Top Trump officials said their strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites were limited, but they don’t have much control over the knock-on effects in the Middle East and their party.
Donald Trump’s top national security officials spent much of Sunday insisting his administration doesn’t want to bring about the end of Iran’s government, only its nuclear program. Then Trump left the door open for exactly that.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
While Trump did not call for the ouster of the regime, or say that the U.S. would play any role in overthrowing the Iranian government, his words undercut what had appeared to be a coordinated message from his top advisers. JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth each insisted Sunday that the U.S. was only interested in dismantling Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
When the tariffs first started up a few months ago, I heard multiple conservatives who had never met each claim that ‘yeah these tariffs hurt, but it’s about respect, and the world needs to learn to respect us again.’ So no, I do not think they are more informed than me, just that they learn talking points through rote memorization and repetition (the only thing taught by our US education system these days).
Does it get oversimplified, sure. But most of that is because I don’t feel like writing an entire essay explaining the nuance of how these people think that they are actually saving our economy by removing all of these ‘freeloaders and jobstealers’ while in reality they are being fucking racists.
Those top comments linking to posts are the talking points being disseminated. That’s the response you’ll get whenever you try to push against their narrative. If you look into most of them, they are just grievance politics and often rely on partial information to force the wrong conclusion. If you ever manage to get past these talking points with real people, that’s when the conversation ends.
These people cannot be changed. I am tired of engaging with them or about them as n the premise that ‘we just need to figure out where they are coming from.’ They may not realize they are bigots, but that sure as fuck is what motivates them.
That’s a good point. None of them seemed to understand tariffs, but honestly, neither did I. I’m still just a casual observer. What I want to know is where’s the data? We’re months into tariffs, and I’ve yet to see any real analysis, just feel-good stories about Canadians boycotting the U.S. or U.S. towns begging for forgiveness. But what are the actual numbers?
This lack of follow-up, of concrete outcomes, leaves me pessimistic. So many leftist apparently, are any of them in economics? Are they not posting online? If they are, are we not sharing that?
We should be acting like relays in an information network. That’s what the right did so well in 2016. I watched them build networks like a slime mold. Fake accounts collecting random users and then connecting those into bigger ones like Charlie Kirk, Bannon, or Bongino.
On the left we did the opposite. Voices who weren’t even that political, scientists, educators, got torn down by our own side. I saw it: people mocking Neil deGrasse Tyson, attacking Bill Nye, even Bill Gates. Anyone targeted by Libs of TikTok should’ve had a wall of support drowning that crap out. Instead, we told each other “don’t wrestle with pigs.
Just look at our methods to engage. Don’t tell me there’s the biggest turn out for a protest and then turn around and tell me those mother fuckers will show up in the heat under threat of arrest and still cannot be bothered to create or share content to shut Charlie Kirk up. I’m nothing but pissed off at every protester because it shows how willing people are to just show up and go home for what? What did that protest do?
Libsotiktok a single Twitter account targeted educators across the country and harassed teachers for having rainbows in their class. Fuck those protesters for drawing all this energy up into a single moment that does fucking nothing. Fuck every single one of those protestors for showing up and failing to build a single network that can match that libs of tiktok bullshit. It’s like when Democrats made their little signs and held them up. I have the same frustration towards that as I do towards these “protests” lately.
That mindset, that it’s beneath us to engage, is the problem. Disengagement isn’t noble. It’s surrender. We gave up the space. And they took it.