The Tortoise and the Hare: How Strategic Patience Lets Conservatives Win While Progressives Burn Out

In the culture war, it’s not ideology that wins. It’s tempo. Progressives operate in existential now-or-never mode. Conservatives move like tectonic plates. One sprints. The other strategizes. One demands transformation overnight. The other sits silently, waiting for the overreach—and then strikes.

Progressives are the hare. They lurch forward, propelled by urgency. Climate catastrophe. Trans suicide rates. Racism. Abortion. Every issue is a crisis. Every delay is violence. So they sprint ahead, sure of their moral position and shocked when the rest of the country doesn’t keep up.

Conservatives are the tortoise. They rarely push forward. They don’t need to. Their goal isn’t to change the world, but to preserve it. So they wait. They accept setbacks—like the 1994 assault weapons ban—with stoicism. They don’t riot. They buy bolt-actions and wait 10 years. When the ban expires, they don’t just reclaim their rights. They expand them. Since 2004, constitutional carry has spread to over half the country. Patience, rewarded.

Nowhere is this clearer than the post-Roe abortion fight. The Right spent 49 years quietly building the legal scaffolding to reverse it. Meanwhile, the Left treated Roe as settled. When it fell, progressives wailed—but had no fallback plan. No state-level fortifications. No legal infrastructure. The tortoise had already passed them.

This isn’t about intelligence. Progressives often mock conservatives as yokels—NASCAR fans, Jesus freaks, dip chewers. But a man who loves monster trucks may also have a 140 IQ, a 30-year plan, and a long memory. He doesn't waste time arguing online. He runs for school board. He takes the sheriff’s seat. He teaches his kids to shoot, pray, and vote. Then, when the time comes, he acts—methodically, relentlessly.

The hare laughs until the tortoise wins.

There’s a second metaphor here, and it must remain distinct: the frogs in the pot. These are not the activists. These are the normies. The moral majority. The 80% who tolerate change—until it starts to feel like a boil. Drag queen story hour. Pronoun policing. Puberty blockers for kids. Decolonized math. At some point, the temperature hits critical mass, and the frogs jump. Not toward the Left—but away from it.

Progressives don't seem to understand this dynamic. They confuse silence for consent. But most Americans are simply conflict-averse. They’ll tolerate the weirdness, up to a point. But the moment the cultural revolution starts targeting their children, redefining biology, or punishing dissent, they recoil. Then they vote Republican—not because they’re cruel, but because they want the heat turned down.

You cannot sprint people into transformation. You must shepherd them, carefully. The progressive movement acts like a sheepdog panicked by the slow herd. They bark louder. They nip at the heels. But push too hard, and the herd doesn't obey—it stampedes. The stampede tramples everything, including the cause itself.

If progressives want to win long-term, they must understand what conservatives already know: the real race isn’t won in viral moments. It’s won through patient, generational strategy. Through zoning boards, state legislatures, curriculum policy, and quiet legal warfare. It’s won by letting the hare exhaust itself in front of the cameras—while the tortoise lays the foundation for permanence behind the scenes.

In American politics, the tortoise doesn’t just finish the race.

He builds the track.

What began as a punchline has become the engine of a new American economy. The mass deportation effort mocked as logistically impossible just a year ago is now moving with quiet, mechanical inevitability. This is not hypothetical. It’s not a Trumpian fever dream. It is the most significant domestic mobilization of labor, logistics, and statecraft since the early days of the War on Terror. Trump’s second administration, buoyed by a mandate that few political scientists predicted, has transformed America’s immigration enforcement system into a fully-fledged Deportation Industrial Complex—a fusion of bureaucratic severity and economic stimulus so powerful that it threatens to redefine how policy is understood: not as governance, but as employment strategy.

Critics once claimed deporting 20 to 30 million undocumented people was impossible, that the system would buckle under its own ambition. But that was a failure of imagination. The American state has never required feasibility to fund a project. Only belief, bureaucracy, and budget. What we are witnessing now is not a plan—it is a machine. One whose fuel is fear, whose product is bodies, and whose real output is work. From Ohio to Nevada, shuttered jails are reopening as federal detainment centers. Logistics contractors are winning six- and seven-figure ICE service awards. Temp agencies in red counties are onboarding blue-collar workers not for mining or manufacturing, but for processing, monitoring, detaining, and deporting.

