The art of letters, claimed these advocates of pen and pencil, would no longer be an art but a trade. Nimble fingers would mean nimble thoughts. Nimble thoughts would mean the end of careful weighing, careful choosing, and the careful setting forth of the results of that weighing and choosing…. Poetry written on a typewriter is apt to become hackneyed, stilted, machine-like. The fingers are slaves of habit and soon make their choice of phrases, with the result that originality is menaced.

The above quote is from a 1924 article called Terrible Typewriters on Parnassus. I found it using AI - specifically, the Perplexity Comet browser sidebar assistant function, which has basically become a permanent feature of my life.

What a great example of exactly what I was looking for! I read the full thing immediately, and didn’t even see that I had taken the same quote to open this essay until I went to insert the above screencap!

But how could you ever trust me on that? I’ve already admitted to what many consider to be the new cardinal sin of writing, any form of AI use whatsoever. Or have I, because it’s no different from Googling at this stage, and the text I could have potentially copied over isn’t even AI-generated; it’s a quote from over 100 years ago.

Here’s the problem though.

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A quick scroll down and we are already out of search territory. Now, it’s giving me guidance. Not just a tool, but a shortcut. Maybe now we’re moving away from an art to something closer to a trade — and a Faustian one at that. I don’t have to think, not carefully, not nimbly, not at all, and words can appear anyway. This could be just some guidance, or it could be taken further, a full outline, or even entire paragraphs copied directly in from the prompt response. Maybe that’s what I am doing right now, did you see the em-dash? Is there not a sentence that uses it’s not X, but Y??

Again, you’ll just have to trust that I did indeed write all that. And I did, except the em-dash, which I copied over to make a point. There always seems to be at least one of them floating around close at hand. And maybe, because of that, I’ve started using them a bit more, small symbols and ways of saying things slowly sliding into my subconscious. Having stared at so much slop it’s now slipping out of me. I am a little worried that I’ve read so much AI text by now, its own particular style will be, in whatever way, adapted into mine. Now it seems that the only way to assure readers that you actually wrote something is to be too differentiated, throw guidelines out the window, maybe insert some typos for good measure, or at least don’t correct them all when you run your drafts through Claude for a copy edit.

This is all to say that we still haven’t figured out how to calibrate appropriate AI use for writers since the debut of ChatGPT three years ago. Actually, it seems like we are actually getting worse in our understanding of what’s possible and what’s pathetic as the tools get better. What used to be just a chatbot can now produce deep research reports modeled after your own voice, having distilled some markdown file guidance from everything you’ve ever written. Agents trained to think like all your favorite authors and editors can pore over your drafts while you sleep, making suggestions, shaping your thoughts, while not exactly sharpening your thinking. Rather than jotting down notes while on a walk, you can send some AI off to do all of this, in sync, the second you have an idea. Rather than sitting with a thought for a while, a working draft could be delivered before you’re back home. If you’re like me, there’s nothing stopping you from doing that right now with the two dozen essay ideas you promised you’d get back to one day. You could basically use this paragraph as the prompt!

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For those who make their living by hitting the right keys in the right order, reading all of that was probably a bit uncomfortable. With the tech bros building our future, their unease never seems to step into the realm of what all this means for writers; it’s more focused on the existential risk of sentient paperclips, sorting polycules, and other silly things. But in one of those ink-drowned places like Westminster — an ocean and a continent away from San Francisco, a place that prides itself on being where real writers can write — all sorts of bad behavior in AI use and in declaring what’s acceptable AI use is starting to creep in. Recently, a minor scandal has emerged over Matt Goodwin, now tagged with the unfortunate moniker of MattGPT, releasing a book that appears to have been written largely with the help of AI. There are hallucinated quotes, there are GPT artifacts in the references, there is the fact that this book has come out in a little over a year since his last, and there is the publisher itself, Northstar, whose services seem to be entirely focused on having AI, ghostwriters, and ghostwriters using AI do all the work for you.

The weirdest part of this, at least for me, is not the fact that AI was obviously used in writing some of this book, but that it was used so poorly. The incompetence in applying some artificial intelligence seems disproportionate to the intense reaction to Matt for using it — shouldn’t good use be seen as worse than easily dismissed slop? Again, it’s now very easy to use AI agents in such a way that it would be difficult to distinguish Matt’s voice from typical AI speech patterns — they could have easily been trained on the entire set of books he actually wrote himself — or have them quickly run through his list of references to remove any GPT-tells. Maybe it doesn’t help, as Mary Harrington has pointed out, that this book has apparently sold quite well. It really shouldn’t be a shock to anyone with any knowledge of political media that the eager audiences for the ever-frenzied culture war drumbeat couldn’t care less about how the show keeps going, so long as it simply does. But for peer competitors, those who are committed to writing things the right way, Matt’s attempt at cashing in does represent a threat, a boundary being crossed, a new potential behavior to be brutally curtailed.

To quote a recent Derek Thompson tweet in full

Writing is thinking, and people who outsource the full writing process to AI will find their screens full of words and their minds empty of thought.

But also: All writing involves and has always involved “outsourcing”—reaching outside of the writer’s mind to pull in pieces of the world, before and after the work of making words. Writers draw their ideas from other people, books, articles; after writing they often rely on outside copy editors, fact checkers, transcribers.

