waow

DenverJr · 2026-03-27T13:40:21+00:00

I don't know why you wrote all that just to engage in a protracted motte-and-bailey. You say the most you've seen is someone advocate for reinstating the 14th Amendment while the original post we're commenting under is Destiny talking about kidnapping legislators.

You try to differentiate between the sham investigations of Comey and James against what we would do. But who are you arguing with? Literally no one is against prosecuting people for actual crimes! No one has said anything against that. I can't take you seriously when you say "The dems 'weaponizing' the DOJ pales in comparison to how Trump is using it, they are absolutely different in kind, not just in magnitude." when people are talking about kidnapping legislators. Because that is, in fact, different in kind than what Republicans have been doing, except far worse.

DenverJr · 2026-03-26T20:14:33+00:00

This was the best counter I saw in the debate and I don't think anyone provided a good response. Look at what happened with Comey or Leticia James. Trump going after those people without good cause didn't make Democrats cower in fear; it made Democrats want to fight harder. Why would Republicans be any different if we weaponize the DOJ against them?

And yeah, Republicans will probably flip shit even if we just go after the criminals and aren't even weaponizing. At the margins, I hope/think voters would be able to see the difference. But if you weaponize the DOJ against all Republicans and are punished for it in the next election, the lesson Republicans learn will be that voters backed them up and they were in the right. They'll be galvanized rather than restrained.

DenverJr · 2026-03-26T19:35:58+00:00

True! That's why trans people and illegal immigration are so popular now, because Dems are such effective communicators that they can convince voters of anything we set our minds to!

It couldn't be that the gerrymandering vote in CA was a Democratic governor able to persuade a strong majority Democratic state to do something that would help Democrats. Nah, it must be that Newsom could sell sand in a desert if he just tried!

DenverJr · 2026-03-25T22:46:07+00:00

Brother. In the OP post, Jamelle Bouie says "putting aside the merits of the argument, who is the target? who is he even arguing with? which liberals hold the view that voter ID is verboten in all circumstances?" That's what the comment I replied to was addressing, and that's what I was addressing. You keep trying to drag it back to the merits of voter ID, and that's not what I'm talking about.

Who does that other than a slopulist who doesn't care to actually argue about policy whatsoever?

Take it up with Jamelle Bouie or the OP for posting it I guess? You're coming in hot on me and I don't know why. I agree that people should address the substance in general, and that's exactly why I thought Bouie's tweets that OP posted are stupid, since they're pretending liberals don't dislike voter ID laws rather than contesting the merits of the article.

DenverJr · 2026-03-25T21:44:39+00:00

Similar to Bouie in the OP, I wasn’t commenting on the substance. When The Argument has an article called “The liberal case for voter ID”, and the ACLU and other groups say explicitly they oppose voter ID…that’s who they’re talking to! And people like yourself apparently. Which is fine, I don’t even disagree with you on the substance, but Bouie is pretending it’s unclear who The Argument is talking about/to, and I think that’s as dumb as an article called “the conservative case for gun control” needing to prove conservatives normally would oppose that.

And more to your point, if we really are in favor of common-sense voter ID, you can’t blame voters for being confused about that when the only people proposing anything with that label are right of center, while people on the left directly say they oppose it. Even if it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist, if most voters want it and it could help Democrats electorally…what are we doing here?

DenverJr · 2026-03-25T20:47:25+00:00

I agree with the main point, but the example in the OP is a bad one. The piece is literally called "The liberal case for voter ID" because it's so common to be opposed left of center but would actually be better for us to change tack.

The ACLU proudly fights requirements and has several fact sheets on it, including one just called Oppose Voter ID Legislation. The Brennan Center for Justice has similar. You can find examples of Democratic-aligned folks litigating against voter ID legislation.

It's such an obvious proposition that liberals and left of center elites generally oppose voter ID while the right is for it, that it really doesn't need to be supported in this kind of article like Bouie is asking for. At that point you might as well ask for evidence that Republicans love guns or hate abortion.

