Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke" when they harass people for being it.
No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
Wilhoit’s Law has never been truer.
I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
> chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
In fact, by their actions, they make the government - police and prosecutors - free to abuse people in almost any way with no reprocussions. One of the latest Trump executive orders even tells the DoJ to go after any legal authority prosecuting police.
And by their actions, they are chiefly concerned with using the government to persecute and suppress anyone they disagree with.
> 60s ... traditional
It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The question is who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself. Ordinarily police are deployed to protect citizens from criminals, so it’s bad to attack the police. But the Capitol police are protecting government officials from citizens, so attacking them is less bad. That’s the view.
> 60s ... traditional It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The assertion that the civil rights era signaled a major shift in views about the relationship between individuals and the government is hardly controversial. There’s a book on this idea (probably more than one): https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
Indeed, folks in the progressive left share more or less the same premise. If you talk to a progressive about foundational principles like federalism and limited government, the chief response is that those ideas were championed by our forebearers so that the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. The point of disagreement is about whether the new approach is better than the traditional one.
We live in different bubbles, it seems. I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.
The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority. The majority can always protect itself by changing the law.
Edit:
> https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
I skimmed through this. The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that. And look at this piece of doublespeak:
When I talk about civil rights, the reader should not get the impression that I’m friendly to segregation, or hostile to the civil rights movement as it existed for the whole of the 20th century up until 1964. In fact, I’m very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation for equal citizenship that went on up till then, but there were problems in the Civil Rights Act that were not evident at first.
They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution. They are "very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation", however. :)
That’s the same argument from the other direction. The federal government, as designed, wasn’t powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. Those rules entailed a major expansion of federal power. Indeed, you can see the seams in the civil rights laws. For example, Title VI’s ban on discrimination in public education is implemented through conditions on federal funding. Because the federal government can’t legislate such a ban directly.
> The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority.
That’s exactly the civil rights era retconning of the constitution I’m talking about. The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip.... The statement is about self determination: the right of a people to determine their own form of government. The equality being referred to is the equality between Britain and its monarch and the colonists.
The founders said almost nothing about protecting minorities from the majority, except perhaps in the context of religious freedom. Their concern was exactly the opposite: that a minority cabal in the government would oppress the majority.
But I think leftists would share the same premise! They would phrase it differently, they’d say something like: “the founders were white men who wanted to limit government power so the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to do things like end slavery or take their property.” But that’s the same argument. The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.
> They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution.
That doesn’t logically follow. The analogous mistaken argument would be saying that those who insist on due process for deportations must support illegal immigration, because “they don’t offer any other solution.” Of course that argument is wrong. Those people simply aren’t willing to compromise on due process to address illegal immigration.
Similarly, you can be unwilling to compromise on federalism and limited government, even if it’s to address oppression of minorities. That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.
This is why he distinguishes between the civil rights movement before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was only concerned with preventing government enforced segregation.
Suffice to say, like most ideologues, the beliefs make sense when analyzed in accordance with the logic rules of the holder of the beliefs.
Think of the beliefs being discussed more as doctrinal tenets of a pseudo religious sect, and you get a little closer to the thinking of the adherents.
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
It's just half of a truism: people apply different standards to "their side". As true of the left wing as the right.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.
I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…
Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.
I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
Although I'm more Georgist these days.
To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.
You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.
There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.
During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.
It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.
I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.
The rich, like the poor, are free to live under bridges and starve.
When I was younger I'd do online political tests and invariably come back with left-libertarian. Then the detour into cpunks, ancap, and the "two axis political chart" made me see myself unaligned and see a lot of utility in rightism. But that started to fall apart when it became clear that fundamentalism doesn't address the big picture of emergent layers of complexity. Ironically it was Moldbug's writing that nudged my transition back to seeing myself as latently left-aligned. No matter how much you'd like to, you can't fight thermodynamics!
He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
>> One of Trump’s most audacious promises was that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or even before.
“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,”
He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.
You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.
He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
You seem to have missed, "highly illegal".
But sure "the trains are running on time"
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/donald-trump-jr-m...
True to their word!
I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe
> reflect what voters want.