This is the new WPA—except instead of bridges and murals, it builds fences, kiosks, and biometric check-in centers. And it doesn’t ask for public adoration. It operates best when it doesn’t have to explain itself. The aesthetic is not Rooseveltian grandeur but sterile militarism. And the workforce, far from reluctant, is energized. For years, working-class Americans were told they didn’t want these jobs—the hard, physical, underpaid labor of cleaning, cooking, harvesting. But what if the problem wasn’t the work, but the wage? Now, under the flush of federal contracts and high-stakes urgency, these same Americans are earning “contractor money” in their own zip codes. Overtime. Hazard pay. Bonuses. What the military taught us in Baghdad is being applied in Bakersfield: when you turn enforcement into a campaign, you create not just policy, but economy.

And the strategy isn’t precision; it’s escalation. The goal isn’t to find and deport everyone—it’s to make staying feel dangerous. Dread is scalable. Rumors are more efficient than raids. A neighborhood whispers that ICE was nearby, and five families disappear overnight. The John Wick effect: the reputation precedes the act. Children fear knock-knocks at the door. Undocumented workers quit overnight. Landlords don’t ask questions. Voluntary removal is suddenly a rational response to an irrational level of perceived risk. Hearts and minds are won not by compassion, but by conjuring something worse than deportation: humiliation, spectacle, rupture.

The left, clinging to rhetorical appeals—“they’re not criminals,” “they just want a better life”—misses the point entirely. The sin, according to the machine, is not what you’ve done, but that you’re here. Illegally present. That status alone makes you vulnerable, makes you processable, makes you part of the quota. The legalism is precise, but its application is total. And the public, overrun with fatigue, fear, and economic anxiety, has made its peace with it. Quietly. Passively. Some with glee.

This isn’t a dystopia. It’s a federal budget line. It’s a hiring fair in Tulsa. It’s a bonus check in Laredo. It’s not jackboots on cobblestones. It’s khakis and clipboard apps. And like all American boondoggles, it may not accomplish what it claims—but it will spend, employ, and entrench itself so thoroughly that reversing it would cost more than letting it run.

This is not the future. This is now. And for many, it’s the first paycheck they’ve trusted in years.

I was born in 1970—the same cultural moment, almost to the year, that NPR emerged. My parents were daily drinkers and secular humanists who raised me in Hawaii with Carl Sagan, PBS, and an FM radio dialed to All Things Considered. Garrison Keillor. Click and Clack. Terry Gross. Diane Rehm. Kojo Nnamdi. This wasn’t politics—it was affection. NPR was calm, elite, literary, but with warmth. A sherry-glass liberalism. A voice that loved America while nudging it gently forward.

For decades I was the cliché NPR listener. WAMU 88.5 was always on. I attended events. I gave money. I listened from sunup to sundown. Even when I moved to Berlin from 2007–2010, I tuned into NPR Berlin on 104.1 FM—the only place in Europe where you could still hear that comforting cadence.

NPR didn’t just report the world. It modeled how to be in it. It embodied curiosity, restraint, and thoughtful compassion. Sure, it was Ivy League-adjacent, but it didn’t perform its politics. It offered a kind of humanist moral imagination that didn’t shout.

But over the last decade, it began to shout.

The slow turn started with Trump, but it accelerated under COVID. What once felt like public radio for the curious became a strategy hub for the perpetually aggrieved. On the Media went from fascinating to hectoring. 1A became sanctimonious. The programming seemed less about informing the public than scolding the noncompliant.

It wasn’t just the politics. NPR has always leaned left, and I’ve always been fine with that. What changed was the tone. It stopped being about persuasion and started being about purity. I started waking up not to gentle reporting, but to emotionally loaded moral litmus tests disguised as headlines.

And let me be clear: I was a lifer. I lived on Capitol Hill for nine years and in Arlington for 15. I studied American literature. I taught writing. I read postwar fiction in Berlin. I’ve attended Big Broadcast tapings. I’ve seen Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris live. I once flirted with Diane Rehm on Twitter. I should have been locked in until death. But if you’ve lost me—you’ve lost the plot.

I should’ve been paying a tithe to NPR and PBS for all 85 years of my life. Instead, I wake up listening to Your Morning Show with Mike DeGiorno, a warm, funny, right-leaning host who loves his audience and doesn’t perform ideological trauma theater every five minutes. He makes me laugh. He reminds me more of old NPR than NPR does.

