7 ms·

I’m so glad that Kyle wrote this. I’m so sad that he had to. Pay attention to what’s going on and vote.

ryandrake 11mo ago
The problem is how many people enthusiastically voted for this madness, lawlessness and cruelty, and are still cheering it on. You can say "vote, vote, vote," and maybe it will work in 2026 or 2028, or 2030 or whenever, but the root problem is not going away: you are still surrounded by people all over the country who want this.
- turnsout 11mo ago
  I don't know, man. That is definitely true, but they didn't win by a landslide. And a lot of their edge came from the MAGA Latinx vote. This ICE/CPB action is a total self-own. That Latinx vote is going to disappear, and we've already seen the results in the 2025 elections. I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. We could even end up with three parties, only one of them able to obtain a majority (Democrats). There's a plausible version of the future where the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    > I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. If they turn on themselves it will not be over immigration. This is the one issue where they are almost all in wild agreement. A massive, overwhelming majority of Republicans agree with these cruel treatment of immigrants[1]. They might disagree on the economy or tariffs or jobs or whatever, but there's no infighting here. They fully back this cruelty. 1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/what-americans-think-about-trumps-immigration-actions-early-in-his-second-term/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/what-amer...
    - turnsout 11mo ago
      No, you're right—I don't think it will be over immigration. I think they'll lose in 2026 and tear themselves apart infighting about who's to blame.
      - UncleMeat 11mo ago
        Losing in 2026 barely matters. Existing dem leadership has no desire to end the filibuster, which means we get one bill a year that is full of technocratic approaches. The Trump administration, backed by the supreme court, is accruing more and more power to simply ignore the will of Congress. Even if the dems get some guts and defund ICE, the Trump administration has already demonstrated that it is happy to just illegally distribute or withhold funds wherever it likes. The only way out of this is replacing dem leadership in congress with people who give a shit, winning the presidency in 2028, killing the filibuster, and then going on a serious denazification effort to restructure our institutions so that this sort of shit can't happen. Court packing. Total dismantling and rebuilding of federal law enforcement. Recreating a functional congress.
        turnsout 11mo ago
        I agree, but that’s not far off from simply dissolving the country and starting over under a new name. Maybe that’s the way forward.
    - techblueberry 11mo ago
      The biggest division right now seems to be support Israel. And if we up the attacks in Venezuela, I do think the America first folks will get louder in their divisions. https://www.thefp.com/p/the-rights-existential-fight-over https://www.thefp.com/p/the-rights-existential-fight-over
  - UncleMeat 11mo ago
    There is no way that the republicans split. They are 100% captured by MAGA. The only possible splitting point is with the Fuentes wing, who'd just like to murder all the jews in the country in addition to all of the latinos.
- WillEngler 11mo ago
  There are some who voted for Trump and do celebrate the cruelty on display in Chicago. But I also think many wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" and that is what they thought they were promised. And per the media many consume, that is what's happening. It's an open question on whether the real extent of the crackdown will break through the echo chamber, but from conversations I've had with people who consume Fox News, I really do think a lot of Trump voters will not be ok with the tactics as they are actually being carried out. For example, I just don't think that earnest religious conservatives I know would defend denying the Eucharist to people in the processing facility (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-denied-entry-to-broadview-ice-facility-hold-mass-outside-anyway/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-...) and then banning prayer outside the facility altogether (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-leaders-no-more-prayer-outside-broadview-facility/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-lead...). When you lay out this (and the many events in Aphyr's post) to them clearly, they really don't like it.
- toomuchtodo 11mo ago
  Margin of victory was ~2M votes, about how many voters 55+ die in a year. Hopefully enough voters have aged out or learned their lesson next time around (considering election results we've seen in the last week or so [1]). You're never going to convince unsavory voters to vote with empathy, the subject brain structure does not support it (anterior insular cortex, primarily), you can only hope they're aging out of the electorate at a reasonable pace (and not being replaced). "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Planck's Principle [2] applied to voting) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818505 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
  - saulpw 11mo ago
    The replacement voters are currently teenagers. They haven't "learned their lesson", they aren't old enough to have experienced politics at all. They were 6 years old when Trump was elected the first time. This is their reality and we can't expect that the electorate gets more sensible because old people rotate out.
    - toomuchtodo 11mo ago
      https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.newsweek.com/trump-support-among-men-eroding-10895664 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-support-among-men-eroding-108... https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-absolutely-craters-young-voters-161346893.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-absolutely-craters... Young women are also most liberal than ever, and who carried recent election wins. I expect this trend to continue. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gallup-analysis-finds-young-women-are-more-liberal-than-theyve-been-in-decades https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gallup-analysis-finds-yo... https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men... https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/03/2025-election-results/ https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/03/2025-election-results/
