The Jason Arday story continues to surprise. I didn’t believe that there would still be much to talk about regarding this man’s individual story nearly a week after his death, even though I thought it was clear that his rise and fall exposed deep problems in academia. Instead, the reaction of the British left to the entire episode has been clarifying, and helps explain how we got a figure like Jason Arday in the first place.

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I’ve actually been getting jealous of all the Nathan hate. At least someone sent me this, informing me that I was “catching strays,” as the kids say.

We should all applaud Nathan’s bravery. But the fact that he has become the face of the anti-Arday movement has something to teach us about the fundamental, unbreakable nature of the race/IQ taboo, which people seem to have trouble understanding correctly.

In the two and a half years since I wrote “Shut Up about Race and IQ,” it seems that every other taboo enforced by the left has become weaker, including the one on open racism. This is the culture of the Based Ritual. You’ll find major conservative figures arguing that women should be housewives, vaccines don’t work, authoritarians like Franco were great, and we should deport 100 million imaginary people. On the trans issue in particular, there was a major vibe shift that began the moment Elon took over Twitter, which I predicted would happen at the time. But race and IQ remains forbidden territory. Sure, Trump may refer to Somalis as “low IQ” and that can titillate the racists, but the only people who focus on group differences in intelligence and make it regular to their messaging are generally figures who remain fringe.

Free speech was enough to make trans activists into laughingstocks. But you got your free speech to talk about race and IQ, and here we are still seeing the race science crowd making the exact same arguments as they’ve been making since at least the 1960s without getting anywhere.

Why does there remain a sense among people across the political spectrum that this taboo must be maintained, or at least is not worth fighting against? Most standard explanations are unconvincing. For example, in the top comment to my article on race science, someone noted that “most normies would find hereditarianism more palatable if they understood that the bell curves overlap.” A famous writer messaged me after publication and said that she liked the piece while making a similar point.

This is a strange argument. Of course people understand overlapping bell curves. If I tell someone that I met a woman who was taller than me, people don’t respond “Impossible! That would mean overlapping bell curves. I thought all men must be taller than all women. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

You can think of a thousand other examples. “Some kids are more mature than adults.” Not a difficult statement to accept.

If anything, people understand overlapping bell curves too well. Women are able to beat up men on TV much more often than they can in real life. Audiences love a story of the triumph of a protagonist who supposedly couldn’t accomplish something based on their group characteristics, but then overcame obstacles to succeed. And a lot of people seem to not understand that if groups differ on average, then there are likely to be massive disparities at the extremes of the distribution, which is again a case of expecting bell curves to overlap too much.

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People argue against bosses sleeping with their subordinates on the grounds that such situations involve a “power imbalance.” Occasionally, they go a step further, and imply that some men are so rich and powerful that relationships with almost any woman can be presumed potentially abusive. Part of the hysteria about Jeffrey Epstein comes from the fact that many seem to assume that anyone that wealthy going out with a younger woman is somehow taking advantage of her, even though the more lurid accounts of what he was doing have never been substantiated.

All of this is completely backwards. While it is true that such relationships do have power imbalances, they’re clearly in favor of the woman.

Take the case of Eric Swalwell. One of the accusations that led to him dropping out of the California gubernatorial race was that he received oral sex from a staffer and “twice sexually assaulted her when she was too drunk to consent.”

Think about the state of affairs before Swalwell and his staffer hooked up. When going into any relationship, both parties understand that it might lead to hard feelings at a later point in time. Swalwell has to keep the affair a secret for the sake of his career and reputation. If he gets mad at his employee or she rejects his advances, he may fire her from a job that doesn’t pay all that well. In theory, he could perhaps wield his position to ruin her life in other ways, like trying to stop others from giving her a job. But usually powerful men don’t have the time or psychological incentive to do things like this. That’s simp behavior. Men who don’t have options are the ones most likely to become vengeful stalkers, while those with power can much more easily deal with rejection.

What about the woman’s perspective? Her leverage over Swalwell is much greater because he has a lot more to lose. We all saw what happened to his hopes of political advancement as a result of this affair and other indiscretions. Moreover, luckily for the woman, the media will believe and amplify her story regardless of the state of the relevant evidence or how she behaved at the time. It doesn’t matter if Swalwell has a hundred text messages of the staffer saying “I’m loving every moment of this. I happily give you my consent!!!” She is free to decide at any moment that she was a victim. Was a drunken hookup a memory she looks back on fondly or “sexual assault”? It’s up to her. No choice is final – she gets to change her answer whenever she wants. If they were both drunk, he might have sexually assaulted her. For Swalwell, being intoxicated compounds his crimes rather than excuses his behavior.

In fact, I was probably wrong when I just said that Swalwell can at least fire her if the relationship goes downhill. He has to be extra careful not to anger this woman. Swalwell should be expected to go out of his way to not treat her unfairly, knowing that she can destroy him at any time. This is true whether they have an affair or he simply makes a pass that is rejected. This might lead to a bias against other employees, though it is the woman who had the relationship who our society considers the real victim.

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Yet there is a near universal pattern in the opposite direction, as shown in a new paper by John Nye and his co-authors called “Education and Market Liberal Preferences.” Looking at World Values Survey data over the time period 1990 to 2023, they find that higher education predicts pro-market values in 95% of cases, with 77% of the country-years showing a statistically significant relationship in that direction.

Pro-market values are determined using three World Values Survey questions asking respondents to place themselves on scales concerning a) whether incomes should be made more equal; b) whether private ownership of business and industry should be increased; and c) whether competition is good because it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas. The authors combine the three into an index, coding each so that higher scores represent more pro-market views.

Below is the percent change in a pro-market direction associated with having a college degree for various countries across the last few decades.

Compared to most other places, college graduates in the US are not that much more pro-market. But note that even in America the sign is positive in four out of five years.

This is all pretty remarkable considering the state of the universities. And Nye et al. find that being more educated is associated with more pro-market views even among Russians who grew up in the Soviet Union. There is a deep connection between being more friendly to capitalism and being more educated that seems to go beyond what is taught in any particular education system. It is probably related to intelligence and openness.

By just looking at the US and the UK, we get the wrong impression about human nature, since these are unusual cases. That said, even American college graduates were more pro-market than non-college graduates as late as 2017, though just barely. Yet they still voted for Hillary.

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While some actually deny he was a plagiarist, it seems more common to acknowledge that Arday screwed up while saying that the media and conservatives on X should be condemned for paying too much attention to the story.

This reminds me of something an old professor told me when I was in graduate school. He was a historian who had grown disgusted with the direction in which academia had gone. In his class, we would dig deep into some of the work of prominent political scientists and expose the flaws in their papers and books. This was effective in puncturing the aura that surrounded high-status figures in academia, and we would wonder how they got away with producing such drivel. He told us that many academics saw their work “like a game.” You don’t care all that much if someone you know cheats in a board game. Who cares? Why start a conflict? We’ve all got a nice thing going here, and it’s better if we all just continue getting along.

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A chooses a more capitalist system, and B chooses social democracy. Let’s say that, because of this, a poor person in B is better off.

At the tenth percentile of income, assume a person in A makes 35% of the average, or $35,000 a year. In Country B, because it engages in more redistribution, the person at the tenth percentile makes 45% of the average income, so $45,000. This is unrealistically high for the difference between relatively unequal and relatively equal rich countries, as the gap between the US and Sweden is much smaller than this. But let’s just go with it.

Let’s also assume that because A is more capitalist, it has faster growth. A grows at 2% a year, compared to 1% a year for B. In per capita, PPP-adjusted terms, America has grown about an extra 1% a year compared to Italy over the last three decades, so this is not unrealistic.

Here’s what happens in each country to average income and income at the tenth percentile over the next fifty years, assuming the ratio between the two doesn’t change.

By year 26, the poor person in A ($58.6K) ends up wealthier than their counterpart in B ($58.3K). From there, the gap grows. In 50 years, the poor person in A is at $94K, compared to $74K in B. That’s ignoring what has happened to the average, which is now $269K in A and $164K in B, and of course we’re ignoring everyone doing better than average too.

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It was genuinely shocking to me how bad the arguments against the hereditarian hypothesis were in those years. Geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that on many genetic markers there was more variation within races than between them. This somehow meant that the concept of race had “virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” This is such a bad argument that it is now called “Lewontin’s fallacy.”

