Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, May 14, 2026
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21 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/14/800038686/community/reddit-deleted-hundreds-of-thousands-of-bot-accounts-on-r-conservative/
Apparently, MAGA-style conservatism isn’t as popular as they want us to think.
As I have always maintained, American Conservatism is a solution, seeking justification rather than a problem, seeking a solution.
“Bulwark”
An autopsy of the Harris campaign.
Not quite the ‘DNC Autopsy’ (which might not exist) but in that neighborhood
Three stories about data centers and the push back. I think this will be a huge political fight soon. If it isn’t already.
NV Energy cutting Lake Tahoe power supply for AI data centers
Texas county pauses data center construction in rural areas for a year
‘So much worse than I even thought’: Utah’s ‘hyperscale’ data center could create massive heat island near Great Salt Lake
“ArcDigital”
Proof of New York Times pro-Trump bias.
What is it about these Christian “influencers” who seem to be chasing a need to monetize their religion? I have a feeling Jesus would have something unflattering to say about this.
Eating Healthy? No, They’re Eating Biblically.
A diet inspired by the Bible has found new audiences online in the Make America Healthy Again era.
It’s WEIRD.
Also, our Ag secretary is being sued for putting religious messages into her communications emails.
Trump is in China. Be afraid, be very afraid.
@Jen:
Grifters go where their marks are.
Christian MAHA/MAGAs must be some of the dumbest, most credulous people on the entire planet.
“Smart people don’t like me,” as their orange idol (no mean grifter himself) once said.
Good lord he is an embarrassment. Who wrote these remarks for him?
Trump: “Chinese restaurants in America today outnumber the five largest fast foods in the United States all combined. That’s a pretty big statement.”
@Jen: @drj: Trump’s way of talking and acting has significant roots in the televangelists. When you look back at those guys in the decades past, a lot of them look, sound, and act like proto-Trumps–the flamboyant hair, the overblown grandiose rhetoric, the flaunting of material excess that would seem to conflict with what Christianity is traditionally supposed to be about, the disparagement of mainstream science and medicine in favor of miracle cures; it all checks. I have increasingly come to the conclusion that Trump consciously modeled his style after these folks (he was involved with Paula White all the way back in the 2000s). In any case, the followers to these movements have been primed for decades to respond positively to a figure like Trump, and it helps make sense of why his absurdly obvious amorality and crude embrace of sin never turned them off, and indeed is seen by them as a plus.
Biblical Eating
@Kylopod: Trump was an attendee (along with his parents) of the Marble Collegiate Church whose lead pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking.
I am not aware of any material results of the Trump/Xi so far, but I am annoyed by Trump’s preamble that he and Xi are good friends. Trump is not the only US President who uses this phrasing, and I think that it is misleading. Xi is the chief executive of the PRC, and we should expect him to promote the best interests of that country without regard for any personal ties to our chief executive who should likewise be primarily acting in our best interests. I know that before WW I the Kaiser and the Tsar often spoke of their blood relationship and personal ties, but that was clearly bullshit.
I saw that Rubio decried Xi’s ambitions for the annexation of Taiwan, but I think that the offers/plans/threats that Trump has made about Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela delegitimize these concerns.
@gVOR10:
The relationship we will have with China in the years to come is going to be interesting. Trump was warned by Xi about Taiwan.
Of course Trump would let China take Taiwan if they invade, but China is not acting on their desires to gobble up Taiwan because of what they see going on with Iran and Ukraine.
Trump’s Venezuela operation was a one off success. Trump’s attempt to gobble up Iran and their oil has us bogged down in the Gulf region, and Russia’s attempt to gobble up Ukraine and and their resources has Russia bogged down.
Xi has to be looking at Iran and Ukraine as cautionary tales. After all, Russia’s plan was to plant their flag in the capital of Ukraine inside of three days and take over the government which would then give Putins’ military all the time in the world to spread out to take over the entirety of Ukraine but look how that turned out.
China is much more frightening as a looming threat towards Taiwan than as an actual invader.
Xi has seen President Trump and Putin act on their desires and how that has worked out for them so he has good reasons to take his own advice to be careful when dealing with Taiwan.