The changes made thus far present at least a decade of rebuilding to fix, and we're only 100 days in.
We're never out of time but the problem is time? There is absolutely a point of no return.
The problem is the time frame of the fix
If the US ends up a smoking ruin it can still be fixed, it'll just take longer.
You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.
It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.
Essentially if you have the very strong support of 10-15% of the party voters, you’re untouchable.
If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.
If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").
One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.
The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, our current president has been advocating for tariffs for about as long as the Republicans were in favor of the free market.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...
Versus 80%? Those five percentage points are worth a double-digit tariff.
Right?
Punitive legislation? Lawfare? Crony capitalism but for the other companies?
Deflection, whataboutism, sealioning with a side of demanding sources for what is essentially the use of a greater than sign.
And, all used goods bought at secondhand stores are tariff-exempt as well. And so is FB marketplace, Craigslist, and others.
My protest is meager, but effective for us - we just will buy used and use 'Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle' where we can. EnEnough of us doing that will slow and hamper the economy (read: rich peoples' money).
There was a loophole in the past where you could take delivery of a car in a foreign country, drive it for a while, and then go through the process of importing it as if you were moving back to the United States. I don't know if the new tariffs honor that loophole or not.
Or are you just saying that if I buy a car that's already in the US and has already had any import tariffs due at time of import paid, I won't have to pay them again? That's a lot less interesting.
Pretty cool. Lots more info on reddit threads.
https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...
I knew someone who tooled around Europe for a month before dropping it off to be shipped to her without having VAT incurred (though it was a couple decades ago).
I was strongly considering importing a 25-year-old kei truck from Japan before the tariffs were announced.
Even buying one locally that is already registered doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to continue registering it.
If new cars become much more expensive, used cars will become much more expensive. This isn't even a theoretical idea. The exact thing happend in 2020-2021 when you couldn't buy a new car.
This is what many don't understand about tariffs in general: you put tariffs on foreign goods and anything exempt will simply raise their prices to match.
[0] Especially because what it tells our enemies. Iran, take out just this one specific building, and America is done for!
That wasn’t an actual coup because some Capitol Police had the balls to do their job and Vice President Pence is a patriot.
I’m sure the next time around anyone “untrustworthy” in the police force will have been removed, and the national Guard in surrounding states will have routine training in Alaska.
There's no reason to have a full allergic reaction to a mosquito bite.
Ashley Babbitt died because she broken through the last barrier between the mob and congress. Had this mob been armed (and there were plans of being armed that were ultimately scuttled), it could have been a blood bath. There was only a handful of LEO between the mob and congress.
This wasn't a "mosquito bite".
Now, what would have changed if the mob had their way with congress or the supreme court? Who knows. For the SC, it'd have given trump the ability to put in more yes men to rubber stamp his election loss narrative.
For congress, the plan was literally to have congressional collaborators challenge the validity of the election (which still happened) to take power. If many democrat reps lost their life, then yes, congress could have rubberstamped a trump victory. Very few republicans stood up to trump or his plans.
"What could they have done", the answer is kill a bunch of congress people in the opposing party to empower their party.
This was a big deal.
You're saying that it could have been much worse if the mob had gotten into Congress, followed by if the mob had offed Democrats, followed by if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections, followed by if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action and if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything and if the military leadership also had no objections assuming of course that no republicans or Trump himself died at any point through the process.
That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
What am I exaggerating?
> if the mob had gotten into Congress,
Correct, which we have documents, conversations and even zipties which show that was the plan.
> if the mob had offed Democrats
Again, multiple conversations and recordings of mob members specifically saying this was the plan.
> if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections
There are literally court documents which ended up getting Eastman disbarred because, you guessed it, this was literally the plan. We even know who the collaborators were because we have recordings between them and Trump/Rudy about executing the plan.
> if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action
The supreme court is literally right around the corner from congress. But I admit, they weren't a part of any documented plan that I'm aware of. However, as we are seeing with the current Trump term that doesn't really matter now does it. If the executive and congress doesn't care about the SC then they are toothless.
> if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything
It was an attempted coup. Who knows what Cali would do, they'd certainly object. But now you have a crisis where congress has declared trump the winner and the military has to choose whether or not they follow Cali or the Executive which they are bound to. How that would have played out is anyone's guess.