Writers like Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould tried to say that humans had separated too recently for important cognitive or behavioral differences to exist.

This can be refuted by…simply looking at human beings. Honestly, that’s all you need to do. There is obviously enough temporal separation between human races to make them appear very different. So the idea that there couldn’t be cognitive or behavioral differences was always based on the at least implicit assumption that physical features change much faster than mental traits. I’m aware of no principle of evolution that indicates that is the case. And we’ve actually seen species change in their mental traits on time scales that are much shorter than those that separate major human races.

In fact, when we breed animals for certain kinds of behavior, we usually end up changing their physical appearance too. The same is true when going in the opposite direction. Chickens selected for body weight become more aggressive. And dog behavior varies according to traits like weight and skull shape. If among animal species you see two populations that have zero overlap in physical appearance, then the odds that they would have no statistical differences on important behavioral or cognitive traits are quite low. The main reason that races diverge in physical appearance in the first place is that different environments selected for different physical features. It’s simply not credible that regions with such diverse climates wouldn’t also shape cognitive and behavioral traits. You wouldn’t expect this with any other species.

The fact that Gould and Lewontin were able to publish influential articles and books with such terrible arguments reflects how much desperation there was to refute the hereditarian hypothesis. The typical liberal found the ideas put forth by Jensen and others like him so uncomfortable that they couldn’t even stand the thought of genetic racial gaps being an open question. They needed people with fancy credentials to tell them that natural race differences were impossible.

Herrnstein died in 1994, and Jensen passed away in 2012. They left no successors. The Trump administration might claim to be bringing back free speech on university campuses, but the taboo on postulating natural racial differences in IQ is so strong that it’s one thing that is well beyond the power of the law to remedy.

And yet…science has marched on. In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues found that humans outside of Africa had 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. That same year, scientists first reported on the discovery of an archaic hominin population called Denisovans, who make up about 4-6% of the ancestry of Melanesians. Trace amounts of Denisovan heritage can be found in other modern populations including East Asians and Native Americans.

Ancestry in the 1-6% range might not seem like a lot, but even small genetic influences can have a major effect. For example, Tibetans have a Denisovan-derived genetic variant that helps in high-altitude environments, indicating that it was important in their evolutionary history. For now, scientists can only speculate regarding most traits our hominin cousins may have given to different populations.

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Now imagine that you are writing this in a country that has a colored tax. If you are black, Hispanic, etc., some part of your paycheck is taken away and given to white people. In fact, programs earmarked specifically for whites make up over a third of the federal budget. Moreover, these programs are projected to grow to the point that, in less than a decade, they will be impossible to maintain as is, and our society will have to choose some combination of tax hikes and spending cuts as a result.

I would think that in such a situation, cutting white entitlements should be your main issue. But Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America doesn’t take that route when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. Rather, despite pages and pages explaining how the elderly are too wealthy relative to the young, he believes that entitlements need to be expanded.

The reasons he gives for this highlight the extent to which his book about “gerontocracy” is not ultimately about redistributing resources and power by age, but socialism. When anti-gerontocracy and anti-capitalism conflict, as in what to do about Social Security and Medicare, hostility to individual liberty and markets tends to win, although YIMBYism is an exception to this. One must ensure that when we dispossess old people, it has to be done in the service of building a more collectivist society where government takes a larger role in providing care, meeting people’s needs, and placing limits on the control private individuals have over resources.

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Tucker Carlson is outraged, having made resistance to Flock cameras one of the messages he prints out on the hats he sells for allowing his fans to broadcast their low socioeconomic status. Groups that are worth taking more seriously, like the Institute for Justice and the ACLU, have also expressed concerns. How much should we worry? And where should we come down in this particular iteration of the old debate of liberty versus security?

Flock Cameras Likely Explain the Recent Crime Collapse

On the plus side of this technology, a 2023 study from the company itself estimated that Flock cameras are used in solving 700K crimes each year, or approximately 10% of all reported crime in the US. This study involved surveying law enforcement agencies that were Flock customers, ending up with 123 respondents that provided data researchers considered adequate for analysis. They were asked “How many arrests have you made that can directly be attributed to the use of a Flock Safety camera?” and asked to provide corresponding case records.

From there, the authors make broader estimates of society at large. More recent research from Flock boasts about last year seeing 1,000,000 “cases supported” and helping to locate approximately 10,000 missing persons. The company estimates that its technology was involved in roughly one in five cases cleared in its customer jurisdictions.

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Both of our major political parties are being overtaken by virulent strains of populism. On the right, MAGA has normalized corruption, misinformation, and open bigotry. On the Democratic side, avowed socialists have been winning primaries, bringing closer to power politicians whose agendas pose a distinct threat to the country’s long-term economic health.

No single factor caused this deterioration. But one contributor has been the tendency of politicians and intellectuals who should know better to place partisan interests above the greater good. We cannot criticize the crazy people on our own side, the thinking goes, without giving the opposition an advantage and helping it gain power.

Escaping this undesirable state of affairs will require leadership, along with concrete steps to build reciprocal trust across the political aisle. Toward that end, I have a simple proposal: Nationally prominent Republicans should reject Ken Paxton and support James Talarico in the Texas Senate race. At the same time, Democrats should reject Abdul El-Sayed and support Mike Rogers. Members of each party should do this in the context of creating a bipartisan movement of politicians, activists, intellectuals, and donors that is both clear-eyed about political realities and optimistic that we can make things better

Luckily, prediction markets and prognosticators consider each race a toss-up, meaning no party would gain a clear advantage from such a movement. If both efforts succeeded, Republicans and Democrats would simply exchange one seat apiece while preventing two unusually bad candidates from entering the Senate.

Paxton is a generationally corrupt politician. In 2023, the Texas House impeached him by a vote of 121–23—a bipartisan majority that included more than 70 percent of House Republicans—over allegations that he abused his office to assist a wealthy donor and retaliated against whistleblowers who reported him. He stayed in office after Donald Trump took an interest in the story and pressured Republicans to vote to acquit him in the Senate

Meanwhile, in nominating El-Sayed, Michigan Democrats have selected a candidate on the party’s far-left edge. He has repeatedly campaigned with Hasan Piker, a socialist streamer who called Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world” and defended Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea as justifiable.

Partisans will find much to dislike about Talarico and Rogers. But neither has revealed himself to be remotely as corrupt as Paxton or shown El-Sayed’s willingness to embrace radical left-wing economic policies and align himself with apologists for authoritarianism.

The parties could continue fighting for control of the Senate everywhere else on the map. Rather than gambling on winning both races and risking the election of both Paxton and El-Sayed, each side would accept one victory and one defeat.

Of course, it would be foolish to expect every Republican or Democrat to sign on to such a plan. But it would take only a few prominent political figures from each side to turn their effort into a major national story.

One problem our politics has faced in recent years has been the difficulty of inspiring moderate and independent voters who are sick of partisanship, corruption, and politicians embracing the most odious figures on the left and right. A Rogers–Talarico bargain could give those voters something to believe in. And because both races are competitive, there is a plausible chance that such a movement could tip each contest toward the more acceptable candidate.

This path would, of course, involve risk. What if Republican-leaning voters in Texas did the right thing and rejected Paxton while Michigan Democrats didn’t, or vice versa? Any political figure who endorses a member of the opposing party while control of the Senate hangs in the balance would be opening themselves up to attacks from within their coalition. Still, some leaders and intellectuals might see an advantage in betting on a future politics that is less acrimonious and destructive than what we have now.

The combination of these two terrible candidates and their being involved in two similarly competitive races creates a rare opportunity. If either contest were a blowout, there would be little possibility of a positive-sum arrangement that placed the interests of the country above those of either party.

Seizing the opportunity now provided will require real leadership. If American politics ever moves in a healthier direction, the nation will be deeply indebted to those who showed courage during an era in which it was conspicuously absent.

To call each race a toss-up might be a bit of an exaggeration, at least in Michigan. On Kalshi, Paxton has a 54% chance as I write this, and El-Sayed is at 62%. So the bargain would very slightly favor Republicans, but it’s close enough that neither side is taking a huge risk here. I don’t see why a few people couldn’t start on this cross-endorsement thing, and then it could snowball. It’s risky at the individual level, but not so much that I would put it in the impossible category. The more people do it, the more cover they have.

