Isn't it ironic how the people who complain about immigrants potentially changing America into a third-world culture are themselves actually the ones turning America into a third-world culture?
Blue state institutions have been flagrantly flouting civil rights laws for decades, and when the court recently ruled against Harvard, they immediately started publishing scheming on how they'd get around the ruling; treason?
Democrats openly proposed rigging the court by packing it so that they could pass an agenda that would never survive a real constitutional challenge; treason?
Blue states responded to the Bruen ruling with bills openly defying it; treason?
Finding another way to get your goals done when the court blocks one way is not treason. Court packing, had it even HAPPENED, is not treason. I don't know anything about what Bruen is, but the two examples I responded to are in-line with the democratic process and laws of America.
>they immediately started publishing scheming on how they'd get around the ruling
Not a single court has held any of them in contempt, so whatever is included in the steps you're describing likely isn't even criminal.
>rigging the court by packing
Democrats should expand the court since McConnel unconstitutionally refused to hold hearings for Garland and then immediately went to hold hearings for Barrett.
>bills openly defying it
They would be facially unconstitutional so anybody attempting to enforce them could be sanctioned for doing so. There's also principles of federalism incorporated here but you give no examples so I have nothing to say.
In a world where submitting to the constitution means letting millions of people in illegally year after year and nothing ever being done about it, why should a man concerned for his country worship the document alone without the spirit animating it?
Oh yeah, let’s make America a dictatorship. Better to have Trump as a dictator than allow a immigrants in, right? You consistently post some of the dumbest things I see online.
If you want to call judges “dictators,” you can, but it’s not accurate in the usual sense of the word. In a constitutional democracy, judges are part of an independent judiciary that is designed to check the power of the executive and legislative branches. They interpret the law and have limits set by the constitution and the rule of law itself. This isn’t a Stalinist-style judicial dictatorship, and it’s precisely the opposite of what Trump is trying to do. He wants to remove those limits entirely centralizing power in the presidency and bypassing the checks and balances that are essential to a democracy.
Does anyone check their power ever, or do we have to just here as they betray the country to foreigners? And if so what better word would we call some unquestionable, unelected authority?
I’m not sputtering at all. I just assume you’re smart enough to understand why that argument doesn’t hold up, and I’d rather not insult your intelligence by explaining what’s already obvious.
The people who think that dictators are uniquely horrible forms of government to be avoided at all costs have a funny way of tying themselves in knots about FDR and Lincoln.
Impartially speaking, supporting a dictatorship is a gamble that you will get specific outcomes you like, plus tyranny, or not get the outcomes you like, plus tyranny. Tyranny is part of the deal.
I don't see what your issue with the constitution would be here. To prevent illegal immigration, there are many *legal* remedies available. Congress can pass laws increasing penalties on the employers of illegal immigrants, and budget for the enforcement of those laws. They can make expulsion of illegal immigrants somewhat easier. They could fund the immigration courts to operate much faster. They could budget for more security at the border (probably the least effective intervention available to them, but would still make some difference). There are many other options, all perfectly legal; use your imagination.
Giving the executive the power to ignore laws is one of the worst ways of going about dealing with illegal immigrants. If the next president decides to "let in millions of people illegally" some year, there is no longer any recourse. What if he feels like inviting anyone across the world to settle in the USA? What if he declares them all legal? If the executive is not bound by any law, nothing can stop them from doing this.
And even if the president is nominally "on your side" for this issue, the more power he has personally, the more his whims and fancies and changing moods will take over, and the less he'll listen to or care about your concerns.
>Congress can pass laws increasing penalties on the employers of illegal immigrants, and budget for the enforcement of those laws. They can make expulsion of illegal immigrants somewhat easier. They could fund the immigration courts to operate much faster. They could budget for more security at the border (probably the least effective intervention available to them, but would still make some difference). There are many other options, all perfectly legal; use your imagination.
These are all options, but they are worthless options in the hands of a Congress that would let so many people in the first place without doing anything.
Congress follows popular opinion, roughly, or they get voted out. They especially follow strong popular opinion if the solutions are cheap.
In a vague and approximate way, the US population has spoken: they don't like the current illegal immigration, would like to see it reduced, but aren't willing to pay the costs of making a serious dent in it.
