I didn't appreciate the WWE politics and I think the signal/noise
ratio wasn't very good.

The thing that a lot of people miss about Mr. Trump is that he is a master persuader. He can read a room and he knows the level of intensity he needs to use. This served him well in 2016 when he had to be *really* noisy to cut through the crap and rise to the top. In 2024 he was more restrained, more diplomatic, and again it served him well when all he needed was to not be as ridiculous as the other major candidate's team.

Someone accidentally gave the secret playbook away shortly after 2016 election.
I don't remember where but I only heard it onc: e: they vowed that they could not allow the Trump presidency to be "normalized." They could not allow the vibe to be "the other party is in power right now" but actually "we are in a hyperscale crisisO". The cries of "#resist" were meant to spin people into apoplexy. For the longest time I believed that this was because Mr. Trump was so different from other republicans that they needed extra effort to counter him -- and this might be partially true -- but I recently realized that this was also the first time a significant challenger on the right rose to prominence after the Obama/Alinsky radical style of thug government rose to the national level.

But as I often point out, nothing moves in the same direction forever. The Overton window has moved, and one result of the mainstream media having lost its monopoly on the narratve is that populist politics are back in the legitimate mainstream. We can thank Elon Musk and Seth Rogan for the biggest parts of that, but it's happening in general. And if the left loses the narrative they lose everything, because their policy positions cannot fly without a monopoly on propaganda.

This is why Mr. Trump won back the White House in a landslide in 2024. It's also why the far-left looks so ridiculous, petulant, and childish right now: they're still running the 1st-term-Trump playbook of yelling and screaming and challenging every last thing he says and does. It cost them the election when they opposed all the things people are actually looking for (like an end to inflation, an end to foreign wars, etc. etc). And now they're hemmorhaging support by continuing to shout "nazis" and "racists" and "traitors" at simple American wins like DJ Daniels.

The party really is collapsing, like the GOP did during the Hoover days.

I don't know if you are following romanian politics much, but after Romanian electrions got voided, they have decided to repeat them by excluding the candidate who won.

Yay democracy. European Democracy at that. Vance was right when he said Europe had to re-evaluate its democratic procedures.

Syria. Has anyone else here heard anything about anti-Christian
genocide there?

I read a little bit about it this morning. They've murdered tens of thousands of Christians.

And not a peep about it from the western media. I thought they were anti-genocide.

I don't know if you are following romanian politics much, but after
Romanian electrions got voided, they have decided to repeat them by
excluding the candidate who won.

I heard about that too. Preserving democracy by destroying democracy. My understanding is that they had a populist candidate who won in an upset victory so they discarded the election results and installed who they wanted instead.
And when he tried to run again they disqualified him.

I heard about that too. Preserving democracy by destroying democracy.

My understanding is that they had a populist candidate who won in an
upset victory so they discarded the election results and installed who

they wanted instead.
And when he tried to run again they disqualified him.

Prety much. It is outrageous to the point opponents of the people who got banned had raised formal complaints.