In other “Country over Party” news, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs is apparently going to pick James Giles, a Republican former mayor of Mesa, to run alongside her. This is timely, coming on the heels of my article on what has happened to Arizona Republicans. Giles was already a critic of MAGA, so it’s not that radical of a step, but still notable and interesting. Hobbs is running against Andy Biggs, who was one of only 12 members of the House to vote against giving Congressional Gold Medals to US Capitol Police over what happened on January 6. That means he’s at the extreme end of the pro-insurrectionist spectrum, even within the Republican Party. We need more gestures like this.

I’ve never actually watched The West Wing, which ran on NBC from 1999 to 2006, but the show has remained famous for its idealistic portrayal of politics. I just had a funny thought that I should livestream myself watching the show and reacting to it, so look forward to that.

Temperamentally and politically, I’m not really a moderate. I’d like a world much different than the one we have. But I’ve realized that practical politics has to at this moment involve a defense of the establishment, since any attempt to use populism to remake society will take us further away from the kind of country I want to live in. This is because public opinion is really awful, especially if you weigh the views of individuals by intensity, which is what matters most in practice. The median voter is actually better than the more mobilized part of the public, since El-Sayed and Paxton will each underperform for their state. Both Democrat and Republican primary voters are currently behaving irresponsibly because these are the most engaged electorates, and being engaged in politics now increasingly means spending a lot of time on the internet and indulging in false narratives and the kinds of hatreds that often drive mass movements.

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The Chuck Edwards thing I find quite hilarious, and we end up getting into a long debate about what counts as simping as we browse through the ethics report.

Check out my X thread on the Edwards story.

See also Michael on Max Miller’s strange “political marriage,” which Trump officiated.

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Despite this clear and straightforward fact, I’ve rarely seen anyone make an obvious argument that seems to follow from it: men should get preferences in jobs, and probably other things that involve material status like inheritance.

This is because a dollar is worth a lot more to a man than a woman, in the same way that it matters more to a poor person than a rich person. The latter fact is used to justify economic redistribution, and the logic seems equally sound when comparing the sexes.

When it comes to buying goods in a store, a dollar is equally valuable in the pocket of an individual of either sex. But it does more to contribute to a man’s social position and future prospects of starting a family.

There’s even evidence that couples are least stable when the woman earns more than the man. A Swedish study of lottery winners showed that men who won were more likely to get married and have children, while married women who won got divorced at nearly double the baseline rate. This means that if you are choosing between a male and female employee, giving the man the job is more likely to create a family, while giving the woman the job might destroy one.

Usually, arguments that rely on the idea of job competition rest on economic illiteracy. You should never restrict immigration, free trade, or the deployment of new technologies on the grounds of labor competition, although you may have other reasons for taking these positions. Destroying jobs is how progress happens. Labor competition can drive wages down and even put people out of work in the short run, but there is no other way to improve living standards. We’re all better off when we think about how to make society more productive rather than see jobs as scarce goods that we need to distribute fairly.

But here, there are potentially positive sum outcomes to society giving jobs to males over females. Doing so can lead to more sexual attraction in the world, more coupling, and more families. In theory, it is basically the equivalent of waving a magic wand and making all women more physically attractive to the opposite sex, but doing it for men instead, who are judged less based on looks and more on relative wealth and status.

Here, you might be saying that mate preferences will change to account for new technological developments. That always happens to some extent, but one of the key lessons of evolutionary psychology is that people in modern societies continue to operate using behavioral modules that are no longer adaptive.

For example, men like big breasts. The evolutionary reason for this is that boobs indicate sexual maturity, fertility, and necessary energy reserves. Someone may be tempted to argue that, these days, everyone has sufficient calories and baby formula has already been invented, so men should stop prioritizing breast size. But attraction doesn’t work like that. Even if the object of attraction is no longer as good a signal for reproductive success, women are still rational to get breast implants.

Likewise, female preferences can’t just “get with the times” because we’ve achieved greater sexual equality in the economic realm. Women’s attraction to those with more resources and status than themselves is as hardwired as men’s attraction to breasts. When a male earns more money than a woman and has a more desirable job, she is more likely to want to partner with him. It does little good to tell her “Stop caring so much about money! That’s just caveman values talking. Today, you don’t actually need a man to support you.” We don’t choose what we’re attracted to. Instead of adjusting their desires to take into account modern conditions, a lot of people will simply end up not partnering up.

It seems that a lot of right-wing economic populism, of the type represented by groups like American Compass and politicians like JD Vance, is about trying to create a world where men have higher status than women, with the implicit assumption that this will lead to more family formation. Hence, they prefer an economy that creates more manufacturing jobs, where men tend to have an advantage, over one with more service jobs, where women do relatively better. The problem here is that government central planning is difficult enough to do when you are directly shooting for a particular outcome. Trying to remake the economy as you’re hiding your ultimate motivations from others and not explicitly pursuing your real goal – in this case increasing relative male status – is even less likely to succeed. This is why right-wing economic populism simply makes everyone poorer without doing anything for family formation.

In his 2022 Senate campaign, Blake Masters would show how based he was by talking about how it should be possible to support a family on a single salary, while usually not specifying which sex would be the one working. This argument made no sense. Objectively, you can definitely live a 1950s lifestyle on one salary today without much problem. But most women are not going to marry you if that’s all you can provide. I’m often extremely hard on right-wing economic populists despite agreeing with some of their social goals because I think that by refusing to be honest about what they want, they talk themselves into dumb economic views and end up building ideological constructions based on their trying to avoid saying what is actually bothering them.

So does this mean that we should just directly advocate for male preferences in hiring, whether through government or the private sector? Well, to start, we can say that women caring more about a partner’s income is another good reason to get rid of affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws meant to help women. I’m of the belief that such programs shouldn’t exist anyway because the market punishes irrational discrimination, and even if it doesn’t, freedom of association matters. If government policies to help women are also bad for family formation because they raise the status of females relative to males, that is just another reason they shouldn’t exist.

At the very least, we can say job preferences in favor of men are much easier to rationally justify than discrimination going in the other direction. Here, we can add that men who face financial difficulties in life are more likely to abuse drugs, suffer depression, and commit suicide, so even if we didn’t care about marriage and babies, there are other reasons to make policy with the idea that jobs matter more to men in mind.

All that said, I don’t think male job preferences can work in terms of helping family formation. There’s a Catch-22 quality to the debate. Men become more attractive if they are higher status than women. But what does it do to a man’s status when he argues for special preferences from society on the grounds that he needs them in order to attract a partner? We can call this the male status paradox. Men need higher status than women to have reproductive success, but a man arguing that case loses status.

Whenever I see men talking about how they need to be protected in the labor market from competition or they want society to do something for them, I am overwhelmed by disgust. I can just imagine how women feel, given that they have been evolutionarily constructed to be repulsed by losers. This is why “men’s rights” has a stench to it and is a lot less politically powerful than feminism.

It also explains why women, particularly those who are successful or highly educated, react so negatively to the traditionalist and populist right. They understand that the ultimate goal of such movements is to reduce their status, as can be seen in the outraged reaction to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark. Right-wing populists, in addition to taking standard conservative views on social issues, tend to glorify things that men are better at than women, like toughness and physical labor. If a trad movement took power in a Western country with the goal of raising relative male status, the situation would end up like Iran, where you would win over some of the lower classes but get massive resistance among the more educated segments of the public, particularly women. Any gain in increasing mutual attraction by using government to artificially boost male status would probably be more than cancelled out by women resenting the way that they are being treated.

And here is perhaps the genius of religion, and why faith traditions that call for male leadership in public life have proved so adaptive. Religion creates patriarchy without men directly having to argue for it. “Look, honey, I’d love for you to have equal rights and responsibilities, but it’s just not in God’s plan. It’s right there in the Bible. So what are you going to do?” Religions give men higher status, thus making them more attractive partners, without the ick-inducing sight of men saying that they need to keep women down in order to have a chance of finding a mate. This doesn’t require that everyone in a community even believe in God. Rather, it’s enough that people believe that others do, which creates communal norms that everyone feels obliged to follow.

Even without religion, an economy favoring male skills in the labor force gives us the same effect. When hard manual labor is the best way to earn a living for most people – which has been true throughout most of history – men will have a lot more money than women, and we don’t even need evolutionary theory to explain why women will be more inclined to be housewives, since material incentives alone will make such a life more attractive. But the way heterosexual attraction works likely compounds the effect. The problem with the American Compass types is that they have convinced themselves that you can just have government decide to rearrange the economy to engineer higher male status without making everyone much poorer, which would not be sustainable as a policy orientation.

