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Just gonna piggy-back off this to start a little rant, don't mind me @kaputt. Many of Trump's trade / tariff policies certainly seem impulsive and short-sighted, I just don't have the economic expertise to propose an optimal alternative, and at a certain point you just need to make a leap of faith when electing a president and hope he surrounds himself with intelligent and talented people who can help steer the ship in the right direction. It's clear that what we've been doing for the past 30+ years isn't working; We've hollowed out our industrial capacity, offshored American jobs, and undercut domestic labor from both ends with H1B and illegal labor. We're also leaking tons of money in the form of foreign remittances. As for principled conservatism and "center-right leadership", what have they even accomplished in the 21st century? They sat idly by and conserved absolutely nothing while our country and culture was ravaged by radical progressivism. I was just listening to the oral arguments for the Supreme Court case involving LGBT books in classrooms this morning and couldn't help but think about how far down this slope we've slipped. First it was "Leave us gay folks alone and let us do what we please in the privacy of our bedroom," which seemed fair enough. Then it was "Bake the cake for us, you Christian bigot!" After that it became "Let my son compete against your daughter in the swim meet / wrestling tournament / etc. you transphobe!" And now we're at the point where the Supreme Court is going to decide if parents have the right to opt out of school lessons on drag queens. It seems like the LGBT people can't leave everyone else alone. I'm simply a man of the Right, and the right-leaning politicians we've elected in the recent past haven't done enough to reject the fundamentally erroneous premises that the Left has foisted upon us during their cultural ascendancy and tenure in power. I reject the premise that my country is an economic zone for the world's tired masses to benefit from. I reject the premise that every man, woman, and child on this planet is an American waiting to be "documented". People aren't owed access to my home just because it's better than the shithole they came from. The Overton Window has shifted rightwards more in the past 6 months than in the 25 years preceding that, and it wasn't because of principled conservatives like Romney, Ryan, or the Bushes.

Anything less than life in prison is bullshit. I’d prefer immediate death - maybe general pop can help with that.

Anyone here think Trump is learning about the true nature of his buddy Putin?

Progressives like yourself have never been pro-Constitution, unless it supports their agenda. Conservatives have also never been pro-Constitution either. I’m not surprised you don’t understand

Wait, the Government just now started reporting Alternative Facts? Sounds like fake news...

Kilmar Abrego Garcia admitted he came here illegally...what more do you need?

GMAFB, you are presenting the false dilemma: treat an unprecedented mass of illegal murderous gang members with the same deliberate protections of law provided citizens or we cannot maintain the constitution. I reject your premise. Is there any doubt how our founding fathers would've handled this situation? They were actively driving out the natives & preventing additional British colonists from staying; it was obvious to those who wrote the constitution how/when "due process" applies and who is eligible. Yet now we're arguing to obey the constitution we have to do the opposite of what the authors intended? Go with your opinion on the mandatory Covid vaccine, forced closure of churches & arrests of people engaging in the free exercise of religion during that time, assault weapons bans, sham trials for J6, FISA court abuses....

Narrator: “In this forum, you can watch active and retired military officers who have sworn an oath to the constitution and American institutions pontificate that the 5th/14th amendments and decades of legal precedent around them are okay to be ignored if it’s in the interest of their political goals. Fascinating!” “Even one whose presence in this country is unlawful, involuntary, or transitory is entitled to that constitutional protection.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/426/67 “It is true that aliens who have once passed through our gates, even illegally, may be expelled only after proceedings conforming to traditional standards of fairness encompassed in due process of law.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/345/206 It’s not about supporting or not supporting MS-13 gang members - you guys are presenting an entirely false dilemma. It’s about supporting the constitutional right to due process. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Ukrainians were taught of or remember the holomidor when the USSR killed up to 7 million in the 1930s. They also know what the Russians have done in places like Buca. That’s why I shake my head at people in this country who think we can negotiate a peace settlement. We can stop supplying weapons, and they will continue to fight with sticks and rocks if that’s all they have. If you know the Russians plan to kill yiu, there is no benefit to surrender. Might as well die fighting. I don’t know if Taiwan feels that way, but they can see what happened in Hong Kong.