(And it's clearly not really a priority for the current executive either, or they'd be using more effective but lower key methods)
If you want a real change to the situation, convince more people that it's serious. And/or negotiate a compromise with the opposition. People have done these sorts of things, on all sorts of issues, since the founding of the USA. It's not some special kind of magic.
Except they've contemplated it, given the fact that we have... Immigration law, bills, parts of amendments, court precedent, EOs. So it's not just congress that contemplated it. The entire government has. And will continue to do so.
All immigration laws and policies are written under the assumption that limited immigration can not be tolerated, as the cost of doing so would be too high. The tranquil economic years of the first Trump administration and the economic failures of Canada and Britain in the present are dismissed and rejected in this analysis.
I hear debates about these costs all the time. There seems to be roughly three types of cost: direct cost of enforcing the laws (including ICE, border security, immigration courts, etc...), economic costs to industries that make use of immigrant labour, and social cost of enforcing the law (including surveillance apparatus, hassling US citizens who have the wrong appearance, etc...)
The second cost seems to be the one that politicians balk at. They occasionally increase anti-immigration budgets and many certainly seem willing to bear the social cost of enforcement (within reason and with some pushback). But there doesn't seem to be any serious enforcement against farmers, construction industry, middle-class families with nannies, or others who extensively use immigrant labour.
To make this clearer: the principled MAGA-ist has no problems violating the Constitution because he knows that the principles of the Constitution have already been violated by his enemies for a long time.
Matt Walsh does not hold these principles, of course.
You still have to justify why you want a right-wing dictatorship instead of a return to democratic liberalism (like centrists and moderates wish to), if you think the left has already defected from the liberalism game.
You have to justify why right-wing authoritarianism is an improvement over leftism, which no MAGAs have convincingly done to anyone who doesn't already agree with their extremism.
Right wing authoritarianism is good for right wingers. Limp dicked centrism that hypothetically could be good for everyone needs a centrist authority to actually enforce it, rather than an army of pseudo-communist commissars. Given that things are as they are, I will choose to support getting whatever piece of the piece that can guaranteed to be mine rather than supporting the default of the left taking my piece of the pie and then stabbing me afterwards.
Lincoln ignored rulings of the Supreme Court, and he's still regarded as one of the best presidents of all time who embodied American values. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I'd argue that mass illegal immigration really is a national emergency, and therefore it makes it acceptable for the executive to act as such. It might not be as bad of an emergency as the Civil War, but it's an emergency nonetheless. Carl Schmitt's "state of exception" applies, this is how a sovereign acts when the very foundation of their sovereignty (the inviolability of national borders) is threatened.
The problem with that argument is that the closing of the border and deportation of undocumented migrants can absolutely be done within the boundaries of the law. There's no shortage of analysis on how it can be done. For that reason alone, it doesn't justify extralegal authority.
Impatience with legal channels is a flimsy excuse. Saying the previous administration disregarded the law is a flimsy excuse.
And did the prior administration disregard the law? If so, wouldn’t articles of impeachment have been easily brought? The fact that the Republicans never did that meant that it was not a violation of law, just bad policy.
There was one impeachment, although it was meritless imo as there was no dispositive evidence provided by House Republicans, like their attempted Joe Biden impeachment that failed to even recommend impeachment articles.
I don’t think Matthew is arguing that it’s categorically impermissible to ignore court rulings, but you need to have a good reason for it and expelling immigrants doesn’t look like one
Weird how the ‘American way of life’ doesn’t seem to align with what the median American wants at all? Or even American history. And just what liberals find ‘in good taste’
At some point, there is either follow the constitution and lose your country, or don't and keep your country. You don't have a country if you don't have a border. Even in a whorehouse you get to decide who gets in and who not, liberals think their country lesser than even that. Simple as.
We didn't have a country until 1875 when the first federal immigration laws were passed? Also Biden deported people faster than Trump in his second term so far, it's just that conservatives don't live in reality so they have no clue how to e.g. reason with statistics.
> We didn't have a country until 1875 when the first federal immigration laws were passed?