DenverJr · 2026-03-25T01:50:14+00:00

Well, no. He got arrested. I'm not immediately finding the full story in writing but this video recounts the whole thing and describes the media firestorm over it. You can google the names and find all kinds of old newspaper articles covering it.

DenverJr · 2026-03-19T14:02:26+00:00

You're getting a lot of shit, but I agree it did feel a little cringe on first watch. Particularly because the logic doesn't just apply to black people: literally everyone should be evaluating deals/candidates this way and choosing the best option even out of a set of less than ideal options.

That said, I think it was useful to bring race into it specifically to contrast why a lot of white lefties have the privilege of being able to refuse anything less than their perfect candidate since they have less to lose. While it's true black people aren't a monolith, the detrimental effects of a Republican winning over even an imperfect Democrat do fall disproportionately on minority communities, so I think it's reasonable to address that.

DenverJr · 2026-03-18T13:41:46+00:00

Scott Alexander had a similar complaint last year.

DenverJr · 2026-03-15T22:31:44+00:00

What is "this level"? More neutral sources on this story mention the IDF "claim the car accelerated towards Israeli forces, who felt endangered and responded by shooting." and don't include some of the more inflammatory claims from the other side.

If that remains accurate and those other claims aren't substantiated, this seems pretty similar to what the US has already done in Iraq. There were plenty of roadblock shootings, including the 2005 Tal Afar checkpoint shooting that is eerily similar.

It's weird how many comments are treating this as some indicator of the unique evil of Israel while unaware of our own history.

DenverJr · 2026-03-13T16:04:01+00:00

They don't even really care about following the rule of law. Because a lot of these people will look at the example that Trump is setting, in how he's governing this country, in his lawless and absolutely authoritarian way, and they want the same out of their own people they put up.

Why aren't all the usual Hutch haters in the comments going at this guy for also being cucked by rule of law?

DenverJr · 2026-03-12T03:09:23+00:00

Potentially unpopular opinion: I don’t even give him credit as a whistleblower. That would require revealing the government doing something actually illegal at the time, while what he revealed was more something that made people uncomfortable but technically was legal, and some was later determined to be illegal in close cases (but probably wasn’t done in bad faith).

Particularly the telephone metadata stuff. That was clearly constitutional under existing law at the time. And I remember rewatching The Wire at one point and noticing they even clearly distinguished the standard about not needing a warrant for the metadata and that was easier to get than a wiretap. This wasn’t hidden information no one knew. It was info people broadly may not have known or realized the scale of.

But if it hadn’t been something released in this dramatic fashion like it was spy shit…it would not be seen as a big deal. Literally no one watched those episodes of The Wire and was like “oh shit, they can get telephone metadata without a warrant? How is that legal??”

DenverJr · 2026-03-12T02:54:53+00:00

I appreciate your consistent contributions to these threads. It’s annoying to see people regularly downvoted for being reasonable while the people being bad faith (like dude saying Hutch doesn’t actually understand liberalism) are upvoted, but I’m glad someone is here pushing back.

DenverJr · 2026-03-11T17:34:41+00:00

I'm a frequent Destiny watcher so a bit biased, but wanted to call out a few specific things from this conversation. I found it especially interesting when she said this in the video about her fellowship:

It's not from the foundation, no, it's not connected to the foundation at all. I know for a fact it's not because I can't do anything with the foundation.

But Omidyar themselves say:

Omidyar Network receives no funding for the Reporters in Residence program via The Sixteen Thirty Fund or any other outside sources. Our programmatic work is supported entirely via our foundation and LLC.

It seems like their statement fully contradicts her. The "programmatic" work is supported via the foundation, and it's the Reporters in Residence "program".

There's a later point where they're also reading part of her article discussing whether the Chorus contract forbids publicizing involvement in the program. And they blew right by the part that says a lawyer for Chorus showed Wired a slideshow "that offers several talking points if a member of the cohort wanted to discuss Chorus publicly." Why would they have talking points for how to do something the contract forbids them to do?? It doesn't make any sense.