To the extent that we can get rid of female status-enhancing aspects of the economy that make society worse off in the aggregate – like anti-discrimination laws – we should definitely do that. And maybe we should in fact sacrifice some economic growth for more family formation, but we need to be honest about what we’re doing. A movement that emphasizes crank economic ideas as a mask for social goals is going to draw in true believing cranks, and end up pushing for policies that are unlikely to help anyone.

In the last three quarters of a century, we’ve seen four general trends that have reduced male status relative to female status: the decline in religion, the decline in the value of physical labor relative to social skills and intellectual labor, birth control making pregnancy optional, and government programs and initiatives to benefit women. It is thus unsurprising that coupling and birth rates are falling everywhere, with the partial exception of communities that remain strongly centered around a religious tradition, despite living standards improving for nearly everyone.

Maybe the outcome isn’t so bad? Why do we need low status men to form families anyway? There are good reasons to worry about population decline, but if the declines are coming disproportionately among the less productive members of society, one can argue that this is at least a silver lining. And indeed, there’s today a positive relationship between income and fertility among men. Perhaps we should focus on pro-natalism directed at the upper class – where the wealthiest men still outearn practically all women – since the sexes have achieved more relative equality at the left end of the socioeconomic spectrum, meaning that many low status men don’t have much hope of starting families no matter what we do.

Pro-natalism has two components: encouraging coupling, and then the decision to have children. High-status men still get married at relatively high rates, so with them it is mostly a matter of convincing them and their wives that having kids is something worth doing. But there may be hard limits to what society can do for those who are unable to attract a mate in the first place.

I like how this treats left-wing policy goals themselves as accomplishments. “Paid maternity leave”, “higher minimum wage”, and “statutory paid holiday.” What if a country just declared the entire year a paid holiday? I guess that would be a great success story. This reminds me of how the Soviet Union had an endless number of rights guaranteed in its constitution, for all that was worth.

Economic statism is always sold as something that will help make societies richer. When it fails, you can just point to the policies themselves as a success that refutes the need to worry about economic comparisons at all! I can just start listing right-wing political goals like more religious freedom, free speech, and lower taxes to prove America is a better place to live.

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This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

People like to share opinions on politics. In theory, we should be able to settle major disputes through prediction markets. Do you think Democrats or Republicans are better for economic growth? Which approach to foreign policy is more likely to deliver global peace? All we need is to bet on GDP growth or global combat deaths conditional on each side winning an election. Do this enough times and, if the markets turn out to be well-calibrated, we might learn something new.

Pundits run their mouths and professors come up with theories, but if such figures started making actual bets and we could track their predictions over time, maybe we’d be better able to decide who to listen to. The best ways to fight crime, make societies wealthier, and avoid war could start to have scientifically precise answers.

I still believe that prediction markets are pretty well-calibrated. When, for example, I hear about an up-and-coming politician and want to see whether he has a chance in an election, I will check the prediction markets first. That is the single best source of information for many questions one might ask. I’m glad they’re de facto legal now, and support them continuing to be allowed on the grounds of both libertarian principles and the idea that knowledge is good.

One positive impact can be seen in the fact that there used to be more of a culture of pundits making off-the-wall predictions and getting attention for them. I’ve seen less of that in recent years, because we can always reply “if you believe that, why not bet on it?” And even though journalists can say it would be a conflict of interest to do so, the theoretical possibility still has an impact. We may accept that journalists don’t place bets, but nonetheless dismiss the wild speculator on the grounds that he hasn’t done a good job of convincing others of his views, because if he had, the market would have moved more. CNN will now point to prediction markets in discussing the likely outcome of an election, and that is clearly a superior method of covering the news relative to having talking heads spout evidence-free opinions, often based on what they hope is true.

Despite those clear benefits, I no longer think that prediction markets are going to come anywhere close to revolutionizing the search for knowledge or introducing a new system of government, or taking us toward a futarchic utopia, unless there is a real effort to merge financial incentives with prestige incentives.

Usually, when I change my mind on something, the effect is gradual. In this case, however, I can trace the shift in my thinking to one specific article. This was a May 2024 essay, “Why Prediction Markets Aren’t Popular,” by Nick Whitaker and J Zachary Mazlish. It was written before Trump won reelection and we got de facto legalization. The two authors argued that, while prediction market enthusiasts thought that the law was the main thing holding them back, there were more fundamental problems that they were ignoring.

There is one important reason that prediction markets are not used by savers, and probably never will be. Prediction markets, unlike most asset markets, are zero-sum – in fact they are negative-sum, once you factor in platform fees. And if your money is in a prediction market, it can’t be invested in equities, or be earning interest in the bank, either. Every winner of a prediction market necessitates an equal and opposite loser. Securities investors with diversified portfolios can expect positive returns in the long term, because they are giving up their money for others to use to create output and wealth, in exchange for a share of what they create. That’s why responsible people have their pensions in stocks and bonds, rather than a diversified portfolio of sportsbooks. Positive-sum savings vehicles are far, far superior to zero-sum ones, for the simple reason that they will grow your savings in the long run.

Since that time, we have gotten a new administration that has basically let the prediction market sites run wild, which has disproved the main thesis of the article – prediction markets have in fact become popular. But the essay was wrong in a way that proved some of its larger points correct. Whitaker and Mazlish wrote that gamblers wouldn’t want to participate because it would take too long to resolve bets and the topics were too esoteric, and that sophisticated players as a result wouldn’t want to be involved because there wouldn’t be that much money to be made. And, as the passage above indicates, savers also would always stay away for the reason that prediction markets are zero-sum.

But, as it turns out, you could have an endless number of prediction markets on topics that resolve quickly. We’ve also learned that a lot of people are interested in gambling on random, non-sports related content. Prediction market trade volume has exploded since mid-2025, coinciding with de facto legalization.1

Yet these markets aren’t exactly the places where you would expect intellectuals and pundits to prove themselves. Instead, we have winner-take-all systems composed of a lot of suckers and a few large winners, and little betting on fundamental questions that might tell us something important about the world that we didn’t know before.

A May analysis from the Wall Street Journal shows that the top 0.1% of traders on Polymarket make 67% of the profits. And if you sort traders by trade frequency, only the top 0.1% make money on average. Those at the top are not smart pundits using their forecasting skills to improve their reputations, but largely bots that have been trained to take advantage of everyone else. You also have a lot of insider trading going on, meaning prediction markets are largely moving money from outsiders to insiders.

Knowing that their business model depends on stupid people losing money, Polymarket has found it advantageous to sponsor influencers who have large, unsophisticated audiences, primarily on the political right. I’ll note here that Polymarket has also reached out to me to discuss sponsorships, but it never ended up working out, and I suspect it’s because they understand that my readers aren’t the types to go out and bet their life savings on it being revealed that Michelle Obama is actually a man. Contrast this with a company like Mechanize, which wants to reach productive and talented individuals in order to engage in positive-sum economic activity.

Speaking of which…

This post is brought to you by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

While it has been teaming up with trash influencers, Polymarket has engaged in fraudulent practices when it comes to making ads, staging fake instances of people making money and sharing them as real videos. Prediction markets have just become another right-wing scam in the MAGA era. Again, I’m fine with brushing this off by saying fools and their money are soon parted, we must preserve individual liberty, etc. Being allowed to blow all your savings because of some fake news you saw on social media is one of your God-given rights in my mind, and we cannot take away that right from someone without robbing them of their dignity. But I don’t have to praise the people who benefit from the scam if they make taking advantage of the weaknesses of others a key part of their business model.

As for more esoteric topics we might care about like “what kind of economic system is good for growth,” Whitaker and Mazlish remain on point. Only smart people care about these things, and they have better things to do with their money than play a zero-sum game against others who also know what they’re doing, often having to wait a long time to get any payoff. If markets don’t have a lot of liquidity, they can more easily be moved by large or motivated bets, and may lack the ability to incorporate the wide sources of independent knowledge that make prediction markets work. Less liquid markets aren’t necessarily always less well-calibrated, but prediction markets that are volatile and have few people betting on them are unlikely to convince people that they’re doing anything useful, any more than Metaculus predictions do.