Some of this stuff is just going to be done by AI in the future, and the boundaries between “good behavior” and “bad behavior” will have some blurry lines, and we should be honest and open about the blur rather than declare everybody with an open Claude window a part of the slopclass.

Anybody who says AI transcription of long interviews obliterates the identity of a writer is being a little silly. But what about copy editing? Claude is a fast and decent copy editor, but it is inhuman to rely on it for that function? Is it moral to google “Econ papers on income transfers for child poverty” but immoral to write the same thing as an AI prompt? What about throwing 500 muddled words into ChatGPT and saying “does this make any sense? what do you think I’m trying to say here?” That’s going to be useful for some people.

At an aesthetic level, I don’t like copy-pasting AI paragraphs into articles and pressing publish. That feels like me cheating myself. It feels like de-skilling. But the idea that “using AI” is anathema to the identity of being a writer is, in a few years, going to sound an awful lot like claiming that “using a computer” is a violation of the craft of writing. (Which, haha, maybe it is and we should all just go back to Steinbeck and his pencils; but talk about ships that have sailed.)

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Obviously, having ghostwriters use AI to throw together a rip off of the Strange Death of Europe is a bad move. But so is having ghostwriters to begin with! It’s not obvious to me why having another human intelligence handle all the work and then stamping your name on the cover is any better than just outsourcing all your thinking to a data center. And this happens all the time! Maybe the audiences don’t care, but the author should because they are sabotaging themselves when it comes to the next step of shipping some writing - the media tour. Now, writing a book is largely an excuse to go on podcasts, give speeches, and use these invitations to cash in on the newfound “authorly” credibility. This is where many writers actually make their money, if they make any at all. And you can’t show up to this leg of the journey with your mind empty of thought because now it’s live, you need to know your own work. What’s worse, the more people who give in to this path, the easier it will be for a similar sort of scorn to appear — any author who writes something controversial can now have their work denigrated as slop, even if no AI was used at all.

And yet, I see much more derision directed at those who are beginning to write alongside artificial intelligence than I have ever seen for authors using ghostwriters, or using unnamed editors who should really be considered co-authors given their contributions, or writing essays that are mostly just quotes with a couple of rephrased sentences thrown in between. While Thompson is right in that determining what the right type of writing will look like is going to take some time, I am more curious about why there is such vitriol against any form of AI use at all in certain sectors. The only explanation I can come back to is where we started, with the handwritten diatribes against the typewriter. Those most resistant to the idea that there can be any form of “good behavior” when using AI to write will be those who succeeded in writing before it was ever possible, and those who can’t help but romanticize a past that will never come back. And one of the greatest differences between past technological displacements is that the people precisely equipped to understand, diagnose, and demand someone do something, anything, about the situation are the writers themselves.

Writing, like AI, is both a technology (maybe the most powerful form of technology ever discovered) and the thing that advances technological progress forward. When Gutenberg found a way to mass-produce thought at scale, there were all sorts of unforeseen complications. Deliberate lies, unintentional half-truths, and endlessly debatable new ideas spread like wildfire and sent Europe into chaos. Scribes lost their jobs. And critics complained that a slew of low-quality books were breaking apart what had always been understood as “true” knowledge. And yet, in the end, Gutenberg created more opportunities for writers than ever before — almost all great literature is downstream from his press because, without distribution, it’s almost certain that not enough people would have ever had the chance to read Frankenstein or Paradise Lost or Fahrenheit 451 or any of the classics for them to be considered classics. Even those who decried the typewriter a century ago would certainly have been impressed with Bradbury churning out the first version of his masterpiece on a pay-by-the-hour typewriter in his local library in a little over a week. Did his nimble work hamstring the originality of his vision, or was it necessary to bring it to life? Could that same argument be used to let a million new writers bloom with pay-by-the-token tools? Maybe — but remember, the entire point is to fill your mind, not the page.

These are the questions all writers and readers will have to grapple with as we rush toward whatever’s next. My advice for anyone committed to figuring out how to fill both mind and page would be to set some personal ground rules and chain yourself to their mast, maybe even write them down. Personally, I refuse to publish anything that is copied and pasted from AI. I try to only use it for search when writing my drafts and save a more robust use for a copyedit at the end. I ask it not to provide any suggestions outside the grammatical. I’m willing to let it take more of a role in behind-the-scenes docs, all those necessary pitches, plans and proposals that go into intellectual work, but even then, everything should receive multiple revisions before being sent out. As for one of Thompson’s rhetorical questions, ‘What about throwing 500 muddled words into ChatGPT and saying, does this make any sense? what do you think I’m trying to say here?’ That’s going to be useful for some people.” I don’t think that will be useful for anyone, and I refuse to do it. Making yourself make sense is all the fun there is in writing; don’t deprive yourself of that.