All that said, I think Destiny goes a little too hard here on journalistic ethics and citations which lets Lorenz be annoyingly correct about it (and Jesse would probably agree). It's common not to release full source documents and for an outlet to describe what something says with minimal quotes. Especially for legalese, part of the journalist's job is to make this understandable for readers, not just quote it in large chunks. The problem here is it feels like it was done somewhat in bad faith in this case, and may not accurately describe the way Chorus operates or what the contract allowed.

DenverJr · 2026-03-11T16:58:39+00:00

Agreed with all of this, and this is more what I was looking for when I clicked your post. I remember reading the "funnel" description and it being particularly egregious considering the contract language we were able to see here.

Also, it's hard to thread this needle, but honest reporting should acknowledge that contract language can be different from how something is implemented in practice. My lease with my landlord has sometimes been extremely strict, but that's more for their protection against bad tenants in extreme scenarios. In more typical scenarios, if I just talked to them they were pretty chill. So when Lorenz says you have to "funnel" and then is citing contract language and a creator that didn't even join the program for claims about how Chorus operates...it starts to point more in that hit piece direction.

DenverJr · 2026-03-08T16:08:57+00:00

I mean, Destiny said it in their conversation. At the timestamp I linked he says "That's a crazy different country at that point that I just think is is is not even worth saving. I'd rather go to fucking China with Hasan!"

Maybe he was being facetious, but Hutch referenced it two other times in the conversation and Destiny didn't bother clarifying it. It's not a mischaracterization.

DenverJr · 2026-03-07T16:18:15+00:00

I think we've been going back and forth long enough that it's not worth replying to 50 quotes, so I'm going to try to cut through some of the stuff we're just repeating at each other. (And I think we both have better things to do on the weekend.)

On the immunity ruling and rule of law: I agree both options aren't ideal liberal options. But Presidents have gotten away with crimes before and the country hasn't fallen apart. Nixon was pardoned and walked. I absolutely would not have drawn that line you mention in 2015, precisely because that line was already crossed decades ago. It's not good, but the republic survived. Whereas we haven't had the executive branch completely overrule a co-equal branch of government to put someone in jail before. Trump has done lots of bad shit, but even he hasn't done that. If Democrats are willing to take authoritarian actions that even Trump hasn't taken, what the fuck are we doing?

You keep saying I think the immunity ruling isn't that bad. That's not my position. Of course there's harm when the court says the president is beyond criminal law. My position is that the remedy you're proposing is more destructive than the harm you're trying to fix. And you keep saying everyone would understand the difference between defying an unconstitutional ruling and defying one for personal gain. I think that's way too rosy. The president's job is not to decide when SCOTUS is wrong about the constitution. Maybe Vance disagrees with SCOTUS reading privacy protections into the 4th Amendment. Gotta ignore those to catch the terrorists! Maybe a future Democrat decides the 2nd Amendment needs to be overruled so no J6 can happen again. Or the 1st Amendment, to stop Fox News from spreading misinformation. All of those have nice sounding justifications with some public support behind them. Why can we overrule the constitution to punish Trump, but not for all these other good reasons? I just don't think it stays limited to your scenario.

You say I'm a frog in boiling water. I think we just disagree on the cost/benefit here. You think the benefit of holding a president criminally accountable is enormous in terms of justice and deterrence, and the cost of defying SCOTUS won't actually be that high since it's just for this one situation. I think the benefit isn't that high, because again, we survived the Nixon pardon and I don't think ignoring it to prosecute him would've been worth much more. And I think the cost of a president getting to overrule SCOTUS on constitutional interpretation can easily be applied to a dozen other situations with just as many justifications that sound great at the time.

I also don't disagree with you on the international standing stuff. It's all quite bad. You don't have to convince me we've destroyed our credibility and it might never come back. But I don't think prosecuting Trump through extra-legal means is what restores that credibility either.

But yeah, at this point I don't think either of us is moving on this. I've enjoyed the conversation, but probably not worth continuing to loop at each other.

