kink.
Which is how Bauxite decided to chime in with their trademark utter lack of awareness.
I’m tempted to leave this as a final note and laugh at it. But no.
A few points.
Firstly: My response was to huxley, not you. It was a response to you, but at no point pretended to do anything but summarize your track record and the follies of many of your other points.
THIS is the latest response to you and your claims in detail. I’m pretty sure even you can tell the difference, because most others definitely will be able to.
Secondly: “Address even a single substantive point from your comment”?
What substantive points?
Your April 17, 2025 8:54 pm comment had no substantive points beyond the unsubstantiated, baseless claim that AOC in 2028 would be comparable to Trump in 2024, being “plausible winners” (funny, I don’t seem to recall you being so clear about Trump being a “plausible winner” for 2024 during the actual goddamn 2024 campaign), and being the “other party’s best chance of winning” (which again, is provably false for the reasons we’ve gone over regarding the grassroots campaign).
To support these bold assertions you provided a staggering exhibit list of… absolutely nothing. And they are basically rehashes of similarly baseless, similarly deluded, and similarly debunked claims you’ve made before. There was nothing substantive in that entire comment, and so I treated it as such.
Your comment on April 18, 2025, 9:38 am was similarly devoid, being basically a lazy, dishonest, “NO U” clapback at Art Deco’s point about Trump’s platform being that of Normalcy, without addressing any of AD’s point but instead trying to draw a false comparison between Art Deco now and what the Dems supposedly told themselves at the time (in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary).
Not only was there no substantive point here, but if you had any base awareness you’d have realized how utterly destructive this post and this particular argument would have been to your claims.
Which brings us to this latest reply at April 19, 2025, 1:09 am, which does little but whine about my comment about you to huxley in which you claim I did not “address even a single substantive point from (your) comment” and that this was “Very telling.”
It is very telling in its own way, but not for what you insinuate. Namely, Even Someone as Deluded and Biased As you should KNOW ME BETTER BY NOW, BAUXITE.
But so feeble was your grasp of others, your ability to understand them and predict future events, and your knowledge of others character that you decided to do this petty snipe. Thus handing me this extra target to shoot at as I put the finishing touches on this.
I only WISH I were genius enough to have predicted or set this up. Precisely because of how it compounds many of the points I’ve made about you. That you are arrogant, overconfident, situationally oblivious, and when it comes to the Great Orange Whale utterly blinded by your biases such that you cannot see what you get wrong, and what you fuck up.
Thanks for that by the way.
In any case, the claim I did not address any single substantive point made in your comment is false. I pointed to your failure to address Art Deco’s response in any substance. Which I think befits you.
But this brings us to the comment you made to huxley, which is probably what you were referring to. April 18, 2025, 8:37 am, by far the longest (more put together) and where you seem to have made an EFFORT to make substantive points.
Which I addressed, such as they are.
The problem is, several of your “substantive points” aren’t. The claims about the electoral results are objectively false. The claim about how we’d have to admit the public liked Obama’s platform more in 2008 and 2012 is a logical fallacy and thus objectively false. Your “more plausible explanation” is objectively false for the reasons I mentioned before in not coinciding with the evidence. Your claim about Abrego Garcia being deported without due process is objectively false and shows you’ve been stupidly, unthinkingly parroting MSM narratives without checking the evidence.
And as for the rest? Well, that’s what this comment was meant to address. And it did.
Be careful what you wish for, Bauxite. Because you might get it good and hard. And if you had bothered paying half as much attention to me as the average person reading this blog that stumbles across my comments does, you should have KNOWN BETTER coming from me.
I imagine there are literally brainless LLMs that – if fed the threads with our comments – could have predicted what I would post next on here. I imagine that there are even more than a few Obama cultists that could.
But you couldn’t. Now what does that say about your wisdom, situational awareness, or knowledge of the situation?
Now, I started with this but I’ll finish it. Quit while you’re behind and get back to eating crow. You haven’t had anything like the quota you need to.
Bauxite claimed he would be eating crow after the 2024 election, who knew that crows are as abundant as Passenger Pigeons.
Bauxite is still looking for a crow, and getting thinner every day.
we’ve already seen the ocasio cortez program, higher energy prices, more unsafe cities, probably legalizing 20 million illegals to vote, recognition of Hamas and their jihad against Israel, which will in due course be a jihad against us, of course the citizenry will be disarmed but the criminals will not be disadvantaged, packing the Court, yadda yadda,
So, ah, Turtler, what do you REALLY think?
@om
To what credit I will give Bauxite he ate crow on here for a couple of days after the election. But it did not last very long, hence the shift to claiming that any Republican, in essence, could have accomplished the results we saw in the 2024 election and more.
It’s fucking absurd, but that is where we are when Bauxite gets onto Orange Man.
That said I am not sure I believe Bauxite is getting thinner by the day.
@TIM FERRELL
That might take too long and be too wordy even for me. We might have to narrow it down a bit.
Which admittedly is one reason why responding to or fisking things is convenient for structure with me.
its like Mogatu in Zoolander, who is the villain, but also the smartest character in the film ‘blue still, le tigre’ it’s the same thing, the pretense is over with Carter and Clinton they thought because he was a good ole boy, well he would be sensible,
of course his inaugural was about how we had ‘an inordinate fear of communism’ hence Vietnam, now its arguable how proper the Vietnam intervention was specially after 1965, however it doesn’t follow that Communism has to be dismissed Clinton after a generation had the same gimmick, why we have been stuck with Reich, like a nasty barnacle for 30 years, how he enabled Cloward and Piven, with the Housing policies, with the Voting reforms,
Well I guess Bauxite can answer the age old assertion:
” (blank) tastes just like chicken.”
Does “crow” really taste just like chicken?
First for Mr Hoggs plan, I must echo Napolean Bonaparte, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. Ultimately the Dems MUST hold seats to regain the house, Bruising primary fights even in very safe seats might backfire.
AOC is an interesting issue. Can she win the Nomination? Well maybe, if there is a HUGE field like there was in 2020 and they all stay in through Super Tuesday likely NO ONE would have a majority and she might have a plurality of the regular delegates and be able to get the more radical super delegates. Can she win the general? Highly unlikely, she’s the punch line to jokes across much of the Red and Purple states. She is well known for being VERY left, so she can’t do the old run moderate govern left Democrat maneuver (CF Clinton, Obama). Her base would be educated 29-40 women, Gay and Trans (loud but tiny), African American and Hispanic. Except the male African American and Hispanic were defecting to Trump and may or may NOT return for AOC. Without that the Blue wall states are in play and that’s a disaster waiting to happen (see 2024) for the Democrats. The Democrats BEST hope is to grab an obscure middle of the road governor (Say Bashear of KY or Shapiro of PA) and run them as far right as possibly with a wink and a nudge to the base A LA Obama. With Mr Hogg driving a large part of the Dem base that is highly unlikely to occur, and even if that miracle occurred if things are not absolutely in the crapper late 2027/Early 2028 any Dem candidate will have to work their ass off. I do NOT see AOC doing that, she would campaign on the Kamala Harris model as she has NEVER had to run in a more open statewide seat let alone a national one.
And like Mr. Guilfoyle I would love to see a set of Vance/AOC debates. Although after watching her eviscerated in the first two or three it might get repetitive…