We wouldn't have if the third world wasn't priced out of coming. It was a long, arduous and expensive journey that barred almost all that aren't high human capital from arriving.
I can assure you, in year 1800, if I could snap my fingers and bring modern transportation technology to that year, borders would have gotten closed 98% the very next day.
>Biden deported people faster than Trump in his second term so far
"In April 2025, about 8,400 attempted illegal crossings were detected, which is a 93.5% decrease compared to April 2024"
What you hear from the smarter and more honest maga people is, " there are 10+ million illegal immigrants. How can we get this done if not this way?" If the other side just says no, what you have is a line in the Sand and an escalation towards violence. If you are arguing with your neighbor over a tree that encroaches on his land adults will think of many possible solutions and come to a compromise rather than just saying: No or that's not our norms
If you implemented strict e-verify and prosecuted businesses that were caught employing undocumented workers, that would do it. (it would also tank the economy, but whatever)
You increase funding for immigration judges like what was proposed in the Lankford drafted bill in the Senate that Biden said he would sign into law - until Trump told Republican Congressmen to vote no on it so he could run on immigration as an issue in the 2024 election. Also, there are no smart or honest maga people.
Yeah, as I mentioned above, there are many legal options available. Some of them don't even need congress. Going about things in such a brutal and cack-handed way just stiffens resistance and makes solving the issue harder, not easier.
Republicans control the supreme court, both houses of Congress, and the presidency. Who exactly is saying no? They can vote on whatever bills they want and then go enforce them. They've passed almost nothing
"Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster. But it is not optimal for this Court, far removed from the circumstances on the ground, to determine in the first instance the precise process necessary to satisfy the Constitution in this case. We remand the case to the Fifth Circuit for that purpose."
(Unrelated but more notably, this quote captures the criminality of the Trump administration: "And we are skeptical of the self-defeating notion that the right to the notice necessary to “actually seek habeas relief,” J. G. G., 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3), must itself be vindicated through individual habeas petitions, somehow by plaintiffs who have not received notice.")
District court judges have been ordering that deportees are given ~21 days notice.
I think you're thinking about it way too hard, or rather giving people way too much credit for intellectual consistency. People are tribal. The whole Red Tribe jumped behind Trump, so Walsh did too. I'm sure you can list hundreds of Blue Tribe examples in your own experience, though they seem to have a whole complicated hierarchy of whose interests come first in intersectionality.
Actually having principles you're loyal to is really, really rare.
Once I realized this I just went all in on self-interest. ;)
That is not what based is short for. It means something to the effect of holding a position firmly in the face of controversy and/or that position being pretty admired
Minor point but during the first Trump admin when it seemed like Bernie Sanders had a very strong chance in the upcoming primary, some of his high profile supporters comparable in fame to Walsh (I’m thinking media figures like Kyle Kulinski) promoted the idea that undermining the courts with pressure from the executive might be the way to force through his democratic socialist agenda.
Isn't it ironic how the people who complain about immigrants potentially changing America into a third-world culture are themselves actually the ones turning America into a third-world culture?
i like ya cut g
Thanks that means a lot.
Blue state institutions have been flagrantly flouting civil rights laws for decades, and when the court recently ruled against Harvard, they immediately started publishing scheming on how they'd get around the ruling; treason?
Democrats openly proposed rigging the court by packing it so that they could pass an agenda that would never survive a real constitutional challenge; treason?
Blue states responded to the Bruen ruling with bills openly defying it; treason?
Finding another way to get your goals done when the court blocks one way is not treason. Court packing, had it even HAPPENED, is not treason. I don't know anything about what Bruen is, but the two examples I responded to are in-line with the democratic process and laws of America.
Simply just... Ignoring court orders is not.
It's (D)ifferent when they do it?
None of these are treason.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/part1/chapter115&edition=prelim
>they immediately started publishing scheming on how they'd get around the ruling
Not a single court has held any of them in contempt, so whatever is included in the steps you're describing likely isn't even criminal.
>rigging the court by packing
Democrats should expand the court since McConnel unconstitutionally refused to hold hearings for Garland and then immediately went to hold hearings for Barrett.