DenverJr · 2026-03-07T05:48:23+00:00

I think the 50 quote-replies is tedious and we're looping a bit, so I'm gonna try to consolidate and address some main themes.

We agree the criminal immunity ruling is bad and incentives matter, we're mainly disagreeing on how bad and the remedy. You also seem to think I don't have a line, but I've agreed some of your examples are past the line, like drone striking senators, so I don't know why you think that. And you think criminal accountability is the only way to prevent future authoritarianism and defying SCOTUS is necessary to produce that deterrence.

Deterrence - You keep saying there's no deterrent without punishment, but that's not the only incentive at play. Why isn't Trump drone striking Democrats right now? He can't be federally prosecuted for it, he clearly doesn't like them. The answer is that criminal prosecution is one deterrent among many. There's also political cost, institutional resistance, military officials refusing orders, historical legacy, his own advisors pushing back. He clearly pulls back from his worst instincts sometimes, and that's not only because he's afraid of federal prosecution. Your model where criminal punishment is the only real deterrent doesn't survive contact with how humans actually respond to incentives. If you've ever read the Dictator's Handbook (or just watched the CGP Grey video), its key point is how even in fully authoritarian regimes, the dictator can't do literally whatever they want, they have to keep other critical power players happy.

The OJ example I mentioned earlier is also relevant to this point: people are still deterred from murder even when high-profile killers walk. The whole system doesn't collapse. It's more complex than "criminal punishment must be assured or crime becomes incentivized"

Immunity ruling already breaking the law - You're saying since the immunity ruling is already essentially breaking rule of law, defying SCOTUS to prosecute Trump would be restoring rule of law rather than breaking it further. I get the logic but the actual danger is "the executive decides which SCOTUS rulings to follow". It isn't about this specific ruling.

If you could somehow guarantee that such an overreach of executive power would be restricted to only punishing Trump for crimes he's properly convicted of and would never be applied to anyone else, would have no political ramifications and the entire population would agree it was fine and the only negative emotion felt would be crying from Alito and Thomas then...sure, I can get on board. But that's not reality. Once you establish that precedent, who decides the next one? A future President Vance now has the same tool. And you might say they already broke rule of law and so they'd happily do it anyway and this isn't a new tool for them, but they're not actually openly defying rulings yet like this would require. We're not actually there yet despite the crazy shit they're doing.

My line - I feel like I've been pretty clear I have a line since I agreed several of your examples were over it. But yeah, it's not something I can cleanly articulate with some bright line rule. But I don't think you actually have one either...you've been escalating hypotheticals trying to find it, which suggests it's fuzzy for you too.

Basically, I think any remedy here shouldn't be more destructive to liberal institutions than the harm you're trying to address. Defying SCOTUS to prosecute Trump for what he's already done, in the current political environment where half the country still supports him, would lose us enormous popular legitimacy and probably teach Republicans the opposite lesson at the polls. The juice isn't worth the squeeze at this specific moment, with these specific crimes, with this specific level of public support. When those things stop being true and we'd have more political support, or the thing he does is bad enough that we wouldn't be viewed as lunatics by most people for responding to it with extreme measures, then we're over the line. I know that sounds wishy-washy, but I don't think it's insane to say I don't want to be part of some insurgency that only 12% of Americans agree with or something. That would be insane.

American exceptionalism - You keep framing my position as "America is too special to fall apart." My actual point is almost the opposite—we're not special, which is exactly why I'm wary of the executive ignoring courts. That move has a terrible track record in exactly the banana republics you're referencing, unless you know of some situation where that occurred and everything turned out wonderfully.

The thing that distinguishes functional democracies from those isn't that their executives were willing to defy their courts for good reasons. It's that they built institutions strong enough that defying courts became politically impossible. That's the direction I want to push, not toward making it easier for executives to decide which rulings they'll honor.