@charontwo: Thanks. I don’t normally read The Bulwark, so I would have missed this. Long, but well worth a read. The writer, Rob Flaherty, was coordinator for internet activities for the Harris campaign. He spends a lot of time talking about online activity. Besides the campaign activity it’s a window into where the online world is generally and where it may evolve, including AI. He stresses poor coordination between the campaign and the Harris Super Pac, Future Forward. Lawyers told the they had to be very careful in engaging with moment creators paid by FF. I doubt that would have even come up with Republicans, except maybe briefings on how to cover it.
He also hits a couple of my pet issues. He notes the importance of branding, and how badly Ds have handled it. He also notes the lack of ongoing party activity between elections.
His first footnote references rumors somebody lost the hard drive with the party autopsy.
Fascinating read, Again, thanks.
@Kylopod: I would say that is a cross between the evangelical revival preachers and pro wrestling. Lots of hyperbole, self promotion, planned costuming learning how to read and grift the audience.
Steve
@steve222:
Very good point. He has a long history with those folks as well–with the important caveat that most WWE fans, unlike most members of those megachurches, are perfectly aware of the fact that what they’re watching is fake. But even that can get tricky, because one of the aspects of MAGA involves a certain level of recognition that he’s engaged in some kind of trickery, which they go on to rationalize–the notion that he should be taken “seriously but not literally,” that he’s crazy like a fox, that it’s all part of his negotiation style, and so on. It’s not so much that they fail to recognize him as a bullshit artist as that they see him as their bullshit artist.
@gVOR10:
I thought that was the most significant point. It’s the big weakness of anyone seen as wishy-washy or, like Gavin Newsome, as a bit of a chameleon.
I like AOC, definitely a brand there.
@inhumans99:
In Venezuela, El Taco only gobbled up Maduro and left the regime where it stood. I’m not sure what the oil situation is, but very likely not the Taco claims that he owns all the oil now, quite aside from the quality of the crude.
A similar attack on Iran, kidnapping Khamenei Sr., wouldn’t have had the same results as did kidnapping Maduro in Venezuela. So, he went and did a Mad Vlad, thinking his dick tougher than the meat grinder.
@gVOR10:
He could get a lot from them in exchange for “the US will support selling ASML’s state of the art chip fab equipment to China.”
I have been wondering if they would announce a deal to provide ASML tech to China in exchange for becoming an actual competitor to Taiwan’s TSMC for bleeding edge parts. It would explain why the billionaire tech boys are on the trip.
@Slugger:
I don’t know if the announcement was made in China, or is only coincident with the visit, but they’re going to let ten Chinese companies buy Nvidia’s H200 chips. Previously they could only buy limited numbers of the prior generation H100 chips, and had to pay a premium price.
The fight over Taiwan today is actually over TSMC, the sole source for the leading edge chips AWS, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Google, and the rest need. Letting China buy the leading-edge tech gives China an incentive to make sure nothing “accidentally” happens to TSMC.
Per the NYT, Cuba says it has run out of oil.
So, I finally got around digging up my old, old, Windows Vista HP “desktop”*. Surprise, the cables were not with it. So, I dug around the cabinets of my secondary bookcase (where I set the TV and keep mostly old DVDs on the shelves). I found a power cable, and two VGA cables. So I’m still missing one power cable for the monitor… I’ll get one tomorrow.
I also ran across some books I recalled stashing there because 1) the primary bookcase was full, and 2) I wasn’t likely to ever re-read them. among them was a Harlan Ellison book (!) I don’t recall ever having. It’s called Edgeworks Vol 1 (hope the link works). The print history is 1996, which was one year before I ever got books from Amazon or other online retailers. So I must have bought it on a trip to the US, or more likely my parents got it for me in one of their trips, though I don’t recall asking them for it.
I also found the two missing Babylon 5 Psi Corps books. The third is in the primary bookcase with the rest of the B5 books.
*Besides running Vista, it was underpowered through the use of a budget notebook CPU and a paltry 2 GB RAM. So it was a desktop in shape only.