> That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
You are now extrapolating past what I did. What would have happened in the aftermath of the coup isn't something that anyone could know. There's no way to know if it'd be successful. But that's entirely not the point. The point is the coup was attempted and it was damn near the point of having multiple congress people killed.
My point, which you are trying to get away from, is that this was more than a mosquito bite. This very well could have caused a huge amount of turmoil and that turmoil was planned and documented. And, of course, those that planned this turmoil were all pardoned by Trump.
What you are doing is downplaying how serious J6 was. You want to act like just because it wasn't successful, it wasn't serious. Or that just because it might never have been completely successful, it wasn't serious. That is ridiculous.
The claim that J6 was a serious threat, by stringing one improbable event into what could have happened if a dozen additional improbable events also occurred, is the Democratic Party’s favorite conspiracy theory. Both sides have them.
Let's set aside everything else. Do you at least conceed that politicians lives were on the line.
I still retain enough naive optimism to hope that, had it come to that, that distinction would have mattered.
And during a constitutional crisis, the people with their hands already on the levers of power have a huge advantage,
If everything is a constitutional crisis, nothing is.
Something to think about.
They killed people while storming the capitol. If hundreds of protesters getting their hands on all of our ballots, physically threatening our congressmen, is not a constitutional crisis, I don't know what the hell is. Perhaps you should take your own advice. You can only say "you're overreacting" so much before people realize we can't rely on you to evaluate risk.
I'm not sure what it was, but it surely wasn't a coup.
They do, but Congress and the Supreme Court selected by Congress together define who this figure is. There is no sign that the military was prepared to defy either.
The same is true about the sitting president and some of his staunch supporters repeatedly "joking" about, and alluding to a third term[1][2][3][4] - including merch[5].
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-te...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5104133-rep-andy-ogles-pr...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-jokes-ru...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9-ft4BvHTE
[5] https://citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2025/04/29/trump-...
The danger is here. Due process is being denied, inch by inch.
You know, probably not? It's not particularly comforting to know that democracy will probably survive in 2028.
> Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]?
Did Yoon Suk Yeol seriously think that temporarily obstructing a National Assembly vote would make it impossible for them to end his coup? Yes, and so did the National Assembly - they worked hard to get into the legislative chamber, and once they got in they refused to leave until they were sure the coup was defeated. If the January 6 mob had made it onto the floor while it was in session, and "convinced" even a subset of Congress that they need to say Trump won the election, he would not have agreed to leave office on January 20th.
Someone asked what is the car model with the most American parts right now? We will make everyone meet that benchmark or better.
But Ford can probably get the USA content for gas-powered Mustangs up from 80% to 85%. The electric version is made in Mexico, but once Ford's Blue Oval City plant in Tennessee comes up in 2027, that will move to the US.
Of course, who knows where Trump will be by then.
If they were allowed to the US market we know what would happen here.
I can only assume they're all actually largely ok with it.
I would not have imagined that they just never thought about things like that in general and now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened. I have no previously considered reactions or plans for most things and life just smacks me in the face like I've been walking with my eyes closed, but I'm a hapless midwit.
I only mean to imply they are people who know how to get what they want, and are willing to do more or less anything.
There is a new story that Amazon is going to overtly display the tarrif on every price. That is like 1% of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.
Most people in power lack critical thinking skills, having earned their position primarily due to the circumstances of their birth and the people they know.
It is incredibly rare for someone who is competent enough to weild such levers of power to be granted access to them.
The "US is an oligarchy, the corporations are in control" was always a false narrative.
If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.
Good grief. There are times when I read some posts and it is like reading youtube comments under madtv skit 'apple i-rack' asking what it means... how do you not know what it means?
Good grief, this is just an axiomatic belief, then. No evidence will sway you one way or another.
Sometimes a stupid guy gets elected by low-information voters, and enacts stupid policies that crash the economy. There isn't any secret illuminati meeting where they can tell him to stop.
They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.
But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.
This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/part-583-american-automobile-labeling-...
There's a mall that closed and, for a while, there were hundreds parked in that lot waiting to be sold (and they were).