- ssl-3 11mo ago
  We must always vote. Our voter turnout for elections in the US is approximately shit. We must also do other things, too: Voting isn't the end-all, be-all solution to everything. (And that's OK; we can do more than one thing at a time.) But the absolute necessity of actually-voting is a constant, and I'm equipped with a profound amount of intolerance towards any idea that may suggest otherwise.
  - throwaway173738 11mo ago
    Yeah, the people who suggest voting doesn’t matter are either suffering from some nihilistic delusion or they’re spreading a self-serving lie.
    - atmavatar 11mo ago
      Or, they live in one of the 40-something states where the election margins are large enough that it doesn't matter whether they vote. My state hasn't voted Democrat since 1964. The only two elections with less than a 10-point spread since then were in 1976 (7.5% spread) and 1992 (5% spread due to Perot stealing votes from Bush Sr.). I moved to this state in 1993.
      - throwaway173738 11mo ago
        Local government and utility commissioners are very important too.
      - ssl-3 11mo ago
        I have three general questions: --- 1. So it's about odds? By what mechanism do you think that refusing to vote will improve your favored diminutive party's odds in your state? --- 2. Or maybe it's about cost, instead? What does it cost to vote in your state? How much time, and how much money, does a voter need to put forth in order to cast a vote in [wherever you are]? --- 3. Are you a masochist? (Are you sure about that?)
    - gishh 11mo ago
      Hmm. Possibly. I predict that California will “go blue” in the presidential elections for at least the rest of my lifetime. Someone who “votes red” in California can say that their vote doesn’t matter, and a reasonable person would understand why they feel that way. You don’t seem like a reasonable person, or you’re also suffering from some nihilistic delusion, possibly.
- skopje 11mo ago
  Half the US cheers about this. I hope we do not get a world war to stop it.
- tptacek 11mo ago
  I don't think this framing is very helpful. Whatever you believe about the people who pulled the lever for Trump, which included an unprecedented number of Latino and Black voters, they exist, and they're not persuaded by your disapproval. I think a really big problem we have on my side of the aisle is the belief that there's a celestial referee who will call offsides on the Republicans if we can just find the right argument at the right amplitude. What led into our current circumstances was several years of uncontrolled, chaotic immigration, caused in large part by specific articulable decisions Biden's administration made. People felt like the situation had gotten out of control, and they weren't wrong. Every day I'd commute into my office and pass multiple corners and Ike off-ramps(!) staffed by a woman and several of her tiny children, out in the cold, trying to sell bottles of water. My reaction to that wasn't "deport them". I'm a liberal Democrat. But we're kidding ourselves if we think a natural reaction to that situation was "this is fine". The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. It was not: people fucking hate inflation. By a large factor inflation was the most important issue in the 2024 election. But the second-most important issue was immigration (like it has been throughout Europe over the past 10 years) and then after that the issues sharply trail off in importance.
  - jonway 11mo ago
    Could you please qualify both: the several years of chaotic annd uncontrolled immigration as well as Biden betting on employment vs inflation with the policies that you are referencing? For example, while I’m aware that the Biden admin ended title 42, it had only been policy for a few years, ending this policy simply removes us to the Obama era. Although I certainly don’t intend to strawman what you are saying, Obama immigration certainly wasn’t chaotic and uncontrolled. These statements don’t comport with my reading of the facts, as well as inflation, since I understand this to be a global phenomenon. I am genuinely interested
  - keeda 11mo ago
    > The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. There is credible theory (shared by a very balanced labor economist I follow) that the immigration crisis helped tame the inflation crisis, besides boosting the economy enough for a soft landing: https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy-election-labor-market/ https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy... Also some studies for and against this theory: - https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2025/01/10/Immigration-and-Local-Inflation-560285 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2025/01/10/Imm... (Finds inflation lowered.) - https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0708 https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0708 (No effect on inflation, but yes on GPD growth.) Now, I'm not saying this was always Biden's plan, but the economics are not as straightforward as "employments vs inflation."
- UncleMeat 11mo ago
  Right. The plan to defeat fascism can't be "never lose a single election ever for the rest of time." Political leaders did absolutely fuck all to consign Trump to the garbage bin of history in 2021 and now we've got a fascist president motivated entirely by two things: hurting as many people he hates as possible and putting up tacky gold shit in the white house.
alangibson 11mo ago
Voting is what got us in to this. This is supported by a majority of the US. You do not live in the country you think you do.
- daseiner1 11mo ago
  Yup immigration was arguably the concrete issue of the election and these were the campaign promises. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that this is what mass deportation would look like.
  - metabagel 11mo ago
    We already had mass deportation under Biden, and it wasn’t conducted in this manner.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  > This is supported by a majority of the US. The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts. All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    > The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts. There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859760