And that’s the saddest sentence I’ve ever written.

Public media made a fatal gambit in 2016. They believed Trump was an aberration, a glitch, and if they could just signal hard enough—he’d vanish. But when he won again in 2024, after 34 felonies, after billions in judgments, after being called Hitler daily—they were shocked. Because they had stopped listening. They didn’t realize his supporters saw the media itself as the enemy. That “they’re not coming for me, they’re coming for you” landed. That Trump, for many, isn’t a savior but a middle finger.

NPR had become Tokyo Rose, broadcasting at its own people from a bunker of moral superiority.

Meanwhile, I’m streaming old Coast to Coast AM episodes. I watch Gutfeld!, not because it’s smart but because it’s stupid in the way old late night used to be. Colbert? I was a disciple. But since COVID, he’s turned into a high priest of performative grievance. I can’t even watch him interview celebrities anymore. If I want celebrity joy, I turn to The Graham Norton Show—where nobody cries about the state of the world before asking about someone’s rom-com.

Even The Daily Show knows what it has become. They joke about “TDS”—Trump Derangement Syndrome—because they know. It’s not satire anymore. It’s affirmation.

What I miss is what radio used to be. Sweet. Surprising. Curious. Gently skeptical. What it did best was model how to be open in a closed, chaotic world. And now that voice is gone.

I miss the voice in my kitchen.

And I’m still grieving.

At first glance, the idea of deporting 30 million undocumented immigrants sounds logistically absurd. It seems politically suicidal, morally grotesque, and economically unviable. And that’s precisely the point. For years, the unspoken strategy among progressive immigration advocates and Democratic administrations has been to overwhelm the system. The assumption was simple: if you allow enough people in, undercut enforcement, delay asylum proceedings, and stretch ICE past the breaking point, the machine will collapse under its own weight. Amnesty—if not by law, then by inertia.

But this strategy misread the nature of the American state. It assumed that cost would be the limiting factor. It assumed that there was some point where the budget said “no.” But America doesn’t fear large-scale expenditures—it industrializes them. Just as the military-industrial complex learned to turn every war into a jobs program, the deportation-industrial complex is now preparing to turn mass removal into its own domestic surge.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about procurement. The logic of wartime spending, redirected inward. If there are 30 million people to remove, then every law enforcement agency, detention facility, border town, federal contractor, and software vendor just found itself a 10-year growth plan. The more people there are to deport, the more money gets spent trying. And when there’s money to be spent, there’s power to be built.

It will look familiar. Local police departments will get new funding under “immigration task forces.” Counties will expand jail capacity “for processing purposes.” Private contractors will bid to provide buses, surveillance software, interpretation services, and biometric tracking. ICE will become the new VA. CBP will get its own public relations office, veteran hiring initiatives, and branded recruitment campaigns. Every piece of the federal deportation puzzle will scatter across congressional districts—just like defense spending. Just like fighter jets built in 50 states to guarantee buy-in.

Even the intelligence community will find its place. The Five Eyes alliance won’t stop at terrorists—they’ll offer data-sharing agreements to help root out visa overstays, border jumpers, and cartel networks. Domestic surveillance, long a third rail, will find new life under the banner of “immigration enforcement.”

It’s not that the political class wants to deport 30 million people—it’s that someone told them they could. And more importantly, that there’s money in it. The idea that scale would act as a deterrent was always a gamble. But now it’s starting to look like an accelerant.

The deeper irony is that, in trying to overwhelm the system into mercy, open-borders ideologues may have instead created the greatest federal jobs program since the WPA. Not in green energy or infrastructure, but in the mechanized removal of the very population they sought to protect. And every mayor, governor, and senator who once cried about federal neglect will now see an influx of cash and contracts—just so long as they play their role in the machinery.

What’s coming isn’t just about law and order. It’s about full-spectrum mobilization. The same way the New Deal turned dams, railroads, and murals into work for millions, the deportation-industrial complex will do the same—with detention centers, court dockets, and field agents.

You thought mass deportation was impossible because it was too big? In Washington, that’s a feature, not a bug. When you give the federal government a problem too large to solve cleanly, it builds an industry around failing slowly. And it keeps the checks flowing.