If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly
I'm sure the targeted aspect of that one is applauded by the same side that is unhappy about this tariff.
At least in the tariff case, it's an objective numerical target and probably even achievable by other manufacturers. Ford is only 5% away from the target for some of its models.
I am not even sure how impactful it is, that Washington state does something different. Like ... Are things built or sold there by a large amount? What makes Washington state special? And what are their intentions? And can their lower level rules actually override what is decided at the country level by Trump's gang?
It is bad enough, that people have to deal with hearing about all the crazy stuff the orange clown or his henchmen do on a daily basis. There is a limit to how much people want to deal even more with political stuff from the US, you know?
Did his competitors do something similar in Washington?
To be making this claim, you must be an vehicle supply chain expert, so can you tell the rest of us which parts can be domestically sourced in the US and which can't?
Also, why is the Model S is stuck at 80%?
Ford will quickly get to 85%, but you can’t deny this is yet again a move that is touted as “pro-America” yet somehow mainly benefits Musk (or Trump or someone in their orbit).
If Tesla was writing these rules, surely they'd have chosen the 80% threshold instead.
I doubt they see the Ford Mustang as being in their same target market, and wouldn't be a reason to increase the standard.
The fact that Elon Musk is personally involved in the decision making and cabinet level discussions and personally benefits immensely- and exclusively- from this special carve out looks like rank corruption on the surface and at face value. Any other administration in history would be investigated until the cows come home if something comparable had ever happened. Even if it somehow eluded the rule makers that they exempted 95% of one companies sales to the exclusion of all other companies and that companies CEO had curried extensive favor with the administration and this was a mistake, the appearance of gross impropriety and conflicts of interest should cause a rapid reset and roll back. I suspect, however, it will not be rolled back, and that they were entirely aware of what they were doing. This is what kleptocracy looks like.
Otherwise I don't see any other rule that would ask the foreign company to move most of it's workforce and production capacity.
Besides, apple are one of the decision makers in the usb c standard, the legislation mandated a standard, but not a specific one, just the same one for all, and this forum which includes apple decided to go with usb c https://www.usb.org/members
Everyone else can start rearranging their supply chains and building new factories to comply. Easy peasy right? Be up and running in a few weeks, at most, right?
...or to create massive stock market front-running opportunities with plausible deniability.
"But, but, Hanlon's razor!". Sorry, but at this level of responsibility, incompetence equals malice.
We fscking all have to live with the consequences. That includes those of us who could not vote for an alternative.
Not only that, Trump is actively lying about negotiating them down [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-foreign-ministry-says-x...
There are two reasons to believe this is applicable here: 1. Trump has a track record of quid pro quos (Adelson being a salient example). Musk is definitely seeking his pound of flesh 2. Lutnick urged people to buy Tesla (shocking and explicit favoritism) The view that this is just incentivizing local production is naive.
The rules are written with full knowledge of the current market situation and the understanding that companies can't re-engineer their supply chains overnight.
The rule-writers had full knowledge about which companies would and would not immediately benefit from this rule. They wrote it accordingly.
This doesn't compare to the EU rulemaking discussion for that reason. If the EU rules were written so that only a single company was hit by the rule, people would be saying the same thing.
Remember when Oklahoma‘s requirements for a new school bible coincidently where only met by the Trump bible?
You can't argue in good faith about "well, that's the rule" when the rule was very obviously constructed that way to achieve this specific purpose.
Not that your point is entirely invalid, just that I think the context is probably different (though I'm not sure exactly what EU comments you're referring to).
This administration's policy decisions aren't particularly stable.
* Bogus emergency is up for review
* Congress discussing stripping power
* Constitutionality in question
* Public going to to bury them in the midterms if this keeps up
Yes, you can. Such a law cannot direct punishment or assign guilt to a particular individual or entity without a judicial trial, or it would violate the Bill of Attainder clause, but laws doing other things that apply to a specific named individual or entity are (unless they violate some other provision) Constitutional; in fact, in some cases they are necessary to satisfy other Constitutional rules.
Would be nice to see a technical definition for how the % imported is worked out.
85% of parts != 85% of cost
The rules for calculating what percentage of a vehicle is domestic or foreign made are obscure. It's not clear what rules they're going to be using for this tariff exemption yet.