As the past few weeks have shown, the coming conflicts in the age of automation are unlikely to feature truck drivers attacking superchargers or parking their rigs in the middle of a highway. Workers protesting job losses can usually be pacified by simply providing a new, viable career opportunity, and that’s precisely what many companies focused on re-industrializing manufacturing are doing right now. While there will be an uncomfortable transition period, I’m not worried about the dads who just want to provide for their families slipping into massive destruction or acting against their own interests. Some blue-collar boys might mourn the loss of trucking culture, having to step back from the “thin yellow line,” but most will be happy to be put to work. The same goes for white-collar office workers who may finally see their quiet dreams come true and be relieved of the endless, excruciating days in Excel. I’m reminded of The Company Men, where Ben Affleck’s character is fired from a shuttered shipbuilding firm, works construction to make ends meet, and eventually joins a shipbuilding startup. Serious men provide; they find ways to be productive and adapt to their new reality. Sabotaging a supercharger station might feel cathartic, but it’s not in anyone’s long-term interest.

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What worries me, and what must be increasingly worrying to the companies racing to automate everything, is the behavior of those who cannot slot in as white-collar executives or blue-collar laborers. These are the people who burn towns during BLM riots, set up “autonomous zones” in the name of peace that end up ruled by neighborhood warlords, or slash priceless paintings to protest for Palestinians. They do not care that destruction undermines their stated cause; they want an excuse to destroy something beautiful. This same crowd recently torched Waymos in downtown Los Angeles. There was no reason to burn the cars, no coherent political program, not even a loose ideology—only the urge to wreck a machine that embodied competence they could never match. Orwell saw the pattern in The Road to Wigan Pier: many who claim to love the poor simply hate the rich. So it will go with this contingent; they will pretend to defend the temporarily displaced, but their real aim is to lash out against anyone capable of building, a living reminder of their own inadequacy.

This reality will become harder to ignore with each passing year. As more footage circulates of people destroying robots purely for destruction’s sake, the companies that cherish their autonomous fleets will face difficult choices. It may soon be normal for Waymos in San Francisco to avoid the Tenderloin entirely, or for robo-rides in other troubled neighborhoods to carry a steep safety surcharge. Anyone caught on an external or internal camera contributing to the chaos could find themselves locked out of a whole suite of services. Burn a Waymo today and watch your Gmail, rideshare, and delivery apps vanish tomorrow. It is not personal; it is a product searching for market fit, seeking streets and customers that do not impose extra costs for cleaning, repairs, or replacements.

Automation will always thrive first in highly predictable environments. That is why robots made their commercial debut on the factory floor, where Henry Ford had already orchestrated perfect order in service of the perfect product. Yet as robotics moves from assembly lines to city streets, its preference for order is bound to look political. If robotaxis avoid certain neighborhoods because the algorithms favor passenger safety and asset security, and if particularly politically salient demographics dominate those neighborhoods, headlines crying “Racist Robots” will be inevitable. The pattern will discriminate against men as well, since they commit the bulk of violent crime. In an age fixated on identity, every rerouted trip will read like a moral verdict. Developers will plead that it is about public crime data, insurance tables, and indifferent machine learning, yet those explanations will echo unheard across the outrage gap. Adding to the fury, several of the most high-profile automators have been anything but discreet in their opinions on demographic challenges, so their silence or corporatese compromises will convince no one.

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Activists, sensing a fresh mother lode of grievances, will not bother untangling risk tables or liability clauses. Math is hard; moral outrage is easy. They will simply point to the bright line on the map where the robotaxi service area ends, overlay it with census heat-maps, and declare the machines guilty of neo-redlining. A viral clip of a Waymo breezing past a struggling grandmother on a cracked sidewalk will do more than any white paper; it will collapse nuance into a single frame that can be rage-shared a million times.. Hashtags like #BotApartheid and #NoRideNoJustice will bloom overnight, complete with scrolling threads comparing autonomous fleet algorithms to the mortgage discrimination of the 1960s. The optics are too clean, the villains too loud, their products too silent. In a culture primed to see every differential outcome as a moral indictment, the storyline writes itself: the robots have come, and they only serve those society was constructed to serve already.

But while the rest of the world is breaking down, the benefits of automation will quietly accrue to the safe, predictable streets that the well-to-do are increasingly protective of. Well-ordered communities will integrate with this technology, receiving faster, easier-to-access services and (now automated) domestic labor that mirrors the type of in-house help that, until now, has been the exclusive luxury of the very rich. What this means is more free time; gone are the commutes and the hassle of sorting out your colored clothes for laundry. Those able to live in harmony with robotics will find that extra hours of every day have been given back to them. This is more time to get ahead, more time to spend with children, ensuring they don't fall behind; more time, in other words, exacerbating the differences between the communities capable of this integration and those who will be increasingly left behind.

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The intelligent move would be to chart the map of this looming moral debate before it becomes inescapable political territory. Arguments against automation can be addressed before their fiercest voices even emerge. Policy makers may try to paper over that widening fault, yet each remedy carries its inherent cracks. Mandating universal robot coverage forces fleets to absorb higher risk and pass the bill to every rider. Quotas for human drivers keep a few jobs alive, but they also erase the efficiency that made the service possible. The code keeps optimizing while the legislation limps behind, and the market quietly routes around the rules. With every patch that fails, public trust thins, and the culture-war framing grows sharper: one side demanding safety and uptime, the other demanding equal access even when the data coldly demands the cars keep driving by.

Best buckle up.

