Hegseth actually has a goal beyond just being corrupt, Patel doesn't. Like, Hegseth would be 1000x less damaging if he adopted Patel's approach and was just Secretary of Getting Imagine Dragons Tickets.
In fairness the Ramones were always conservatives. Its basically "guy who supported the Republicans in the 1980s supports the Republicans in the 2020s."
I think "opposing Israel on a pro-Palestinian basis" gets it backwards. He's anti-Jewish, therefore anti-Israel, and is pro-Palestinian because its anti-Israel. He just has the moral luck that this calculation plays out on a backdrop of Israel actually being really horrible to Palestinians.
Prester John coming from the East to save some souls and avenge his son David's overthrow by Genghis Khan (which is something 13th century Christians actually believed).
This mentality also worked a lot better for them back in the day, but now that print media in general is struggling and trust in media is at an all-time low it just comes across like those former royal families who think anyone gives a shit they used to rule Montenegro.
But Anakin betrayed the Jedi and turned to the Dark Side. The Vader connection is necessary to demonstrate that Anakin redeemed himself and fulfilled the Chosen One prophecy by killing the Emperor and destroying the Sith.
Could a man survive falling into a river of lava? No, that's ridiculous. The Skywalker-Organa clan is lying about Vader's identity in order to promote the myth that their father was the Chosen One and not simply a traitor, which in turn justifies the family's dominance of the New Republic and Jedi.
Yes but the longer Mike Johnson can drag this out for the longer he can avoid having to come up with a plan to deal with the problem. He's basically doing the political equivalent of refusing to see a doctor because you can pretend you're fine until they officially diagnose you.
The fact that the culture war was always secondary to Kristol really helps him here. He doesn't need to go "Does the radical left know what a woman is?" in order to feel valid, but Brooks has to scream that because otherwise he loses a core part of his identity.
Its especially notable in Johnson's case because that's his go-to answer. At some point any decent reporter would say "OK, so how can you be Speaker and know literally nothing? Are you stupid or lying?"
With food in particular it fell apart pretty quickly because it stopped even being about making money/displacement and just became about the act of eating it at all. Which is both not actually a problem and also a building block of how culture develops in the first place.
Part of "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" is that if the Court's role as interpreters of the Constitution can be nullified if their interpretations are flagrantly anti-constitutional. You can only use this in extreme circumstances, but we are in extreme circumstances.
Hating Buttigieg made sense in 2020, maybe even 2021, but at this point anything more than moderate dislike can be safely called Mayor Pete Derangement Syndrome.