It could be possible that the 15% foreign content of a car could make up 30% of the cost of goods sold, for example. If the parts come from China they could have a 125% or higher tariff applied, pushing the share of BOM cost even higher.
The idea is that automakers will get special exemptions from the tariffs for what they do import.
Handing out tariff exemptions was one of the red flags people were raising during this process. It becomes a lever the administration can pull to grant favor to specific companies. Everyone else suffers.
"Final" regulation: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...
Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.
Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)
Yeah, how dare they do the things that make reactionaries be... reactionary.
And it was inevitable that the more mainstream automakers would sell more evs then Tesla as EVs became a larger and larger share of cars sold. Granted it's taking longer than expected but Tesla is no longer the majority even if it's overall has a large plurality but falling pretty fast
Further he really isn't a conservative. He's still running around on X talking about how we need to double the number of H1-B's and other social-left causes. Cutting spending through DOGE is something every Republican has talked about for decades, and I don't think it's a major flip for him to want to do that.
That is the story the auto companies like to tell, to make unions look damaging to workers and communities. From what I've read, the migration had a lot to do with race. But regardless, do either of us have any evidence to share? (not me right now)
Similar things happened in most major industries. The other one I'm familiar with is GE Locomotive, who moved their engine facility to Grove City (which still never unionized), and now has a major facility in Fort Worth as well.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...
Tesla is now above that price from March again. Orangehorseshoe loves Tesla!
https://www.americanautomakers.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/...
Otoh, I listened to conservative ratio the other day and the general tone was "good, he is making them mad and he doesn't care."
If that's the way policy decisions are going to be made every time conservatives come to power in the US, then it's best that the rest of the world not go down with the US when the time comes.
Major effect of Trump's trade war is yet to be felt. I think Americans' perception of Trump will get much worse soon, and Tesla's brand image will follow suit. A tariff exemption is cute but I don't think that's enough to save Tesla.
Uhm, wait a moment.
Yeah we allowed a deranged billionaire to transform auto industry, even if it cost us democracy and threats of fascism and authoritarianism for the foreseeable future.
Completely delusional.
To me it is like claiming without iphones we wouldn't have gotten smartphones or touchscreens until a decade later. Except PDAs and touch screens already existed, apple just got a few years jump start on a big brand model before many other companies did the math on how cheap mobile computing and touch screens were becoming.
As someone who works in the industry, "where" something comes from is an inherently fuzzy concept. Different parts of the government use radically different definitions. For example, under NAFTA "domestic" parts are usually things manufactured anywhere in North America. This was done to onshore automotive manufacturing that wasn't realistically going to come back to the US, but political leaders didn't want to stay in Asia. One result of these tariffs may actually be that more auto manufacturing moves to Asia as the advantage of North American manufacturing is lost.
[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/MY2025-A...
Most manufacturers will eat the cost and raise prices to a certain extent. Base models of any product tend to be manufactured in such as way that they have much looser margins.
And that was under the Biden admin, which was much less pushy. The Trump admin is much more vindictive, especially with a policy that appears to be backed personally by DJT.
Here are some interesting legal articles discussing this very thing in the Trump admin
https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2025/02/us-administration-t...
https://natlawreview.com/article/what-every-multinational-co...
Won't be surprised if Stamos quietly "resigns" in a couple months as well.
I was involved in similar efforts to remove Chinese parts from the supply chain during the previous Trump administration. It was a nightmare that involved dozens of people reviewing tens of thousands of parts across hundreds of components with multiple revisions. I was involved for two years and that wasn't even the entire thing. Most changes required multiple layers of analysis/engineering review, change proposals (which often had to pass change review boards), vendor negotiations, manufacturer negotiations, reams of documentation about changes to refit procedures for previously produced HW, testing, validation, etc.
Removing Mexico and Canada from supply chains would be even worse. Probably nigh-impossible for some OEMs.
Impossible meaning the parts aren't yet manufactured in the US, or that they can't be for some reason?
I had seen stats putting China's control of certain rare earth minerals as high as 80% and products like lithium batteries as high as 97%. I don't know the industry well enough to validate that, but I couldn't find anything refuting or disproving those numbers either. If true, we very well may not be able to make them here if China were to cut off those resources long term.