Immediately after Election Day 2024, I predicted the three main fault lines that could split apart the MAGA-Tech Right alliance: immigration, bioscience, and war. Well, two out of three ain’t bad. There was already some major Christmastime contention over immigration, ending with Vivek Ramaswamy being the first to depart from DOGE. The debates over bioethics have been slowly boiling along since then, with advances in the genetic screenings of embryos delighting many on the Tech Right but disgusting much of the Republican base. Even still, missing the now-obvious fissure of finance feels like a black mark on my fortune-telling record. As always, it’s the economy, stupid. In my defense, back then, it really did seem like everyone was behind DOGE—who wouldn’t be eager to cut away waste, fraud, and abuse? As tagline goes, the people voted for major reform, and Trump 2.0 might be the only admin capable of delivering it for quite some time, given his vendetta against the “deep state,” his inability to run again, and the surplus of high quality tech-talent that has converged upon the capital to enact his (very) popular mandate.

What happened?

Not even a year later, the temporary alliance between the right-wing progressives and the conservative base has never been more tenuous. Everyone has rushed to their keyboards and microphones to prognosticate on what it means when the world’s richest man calls the world’s most powerful man a pedophile (and then deletes it a few days later) and promises to start a new political party (and then appears to walk back from that as well). As we sort through the debris from the weekend’s inter-coalitional ballistic exchanges, it looks like Elon has calmed down (or at least come down) and is now making moves toward de-escalation. Trump responded as expected, starting the exchange by giving as good as he got, but ultimately closed out the conflict in a manner closer to a magnanimous grandfather wanting the best for a prodigal son.

As we have all been learning over the past few years, first with the great interior migration brought on by COVID and now with the right recapturing the capital, the nature of a city is very hard to change. Sure, if you’re Joe Rogan, you can buy up a B-tier town like Austin, already known for being a bit weird, and import some podcasters. But what happened to Miami as the new heart of tech? Despite all the good governance, it’s just harder to be productive when surrounded by all that sun and fun. So it has gone with DC. It’s a little more difficult to move fast and break things when you’re wading through a swamp of entrenched interests and brittle egos. Harder still when you're used to innovating new technology to tackle problems that are much more interesting and important than partisan politics.

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To Elon, a man not exactly used to making concessions to anything other than the laws of physics, the work of maintaining a political coalition must be maddening. This can only be magnified by trying to run multiple companies that already demanded constant attention before they became political targets. While any throw molotov must eventually come down, the politics that set it in motion has its own set of rules, one that relies on a different understanding of inertia and gravity. As Mike Solana points out, “Both men are historic titans in their respective fields, which they both know, and they are both globally famous social media personalities, which is no small thing: beyond politics or tech, these are the two most successful shitposters in human history. Their instincts are to conflict, and to navigating conflict, which means while their alliance was powerful, the highly dramatic dissolution of their alliance was always inevitable.” Both men thrive on conflict, but it's evident that the unique viciousness of politics at the very highest level has impacted them in different ways.

Trump is the only person who can survive the pressures of the presidency, not only unscathed (with perhaps the exception of a small scar on his ear) but also seemingly healthier. He’s in his element in DC, playing to his East Coast instincts, with deals to be made, friends to reward, and enemies to punish. Trump has also had many years to develop a resilience to the attacks, whereas Elon, though never without his detractors, was immediately dropped into the very deep end of political vilification. Elon is also much more accustomed to the type of conflict that's found on factory floors and launch pads, battling against forces that can be modeled, the center of a universe that can, at least theoretically, run on pure logic.

After losing a small fortune, Isaac Newton once complained that he could “calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” So it goes with Elon, who can comprehend precisely how much all this political conflict has cost him. Its rewards, however, are a little less quantifiable and are ultimately reliant on his continued popularity with Trump and the movement he leads. The reality is that there will always be an uneasy tension in any relationship where one party receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the other. While Trump was certainly made financially prosperous thanks to Elon, he made Elon popular in return (as much as these terms can apply to world-famous billionaires). Accusing Trump of being indicted by the Epstein Files was too ridiculous to cause any lasting damage, but it does seem as if Elon’s claim that he was responsible for Trump winning the 2024 election is what pushed things over the edge. It’s true that Elon’s purchase of Twitter and reinstatement of pro-Trump accounts, including Trump himself, triggered a massive vibe shift. But it’s also true that Trump had won (at least) one election without Musk and was prepared to do so again.

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Musk was supposed to provide tech talent and capital, while Trump provided the political movement and popular support. Misconstruing the subtle art behind that particular deal was unwise. I firmly believe Elon expected a massive amount of popular support when he stood up for fiscal responsibility and the 80% of Americans found in the center of the political spectrum. There are only two problems with that approach. The first is that it’s never really about the money, but what the money represents. The second is that the members of the “silent majority” are not defined by their numbers, but by their silence. Turns out that the massive reform voters have consolidated behind is driven by what the 20% have been shouting since before 2016, something, as Matt Taibbi distilled down, approximating “fuck you”— the least responsible and quantifiable statement of all time.

