Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Michelle Goldberg: "This is What Autocracy Looks Like;" or: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Hysteria.

Goldberg's main points are:
[1] Orange Man: bad.
[2] Illegal aliens: good.

To be more accurate:
Goldberg is basically a progressive in good standing, ergo she thinks that, once someone sets foot in the country, they can stay for life. Deportations are inherently unjustified. Anything Trump does is wrong. So: Trump ordering deportations...super-DUPER eeeeevil.

That having been said, I guess we should focus on the least-hysterical points.

So: 
Is Trump justified in sending in the Guard and the Corps? 

The answer to this question seems to turn on two other questions:
[a] How extensive are the riots?
[b] Under what kinds of conditions have Presidents historically taken such actions?

[a]
I don't know. And I don't even know how one quantifies the extent / severity of riots. 
[b]
I don't know.

The MSM is, unsurprisingly, trying to minimize the riots, as they did with the BLM/Antifa riots of 2020. Conservative commentors clearly think they're pretty bad--bad enough to justify what Trump's doing.

Me, well, it looks utterly insane to me.
If I'm left to my own devices here, I'd say that sending in troops is probably the right thing to do...but I don't seem to be in a very good epistemic position from which to judge.

I will say:
Look, this is more-or-less what the left wants. Multiculturalism, baby! Chaos, open borders, outright refusal to comply with laws that support a social order they see as inherently repressive and wrong. The left is guided by a vision of a dystopian utopia--I think of the Blade Runner world, a kind of turbocharged urbanism, or NYC/LA on steroids, in which impossible skyscrapers and wealth and sophistication exist side-by-side with abject urban decay and multicultural fragmentation of languages and society.
   The left of my youth seemed to be reacting against the staid order of the suburbia of the '50s--real or imagined. Chaos was preferable to such order. Excitement to boredom.

   It is, of course, somewhat strange that the advocates of big, repressive government also crave anarchy. But here we are. Kids learning phonics in Kansas and actually learning to read...authoritarian repression! Burning down LA as a way of demanding and enforcing open borders...just totally cool, comrade...

Oh, hell, I don't know.

The left is now so insane along so many prominent axes that I just can't tell anymore--can't be sure I'm being sufficiently objective.

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