Other manufacturers can do all sorts of things to try to be compliant, but ultimately the only way to be in compliance is to bend the knee.
They’re welcome to sue, but that could take years and millions to figure out.
Are you arguing that the fuzziness was built into the system previously to allow presidents to pick winners and losers in the auto industry? Do you know if there are clear examples of past presidents actually using that power?
What has changed here is that loyalty to the head of state is the primary determinant for all of the gray areas — and that guy can be as arbitrary and capricious as he wants. Context always matters; context is the difference between prerogative and corruption.
Person above is pointing out that even Tesla isn’t 85% USA
The real question is whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. As always, people who like the policy/candidate/official will overlook the corruption, while people who dislike the policy/candidate/official complain about it. The people who demanded evidence about Biden will accept speculation about Trump, just as the people who speculated about Biden will demand evidence about Trump.
With that in mind, I'm curious, what's everyone's stance on American manufacturing? Do you agree with Steve Jobs that "Those jobs aren't coming back"?
Murder is an interesting example, because like corruption, people overlook it when "their side" does it. Governments employ soldiers to do it on demand. Gang members and mafiosos use it as a tool. Sometimes people even celebrate it, such as equating body count with success in war.
The problem in politics is that everyone seems to choose a side, then apply that same kind of double standard. Rules for thee and not for me, as it were.
Edit: but of course, "war is the continuation of politics by other means." So it makes sense that the behavior would be similar.
> Warfare is entirely different.
Not so much. A lot of people are already talking about civil war. If political differences escalate to that point, how many will mourn the loss of lives from "the other side"?
No they don't. If someone I know committed murder, like almost everyone - organized crime members are very few in the population - I would absolutely not overlook it. What an absurd argument.
Warfare is entirely different.
This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.
Regardless, that wouldn’t make it okay. It’s weird to claim that it’s normal.
> The real question is…
No, that’s a separate question. Not the “real” question. The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary because it’s so economically damaging that Trump’s successor (of any party) will remove it, if Congress doesn’t get there first.
This isn’t bringing manufacturing back to America, it’s making America a toxic and unpredictable place to do business.
Rules that favor a politically connected company over others is absolutely business as usual. It's the foundation of the multi-billion dollar lobbying industry.
This is why you might think that isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption, because I assure you most on "the other side" would rather disagree with you. Consider that a President gave banks who were failing, exclusively due to their own greed and reckless investing, hundreds of billions of dollars in an unprecedented scale bailout, and would then go on to go give 30 minute "chats" to these companies after leaving office for $400k a pop, making himself tens of millions of dollars out of it.
I'm trying to avoid more contemporary issues precisely because of my first paragraph. But I will say that overt corruption and weaponization of various institutions was perceived, by many, as exceptionally widespread in the previous administration. That's largely why November turned out the way it did, and similarly why many were so surprised by it. People increasingly live in two different realities and the hyper-polarization of media is heavily contributing to this.
Yes, 'well connected' counted in the past. Now it's "buy my crypto thing directly" or "talk with me about exceptions to the tariffs".
If there was a faint whiff of something untoward in the past, this is the Augean Stables.
Honestly the biggest issue I have seen with US companies trying to manufacture goods is that they tend to only target US customers. Especially at the low end.
There must be some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.
I keep trying to buy local self pub (as in proper self pub, not just Amazon POD) books from americans and the half that actually permit foreigners to buy their books have actively stopped permitting their promotions to be accessed by foreigners.
I used to try to buy hobby stuff (militaria etc) from americans via eBay and 90+% of them would explicitly tell ROW to get bent in the listing.
And etsy postage from yankistan? Forget about it.
Kickstarter postage from the USA? Often as much as the product.
So the question is whether these tariffs will increase the number of cars manufactured in this country, and whether that increase is an acceptable trade-off for making the cars sold more expensive.
