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The objective principle is inference to the best explanation.
I do not ask, “Can I imagine another explanation?”
I ask, “Which explanation accounts for the greatest number of independent facts with the fewest assumptions?”
Your explanation requires treating each piece of evidence in isolation:
- Trump adopts the term remigration.
- Stephen Miller adopts it.
- The State Department adopts it.
- DHS adopts it.
- Trump says immigrants are “poisoning the blood.”
- The administration sharply reduces both legal and illegal immigration.
- Influential MAGA figures attack their own DHS secretary for merely acknowledging that legal immigration can benefit the economy and insist on “deportations first.”
The Hawaiʻi Supreme Court used the same kind of reasoning about the Roberts Court.
It did not rest on one case or one quote. It pointed to a pattern across voting rights, racial equality, campaign finance, presidential immunity, abortion, guns, and administrative law.
And on race, it was explicit:
“The Roberts Court sees only white.”
“The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was.”
“That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design.”
Then it summed up the broader pattern:
“Rulings run in one direction, time after time. Weakening protections for those with less power. Fortifying those with more. The pattern speaks for itself.”
That is the point.
Any single fact may admit multiple explanations.
But when independent facts repeatedly align in the same direction, the burden shifts to the person insisting they are all unrelated.
At some point, the question stops being, “Could there be another explanation?”
It becomes, “How many exceptions do I have to invent before the obvious explanation is the better one?”
If your life depended on it, would you trust the explanation that requires the fewest exceptions, or the one that requires a new exception every time another fact appears?
Lol, I'm done with arguing against your AI. You keep posting multiple giant dialogs and paragraphs (bullets, bolding, etc) before I can even read your posts. AI...no one says Hawaii like "The Hawaiʻi Supreme Court"
Your use of AI is why this discussion has shifted so dramatically from immigration policy to "remigration" of anyone that isn't white.
Your AI failed you today...DONE.
Fair enough:
Here is what I took away from our discussion:
"civic ideal” - no idea what this means
assimilation - speaking English (although not constitutionally required, but wanted by the right), obeying the law, and civic engagement.
“American values,” "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
You and @coffeebadger both look at the evidence and make exceptions for it based on what you want to believe. For what it’s worth, I put you both together. I do a lot of research, so I use AI to bring it all together.
Regardless, at least I know that English is important to you both, and you have ideas about a civil society full of American virtues and shared culture that has never existed.
It's not an "evidence" kind of question. Republicans want to close the border because a lot of migrants from third world countries hate Americans and want to kill us. Democrats want it open for the same reason. It doesn't make sense to talk about which policy is better for the economy when we have fundamental disagreements over what success looks like.
Exactly my point. No evidence. Just false statements.
You're confident that the administration's rhetoric and policies support one dominant inference about its motives. I'm saying they support multiple plausible inferences, and you've consistently treated yours as the only reasonable one.
So what objective principle are you using to conclude that your inference is stronger than competing explanations, rather than simply the one you find most persuasive?
I don't think we've disagreed much about the facts. We've disagreed about how much certainty those facts justify.