We talk a lot about racism in America, but what we’re really contending with today isn’t just race—it’s culture. It’s not about the color of your skin, but the code you speak. Not the blood in your veins, but the dialect on your tongue. It’s not whiteness that gets punished—it’s acting white. It’s not blackness that’s rejected—it’s betraying the culture. This is not racism. This is cultural apartheid.

I learned this growing up in Hawaii, where being a haole (white) wasn’t the problem—it was acting haole that got you smacked down. The local Asian and Polynesian kids who studied hard, dressed preppy, or spoke standard English weren’t accepted. They were called Twinkies (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) or bananas. Brown kids were accused of acting white. It’s the same logic that calls Clarence Thomas the “Black face of white supremacy.” The attack isn’t about biology—it’s about betrayal.

My mother knew the code. She drilled it into me. Inside the house, I was to speak proper Manhattanite English—“NPR English,” she called it. She filled my mind with Sagan, Picasso, PBS, poetry, National Geographic. But when I stepped out the door, she expected me to speak local. Slippah talk. Braddah slang. "What, you? Stink eye, eh?" That kind of thing. Code-switching wasn’t optional. It was survival.

And here’s the thing: the people who don’t or won’t code-switch—who plant their feet and refuse—get culturally ghettoized. Not racially. Culturally. And then they’re told this isolation is empowerment. That rejecting the norms of so-called whiteness is resistance. But what it really is? It’s opt-in apartheid. It’s self-segregation dressed up as identity.

This isn’t just about dialect or diction. It’s deeper. It’s about creating pride around disconnection. It’s about rejecting opportunity because opportunity looks like assimilation. It’s about mocking Black excellence if it “sounds white.” It’s about labeling those who succeed outside the culture as sellouts. It’s a trap—and it’s being sold as virtue.

What’s happening isn’t that different from what eugenicists once tried to do through force—except now it’s happening through cultural manipulation. Back then, they sterilized. Now, they convince you to sterilize yourself. Back then, they built ghettos. Now, they convince you to build your own. Back then, they burned bridges. Now, you’re told burning bridges is bravery.

You want to know the wildest part? Even among white people, there’s a caste. I had a guy on Mastodon—a literal white supremacist—tell me I wasn’t really white. I’m Irish and Hungarian. That makes me untermench to him. Not Anglo. Not Aryan enough. Catholic, no less. Garbage blood. Slavic trash. So when you talk about whiteness, understand even the racists have tiers.

The people who think they’re resisting white supremacy by rejecting standard norms are actually reinforcing a deeper, more sinister system—a system that wants you contained, controlled, and culled. It wants you to choose self-limitation and then call it identity. It wants you to abandon the tools of success, then blame “the system” for failure. It wants you broke, isolated, and dependent—and convinced that’s freedom.

We need to call this what it is: cultural apartheid. Not class apartheid. Not even racial apartheid. Cultural. You’re judged not by your skin, but by your syntax. Your style. Your self-presentation. You’re either in the house, or you’re in the yard. And the tragedy? A lot of people are choosing the yard and calling it liberation.

So no, this isn’t about “acting white.” It’s about refusing to play the game that keeps you small. It’s about seeing code-switching not as betrayal, but as strategy. It’s about refusing to be a mule who plants their feet in defiance while the world moves on.

Speak every language you can. Walk in every world you can. Don’t let anyone shame you into staying small. The deck is open. The cockpit has a seat. Don’t chain yourself to the hold and call it pride.

I didn’t plan to write this. It started with a Thread, sparked by a conversation with someone who spoke as if identity was destiny, and belonging was determined by pain. They spoke in the voice of certainty—about who could speak, who couldn’t, and who owed what to whom.

But it stirred something old in me.

I grew up in Salt Lake, Oahu. Subsidized garden apartments near the airport. I was six. A haole kid—Irish, English, German, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian—surrounded by friends who were Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Samoan, Filipino. In Hawaii, we were all poi dogs: mutts, proud of our mix. Nobody cared what you were—until intermediate school, when I was suddenly just “white.” One word flattened my whole ancestry.

That flattening—that erasure of nuance—is what this is about.

Let’s be clear: America has never been an ethnostate. It’s never required blood purity. It’s flirted with white supremacy, yes. It’s been built on contradictions, certainly. But it has always been chaotic, plural, experimental. Jews were among the first colonists. There were free Black people before slavery became systemic. Hawaiian royalty toured the White House. The myth of America as ethnically pure is just that—a myth.