There are already other ways to get at many of the same questions that prediction markets deal with through the stock market or other financial indicators. I think Milei’s policies are good for Argentina because of the way markets react to rises and falls in his political fortunes, and people who aren’t convinced by that argument aren’t going to be convinced to become capitalists because of what prediction markets say. Once again, this isn’t necessarily a problem with prediction markets, but it does raise the question of what exactly their added value is.

The fact that stock markets already exist, and, again, they’re not zero sum, is an issue for the theory that prediction markets are going to give us insights on important questions we don’t already have. That’s true even if the latter are superior to normal punditry on questions like who will win an election or even when a war will end.

This is a problem with the culture of forecasting more generally. People act as if the top performers on Metaculus are the world’s greatest forecasters. It’s kind of like assuming that the best player in a recreational softball league is one of the world’s greatest athletes, or that chess grandmasters are the world’s smartest individuals. The best athletes in the world are doing things that are more rewarding, like playing in the NBA or winning Olympic gold medals. Similarly, we have every reason to believe that the best forecasters in the world are running successful hedge funds instead of spending all their time trying to prove how smart they are to strangers on the internet.

Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. So many people spend time being wrong on the internet and having a careless disregard for what is true that we might say it’s a good thing that individuals can gain status by making accurate forecasts. That is, unless the opportunity costs of doing so are too high, in which case they perhaps should devote their talents to something else.

Did the cause of prediction markets have to end this way? Imagine an alternative world where, instead of recruiting MAGA influencers in order to squeeze as much money as possible out of their fans, Polymarket had found a way to team up with a serious journalistic institution or credible nonprofit. They maybe could’ve funded Robin Hanson or Phil Tetlock starting a Center for Forecasting at a major university to explicitly test the predictive power of various ideologies. While prediction markets won’t deliver convincing answers to deep questions we care about through market incentives alone, the story might be different if we use a combination of market and prestige incentives. Imagine Metaculus but with real money on the line – though the effort would probably need to be heavily subsidized. If Polymarket wants to do this now with all the money they make off simple-minded MAGAs, it would go a long way toward redeeming the negative impact they’ve had on our political culture.

I’m not saying that this would be certain to produce new forms of human knowledge, but it would at least be worth trying. And going down the path of trying to win over elites would also ensure the long-term viability of prediction markets. Right now, they’re basically begging to be shut down the next time a Democratic administration comes into office.

I remain appreciative of the spirit behind prediction market enthusiasm. Until this year, when going would have conflicted with the promotion of my book, I had attended every Manifest event since the conference began and enjoyed my time there. Support for prediction markets was always motivated by the search for truth, and in my case in particular, frustration with how much stupidity there was in the discourse. That makes it a particularly bitter irony that Polymarket has been making it even dumber by providing support for awful influencers with large social media followings.

When the questions you are interested in are straightforward, go ahead and use prediction markets as a good first approximation of what you can expect to happen in the world. Unfortunately, experience has so far exposed the limits of what they can tell us through using financial incentives alone.

1

Kalshi is actually majority sports gambling, while it is around 40% of volume on Polymarket. Thus, while the chart captures an increase in sports gambling too, it also indicates a large rise in non-sports related content, as shown in the chart below. I thank Charles Fain Lehman for pointing this out to me.

Reviews:

Ross Douthat (now moving on to 60 Minutes)

Robin Hanson

Bentham’s Bulldog

Scott Sumner

Deep Left Analysis

Tibor Rutar

Stetson

Scott Greer (podcast review)

Podcasts and Streams:

Reasonably Optimistic with Megan McArdle (YouTube video here)

Razib Khan

Destiny

Coleman Hughes (Free Press link, YouTube)

Terms of Engagement, from the Harvard Ash Center

The Political Orphanage

In case you missed it, there was an Atlantic profile.

There’s also this from The Times, which applies the lesson from Kakistocracy to understand the trajectory of Nigel Farage, and Bloomberg Opinion (ungated here), which uses it to analyze the rise of the populist left.

The Free Press asked me to participate in a symposium on the rise of the latter topic. Here’s how mine begins.

The rise of democratic socialism on the left has become a cause of great concern among those who, witnessing the relative economic dynamism of America over Europe and red states over blue ones, believe free markets are the best way to organize society. Yet, as much as this is a story of the left, one can’t understand the phenomenon without looking at what’s happening on the other side of the political spectrum: namely, the complete collapse of any intellectual justification for capitalism on the right.

In a recent interview with Michael Knowles, Vice President J.D. Vance laughed about how Trump wanted to “seize the equity of AI companies.” He celebrated the fact that there is little opposition to this and praised the president for reorienting the right away from the ideas of thinkers like Milton Friedman. This isn’t a new theme for Vance, who has regularly gone out of his way to praise market-skeptical politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Read the whole thing here.

It seems that more people are finally starting to realize that JD Vance has a deep hostility to capitalism. It took long enough; he hasn’t exactly been subtle about this. It’s going to be hard to stop him becoming the nominee, but him becoming president would be the most straightforward way for the United States to end up ruled by two slopulist parties.

1. A fascinating read on the January 1942 Wannsee conference, where high-ranking officials in the Nazi regime met to organize the Final Solution. The article is more broadly on the decision to commit the Holocaust, which you can’t understand without knowing a lot about how the Nazi system worked in general. People make Hitler/Trump comparisons a lot, but a more sophisticated analogy is in governing styles. Each formed a cult of personality where they sit on top, ignore details, and have everyone below them try to enact their own priorities by either being close to the leader or making a credible case that they are acting in accordance with his wishes or the spirit of what he believes. Hitler was a committed murderous antisemite, and this was therefore a major priority of the state and party. He didn’t appear to wake up one day and say he was going to kill all Jews, but his own ideas and the behavior of those throughout his government made that seem like more and more of a natural option as the war went on. This working toward the leader concept is a very recognizable feature of right-wing populism. It’s also interesting to think about how Germany’s status as a democracy and federal state before the Nazi takeover impacted the way it governed, traces of which one can see throughout the regime.

2. I had no idea how absolutely awful the case for “nuclear safety” is. Low doses of radiation might be slightly harmful, slightly beneficial, or have no effect at all. We built a massive safetyist regime based on lies. And note how we treat nuclear risk compared to other kinds..

Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. But even it has caused only hundreds of early deaths, despite the exposure of millions of people in the exclusion zone and nearby...

Two years before Chernobyl, an explosion at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released toxic methyl isocyanate gas that killed at least 2,000 people instantly, permanently disabled another 4,000, and caused 550,000 injuries in total. In 1975, the Banqiao Dam in China failed, flooding 12,000 square kilometers, drowning at least 25,000 people, and destroying perhaps five million houses.

A warning for those who think we can reasonably regulate AI. Are we good at doing cost-benefit analysis for the purposes of regulation when it comes to new technology? It doesn’t seem like it to me.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

3. This Works in Progress article on land reclamation is one of the most informative things I’ve read in a while. Like most people, I thought land was relatively fixed. I had no idea how much of it in major cities has historically been created by draining wetlands. Singapore has expanded by a quarter since 1975, and ”eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed.” The article explains why we stopped, despite the higher costs of land making land reclamation more economically rational than ever before. The villain here is environmental regulations.

I knew NEPA and other laws passed in the 1970s were bad, but had no idea about this particular effect, which seems to be worse than all the others. I can’t say this article changed my mind on something. Rather, it provided new facts that strengthened a conviction I already had: so much of our relative stagnation is self-inflicted and due to bad policy rather than being the result of constraints placed by nature or economic necessities. It also made me even less concerned about global warming than I was before. Who cares about rising sea levels? Draining water is apparently very easy. This is yet another argument as to why, instead of focusing on stopping climate change, we should work on adapting to it.

4. Decker on caste in India. This is quite horrifying. The article gave me a new perspective on the connections between kinship based cultures and strong labor protections, as leveling norms make some kinds of policy choices more natural for a society than others. My other major thought here is how awful everything about the caste system and the culture it is based in looks, in contrast to how great Indians are as immigrants. Can selective migration explain everything? It’s the largest country in the world, after all.

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There’s little danger of Lamb losing the seat for Republicans, given the political tilt of the 5th district. But his victory is the latest in a story of how MAGA-fueled populism has hollowed out the Arizona Republican Party, both in terms of making it electorally weaker and less fit to govern.