The problem is how many people enthusiastically voted for this madness, lawlessness and cruelty, and are still cheering it on. You can say "vote, vote, vote," and maybe it will work in 2026 or 2028, or 2030 or whenever, but the root problem is not going away: you are still surrounded by people all over the country who want this.

turnsout 11mo ago
I don't know, man. That is definitely true, but they didn't win by a landslide. And a lot of their edge came from the MAGA Latinx vote. This ICE/CPB action is a total self-own. That Latinx vote is going to disappear, and we've already seen the results in the 2025 elections. I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. We could even end up with three parties, only one of them able to obtain a majority (Democrats). There's a plausible version of the future where the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  > I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. If they turn on themselves it will not be over immigration. This is the one issue where they are almost all in wild agreement. A massive, overwhelming majority of Republicans agree with these cruel treatment of immigrants[1]. They might disagree on the economy or tariffs or jobs or whatever, but there's no infighting here. They fully back this cruelty. 1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/what-americans-think-about-trumps-immigration-actions-early-in-his-second-term/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/what-amer...
  - turnsout 11mo ago
    No, you're right—I don't think it will be over immigration. I think they'll lose in 2026 and tear themselves apart infighting about who's to blame.
    - UncleMeat 11mo ago
      Losing in 2026 barely matters. Existing dem leadership has no desire to end the filibuster, which means we get one bill a year that is full of technocratic approaches. The Trump administration, backed by the supreme court, is accruing more and more power to simply ignore the will of Congress. Even if the dems get some guts and defund ICE, the Trump administration has already demonstrated that it is happy to just illegally distribute or withhold funds wherever it likes. The only way out of this is replacing dem leadership in congress with people who give a shit, winning the presidency in 2028, killing the filibuster, and then going on a serious denazification effort to restructure our institutions so that this sort of shit can't happen. Court packing. Total dismantling and rebuilding of federal law enforcement. Recreating a functional congress.
      - turnsout 11mo ago
        I agree, but that’s not far off from simply dissolving the country and starting over under a new name. Maybe that’s the way forward.
  - techblueberry 11mo ago
    The biggest division right now seems to be support Israel. And if we up the attacks in Venezuela, I do think the America first folks will get louder in their divisions. https://www.thefp.com/p/the-rights-existential-fight-over https://www.thefp.com/p/the-rights-existential-fight-over
- UncleMeat 11mo ago
  There is no way that the republicans split. They are 100% captured by MAGA. The only possible splitting point is with the Fuentes wing, who'd just like to murder all the jews in the country in addition to all of the latinos.
WillEngler 11mo ago
There are some who voted for Trump and do celebrate the cruelty on display in Chicago. But I also think many wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" and that is what they thought they were promised. And per the media many consume, that is what's happening. It's an open question on whether the real extent of the crackdown will break through the echo chamber, but from conversations I've had with people who consume Fox News, I really do think a lot of Trump voters will not be ok with the tactics as they are actually being carried out. For example, I just don't think that earnest religious conservatives I know would defend denying the Eucharist to people in the processing facility (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-denied-entry-to-broadview-ice-facility-hold-mass-outside-anyway/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-...) and then banning prayer outside the facility altogether (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-leaders-no-more-prayer-outside-broadview-facility/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-lead...). When you lay out this (and the many events in Aphyr's post) to them clearly, they really don't like it.
toomuchtodo 11mo ago
Margin of victory was ~2M votes, about how many voters 55+ die in a year. Hopefully enough voters have aged out or learned their lesson next time around (considering election results we've seen in the last week or so [1]). You're never going to convince unsavory voters to vote with empathy, the subject brain structure does not support it (anterior insular cortex, primarily), you can only hope they're aging out of the electorate at a reasonable pace (and not being replaced). "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Planck's Principle [2] applied to voting) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818505 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
- saulpw 11mo ago
  The replacement voters are currently teenagers. They haven't "learned their lesson", they aren't old enough to have experienced politics at all. They were 6 years old when Trump was elected the first time. This is their reality and we can't expect that the electorate gets more sensible because old people rotate out.
  - toomuchtodo 11mo ago
    https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.newsweek.com/trump-support-among-men-eroding-10895664 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-support-among-men-eroding-108... https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-absolutely-craters-young-voters-161346893.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-absolutely-craters... Young women are also most liberal than ever, and who carried recent election wins. I expect this trend to continue. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gallup-analysis-finds-young-women-are-more-liberal-than-theyve-been-in-decades https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gallup-analysis-finds-yo... https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men... https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/03/2025-election-results/ https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/03/2025-election-results/