>bills openly defying it
They would be facially unconstitutional so anybody attempting to enforce them could be sanctioned for doing so. There's also principles of federalism incorporated here but you give no examples so I have nothing to say.
Where in the constitution does it say a senate majority leader has to play fair with an opposing president?
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C2-3-1/ALDE_00013092/
Try again.
In a world where submitting to the constitution means letting millions of people in illegally year after year and nothing ever being done about it, why should a man concerned for his country worship the document alone without the spirit animating it?
Oh yeah, let’s make America a dictatorship. Better to have Trump as a dictator than allow a immigrants in, right? You consistently post some of the dumbest things I see online.
What i see is a dictatorship of judges: ruling and making stuff as they go along, all at the expense of innocent people
If you want to call judges “dictators,” you can, but it’s not accurate in the usual sense of the word. In a constitutional democracy, judges are part of an independent judiciary that is designed to check the power of the executive and legislative branches. They interpret the law and have limits set by the constitution and the rule of law itself. This isn’t a Stalinist-style judicial dictatorship, and it’s precisely the opposite of what Trump is trying to do. He wants to remove those limits entirely centralizing power in the presidency and bypassing the checks and balances that are essential to a democracy.
Does anyone check their power ever, or do we have to just here as they betray the country to foreigners? And if so what better word would we call some unquestionable, unelected authority?
I think that could be a reasonable decision to make. Are you going to point and sputter at it?
I’m not sputtering at all. I just assume you’re smart enough to understand why that argument doesn’t hold up, and I’d rather not insult your intelligence by explaining what’s already obvious.
The people who think that dictators are uniquely horrible forms of government to be avoided at all costs have a funny way of tying themselves in knots about FDR and Lincoln.
Impartially speaking, supporting a dictatorship is a gamble that you will get specific outcomes you like, plus tyranny, or not get the outcomes you like, plus tyranny. Tyranny is part of the deal.
Seems like a bad deal.
Define 'tyranny'.
No, we are just going to point and laugh at you.
I don't see what your issue with the constitution would be here. To prevent illegal immigration, there are many *legal* remedies available. Congress can pass laws increasing penalties on the employers of illegal immigrants, and budget for the enforcement of those laws. They can make expulsion of illegal immigrants somewhat easier. They could fund the immigration courts to operate much faster. They could budget for more security at the border (probably the least effective intervention available to them, but would still make some difference). There are many other options, all perfectly legal; use your imagination.
Giving the executive the power to ignore laws is one of the worst ways of going about dealing with illegal immigrants. If the next president decides to "let in millions of people illegally" some year, there is no longer any recourse. What if he feels like inviting anyone across the world to settle in the USA? What if he declares them all legal? If the executive is not bound by any law, nothing can stop them from doing this.
And even if the president is nominally "on your side" for this issue, the more power he has personally, the more his whims and fancies and changing moods will take over, and the less he'll listen to or care about your concerns.
>Congress can pass laws increasing penalties on the employers of illegal immigrants, and budget for the enforcement of those laws. They can make expulsion of illegal immigrants somewhat easier. They could fund the immigration courts to operate much faster. They could budget for more security at the border (probably the least effective intervention available to them, but would still make some difference). There are many other options, all perfectly legal; use your imagination.
These are all options, but they are worthless options in the hands of a Congress that would let so many people in the first place without doing anything.
Congress follows popular opinion, roughly, or they get voted out. They especially follow strong popular opinion if the solutions are cheap.
In a vague and approximate way, the US population has spoken: they don't like the current illegal immigration, would like to see it reduced, but aren't willing to pay the costs of making a serious dent in it.
(And it's clearly not really a priority for the current executive either, or they'd be using more effective but lower key methods)
If you want a real change to the situation, convince more people that it's serious. And/or negotiate a compromise with the opposition. People have done these sorts of things, on all sorts of issues, since the founding of the USA. It's not some special kind of magic.
The cost of not letting the immigrants in, whatever it might be, is never allowed by Congress or the elites to be contemplated.
Except they've contemplated it, given the fact that we have... Immigration law, bills, parts of amendments, court precedent, EOs. So it's not just congress that contemplated it. The entire government has. And will continue to do so.