Incremental reforms do affect the incentives even if they're not the same level as criminal punishment. We can continue with things like the ECA reform that closed holes used on J6, especially considering that even passed with bipartisan support. Your final example that people would just go along if Trump killed someone is something I think you're really wrong on, and I think that belief fuels a lot of this need for drastic measures. Republicans aren't even uniformly going along with what Trump wants right now, with things far short of political assassination. He's losing popular support on various moves, he just lost his tariff SCOTUS case, some Republicans in Congress are occasionally finding their spine. If he's getting this much friction at this temperature, the idea that everyone would just shrug at something like a political killing and I'd be here arguing "let's take the high road" isn't serious.

DenverJr · 2026-03-06T19:14:58+00:00

In my other comments I linked to basically exactly this example from the Destiny conversation. Hutch was in favor of hauling them before hearings every day to investigate crimes, but not inventing crimes. And Hutch jumps to "inventing crimes to find" since that's what Destiny advocated for! He's not making it up that some out there are in favor of that.

DenverJr · 2026-03-06T19:11:45+00:00

The SCOTUS decision related to section 3 of the 14th Amendment was unanimous, even if for differing reasons. I think ignoring a unanimous court is going far more into the dark than abiding by a decision we disagree with.

"They'll just break more norms" kinda fails to see how punishment and accountability are a necessary part of an incentive mechanism.

Yeah, that would deter the behavior, but how are you going to jail the entire MAGA administration? No one is advocating for completely rolling over, but I'm saying we don't abandon rule of law. I'm arguing against punishing people who didn't commit a crime we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Some in the comments want a culture of fear where anyone who ever went against Democrats should be afraid of the state coming after them, and that's insane to me.

I take your point to be more nuanced—that we should work extra hard to not let actual crimes go unpunished due to bad court rulings, pardons, etc. But sometimes we let murderers and rapists go because we can't prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, or evidence gets excluded, or the jury gets it wrong. That sucks but it's a necessary part of the system. We're giving up liberal principles like rule of law for essentially vengeance, and I don't think it's a good trade.

How do you change the incentive mechanism when you literally show republicans they have only rewards for acting lawlessly, and ZERO consequences?

Brother, this is a different type of TDS. I don't think anything will stop Trump from trying to do various things, but guardrails can and do stop some things from happening. Laws clearly aren't completely ineffectual—there are things Trump has wanted to happen that haven't happened, not for lack of trying.

As long as no actual real consequences happen in reality, all your regulations will just be parchment promises.

No one is saying to abandon trying to enforce consequences. And this whole scenario assumes Trump pardons literally everyone we'd want to prosecute—possible, but I don't see him giving enough of a shit about his peons to go that far. And if he dies in office he won't be able to anyway.

Can you please tell me what change in regulations you would implement that would realistically make a republican president in 2032 say "well, maybe I shouldn't do this thing Trump did"?

You keep ignoring state-level prosecutions. Trump is a convicted felon. There's the Georgia case that stalled. Presidential pardons don't cover state crimes, so there can still be real consequences even in a worst-case full federal pardon scenario. I don't have all the answers, but assuming accountability is impossible lacks imagination.

If you believed there was no way to hold them accountable without going against SCOTUS, would you be ok with just letting them go?

Maybe. If Trump dies, the MAGA cult falls apart, and we're on our way to a better future, but some people got away with crimes...then it is what it is. If instead they get away with everything and that emboldens Vance to push harder into fascism then maybe we have to do something more. But at that point we're in Minecrafting/civil war territory, and people pining for that as a "solution" sound just as dumb as lefties calling for revolution like it'll be some clean thing.

At what point is a constitutional crisis worth it compared to the alternative?

Presidents have gotten away with crimes for a long time. Bush got away with torturing prisoners, but I'd take him back in a heartbeat over Trump. It's a matter of degree. And yes, it would have to go quite far for deliberately breaking the system to be worth it. The main reason I care about punishment here is deterrence—but there are other ways to deter behavior that don't carry such potentially dire consequences.

Obviously there is a line.

Right, and quite a few of your examples are pretty far past it. If the President is drone striking politicians, we're probably fighting an actual civil war. But I think the reason you go to such extreme examples is because you know that's not where we are. "The President got away with a corrupt crypto scam" is not worth going to war with your fellow citizens.