This is a shame, because Arizona had been a success story demonstrating that conservative ideas work at the state level. It has seen high population and economic growth over the last several decades. Here is a comparison in real total personal income between Arizona and neighboring New Mexico, a state that is somewhat similar in terms of climate and demographics. But New Mexico has been run by Democrats, and as a result has done much worse. This includes population growth and per capita growth, but I’ve always said that states deserve to be judged based on how many people they draw in or force out.

This success has occurred under conservative governance. Between 1991 and 2023, Arizona had a Republican governor in 26 out of 32 years. The GOP has held the state House continuously from the 1966 midterms, and the state Senate since winning it in 2002.

Yet while Republicans continue to control both houses of the legislature, they’ve started to regularly lose statewide elections. Trump won Arizona in 2016 and 2024, but came up just short in 2020. Two years later, Democrat Katie Hobbs won the governorship. And when Mark Kelly took office in late 2020, it was the first time Democrats held both Arizona Senate seats since the 1950s.

The bad recent luck can be directly traced to poor candidate selection, caused by a MAGA takeover. In 2019, the state GOP selected Kelli Ward to lead the party, replacing a more conventional Republican. Her platform was that other Arizona Republicans were not Trumpy enough, and in her efforts to make the party more of a cult of personality, she reached out to right-wing conspiracy theorists as part of a conscious effort to change the type of people it was trying to reach.

Trump’s loss in 2020 accelerated the MAGA-fication of the Arizona GOP. Ward and her husband were among 11 Arizona Republicans who signed a document putting themselves forward as the legitimate electors of the state in an effort to overturn the results. But Arizona was controlled by establishment Republicans at the time, and elected leaders refused to go along with Trump’s coup attempt.

Upon losing the 2020 election, Trump and Rudy Giuliani called Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers and encouraged him to overturn the results of the state on the grounds that illegal immigrants and dead people had voted. Bowers asked for evidence, which they promised to deliver. There was of course no evidence ever provided, and there has been no evidence of substantial election fraud in 2020 since that time. Nonetheless, Trump and Giuliani put more pressure on Bowers to hold hearings on the topic, and MAGAs went to his house with bullhorns while accusing him of being a pedophile, because, of course, that’s what MAGAs do.

Since that time, election deniers have been winning nominations for statewide elections. In 2022, Republicans nominated Kari Lake for governor, a former newscaster who made Trump being cheated out of the 2020 election central to her political identity. She went on to lose in the general, and unsurprisingly refused to accept the outcome, filing a lawsuit to reverse the results. Lake raised money from supporters in order to fund her legal battles, with very little of it actually going to pay lawyers.

On the ballot alongside Lake in 2022, the Republicans put forward as their Senate candidate Blake Masters, a tech bro who has a different vibe from most MAGAs but nonetheless is a walking personification of the Based Ritual. During his campaign, Masters filmed a video explaining that the right to own a gun was about being able to shoot at the government, praised the writings of the Unabomber, and declared that those who performed abortions were “demonic.”

Masters lost, but to his credit conceded defeat. The Tech Bro/MAGA mind meld on right-wing brain worms is something I’ve written a lot about before. See Curtis Yarvin, who in 2026 is still waiting for the smoking gun (or any evidence at all, because again, there has been none) that 2020 was stolen.

In 2024, Lake was on the ballot again, this time as the Republican nominee for Senate. As with her previous race, Lake lost and of course refused to concede. Now she has a Trump administration job involving global media, since she is apparently such a credible figure who we want deciding what kind of news and information needs to be broadcast abroad.

Masters also wasn’t done after 2022. He ran for a congressional seat two years later, and campaigned by calling his opponent Abe Hamadeh— who is of Syrian descent — an “anchor baby,” and circulating pictures of him in Mecca. He also attacked his rival for not having a wife or children, which supposedly made him less fit to serve in Congress. Hamadeh won, but don’t worry, he is also “based,” and today is one of the few Republican figures still willing to defend the Tate brothers.

I enjoyed this report on a 2024 meet-and-greet involving Masters, Hamadeh, and other candidates for the 8th congressional district.

Masters came after. He hit the high notes: that there was rampant voter fraud, that millions of illegal immigrants were pouring in, that China was evil, that Democrats were evil, that crime was out of control, that Trump is awesome…

In his pitch at the Hangar, he name-checked Vance, his endorser—“he’s a good friend of mine”—and pushed a growing line, popular among his ilk, that “American business needs to work for American workers.” But the biggest hit was the call-and-response: “The correct amount of illegal immigration is how much?” Masters asked. “Zero!” the crowd responded. “Deport them all, by the way!” he lobbed as a rejoinder. Another big hit was when Masters said: “Joe Biden committed treason against this country.” Cheers and applause.

“You guys are wide-awake—you’re paying attention,” he encouraged our aged crowd. “I got this young energy,” he promised them.

Then, Hamadeh, who is even younger than Masters, so young he brought his mom along, took the mic. Similar high notes: voter fraud, fake news, illegal immigration, Democrats evil, Trump awesome. He reminded us that he and only he was endorsed by Trump (this would change a week later, when Trump would come out with a surprise co-endorsement of Masters), that he had Trump’s number, that he texted him—though it was not clear if Trump texted back. “These Marxists are not going to hand over the keys of power so easily. We have to take it from them!” Hamadeh said. “We are at war,” he added. He pledged to designate the drug cartels as terrorist organizations, in keeping with Trump’s new bluster about invading Mexico, and promised to ban ranked choice voting, which doesn’t even exist in Arizona.

Then came Kern. “I was endorsed by President Trump when I ran for the state Senate,” he assured the crowd, before launching into it. (Voter fraud, fake news, illegal immigration, Democrats evil, Trump awesome.) Kern was so committed to election security that he had nine felony counts to prove it. “I was there on Jan. 6,” he said proudly. “I was there to hope Mike Pence would do the right thing.” He continued, wistfully reminiscing: “It was a fantastic event … 2 million people … we were waiting on Mike Pence to do the right thing.” Kern’s flourish: a pledge to defund the DOJ, the FBI, and the IRS. He also called for a boycott of Chase Bank, after they had canceled his wife’s account.

Dark stuff. Such talk is designed to appeal to an electorate that is driven by nothing but self-pitying hate. The vibes of the most energized portion of the American right are truly poisonous at this moment, and Trump’s personality is the only thing that lightens the mood a bit and stops them all from looking like a bunch of raging psychos. For all the supposed patriotism, it’s hard to even discern what people in this culture like about America, other than the fact that it happens to be the place where Trump lives.

Lamb, the cuck who was just nominated for Congress, also made a name for himself denying the 2020 results, having partnered his sheriffs’ organization with a group called True the Vote, which promoted false theories about election fraud that made their way into the film 2000 Mules.

What’s particularly interesting about all of this is that there is no real ideological difference that explains this transformation of the Arizona GOP. Rusty Bowers is against illegal immigration, pro-life, and tough on crime. He became an enemy of MAGA, and even a “pedophile,” because he didn’t try to steal an election on Trump’s behalf. The same thing happened with Georgia governor Brian Kemp, another conventional Republican who would be a MAGA in good standing if only he’d thrown out the Constitution at Trump’s request. As with Mike Pence, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s genuinely funny that political leaders will become outcasts in the Republican Party, or at least hated by MAGA diehards, for the simple reason that they happened to hold a position during a time when Trump requested that they risk going to jail for him.

The Lamb controversy is only the latest of a series of revelations in which MAGA-coded political figures have had similar scandals involving some form of cuckoldry. Roger Stone and his wife advertised for sexual partners decades ago (“Hot former model seeks exceptional, in shape muscular … studs for threesomes with herself and body builder husband”), while hacked family messages attributed to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s daughters describe him as enjoying watching his wife with other men. Jerry Falwell Jr, perhaps Trump’s most consequential evangelical supporter in 2016, acknowledged that his wife had an affair with a younger man, who himself claimed that Falwell liked being in the room when his wife and her lover had sexual relations together.

This indicates there is a peculiarly MAGA taste for cuckoldry, which might be related to the main feature of the movement being submission to a leader. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a list of cuck scandals over the last thirty years, and it gave me four cases, each of them involving someone strongly associated with MAGA. This is obviously too small of a sample size to draw any conclusions, but it is a fun thing to speculate about, and it’s interesting that I couldn’t find a single Democratic case. There might be biases in reporting one could imagine. For example, if the media was much more likely to dig deeply into family scandals involving Republicans than Democrats, we might get more specific reporting on dysfunctional MAGA behavior.

