I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.
Elon Musk and the 80/20 Split
Eight weeks in to Trump 47 and the Left is in complete disarray.
As Insty and some others have pointed out, it seems that on every issue where the country is split 80/20 – like, say, trans-identifying men in women’s sports, or deporting illegal immigrant gang bangers – the Left unerringly picks the 20% side of the equation. That tells me as a group that they have lost their collective external framework of reality and are now acting reflexively. It’s like poking a drunken hobo with a stick, the hobo’s reaction is as predictable as it is mindless. The fact that it’s Trump holding the stick just makes it more amusing.
James Carville’s suggestion that the Democrats should just sit back a bit and let the Trump 47 Offensive run out of momentum is not only smart politics (never get in the way of a train), but it would force everyone on the Left to take a badly needed mental timeout. No such luck.
The fact that they have basically exiled Carville and now look to do the same with Schumer, the man who is the Left’s only elected power base left in DC, is just further validation that they are nuts.
Ouroboro-ed
The ouroboros was an ancient iconographic depicting a snake or a dragon biting on its own tail, and used to symbolize a mad variety of concepts in different cultures: birth, death, the continuity of life, disorder, yin and yang, infinity, circular reasoning, elements of alchemy … basically, a handy and interesting picture of some kind of circular concept. The notion of an organism busily munching down on its own substance also occurred to me on contemplating the likely movie disaster that will be the live-action version (with CGI-generated dwarves, so exactly how live-action is it, really?) of Disney’s Snow White. Which hotly-anticipated disaster is finally lumbering into the port of general release this week, where it is expected to crash into the dock and immolate. Not only may it likely crash and burn itself, but also the future career of Rachael Zegler … who might be able to sing and dance, but otherwise off-screen seems to have all the charm and tempting appeal of a liverwurst sandwich forgotten in the back of the employees’ break room refrigerator for a month or so.
This is Bad
As almost everyone knows, the Navajo Code Talkers were a group of WWII Marines who provided secure communications by the simple expedient of transmitting and receiving orders in their own language. This procedure was much faster than conventional encryption / decryption methods, and the Navajo language was apparently so little-known and so complex that the Japanese were never able to read such messages.
Someone at the Department of Defense (or more likely some set of someones) apparently interpreted President Trump’s executive order on DEI as meaning that it would be improper to refer to the Navajo Code Talkers as…Navajos, and at least 10 articles mentioning the Code Talkers have been removed from DoD websites.
There have been many other questionable deletions made on counter-DEI grounds, such as the deletion of items about Ira Hayes of Iwo Jima fame. The Navajo Code Talkers deletions I find particularly bad because their being Navajo–specifically, being speakers of the Navajo language–was an inherent enabler of the work that they did. To refer to their accomplishments without reference to their language (and hence, their tribal background) would be as silly as banning a post on codemakers and codebreakers of the more conventional sort from disclosing that many of them had mathematical or linguistic backgrounds.
I don’t know if this is malicious compliance, or arrant stupidity, or just robotic bureaucratic behavior, but I think it is really, really bad. It reminds me of the Left’s destruction of statues. It’s harmful to the country and also harmful to the political future of Republicans/MAGA. It’s not at all consistent with an intelligent narrative of American patriotism and identity.
Free Speech, Natural Rights and Mahmoud Khalil
Some thoughts regarding Mahmoud Khalil, the Green Card holder who is currently being held in detention by the Trump administration pending deportation.
First, Laughing Wolf wrote about Khalil being a planned op. I have similar thoughts that this was fishy given the way the various pieces fit together, and will note my suspicions at the end.
Given that the Khalil affair deals with free speech and citizenship, it applies pressure across several points within not only Trump’s coalition but his larger base of support in the country. Trump drew on a lot of defections from Democrats, Tech, and others regarding threats to civil liberties. Now you sense a hesitancy among some of his supporters.
Khalil’s case actually has two dimensions, freedom of speech and the status of citizenship in a society with accordant rights and responsibilities.
The American concept of “freedom of speech” is held to be a sacred right, though mostly in a confused way since it is viewed mostly as a constitutional right and almost exclusively as a process.