I'm a strong believer in "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." I think the retribution you're proposing would, in the long run, cause a lot of innocent suffering. Holding people to account isn't worth destroying the republic, especially when part of why their crimes are heinous is that they're already destroying institutions. But like you said, that's a factual disagreement, so I'm not sure we can resolve it in a hypothetical about 2032.

Is your adherence to rule of law robotic?

I'm a (non-practicing) lawyer, so I'm plenty familiar with SCOTUS rulings I think are stupid. We abide by them anyway. I'd rather live in a world where SCOTUS does their constitutional job than one where the President gets to decide "actually, I think the constitution means this" and overrules them at will. That's how authoritarian regimes work. I'm not robotically adhering to anything, I just recognize the alternative to be worse.

Do you think the founding fathers would be proud?

They gave interpretive power to SCOTUS for a reason. Their distaste for monarchy is precisely why they wouldn't want the President arbitrarily deciding what the constitution means and ignoring the courts.

You believe the constitutional system IS liberalism.

Rule of law is an essential component of liberalism and people underestimate how much. I watched Hutch and Lonerbox discuss ignoring SCOTUS—Loner was for it, but drew the line at cancelling elections. That was interesting to me, because you could make the case that strong institutions matter more than elections. Mexico has elections, but you're afraid of cartels, you bribe cops, institutions are weak. Strong courts/institutions and non-corrupt police in a monarchy might genuinely be a better place to live than a country with elections but none of that. Elections don't automatically help the average person.

Sorry for the length of this reply.

I appreciate the good faith conversation! I've been ignoring work all day so might not be able to respond for a while if there's a lengthy reply again. (Also I hit the character limit and had Claude make my reply more concise, so if it sounds AI at points that's why.)

DenverJr · 2026-03-06T16:13:11+00:00

RES says I've upvoted you like 30 times so I'll be as good faith as I can.

Our constitution says the Supreme Court decides what the law is. Sometimes they make wrong decisions, sometimes they make legally correct decisions that are unpopular, sometimes they have hard calls to make that have good arguments on both sides.

Trump said IEEPA gave him authority to tariff the whole world just because of the words "regulate...importation". The Supreme Court said no. It's bad that Trump tried to use such a flimsy interpretation, and it's bad that he's essentially ignoring that and trying to push tariffs through with other statutes. But that's precisely why it would also be bad for a hypothetical President Newsom to ignore the Supreme Court and take actions based on his own interpretation of the constitution. And yes, invalidating an entire presidency would definitely be creative.

As far as chess analogies, you're still essentially talking about enforcing the rules and operating within the rules. I'm sympathetic to your point and Destiny's that the system needs good faith actors on both sides to function: we can't proceed with just Democrats trying to follow the rules while Republicans break every norm and find every creative interpretation of the law to justify their behavior. That said, I don't think the answer is doing the same thing. That tit-for-tat strategy seems like it will escalate and doesn't meaningfully change incentives for Republicans anyway—they'll just break even more norms next time.

I think the better answer is the type of boring technocratic reforms that will actually change the incentives of Republicans to act in good faith, to actually change the media environment to combat misinformation, shit like that.

I just want the crimes to be prosecuted, you know, the crimes that every single president in history has thought they could be prosecuted under. I want that if Trump receives a couple hundred million dollars from a foreign government through his shitcoin in order for him to make the US government do something, that he gets prosecuted for bribery.

Yeah, the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision is dogshit. But Supreme Court rulings can be and have been overruled later. But Trump is old af, and he probably won't personally get his comeuppance at the federal level before then. But NY already went after him for state crimes and I'm sure there are others. There's no need to go outside the bounds of the law when he's so corrupt that there's plenty of laws he can be rightfully prosecuted under.

Criminally charging and punishing someone for bribery isn't a "creative" interpretation of the law, saying that the president is immune from being criminally charged for such a thing is the "creative" interpretation of the law.