So as fun as it would be to say MAGAs are a bunch of literal cucks, the evidence we have is at most highly suggestive. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the relationship did exist, for the reason that populism is associated with lower moral standards more generally. Kakistocracy argues that character flaws tend to be correlated, and populism selects for worse people across the board. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the case that figures who are corrupt, authoritarian, sexually perverted, conspiratorial, racist, and anti-science would find themselves under the same umbrella, but that’s what you get with populism, due to the selection mechanisms involved.

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The fact that there is no ideological root at the bottom of the change in the Arizona GOP gives us a perfect test case for the theory that populism draws bad people into politics. The Republican Party of the state has been purging more respectable figures and elevating lunatics because this is what happens when you make loyalty to Trump and adherence to his false theories about voter fraud a necessary qualification for getting ahead.

This is all very bleak, but I think there is some cause for optimism here. These people are motivated by loyalty to Trump. Eventually, Trump is going to go away. Surely, as the less educated party, Republicans will still have a lot of crazy people around, but it seems that loyalty toward one man is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of energizing and mobilizing them, and consolidating their efforts. Most political analysts I think underestimate the extent to which Trump is a cause of our problems rather than simply a symptom of them, because they’re educated people who don’t get leader worship at a gut level. A lot of MAGAs aren’t into politics because they care all that much about immigration, or the cost of living, or whatever. They just love Trump! And organizing around the principle of loyalty to Trump creates a more binary form of politics than organizing around some kind of idea. It’s harder to meet a movement halfway when its underlying principle is worship of one man, who commands that people lie and break the law on his behalf. Kari Lake, Blake Masters, etc. give you the baggage of MAGA without any of the benefits. That’s why Trump ran four and a half points ahead of Lake in 2024 on the same ballot.

Pre-MAGA, the mascot of the Arizona Republican Party could be imagined as the small business owner or corporate executive. Doug Ducey, the last Republican governor of the state, was once CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, a very wholesome and normal job that is usually not a step toward political office. His governorship was mostly considered a success but he was term-limited out of office. There was then talk of Ducey running for Senate, but he declined, maybe because he realized that he didn’t have a chance in the primaries due to his getting on Trump’s bad side by not helping try to steal the Arizona election in 2020.

The businessman as the heart and soul of the Arizona GOP had been replaced by the internet conspiracy theorist, or maybe a boomer who is suffering cognitive decline, watches cable news all day, and finds himself growing increasingly convinced that he might be smothered by the immigrants changing his bedpan. But neither the internet conspiracy theorist nor the senile retiree has a natural propensity toward organizing and getting into public office in the same way that the businessman does. For the MAGA to be motivated to act, he needs to be amused. The question for the future of the Republican Party is whether their new populist base will find enough entertainment in post-Trump politics to continue ruining American conservatism.

We start by arguing about housing. Beyond all the back-and-forth, we uncovered a real philosophical difference. Although Hilton calls himself a YIMBY, he believes in local control and that the state shouldn’t be telling cities and towns that they need to allow more building. Instead, he’d like to go after labor and environmental regulations and find ways to develop more land outside of established communities. I am all for that. But the fact that we have so much of the Bay Area zoned for single-family homes is absolutely crazy given how much wealth is being created there and how much under any rational economic system the region should be growing. Local control in my view does not trump individual rights, and governments that make housing decisions at higher levels tend to do a better job on this, with Japan being a standard example.

Until recent changes in the law, roughly two-thirds of San Francisco’s residential land was reserved for single-family homes, and Palo Alto has historically been worse. In Chinese hubs where tech industries have taken off, we’ve seen the emergence of megacities like Shenzhen, with a population that has gone from approximately 330,000 in 1980 to over 17 million today. Meanwhile, San Francisco went from 775,000 people in 1950 to only about 874,000 as of 2020. This is disgraceful. It’s great that the Bay Area is minting billionaires. But we also want people who work for their companies to be able to afford to live in the area, and for the wealth to contribute to increases in tax revenue and jobs for barbers, waiters, writers, teachers, and other new residents – the kinds of people who are currently priced out due to artificial scarcity. We’ve made a few old homeowners extremely rich at the expense of everyone else.

It seems to me that blue-state Republicans have found a way to run against Democratic YIMBYs by hammering on about defending “local control.” This is strange, because no conservatives believe that Texas should adopt policies that make it easier for communities to block development. In fact, the state has gone in precisely the opposite direction, recently enacting by-right zoning in large cities. The people involved in local fights are usually far from representative of their communities. And even if they are, who cares? Your local community can’t decide it doesn’t want you to speak out about certain issues, and it similarly shouldn’t have the ability to tell you what to do with your property except in the most extreme cases. The worry that moving in the direction of letting people build what they want would lead to anarchy is disproved by how much better the red state model works in terms of providing affordable and spacious housing. There may be some theoretical limit to the principle of strengthening property rights at which point it can cause harm, but Texas hasn’t reached that point, and that means that California is certainly nowhere near it.

If you want more California housing talk, see my interview with Scott Weiner.

Moving beyond that issue, I ask Hilton why he thinks Republicans have performed so poorly in California. I also bring up Spencer Pratt’s insinuations that the LA mayoral election was being stolen from him. It was reassuring to hear Hilton acknowledge that there isn’t widespread voter fraud in California, whatever the problems with the current system. This is good as a general test of openness to conspiratorial thinking, which I consider morally and intellectually poisonous.

Michael brings up Brexit, tries to get our guest to take a position on Iran, and mentions another one of his favorite topics, which is concept creep when it comes to sex trafficking.

I enjoyed this discussion and thought that the housing part in particular helped clarify where the candidate stands. Despite our disagreement on what is one aspect of one issue – albeit a very important one – I think our politics are largely aligned and I wish him the best of luck.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

One of the most important political developments of recent years is the surge of the Tech Right. The conservative-leaning Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is pouring unprecedented sums into the midterm elections, helping to prop up a dangerous Trumpism at a moment when it is weak. The crypto industry is taking regulatory capture to new heights. And Elon Musk’s X is poisoning the public conversation.

I once believed that tech billionaires entering the Republican coalition would take it in a more fact-based and less populist direction. This did not happen. There is a bitter irony in the fact that adding smart people to the coalition did not raise the collective intelligence of the movement, and may have even made it dumber.

But by understanding what went wrong, we may be able to begin working toward a political future that is less acrimonious and more pragmatic once the Trump era is over.

I speak as someone who had a front-row seat to Silicon Valley’s shift toward conservatism, and had a role to play in that change. I was the first writer to popularize the term “Tech Right,” in my newsletter. Having long believed that conservatism had a human capital problem and was infected by paranoia, conspiracy theories, and a belief in fake news, I thought that self-made entrepreneurs with backgrounds in science could only make things better. In my newsletter article, I predicted that they would push the conservative movement toward more pro-market and technocratic approaches. I was told by a major Silicon Valley figure that a former congressional leader had optimistically shared my article in a group chat filled with prominent tech entrepreneurs, encouraging them to help right a Republican Party that had gone in the wrong direction.

I was able to see the rise of the Tech Right early based not only on what I read in the news but on personal connections I had built. Although I have no background in business or software, my conservative writing had caught the eyes of some of the most famous names in the industry. My work was praised by Elon Musk, I had done podcasts with the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and my 2023 book included blurbs from Peter Thiel and David Sacks. In some cases, admiration from afar turned into close personal relationships. At one point, New York magazine even declared me “an intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right.” Through group chats, I could observe how individuals in these circles thought about current events, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis.

Before long, I began to feel uneasy about what was happening. I’d thought that conspiracy theories were increasingly popular on the right because they were being pushed by less educated voters in the coalition. But I noticed that many members of the Tech Right, if not embracing the most extreme forms of misinformation, were still confident that there was something suspicious about the 2020 election and the scientific consensus on mRNA vaccines. Talking them out of such views was difficult. They trusted me — at least for a while. But they didn’t seem to trust anyone else offering mainstream perspectives on hot-button issues.

In time, they became passionate conspiracists. And they had little interest in acquiring accurate information. Having decided, due to political disagreements, that journalists and experts could not be trusted, the brilliant minds of the Tech Right were content to do what any ordinary partisan might — go to sources that were much more inaccurate and biased than the media they detested, many of them random social media accounts.