ssl-3 11mo ago
We must always vote. Our voter turnout for elections in the US is approximately shit. We must also do other things, too: Voting isn't the end-all, be-all solution to everything. (And that's OK; we can do more than one thing at a time.) But the absolute necessity of actually-voting is a constant, and I'm equipped with a profound amount of intolerance towards any idea that may suggest otherwise.
- throwaway173738 11mo ago
  Yeah, the people who suggest voting doesn’t matter are either suffering from some nihilistic delusion or they’re spreading a self-serving lie.
  - atmavatar 11mo ago
    Or, they live in one of the 40-something states where the election margins are large enough that it doesn't matter whether they vote. My state hasn't voted Democrat since 1964. The only two elections with less than a 10-point spread since then were in 1976 (7.5% spread) and 1992 (5% spread due to Perot stealing votes from Bush Sr.). I moved to this state in 1993.
    - throwaway173738 11mo ago
      Local government and utility commissioners are very important too.
    - ssl-3 11mo ago
      I have three general questions: --- 1. So it's about odds? By what mechanism do you think that refusing to vote will improve your favored diminutive party's odds in your state? --- 2. Or maybe it's about cost, instead? What does it cost to vote in your state? How much time, and how much money, does a voter need to put forth in order to cast a vote in [wherever you are]? --- 3. Are you a masochist? (Are you sure about that?)
  - gishh 11mo ago
    Hmm. Possibly. I predict that California will “go blue” in the presidential elections for at least the rest of my lifetime. Someone who “votes red” in California can say that their vote doesn’t matter, and a reasonable person would understand why they feel that way. You don’t seem like a reasonable person, or you’re also suffering from some nihilistic delusion, possibly.
skopje 11mo ago
Half the US cheers about this. I hope we do not get a world war to stop it.
tptacek 11mo ago
I don't think this framing is very helpful. Whatever you believe about the people who pulled the lever for Trump, which included an unprecedented number of Latino and Black voters, they exist, and they're not persuaded by your disapproval. I think a really big problem we have on my side of the aisle is the belief that there's a celestial referee who will call offsides on the Republicans if we can just find the right argument at the right amplitude. What led into our current circumstances was several years of uncontrolled, chaotic immigration, caused in large part by specific articulable decisions Biden's administration made. People felt like the situation had gotten out of control, and they weren't wrong. Every day I'd commute into my office and pass multiple corners and Ike off-ramps(!) staffed by a woman and several of her tiny children, out in the cold, trying to sell bottles of water. My reaction to that wasn't "deport them". I'm a liberal Democrat. But we're kidding ourselves if we think a natural reaction to that situation was "this is fine". The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. It was not: people fucking hate inflation. By a large factor inflation was the most important issue in the 2024 election. But the second-most important issue was immigration (like it has been throughout Europe over the past 10 years) and then after that the issues sharply trail off in importance.
- jonway 11mo ago
  Could you please qualify both: the several years of chaotic annd uncontrolled immigration as well as Biden betting on employment vs inflation with the policies that you are referencing? For example, while I’m aware that the Biden admin ended title 42, it had only been policy for a few years, ending this policy simply removes us to the Obama era. Although I certainly don’t intend to strawman what you are saying, Obama immigration certainly wasn’t chaotic and uncontrolled. These statements don’t comport with my reading of the facts, as well as inflation, since I understand this to be a global phenomenon. I am genuinely interested
- keeda 11mo ago
  > The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. There is credible theory (shared by a very balanced labor economist I follow) that the immigration crisis helped tame the inflation crisis, besides boosting the economy enough for a soft landing: https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy-election-labor-market/ https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy... Also some studies for and against this theory: - https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2025/01/10/Immigration-and-Local-Inflation-560285 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2025/01/10/Imm... (Finds inflation lowered.) - https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0708 https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0708 (No effect on inflation, but yes on GPD growth.) Now, I'm not saying this was always Biden's plan, but the economics are not as straightforward as "employments vs inflation."
UncleMeat 11mo ago
Right. The plan to defeat fascism can't be "never lose a single election ever for the rest of time." Political leaders did absolutely fuck all to consign Trump to the garbage bin of history in 2021 and now we've got a fascist president motivated entirely by two things: hurting as many people he hates as possible and putting up tacky gold shit in the white house.

alangibson 11mo ago

Voting is what got us in to this. This is supported by a majority of the US. You do not live in the country you think you do.

daseiner1 11mo ago
Yup immigration was arguably the concrete issue of the election and these were the campaign promises. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that this is what mass deportation would look like.
- metabagel 11mo ago
  We already had mass deportation under Biden, and it wasn’t conducted in this manner.
HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
> This is supported by a majority of the US. The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts. All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  > The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts. There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859760