Can I post a funny here

I keep hearing this line - "the world took advantage of us" "we are getting hosed by the whole world in trade" Who, exactly is hosing us? Is it South Korea who imports our goods at near as makes no difference 0% effective tariff rate? Is it Australia with whom we have a significant trade surplus? I was reliably informed that if you have a trade deficit with someone that must mean they're hosing you. So are we hosing Australia? Must be somehow.. And if so why are we slapping additional tariffs on them? Dude just take a step back and call a spade a spade here. None of this makes any f-ing sense. It's a nice graph though. The rich indeed are getting richer at a faster rate than the people with less money. That's exactly how compound interest works. Even for regular folks, it takes approximately the same amount of time to accumulate your first $100k as it does to go from $100k to $1M. Isn't it crazy how math works?! That's also exactly what I would expect growth curves to look like when comparing the 0.1% to the rest of the population. Turns out if youre in the 0.1% you're probably pretty freaking good at allocating money and making more of it. To pin wealth inequality in the US on "globalization" and the "myth of free trade" is definitely a new one. But ultimately the real issue here is your implication that trump's deranged and incoherent tariff plan is going to somehow rectify this wealth problem. What evidence do you have for that? Because so far all I've seen are normie financial dummies panic selling, while the savvy billionaires short the market and use their connections and insider info to capitalize on the insane volatility. The tariffs are also effectively a wildly regressive tax. When you jack up the price of normal goods across the board it's going to hurt regular people far far more, because us normal folks need the same amount of food and toilet paper as billionaires do.

This was literally the goal of the CHIPS act with respect to semiconductor manufacturing. We realized we needed to be less reliant on Taiwan-manufactured chips for advanced military hardware so we wanted to bring some of that capacity back to the US. Problem is the act was passed almost 3 years ago and the chip plants are still under construction. Turns out.. building a megafactory for the world's most advanced microchips takes a while and is a big gamble by companies sinking billions into manufacturing infrastructure, so they need some market stability and predictability from the administration. They had that from 2022-2025. But if trump's argument is he wants to bring back manufacturing across a variety of sectors, you should be able to see that we can't have the leader of the free world inventing new reasons for tariffs off the cuff and flip-flopping on international trade policy on an hourly basis and expect any company to take any level of risk building up their infrastructure. It's simply unrealistic. FWIW I don't actually disagree with some protectionist trade policies surrounding crucial defense capabilities. But I don't think clawing back T-shirt manufacturing from Vietnam or tariffing Madagascar for bananas fits that description. Oh and by the way Trump openly shat on the chips act less than a month ago so take that for what you will. source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/technology/trump-chips-act.html

I’ve seen less pretzel logic from flat earthers, yet you’re bringing it with religious zealotry over an objectively terrible tool inappropriate for the times. Of course the tariffs will be blamed: because they’re the root cause. Asshat Trump is obsessed with them because he saw someone else get one for their industry in the 80s. Now he wants his own, only bigger and dumber, being implemented by absolute amateurs who asked a LLM to implement a massively simplistic scheme based solely on goods trade differential, and based on internet domains regardless of having an actual trade economy. Ignoring the fact that we “export” a massive services and information technology industry to all of those places that operate at far higher margins than manufacturing marbles in Sri Lanka. And ignoring that 45% of our imports are raw materials. And ignoring that tariffs are a massive self-own tax increase on the people. And ignoring that we don’t really have a massive unemployment problem requiring all this manufacturing to move back. And ignoring that manufacturing won’t move back before companies run the clock out for a different admin. And ignoring how wildly unsuccessful they have been in the past when implemented broadly. It’s just tanking the market. Penalizing people with higher costs (inflation), and driving people in the middle to trend their support to other political factions none of us want in charge. But keep blindly supporting your new religion.

Conservatives are now pro-Constitution, unless their dear leader calls for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” lol

The boat comic is exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the U.S. leftist have been setting fire and killing anything that challenges their idiotic anti-human flourishing worldview. Nice try though.