All immigration laws and policies are written under the assumption that limited immigration can not be tolerated, as the cost of doing so would be too high. The tranquil economic years of the first Trump administration and the economic failures of Canada and Britain in the present are dismissed and rejected in this analysis.
I hear debates about these costs all the time. There seems to be roughly three types of cost: direct cost of enforcing the laws (including ICE, border security, immigration courts, etc...), economic costs to industries that make use of immigrant labour, and social cost of enforcing the law (including surveillance apparatus, hassling US citizens who have the wrong appearance, etc...)
The second cost seems to be the one that politicians balk at. They occasionally increase anti-immigration budgets and many certainly seem willing to bear the social cost of enforcement (within reason and with some pushback). But there doesn't seem to be any serious enforcement against farmers, construction industry, middle-class families with nannies, or others who extensively use immigrant labour.
Politicians balk at the idea of the cost, but no one seems to have bothered measuring what it might actually be.
Your logical fallacy is: special pleading and false dichotomy
And it’s richer than Jeff Bezos to think your Clementine Cult Leader cares for anyone other than his overinflated, economically illiterate ego
To make this clearer: the principled MAGA-ist has no problems violating the Constitution because he knows that the principles of the Constitution have already been violated by his enemies for a long time.
Matt Walsh does not hold these principles, of course.
Your logical fallacy is: Tu Quoque
The concern about hypocrisy is important because if one decides to play fairly by the rules, they will get beaten in the real world.
The left's fallacy is: argumentum ad baculum. But that fallacy works pretty well!
You still have to justify why you want a right-wing dictatorship instead of a return to democratic liberalism (like centrists and moderates wish to), if you think the left has already defected from the liberalism game.
You have to justify why right-wing authoritarianism is an improvement over leftism, which no MAGAs have convincingly done to anyone who doesn't already agree with their extremism.
Right wing authoritarianism is good for right wingers. Limp dicked centrism that hypothetically could be good for everyone needs a centrist authority to actually enforce it, rather than an army of pseudo-communist commissars. Given that things are as they are, I will choose to support getting whatever piece of the piece that can guaranteed to be mine rather than supporting the default of the left taking my piece of the pie and then stabbing me afterwards.
Lincoln ignored rulings of the Supreme Court, and he's still regarded as one of the best presidents of all time who embodied American values. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I suppose you could call that an analogy, if you overlook the gigantic differences in context.
Simply calling something a national emergency as an excuse to suspend the rule of law doesn't make it valid.
The context is the Democrats wanting to keep an indentured class of cheap agricultural workers, regardless of morality or good sense.
I'd argue that mass illegal immigration really is a national emergency, and therefore it makes it acceptable for the executive to act as such. It might not be as bad of an emergency as the Civil War, but it's an emergency nonetheless. Carl Schmitt's "state of exception" applies, this is how a sovereign acts when the very foundation of their sovereignty (the inviolability of national borders) is threatened.
The problem with that argument is that the closing of the border and deportation of undocumented migrants can absolutely be done within the boundaries of the law. There's no shortage of analysis on how it can be done. For that reason alone, it doesn't justify extralegal authority.
Impatience with legal channels is a flimsy excuse. Saying the previous administration disregarded the law is a flimsy excuse.
And did the prior administration disregard the law? If so, wouldn’t articles of impeachment have been easily brought? The fact that the Republicans never did that meant that it was not a violation of law, just bad policy.
There was one impeachment, although it was meritless imo as there was no dispositive evidence provided by House Republicans, like their attempted Joe Biden impeachment that failed to even recommend impeachment articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Alejandro_Mayorkas
I don’t think Matthew is arguing that it’s categorically impermissible to ignore court rulings, but you need to have a good reason for it and expelling immigrants doesn’t look like one
Weird how the ‘American way of life’ doesn’t seem to align with what the median American wants at all? Or even American history. And just what liberals find ‘in good taste’
At some point, there is either follow the constitution and lose your country, or don't and keep your country. You don't have a country if you don't have a border. Even in a whorehouse you get to decide who gets in and who not, liberals think their country lesser than even that. Simple as.
We didn't have a country until 1875 when the first federal immigration laws were passed? Also Biden deported people faster than Trump in his second term so far, it's just that conservatives don't live in reality so they have no clue how to e.g. reason with statistics.