It’s these interpersonal and political dynamics that contributed more to the blowout than any one aspect of the Big Beautiful Bill. America’s debt is an extreme crisis, but the money represents something more than just existential risk. It’s something you can count, something that could be hypothetically shrunk as “easily” as the headcount at Twitter HQ. Elon thought that, along with a few trusty sidekicks, an infusion of new blood in the form of Big Balls & Co., and some SF sleep-on-the-floor start-up style work ethic, this was just a new system that could be conquered. Compared to gravity, wrangling the out-of-control government gravy train must have seemed at least possible. But this is a new physics, of the culture war, of “fuck you,” of interpersonal relationships and the weird, fetid ways that time and space work differently in a swamp. A son of South Carolina, Scott Bessent understands these strange distortions. So it’s no wonder that he and Elon reportedly came to blows in the days leading up to the great divorce. Any competent Treasury Secretary cannot cleanly compute the cost of tariffs. What each dollar represents to the administration must be taken into account. Try explaining that sort of moldy calculus to the guy who needs to continue building and selling cars in China.

What may be hard for some in the Tech Right to understand is that there are simply some things that the MAGA base prioritizes over money. We should not underestimate how many voters out there would be willing to tank the world economy or send tanks into downtown LA if it means recapturing a dream they can feel fading all around them. While Elon correctly pointed out that he will be around making an impact much longer than Trump, he forgot that the issues that carried Trump to power not only predate, but will outlast them both. This is a reality that I hope Musk, as well as others in the Tech Right, will begin to internalize. The only viable political movement with which they can hope to work alongside has not exactly been hiding its opinions, nor does it show any signs of reevaluating them immediately after a colossal victory. For these technically minded migrants to the political right, it’s much better to take the immediate wins where they can be found and then work to build up the popular support and institutional capital needed to put differing plans into action down the line. This is especially true now, where reconciliation is still possible, as all future disagreements will now be viewed as the harbinger of another very online, very counterproductive meltdown.

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Another meltdown cannot be afforded for all those relying on Trump 2.0’s coalition of the great and powerful to do as promised and deliver massive change. Much like how the metric by which a nuclear engineer can be ultimately measured is how safely he can run a reactor, the metric by which anyone tagged to bring the Trump campaign over the finish line can be measured following that success is this: do your actions help get JD Vance into the White House in 2028? Because without that, following through on inevitably years-long initiatives like the deportations of illegal immigrants or DOGE will be increasingly unlikely. Now, the only goal for anyone invested in this coalition is to prevent more radiation from seeping out and poisoning something that has real potential.

Men put the mission above themselves, and there is some hope that this blowup might actually be for the best, assuming we can continue putting the pieces back together again. It will create much-needed space, the one thing all productive partnerships require from time to time. The Trump administration is better off staying focused on the pressing issues of its agenda, just as Musk’s time is better spent on starships and robots, rather than becoming another one of those right-wing automatons who recycle outrage porn all day. Quoting Solana again here, “While Trump may work with Elon, neither man will ever fully trust the other again. This means the populists have another opening, and what will likely follow is a quiet war for power at the White House, where they certainly outnumber the Tech Right.” This is probably true, and it’s also fine. They don't have to trust each other completely; they don’t even need to like each other. They need to realize that fighting each other is against their own and the country's best interests.

Likewise, those gleefully proclaiming an early end to the Tech Right are only showcasing their ignorance of what many political pundits, however inelegantly, have been saying since everything kicked off. Men can laugh over a drink minutes after scrapping outside the bar. Elon knows this well, having spent his 20s fistfighting with his brother at his first startup and ultimately losing control of his second to people he still considers friends. Trump knows it as well; it’s probably impossible to count the number of people he’s fallen in and out with over the years.

A lifetime ago, when I was firefighting in Canada, my first crew boss and friend once told me there were three phases to any team: norming, storming, and performing. At first, you get along because everyone is feeling out the ropes, that’s norming. Storming comes when the cracks that inevitably build up grow too wide to ignore. However, the best work is often found after some shouting, if everyone can set aside a bit of their pride. At the end of the day, some very important jobs need to get done. So while it's possible to remake a thing better than what it was before it broke, so long as there is enough gold to cover over the cracks, it’s a lot better to just get to work.

I used to pray for fire—big ones, unstoppable, blazes that could take out a town. I was a firefighter, and big fires meant lots of overtime, adventure, and cool pictures I could send to everyone I knew. Many guys I worked with had the same goals, but oftentimes, there were more respectable motivations layered on top. They wanted to provide for families and protect their communities. I wanted things to burn for my own benefit. When I see the devastation of the LA fires, with families forced to flee their homes, everything they own turned to ash, I can’t help but remember that creeping sense of opportunism. Sure, I was helping, but that was a secondary effect. I never thought much about how scared the fires made those with something to lose, how long it could take to put yourself back together after watching your life crumble into char. I could only profit from the fires. In their aftermath, when people were putting their lives back together, I was busy counting how much money I had made.

I’ve thought about that (lack of) feeling a lot in the past few weeks, though not just because of the LA fires. It started with a little snuff film where a guy who, in a different life, could easily have been a friend of mine, executed a father of two who, in a different life, could have easily been a friend of my family. Then a car plowed through a few families at a Christmas market. I watched a burning woman slump over in the subway. And then, of course, the rape gangs, which caused Britain to devolve into a frenzy, eager to fill the world’s insatiable appetite for true crime. The transcripts were an inescapable horror, with pictures of them plastered across every available screen. They’ve now been swapped out by the face of the Southport child stabber—Axel Rudakubana’s once-innocent schoolboy pictures updated to reveal his current, demonic visage. Each of these stories has lit up the feeds for days and weeks, a cascade of cruelty and corresponding outrage, before disappearing into the next catastrophe.