Earlier this year, Andreessen revealed that he gets all his information from old books, podcasts, AI models, and X. Conspicuously missing from the list is any direct text-based consumption of news that goes through normal journalistic procedures — a remarkable state of affairs for someone so influential in American politics. Rather than placing a limit on conspiratorial and demagogic thinking on the right, Silicon Valley has encouraged it.

There was a time when I found taking a similarly oppositional attitude toward established authority justifiable. I agreed with many on the Tech Right that the political class had overreacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and that newly prominent left-wing ideas on topics such as race and sexuality were both misguided and dangerous for society. Yet I was never under the impression that this meant the MAGA movement or popular podcasts were more trustworthy than actual experts on most issues. The ability to maintain such a balanced perspective turned out to be much rarer than I imagined.

DOGE was the culmination of the anti-intellectual atmosphere that conservatives in tech landed in and amplified. Elon Musk’s signature government initiative was horrifying to watch from the perspective of someone who actually believes in the mission of reducing the size and scope of government. Throughout Washington, there are knowledgeable scholars who have thought carefully about how to go about making government smaller and more efficient. But because they spend their days writing detailed policy papers rather than finding ways to go viral on social media, none of them were consulted. Elon Musk, who apparently had his political worldview shaped by what he saw in his X feed, was happy to claim victory anytime he took a chainsaw to a government program, when in fact his willy-nilly cuts managed to decrease state capacity while failing to reduce spending in any meaningful way.

I eventually determined that the lesson of the Tech Right’s sad trajectory is that none of us are all that smart on our own. The only way one can expect to have reasonable opinions on political and social issues is to be embedded in a knowledge-producing ecosystem. That doesn’t mean only journalists and academics can be informed. But it does mean that those who reject educational and media institutions are destined to live in ignorance.

As important as intelligence may be for domain-specific tasks, it can easily be used to engage in motivated reasoning and justify false beliefs. Smart, talented people from outside the institutions are not going to solve the problems society faces simply because of their own unique abilities.

To solve our problems, there is no hope other than rebuilding the political culture so it can incorporate criticism and feedback. As we enter the final years of the Trump era, what remains of our established institutions should reckon with how censoriousness and ideological extremism fueled a backlash, while their critics need to work to reform those institutions rather than become cheerleaders for populist ignorance.

It’s not news that stupid people are stupid. But one feature of populist movements is that the attitudes, beliefs, and aesthetics of more excitable and less thoughtful members of the public end up in control.

When I saw anti-vaxx sentiment emerge on the right in 2021, for example, I was expecting smarter conservatives to at most tolerate it as a necessary evil one had to accept as part of engaging in coalitional politics. I never thought that they would come to sympathize with the anti-vaxxers, if not turn into enthusiastic anti-vaxxers themselves. It was the same with the question of denying the 2020 election. Neither of these positions would smart people have come up with on their own. They were either derived from the ignorant masses, in the case of anti-vaxx, or things Trump himself was saying, in the case of election denialism.

I realized at that point how little of a barrier intelligence was against picking up brain worms if you’re in a poisoned intellectual environment. I guess we should’ve known that from watching the left over the years. But I thought smarter conservatives had been selected to at least some extent for their independence of thought, and also that it was easier to be conned by fancy-looking academic journals than MAGA moms, Nick Shirley, and anonymous X accounts with frog avatars. Those who had a background in science and tech in particular might be expected to bring a fresh perspective, rather than assimilate to their new surroundings. Buying into nonsense you read in prestigious newspapers or see promoted by scientific institutions is a lot more understandable than just being influenced by hysterical nobodies on social media. The thought of an intelligent person taking ideas from the latter fills me with revulsion.

For me, adopting a politics of anti-populism means placing less emphasis on individual intelligence than I did before, and more on establishing and maintaining healthy epistemic standards. Less educated and informed voters are bad at thinking, but their greatest danger is in the fact that their ideas infect others.

This is partly a question of attitude and identity. As a thoughtful person, you should have absolute contempt for the populist style of knowledge acquisition. Some on the right came to hate liberals so much that it left little room for any other psychological dynamics to play a role in developing their scientific beliefs and political attitudes. My hatreds were always diversified, so I didn’t fall into the same trap.

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It is important to note that Greer rejects the label of white nationalist. To him, though, this rejection simply implies that he accepts the American system and doesn’t aspire to form an ethnostate. However, this is precisely what I would call a worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy. Why else consider every single form of immigration a threat, and why else should anti-white racism, especially after the vibe shift, remain such a high political priority? Greer doesn’t explain, but it all makes sense in the context of a racialist worldview.

To Greer, the victory chronicled in Whitepill means that today we can just call this conservatism. It follows that white identitarianism has so successfully swept the Right that Greer doesn’t even feel the need to make the first-order case for his beliefs.

But that leaves him vulnerable to all sorts of counterarguments (which, again, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging). Even as white identitarianism has ascended, one justification after another for limiting immigration has fallen by the wayside. It was once said new arrivals would boost crime. But crime has consistently fallen – despite some localized disorder and anecdotes that the Trump 2024 campaign pointed to as representative of the effects of immigration – except for a brief spike beginning in 2020 that was driven by higher rates of violence among inner-city natives.

Then there is the argument about migrants pushing the electorate to the Left. In her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole, Ann Coulter argued that nonwhites can be expected to vote Democratic indefinitely into the future; hence, conservatives had to close the border if they hoped to win on any other issue. In 2024, however, naturalized immigrants may well have voted majority-Republican. Now, conservatives are reduced to complaining about competition for tech jobs, despite tech workers not making up any significant part of their coalition, and the American tech industry being such an overwhelming success that it is powering the rest of the economy and putting us at the forefront of the most important industry in the world.

Some of the MAGA faithful may not see such points clearly, but Greer does. Still, he refuses to intellectually tackle them. Instead, the emotional response to immigration comes first, and justifications are simply put forward on an ad hoc basis. As the intellectual case for restrictionism gets weaker, conservative attachment to nativism only becomes more firmly entrenched.

Read the whole thing here.

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1. Tell the story accurately, in which case the audience will hate the protagonist and not be able to relate to him at all

2. Tell the story with a modern twist in order to make it palatable

Christopher Nolan made choice number two. But I don’t think it was much of a choice at all. While some on the right have criticized the film for its multiracial casting, another kind of argument says that the movie made Odysseus too much like a veteran suffering from PTSD.

I personally did find the forced diversity ridiculous. The movie left me wondering why you wouldn’t just go all the way with it and reflect the demographics of the world, or even the United States. Maybe 80% of the actors in The Odyssey are of European descent. There is something to be said for historical accuracy, which would require it to be 100%. But if Nolan really had the courage of his convictions and thought race doesn’t matter, why even have a white majority? Take an explicit stand the way Hamilton did, and discard white domination completely. Make it a third Indian and Chinese, reflecting the demographics of humanity. Instead, we got this political compromise. Keep it as a “white” story, while being able to at the same time say you checked some diversity boxes. This is a marketing choice, but artistically it makes no sense. The Elliot Page thing is too ridiculous to even be worthy of comment; you can just refer to any right-wing X account to get my take on that.

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One casting decision I did like was having Jon Bernthal as Menelaus. He looks and acts like a Fast & Furious character, which makes sense for a Bronze Age Greek involved in a love triangle. But sorry, I cannot approve of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen. Go ahead and cancel me, I don’t find her attractive.

On the film’s embrace of a more sensitive Odysseus, here is Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books:

As this resounding speech echoed in my ears, it occurred to me that it sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer—who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies—but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways. Speaking to the Times on the eve of his movie’s release, Nolan acknowledged how, as he read various translations of the Odyssey, he realized that it was the “ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”

But whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer. Is his new vehicle for Odysseus’s tale impressive in its visual impact and distinctive in its structural ingenuity? Yes. But is its “essential” Homeric? On that I’ll let Penelope have the last word: “The structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.”

See also Scott Greer for a similar take. I agree that Odysseus having feelings of shame and regret is not in any way consistent with the source material. He is haunted by all the people slaughtered at Troy and believes that sending his enemies the wooden horse was dishonorable and violated the laws of Zeus. Throughout his adventures, he has to deceive his men for the greater good, and this causes clear distress. The war is generally seen as containing very little glory in the collective memory. Instead of voluntarily signing up in order to gain honor, men are conscripted, including among the aristocrats, and even the winners end up dead or damaged and feeling betrayed by their leaders.

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