IMO, if gov manipulation benefits citizens; e.g. creates meaningful jobs or opportunities for citizens, then it's not corruption. The difference is night and day. Where was the outrage over massive government contracts handed out to Oracle, Microsoft, etc... under previous administration? What about all corporate tax breaks? These are purely self-serving and the magnitude of the harm done to citizens is far more significant. It's dishonest to turn a blind eye to those and to focus on trivial policies which actually work in the interest of citizens. Here, the benefit to Tesla is just a side effect.
I generally agree with Musk's politics but I wouldn't want all billionaires to share his politics because that would be dangerous. Unfortunately those on the left do not seem to understand this; they keep trying to force total consensus. Which is the biggest evil, total consensus is more evil than any idea you could come up with.
Most ideologies are distractions to get people upset over specific unimportant ideas so that they don't get upset over the massive evil, creeping ideology; the ideology of "total consensus over important ideas."
Full consensus is evil incarnate, no matter the specifics. Its stickiness; inability to adapt to reality is what makes it evil. Without opposition, there is no room for independent thought.
The guy paves the way towards totalitarianism, but please, tell me about we should have people like him because it prevents totalitarianism.
Children are dying in Africa as a direct result of his actions right now.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/14/g-s1-...
But this is part of the reason I am quite happy with USAID being ended. The goal of effective charity should be to make itself obsolete. We can see both that that was entirely possible here, but also in no meaningful way pursued at all. They could have spent those years and millions of dollars funding the infrastructure and other pipelines necessary make sure people were aware of and could easily access these state (or other private charity) clinics. Instead they just acted as a dependency creating drug distributor. In one case having a guy literally just handing out drugs, at his discretion, at a truck stop.
It's by value. And it's not just domestic only but USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada). And the tariffs are seemingly prorated by percent 'domestic' (their example math is nonsensical, but I think that was just a math fail on the writer's part) with numerous relief and rebate options available to help ease in the transition period for various auto manufacturers.
GM, Ford, and other companies have chimed in positively.
[1] - https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/trump-eases-auto-tariffs-l...
Tesla has been one of the best selling car across the world. I don’t think it’s just the parts alone.
- Tesla model 3 - 70-75% US/Canada content
- Tesla model Y - 70% US/Canada content
- Tesla Cybertruck - 65% US/Canada content
- Tesla model S - 65% US/Canada content
Perhaps it is calculated differently since no one hits 85%.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/MY2025-A...
It's similar to giving special status to Apple by not penalizing their China-based manufacturing, then hoping that OTHER not-too-big-to-fail companies will be able to do what Apple couldn't (manufacture at a competitively cheap price onshore) while additionally facing this unfair competition.
It seems it'd be more effective to have incremental (based on % domestic manufacture & labor) rewards/penalties for those making changes rather than carve-outs for those too-big-to-fail and making competition even harder for those you are trying to incentivize.
Also, never mind manufacturing - how about addressing IT offhsoring, which is something far easier for US companies to change if incentivized/penalized appropriately. Is it really domestic clothing sweatshops that we want to encourage, not domestic high-tech industry with well paying jobs, paying high taxes, and helping retain onshore talent in an area of importance to national security?
It doesn’t. Trump is clearly trying to negotiate these tariffs away. So they don’t incentivise moving production. Just taxing everyone but Musk.
Oops! Scratch that, now that China won't back down on their retaliatory tariffs, they were always a tool to make China "fall back in line" or something. Yeah, destroying our own economy ought to teach them a lesson.
This shit is so transparent, I'm amazed as to how 30% of the country can still endorse this clown and his circus. My mental image of the average republican voter is now that of a toddler trying to fit a square into a circle hole while drooling on themselves.
Also a friendly reminder that all these tariffs are being made possible by a "state of emergency" declared by Trump because of fentanyl coming from Canada and China. Otherwise, only Congress would have the power to impose tarriffs.
So shall we just be honest and say we're heading towards a centrally planned economy, China style?
> New York state lawmakers have launched an effort to shut down Tesla’s stores in the state
From: https://electrek.co/2025/04/28/ny-lawmakers-shut-down-teslas...
> WA Legislature considers new tax aimed at Elon Musk’s Tesla
From: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...
"For my friends? Anything! For my enemies? The law [and new taxes]!"
that's an oligarchy.
Can we boot these dickfucks from office yet? Jesus christ
JohnFen•7h ago