As horrible as those events have been, it’s the rush to capitalize on their coverage that’s really bothered me. It's that shameless grasping which has reminded me of Lou Bloom, the vicious little ghost who haunts the neon-soaked streets of Los Angeles in Nightcrawler. Bloom patiently waits in the dark for the sounds of sirens so that he can chase down an ambulance, camera at hand, and then wade into all the blood and misery for his perfect shot. Technically, what Bloom does could be called news (people need to know about the crimes and crashes in their neighborhoods) but his “journalism” commands no respect. He’s not informing; he’s exploiting, orchestrating, all to serve his ego and bottom line. This opportunism might seem like grotesque outlier behavior crafted to sell a story, but in truth, it’s just a distillation of what we now see every day when we unlock our phones. As such, Bloom isn’t so much a character as he is a question: What happens when all your social and financial rewards are maximized by human suffering? If it bleeds, it leads, and that's okay for Lou as he doesn’t feel, just processes and prepares himself for the next opportunity, ready to extract personal rewards at any cost. That cynical mentality is hardly new; self-serving sensationalism thrived long before social media, but his character is embedded within our current moment. Bloom embodies the bleak algorithm of opportunism, sleazy math by which revulsion and rage are turned into ratings, ratings into revenue, the logical endpoint of an economy in which empathy is a liability and “engagement” is the product.

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While Bloom himself is fictional, the world he inhabits is not. It’s ours, and we’ve industrialized his ethos to the point that it has taken on an unsettling life of its own. Social media has let a million Lou Bloom’s bloom. Each fresh horror that lurches into view is pounced on without a moment’s pause, bundled up into media designed for maximum outrage. Of course, very few people can come up with something novel to say when they see some wretch burning alive under the streets of NYC or smoke rising into the sky above LA, but that's alright because the tweets can (literally) write themselves. Even without AI, the correct opinions and phrasing for maximum virality come pre-fabricated: create an outgroup, cast blame, revel in the gory details, claim virtue, and then demand someone else do something to solve the problem. Once you notice the parallels to Bloom, it’s impossible to unsee his cold, transactional logic that has spilled out into our lives. Tragedy is a commodity, outrage a currency.

Of course, the peddlers of these polemics, our own little Nightcrawlers, would never admit to being seized by this vast, devouring machine, one that demands misery before it bestows some meager reward. They wrap themselves in the language of justice and righteousness, convincing themselves their appetite for atrocity serves some greater good. As always, scratch a virtue, find a vice. All this endless perseveration is always for some supposed higher principle like “raising awareness” or reporting on the “public interest.” And sure, we would all have to agree that cars driving into crowds or little girls being savaged need to be covered, and there are real political concerns behind these incidents and more that need to be addressed. While I believe in the causes, I have lost faith in many of their champions. Maybe I’ve just seen too much of what goes on behind the scenes, how terms like “journalist” and “writer” can be warped (“media personality” and “commentator” are, ironically, a bit more honest). Maybe I’m suffering from all the predictable symptoms of meeting too many of my heroes.

But, truth be told, and whatever the cause, this knowledge has been keeping me up at night. I’ve felt like someone who has wandered too deep into a story best left unread, no longer striving for salvation and now pleading only for ignorance. But there’s no going back once you’ve seen it, it's impossible to forget the shapeless monstrosity that lurks behind all the spectacle. The worst part is that you have to beg before you're given a chance to behold this unfathomable parasite, one that feeds off anger and dread and rewards it with “followers.” Its existence is awful enough, but I can't seem to shake the image of the willing and ready line of supplicants. Each of them knows, somewhere, deep down, what it will cost for its eye to briefly gaze upon them but is unable or unwilling to resist the promise of relevance, of influence, of being someone who matters in the great churn of content and catastrophe.

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The great lie this thing tells its eager avatars is that those followers are theirs. They aren't. They will move on to whoever can feed the beast the best. There will always be someone faster to post “Breaking News!” (ideally in all caps, likely next to an alarm emoji), someone willing to be more outraged, to scream louder with the comforting moral and ideological certainty that are the rewards of true zealotry. And when, inevitably, this thing discards them, when the news cycle moves on from their chosen cause, the avatars find themselves turned into husks, deprived of the dopamine that was their only reward (being a thrall pays very poorly) and desensitized to the very real suffering of those that they used to catapult themselves into its good graces. All that is left for them to do is pray, as I once did, for their chosen form of fire—perhaps a mass shooting or a terror attack, anything that can be capitalized on for clicks, something that will let them pretend, once again, that the followers are there for them.

I never stopped to think about what the fires I fought could cost others; I was too focused on the overtime. I worry about those who don't have the luxury of time, as I have had, to think about one of the few (unintentionally) honest things Lou says to someone else throughout the entire film, “Why you pursue something is as important as what you pursue.” Bloom could never have allowed himself to believe that the people who watched the snuff porn he peddled were there because of any loyalty to him. Cold and calculating, he was at least honest with himself from the very start about his selfish motivations. I’ve started to see shadows of Lou’s same haunted look more and more across my feed. I hear whispers of people being warped into something unrecognizable. I’m afraid that each day, we are all confronted, like Faust, with a cruel bargain, one in which the true costs are kept hidden from us, or perhaps could never understand from the start. And so I’ve written this hoping to cast some light on the fear that my feed has been feeding on me and to say one thing to those who might worry, as I do, that they may look into a mirror one day and see something devoured.