Compare that with actual ethnostates. Japan. Korea. Hungary. Nations where blood defines belonging. Where being born in-country doesn’t mean you’re accepted. Where assimilation isn’t expected—because it isn’t offered. These are places with coherent boundaries. That’s what makes them safer, yes—but also more exclusionary.

And yet somehow, America bears the guilt of falling short of an ideal no one else even tries to live up to.

Whiteness in America has never been fixed. Irish weren’t white. Italians weren’t white. Jews weren’t white. Whiteness was a moving caste line. A club. Not a color.

Today, the same people who rightly insist on distinguishing between Vietnamese and Chinese, or Dominican and Puerto Rican, will lump everyone with pale skin into “white.” As if all of us grew up with the same privilege. As if someone like me—raised by a single mom, broke, mixed, uninvited—was born at the top of the pyramid.

It’s not justice. It’s just reversal.

Later in life, on Mastodon—a social platform of federated, ideological islands—I found myself in dialogue with an actual white supremacist. He told me I wasn't really white. Not with Irish Catholic blood from County Mayo. Not with Hungarian roots from Budapest. Not with my Slavic features. To him, true whiteness belonged to ethnic English and Germans. Everyone else was an Untermensch—a word I knew from my time in Berlin. A slur. A caste marker. Garbage people.

I laughed it off. But I didn’t forget.

The deeper you look into the world, the more you see these hierarchies. In Singapore, ethnic Han Chinese dominate. In Finland, the elite are Swedish, not Finnish. Every culture has its own purity test.

That’s why America still matters. Even when it fails. Especially when it fails.

Because here, a kid like me could eat kalbi from a Korean neighbor’s hibachi at six years old and fall in love with kimchi before knowing how to spell it. Here, I could be a poi dog and still grow up to write, to speak, to belong. That doesn’t happen in most of the world.

We talk about justice, but we also need to talk about containment. UBI, grievance culture, and online rage cycles don’t liberate people—they manage them. They keep people home, sedated, sequestered. Just enough bread to dull hunger. Just enough narrative to keep them angry but inactive.

It’s not revolution. It’s sedation.

Still—I believe in this country. Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s unfinished. Because it tries, even when it stumbles. Because it allows us to write ourselves in.

So no, America isn’t an ethnostate. And the fact that we even argue about how to be more inclusive proves it.

It’s messy. But it’s ours.
And I’ll defend that—with aloha.

There’s a power in holding your tongue. A dignity in not showing your hand. We live in an age that mistakes visibility for virtue and volume for valor. But cowardice—real, deliberate, strategic cowardice—is not a moral failure. It’s a tactical doctrine. It’s not for the meek. It’s for those who understand the cost of every movement, every word, every unnecessary war.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war.”
— Sun Tzu

Bravery is the charge. Cowardice is the calculus. It’s the art of surviving long enough to matter. It’s walking into the room with a loaded mind and an unloaded mouth. It’s letting the blowhards burn themselves out while you read the angles. It’s not being seen until it’s too late to stop you. You don’t posture. You prepare.

“Conceal your intentions until the moment of execution.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli

What we call cowardice may be the highest form of courage—the kind that doesn’t get medals because no one knows it happened. The kind that plans the exfil before the breach. The kind that resists the pressure to be visible, loud, righteous, and wrong. It’s courage stripped of theater. It’s presence without pretense.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
— Sun Tzu

Our culture rewards flamboyant resistance. But true power lies in discipline. In camouflage. In deferring gratification, deflecting attention, delaying conflict. Cowardice doesn’t shout—it observes. It memorizes patterns. It lets others waste their ammo on phantom targets. And when it finally strikes, it ends the fight with one quiet move.

“Feign disorder, and crush him.”
— Sun Tzu

I don’t romanticize war. I don’t mistake trauma for proof. I’ve seen what bravery costs. It makes great legends and empty chairs. So I praise the one who backs out of the burning building with the blueprint, not the one who runs in with a speech. The courageous coward doesn’t need to be seen. The mission is the monument.

