Kyle Li made an interesting point that I don’t know about and don’t have the time to dig into, but consider: Taiwan’s current president Trump ran a turbo-rightist campaign based on racism, hatred, and bigotry. The initial coverage of Trump’s call presented it as ham-handed ignorance, and the ‘deeper’ follow-up coverage got bogged down in the details of whether it was arranged by a “transition adviser,” Stephen Yates. Those backward-looking machinations don’t matter so much. What matters more is the forward-looking fact that turbo-rightist leaders are actively networking on an international level. We can expect much more of this. A lot of journalism is organized around trivia about how X or Y happened, but what we need is a wider view: where is this going? This shift is what all the journalistic hand-wringing is about — the ‘new rules,’ ‘how we should deal with Trump,’ ‘post-factuality,’ etc. But everyday institutional norms and procedures will wear that down pretty fast, so counting on journalism to keep big, open questions in focus is like the US left counting on the Supreme Court to save us, which hasn’t worked so well for the last 40–50 years, has it? I think the question is what kind of order these turbo-rightists imagine and how they think it could work. Not a conspiratorial vision, just a network of changing alliances and actors working in new ways. We did a bad job of listening to them in the election, and now we need to learn to do it better.