Don't pray for fire.

Killing Them Softly

The Christmas fury unleashed over American immigration reminded me of one of my favorite pulp movies, Killing Them Softly. For those who haven’t seen it (you should), Brad Pitt plays Jackie Coogan, a hitman who cleans up a sordid situation for the Mafia in the run-up to Obama’s first election. The name of the film comes from Cogan's preferred method of murder - clean, professional, and without unnecessary pain. Despite this small mercy, the movie is deeply cynical, and its ending perhaps the greatest indictment of the American dream I have ever seen.

It’s worth quoting the final few lines, just for full measure. Watch the clip as well.

Barack Obama (on TV): [delivering his election victory speech] ... to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many, we are one.

Driver: You hear that line? Line's for you.

Jackie : Don't make me laugh. We're one people. It's a myth created by Thomas Jefferson.

Driver: Oh, now you're gonna have a go at Jefferson, huh?

Jackie : My friend, Jefferson's an American saint because he wrote the words, "All men are created equal." Words he clearly didn't believe, since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He was a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble, and they went out and died for those words, while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community. Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fucking pay me.

Perhaps a line that could only have been uttered in the wake of the financial crash (the film came out in 2012). Perhaps it takes someone from a place that’s even less of a country than America (the soon-to-be-a-state of Canada) to say this, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that Jackie is right.

America is not a country. It used to be, I’d like it to be, but those days are, rightly or wrongly, long gone. It’s now a business. Not just a business, as Coogan says; it’s easily the best business in human history, but it’s just not a country. Not in the same way that Greece and China are countries—bad news for the last of the remaining Americans - a founding nation facing not replacement but incorporation.

More on that later. A quick reminder of the relevant definitions.

Country (noun): a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.

Nation (noun): a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.

Buisness (noun): A business is defined as an organization or enterprising entity engaged in commercial, industrial, or professional activities.

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America™ and the Americans

The people whose ancestors fought at Lexington and Concord, who manifested their destiny, who turned a colonial backwater into a superpower - are experiencing what every founder does when their startup scales beyond their wildest dreams: dilution. Truth be told, they have been for some time. Those people belonged to a nation and still exist in increasingly smaller numbers. These are our Americans, though they would perhaps characterize themselves differently than I have. Possibly more akin to Eduardo Saverin after finding out there are new investors in a dream he once had much more control of. Of course, successful companies rarely stay true to their founders' original vision. Facebook wasn't meant to be a global advertising platform filled with bizzaro AI slop. Amazon wasn't supposed to be running half the internet's infrastructure. And America? America wasn't originally supposed to become the new colossus, one with conquering limbs astride from land to land.

Yet here they are. Or should I say we? I have an admission that must be made: I am a naturalized American who gained citizenship as a dependent on my father’s H1-B visa. I was born in Canada but grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, next to Jamestown, the birthplace of the American experiment. My dad sells seafood, though, not software, and I am also well aware that Canadians are not considered immigrants in the same way as those from Cambodia or Kashmir, but still—exact same process, exact same costs. Perhaps some will say I need to go back, having read this far, but read on! You’ll find out I already have, for better or for worse. If you’re still living in the USA, you are a part of America™. This applies to citizens and non-citizens alike. It even applies, though more loosely, to expats like me, who thought they could leave and then learned that no, you can only check out of one form of America™and into another. So we then. We are living under the umbrella of the American trademark.

And here is the first place where the “America is a country” argument begins to break down. It doesn’t occupy a particular fixed place. It occupies a great and growing swath of this world. Some of these places are geographical. America occupies Ukraine much as it occupies the Taiwan Strait and the borders of Israel, and many military bases all across the globe. It occupies the McDonald's in Malaysia and the Starbucks in Spain. Can we say the same for Spanish cultural conquest because you can find the Spanish clothing chain Zara in Boston and Birmingham? Of course not; Zara itself belongs to America™ (be honest, did you know Zara was Spanish? Is anything about Zara remotely Spanish?) by virtue of being a soulless, interchangeable multinational chain. No other country can claim anywhere near the same reach of totalizing turbo-empire, one that also occupies the hearts and minds of many, from the slums of Chennai to the no-longer-quite-slums of China to the stultifying red sands of PEI that my father was so determined to leave behind. America™ is everywhere now.

Country (noun): a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.

Regardless of where they are from, people can become Americans™ in a way that works in no other country. I could not become Irish, no matter how hard I may try. Genetically, I am pretty Irish. But even if I were to move to Galway, gain citizenship, integrate into the community, and even talk up step-dancing, I would never become Irish. The Irish can become Americans, though, and many have in the nearly 200 years since the potato famine first drove them west, just like the Germans before them and the Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and many more ethnicities since. That Americans who can trace their lineage back to Gettysburg or even earlier cannot do the same and fully inhabit somewhere else to even a remotely similar degree should they choose to emigrate is not fair, is not necessarily anyone’s fault, and yet remains a fact that can’t be restrained, only reconciled with. As I wrote about the British back in March, the Americans “don't have the option of saying they are proud to be an immigrant, they are not, they are home. But they don't have the option of being proud of that either.”