> We didn't have a country until 1875 when the first federal immigration laws were passed?
We wouldn't have if the third world wasn't priced out of coming. It was a long, arduous and expensive journey that barred almost all that aren't high human capital from arriving.
I can assure you, in year 1800, if I could snap my fingers and bring modern transportation technology to that year, borders would have gotten closed 98% the very next day.
>Biden deported people faster than Trump in his second term so far
"In April 2025, about 8,400 attempted illegal crossings were detected, which is a 93.5% decrease compared to April 2024"
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-migrant-encounters-are-there-along-the-us-mexico-border/country/united-states/
Trump doesn't deport them faster because they're not even coming anymore. The very very few that slip in are harder to find because of being sparse.
What you hear from the smarter and more honest maga people is, " there are 10+ million illegal immigrants. How can we get this done if not this way?" If the other side just says no, what you have is a line in the Sand and an escalation towards violence. If you are arguing with your neighbor over a tree that encroaches on his land adults will think of many possible solutions and come to a compromise rather than just saying: No or that's not our norms
If you implemented strict e-verify and prosecuted businesses that were caught employing undocumented workers, that would do it. (it would also tank the economy, but whatever)
Wonder why Trump isn't pursuing that?
You increase funding for immigration judges like what was proposed in the Lankford drafted bill in the Senate that Biden said he would sign into law - until Trump told Republican Congressmen to vote no on it so he could run on immigration as an issue in the 2024 election. Also, there are no smart or honest maga people.
Yeah, as I mentioned above, there are many legal options available. Some of them don't even need congress. Going about things in such a brutal and cack-handed way just stiffens resistance and makes solving the issue harder, not easier.
Republicans control the supreme court, both houses of Congress, and the presidency. Who exactly is saying no? They can vote on whatever bills they want and then go enforce them. They've passed almost nothing
>the Supreme Court’s ruling requiring him to give illegal immigrants 24-hour notice before being evicted.
They didn't specify a time period.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a1007_g2bh.pdf
"Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster. But it is not optimal for this Court, far removed from the circumstances on the ground, to determine in the first instance the precise process necessary to satisfy the Constitution in this case. We remand the case to the Fifth Circuit for that purpose."
(Unrelated but more notably, this quote captures the criminality of the Trump administration: "And we are skeptical of the self-defeating notion that the right to the notice necessary to “actually seek habeas relief,” J. G. G., 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3), must itself be vindicated through individual habeas petitions, somehow by plaintiffs who have not received notice.")
District court judges have been ordering that deportees are given ~21 days notice.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/colorado-judge-extends-ban-on-deportations-in-state-stemming-from-trumps-use-of-alien-enemies-act
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172841828/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172841828.16.0.pdf
I think you're thinking about it way too hard, or rather giving people way too much credit for intellectual consistency. People are tribal. The whole Red Tribe jumped behind Trump, so Walsh did too. I'm sure you can list hundreds of Blue Tribe examples in your own experience, though they seem to have a whole complicated hierarchy of whose interests come first in intersectionality.
Actually having principles you're loyal to is really, really rare.
Once I realized this I just went all in on self-interest. ;)
Being “based” is shorthand for “based in reality.”
Writing a non-satirical piece articulating the problems of “insect suffering” was a good way to identify that you are not, in fact, “based.”
That is not what based is short for. It means something to the effect of holding a position firmly in the face of controversy and/or that position being pretty admired
Bravo for calling a spade a spade.
Minor point but during the first Trump admin when it seemed like Bernie Sanders had a very strong chance in the upcoming primary, some of his high profile supporters comparable in fame to Walsh (I’m thinking media figures like Kyle Kulinski) promoted the idea that undermining the courts with pressure from the executive might be the way to force through his democratic socialist agenda.
Executive Orders would have instead been titled "Addressing Risks From Blue Cross Blue Shield"
I know almost no one will get the reference, but it's too funny not to post. When I read: I'm old enough to remember....
I hear Pinchas in The Talking Coins by Shmuel Kunda saying: I remember his bris! It was a very nice bris! You weren't invited!