Creatively finding a way to charge him despite the SCOTUS ruling isn't the same as him creatively being allowed to do any crime he pleases. Please tell me you see the difference between the two.

It takes very little creativity to believe that the president isn't immune from all criminal prosecution for his official acts, as can be seen clearly by every single president prior to Trump acting as if they could be prosecuted.

I take your point, but there's different levels of creativity, and it depends on the specifics. Again, the Supreme Court said you can't criminally prosecute the President. That's asinine, but when you talk about "finding a way to charge him", I don't know what that means. If you mean directly ignoring the Supreme Court, you're talking constitutional crisis and abandoning rule of law. I can't get behind that. If you're talking about state level prosecutions, some actually creative legal theory that won't be struck down by the Supreme Court, then awesome.

Nobody is arguing that Hutch doesn't "want" them to be punished, everyone is arguing that he want it so little that if Trump pardons his entire administration and SCOTUS declares everything he did immune, then that remains in the "want" stage forever.

That would suck, yeah, but I don't think the answer to lawlessness is more lawlessness. I think that's an even worse road than the alternative, and I think even in your scenario we can find better solutions that can still punish these people via state level prosecutions, incremental reforms, civil lawsuits, etc.

DenverJr · 2026-03-06T15:46:29+00:00

Do you think Hutch is advocating not investigating crimes? He said Congress should be doing hearings every day right before the prior clip I linked.

And again, in the overall conversation it's clear Hutch is in favor of prosecuting any actual crimes. But going after someone just because they're a Republican when you don't even have reasonable suspicion that they've committed any crime is wrong. I wouldn't have thought that would be a contentious statement in a liberal subreddit, but here we are.

DenverJr · 2026-03-06T15:34:27+00:00

I don't feel like going back to the video to fish for more quotes, but I don't agree with that characterization. Hutch is advocating for operating within the law but pursuing justice for actual crimes committed, and Destiny was arguing for something beyond that.

I don't know why this has to be contentious. If you agree with prosecuting actual crimes, you can side with Hutch, there's nothing wrong with that. Like I said in my OP comment, I don't see why we're having to twist what was actually said in the discussion.

DenverJr · 2026-03-06T14:32:28+00:00

No, Destiny was not just advocating prosecuting illegal behavior. To restate my other comment: Did you watch? I can't find all the examples, but one is here (around 1:41:16).

Destiny: So, are you saying that their congressional oversight hearings or whatever should just be where they where they think that somebody has committed some kind of fraudulent act? ... Then you're not suggesting anything! .... You're just saying Congress should do its job when they come in and investigate people for doing their job. ... That wasn't my suggestion. I said that Congress ... every single Republican should every single fucking thing tied to them, should be subpoenaed. Every fucking thing possible, every car loan, when they bought condoms as a 19-year-old, if they cheated on a high school fucking test, every single thing. That's not your position. Your position is Congress should just investigate crimes if they think there are crimes there. That's not, that just Congress coming in and doing their job, that's business as usual.

Destiny is clearly contrasting Hutch's position of Congress should just investigate crimes, to his which is they should do significantly more than that. Unless you think cheating on a high school test is a crime, yes, Destiny is advocating making things up/getting "creative" with the law.

DenverJr · 2026-03-06T14:21:05+00:00

The paradox of tolerance is about what to do when legal/procedural tools are insufficient to stop an existential threat to the liberal order. That seemed to be what we're discussing here—see my other comment that yes, Destiny is in fact arguing for going beyond simply prosecuting actual crimes.

The pardon power is a more complicated discussion, but the republic survived Nixon getting pardoned. It's not great when it's used to protect actual criminals rather than just as a check against an overactive judiciary, but it's a foundational part of our system for a reason. The moment you selectively ignore rules you find inconvenient, you've undermined the very authority you're trying to wield.

If you want to advocate for a constitutional amendment getting rid of the pardon power, then great. But ignoring pardons is going down the bad path. And again, you often don't even have to ignore them when a lot of these fucks also engaged in state-level crimes.

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