Reid Ribble

Jonah Goldberg Verified account @JonahDispatch · 2d

Steven Miller's immigration policy has taken arguably the GOP's best issue and made it a liability. He, second only to Trump himself, is responsible for blowing up the multiracial coalition that elected Trump in 2024 and sparked the GOP's dream of a multiracial working class coalition. He's also probably the single most despised person in American politics. So of course, Trump appointed him Chief of Staff after getting humiliated at the polls. It's so perfect.

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Shannon Watts Verified account @shannonrwatts · 5d

The Trump administration has plans to deport 200 Afghan nationals first to Pakistan and then to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. These deportees could be persecuted by the Taliban due to connections they or their relatives had to the US war in Afghanistan. 
cbsnews.com/news/ice-depor…

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Drew Cline Verified account @DrewHampshire · 4d

Kansas last elected a Dem to the US Senate in 1932. What was important about 1932?

Republicans passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, and in '32 voters had the 1st chance to respond to its effects. Dems gained 97 House, 12 Senate seats, 11 governorships & the presidency.

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The Rational Animal 🤔 Verified account @theobjectivist · 4d

Matt Walsh calls this the most honest assessment he has read. You should all read it. And then maybe you will see what honesty requires and that both of these men refuse to do it.

Start with Vance's method. A team of data analysts obsessing over electorate composition, pollsters asked to explain the loss after it happens, a survey handed to defecting voters asking what would bring them back. This is the technique of a pragmatist. A man of principle could not care less about polls. He cares about ideas and whether they are right or wrong, and he would rather lose every election in his lifetime doing the right thing than win a single one doing the wrong thing. He holds a standard, measures his actions against it, and knows before the returns come in whether he governed by it. Victory means nothing to him if the price is his principles, because a victory won by abandoning what is right is a defeat in everything that matters. That is not what is happening here. These men are asking the crowd what it feels because they have no idea what is true, then adjusting their convictions to match the answer. Ayn Rand named this method decades ago. When men abandon reason as their guide, the opinion survey becomes their substitute for thought.

Observe what the assessment leaves out entirely. Not one word about tariffs, a tax on Americans that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional and the administration reimposed under a different statute, running through two years of roughly 6% cumulative inflation. Not one word about roughly 30 government equity stakes in private companies, which is socialism practiced by the party that claims to oppose it. Not one word about a brand new universal entitlement, two trillion dollar deficits, or a 40 trillion dollar debt. "Focus on cost of living" appears as a polling answer with no causal analysis attached, because the causal analysis indicts their own record. The most honest assessment somehow misses every policy the voters threw them out over.

Then Vance's 4 conclusions which are out of context slogans which are meaningless as such. The reason we lost is the war. Half true and twisted. Hitting the regime that has waged war on us for 47 years was right and four decades overdue. What voters watched afterward was the goal line surrender, a so called deal championed by the appeaser Vance, who stood at Lake Lucerne praising the framework as the foundation for a final agreement while it waived Iran's oil sanctions and released $12 billion in frozen assets to a regime left standing, with our forces still taking fire in the strait. The failure is not that we fought. The failure is that we paid the enemy and called it peace while they still shoot at us to this day. And buried at answer four is the actual agenda, change our relationship to Israel. This disgusting faction of the Republican party that cannot define socialism while its administration practices it has one firm conviction, pushing away the only free nation in the region, our one reliable ally against the theocracy we are trying to buy off, just as Obama did. At least Obama dropped the pallets of cash for all to see.

This is why Republicans and Democrats keep winning in alternating cycles while freedom loving Americans lose a little more freedom each time. Both parties govern by the same premises, spending, controls, entitlements, state stakes in industry. Neither offers an alternative, so voters punish whoever stands closest to the wreckage while the wreckage keeps growing.

The pollsters then measure the anger and recommend sharper messaging, and Walsh pronounces the measurement honest.

Honesty is the refusal to fake reality. An assessment that evades tariffs, socialism, and a bought off theocracy while blaming the one thing done partly right is not honest. It is a crowd reading performed by men who long ago stopped checking their premises against anything but each other.

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