“Retreat is not surrender—it is the preparation of ground on your terms.”
— Miyamoto Musashi

“Courageous but never brave” is not an insult. It’s a position. A discipline. A posture built for endurance. The brave punch. The coward places a quiet hand on the lever of the trap door. It’s not that you can’t fight. It’s that you don’t until it’s already over.

“The most dangerous man in the room is the one no one noticed.”
— Law Enforcement Aphorism

Cowardice isn’t flight. It’s patience. It’s the assassin in the crowd. The anonymous saboteur. The man with the receipts and the silence. The woman with the leverage and the smile. The activist who never marched but reprogrammed the surveillance drones. It's not a lack of courage. It's courage, curated.

“The blade you never see is the one that cuts deepest.”
— Persian Proverb

The brave take the hits. The coward waits them out and picks the lock from inside. He plays dead, walks backward into shadows, and comes back when the weather changes—always dry, always ready, always underestimated. And when he moves, the system doesn’t even know what hit it.

“The turtle survives not by speed but by shelter.”
— Zen Saying

This isn’t nihilism. This is long war thinking. This is: shut up and collect. This is: don’t strike when you’re angry—strike when they’re tired. This is fieldcraft, not theater. This is OSS, not Instagram. This is the difference between making noise and making impact.

“The moment of advantage belongs to the one who watched longest.”
— Japanese Koryu Tradition

So I say it proudly: In praise of cowardice. In praise of not performing for the mob. In praise of turning down the heat, holding your tongue, and hiding the stick so well you never need to swing it. Because when done right, cowardice isn’t weakness.

It’s dominance—with a time delay.

Why the base isn't breaking, the scandal doesn't land, and the real crisis is still being misunderstood.

A viral tweet claimed the beginning of the end — 67% of Americans, including half of Republicans, allegedly believe Donald Trump is covering up Epstein evidence. The replies were predictable: “The cult is cracking.” “They’ve finally seen the truth.” “Dumpster fire!” And yet none of it rings true. These aren’t signs of collapse. They’re symptoms of projection — projection from people who still don’t understand what the red hat ever stood for in the first place.

Trump’s base — the real one — didn’t form around his virtue, integrity, or moral superiority. It formed in rejection. Rejection of elite consensus. Rejection of institutional sanctimony. Rejection of globalism, cosmopolitanism, progressive condescension, and every smirking pundit who wrote off their towns, churches, and trades as relics. The red hat was never a crown. It was a signal flare: “You’ve lost us.” That kind of loyalty isn’t undone by scandal. It’s reinforced by it.

To Trump’s core supporters, Epstein isn’t shocking — it’s background noise. They already believe the entire power elite is sick, corrupt, and trafficking in children. Trump’s vulgarity isn’t a disqualifier. It’s proof he’s not subtle enough, clean enough, or polished enough to be one of “them.” In their view, he didn’t attend the right rituals. He didn’t take the blood oath. His sins are public, carnal, and crude. Theirs are hidden, ritualized, and sacred. Trump, they believe, is a traitor to the real cult — not a member of it.

Which is why, even now, Epstein won’t be the kill shot. The left keeps mistaking scandal for a spell. Like if you just say the right cursed name three times — Russia, Access Hollywood, Classified Docs, January 6, now Epstein — the walls will crumble. But Trump passed the Alex Jones test in 2016. He survived the full-spectrum accusation suite and still walked. Because to his base, he’s not the evil — he’s the interruption. They don’t need to believe he’s good. They only need to believe that everyone else is worse.

If Trump is losing anything, it’s not his base — it’s the ideological fringes. The purity cults. The “Woke MAGA” types radicalized into absolutism. The suicide-vest faction who want Trump to be the final prophet, not the first pragmatist. But they were always unstable. The core remains: the ones who want deportation, domestic industry, American pride, a nation not ashamed of its own flag. These people aren't peeling away because of Epstein. They were never “Epstein voters” to begin with.

So no — the base isn’t cracking. The red hat hasn’t fallen. What we’re witnessing is another round of wishful thinking from people who mistake performance for politics. Who think a poll is a prophecy. Who’ve been waiting since 2016 for the moral arc of the universe to deliver a neatly packaged reckoning. But you can’t cancel someone whose base doesn’t believe in your high priests anymore. You can’t shame a man who already absorbed every shame you threw.

This isn’t the unraveling. It’s another episode of projection. They’re not watching the red hat fall — they’re chasing a red herring.