Another fact is that America™’s headquarters, the contiguous USA, is comprised of many nations. Of course, there are the literal First Nations (note the plural) who were around before the Americans showed up and are still, in some ways, self-governing. Then there are the African Americans, who the soon-to-be-Americans brought and bonded into their new country. Despite 400 years of cohabitation, these three groups are still meaningfully distinct from each other - in what sense are they a part of the same nation in the same way that Mongolians are, who have maintained cultural continuity since before Genghis Khan? Then you have the waves of successive European migrations across the 1800s and the newer waves of even farther-flung newcomers seeking the New American Dream, the one invented in 1958 and codified in 1965. When Irish Catholics were spat on as they got off of boats and into the ghettos, when the Eastern European Jews were barred from Protestant civic institutions, or when the Japanese were barred into camps, were they just as American as the WASPs? Are they now?

Or, did they recognize the truth in a way that modern Americans cannot reconcile them to? The truth is that America™ has always been what it is now— an engine for capturing the competition between different people and turning that energy into technological, cultural, and occasionally even moral progress. If they could come to terms with this, those last remaining Americans might discover that their competitive advantage within America™ lies not in their founding stake upon the lower 48 but in their deep understanding of how the set of ideas that originated from it operates. After all, they built it. But they didn’t build it alone; they did it through fierce and often cruel competition with everyone else who tried to claim a piece of the American identity.

Like all businesses, America™ is competitive.

Nation (noun) : a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.

Country (noun) : a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.

(I leave the question of whether any of the nations that make up America actually have “their own government” to the libertarians.)

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Memes > Genes

Long before Silicon Valley's code began consuming the world, America™ had already shipped its cultural operating system globally. From Liberia's constitution to Germany and Japan's post-war democracies, modern governments and economies run on American™ software. Democratic institutions, market capitalism, presidential systems—these were America's first viral exports, spreading from mind to mind, nation to nation, rewriting the global order in America™’s image. This is because, at its core, a business is a meme - an idea replicating itself through minds and markets, unconstrained by the biological limitations that bind traditional human organizations. Whether America™’s software update is compatible with the world is for others to argue. What matters to us is that the world's source code has been rewritten in America™’s image.

Humans are unique among Earth's creatures in their ability to operate outside family units and build trust and cooperative networks with perfect strangers. We can create abstractions (such as LLCs) that enable coordination at scales that would make even the most complex ant colony seem quaint. Put simply, our memes are more potent than our genes. A nation is really just an extended family unit, bound together by shared blood, soil, and story (and in that order). In that frame, a country is a family home, shared genes on shared land. But America™ broke that model. It became something else entirely: a platform for human coordination that transcends genetic ties, including those of the Americans. Capital benefits from cooperation and the inter-ethnic battles that helped forge America™ were subsumed by economic self-interest. And then it began to subsume everywhere else - successful code consuming the world.

This transformation wasn't an accident—it was the price of total victory. American dominance created its own gravitational pull, drawing in talent and ambition from every corner of the globe. The success of the America™ experiment (and each great start-up is an experiment) made traditional American nationhood untenable. How could the winners of history's greatest game expect to keep their playground exclusive? They wanted to enjoy their victory, and others would do whatever it took for the chance to play the same game. The spoils of success inevitably included the dilution of the very thing that made it possible.

I am afraid that this is where the Americans must be killed softly. If it's any consolation, it's nothing personal, just physics. But someone must deliver the hard truth: the pre-1965 nation they pine for was always destined to become America™, not because of any policy or political decision but because of their own success. Simple inertia did the rest. They built something too beautiful, created something too compelling, too powerful to remain merely a country. Each victory, from the Marshall Plan to the Moon landing to the creation of the internet, inevitably created more would-be Americans™. To wish it were otherwise is to wish their ancestors had failed at their outset. Unfortunately, victory defeated them all the same; all they won was the chance to push the costs off for a few decades. Their descendants face the ultimate founder's dilemma: adapt to the entity they created or be left behind by it. They can't preserve their equity stake; dilution is inevitable when running the world's most successful enterprise. At best, they might leverage their founder status into a meaningful role in America's next phase. Will they be like Jobs, ousted but eventually returning to guide a new renaissance? Or will they be like Yahoo's founders, watching from the sidelines as their creation becomes unrecognizable?

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Who Will Survive In America™?

A synthesis of the emerging right-wing coalition, with figures like J.D. Vance straddling old and new America™, represents one possible future for the American™ enterprise. But as the Christmas immigration meltdown demonstrated, it's unstable right now, with two different versions of the American dream fighting a civil war. As Republicans, new and old, are learning, you can't simultaneously be the party of American heritage and the party of global talent optimization. The attempt to maintain both inevitably collapses into contradiction. Like trying to run a family business on a global scale, the imperatives of growth eventually overwhelm the founders' original vision. Some Americans seem to understand this intuitively; they sense that to preserve what they value, they might need to look elsewhere.

Those Americans seeking a return to homogeneity and cultural stasis might find what they're looking for—just not in that place that used to be America. Smaller European nations might offer more demographic stability and cultural continuity they yearn for. In the traditional sense, these are still real countries in a way that America™'s ruthless arena is not. Perhaps there's a grand bargain to be struck: Europe could maintain its cultural continuity by redirecting its newcomers toward the great American™ frontier, while America's heritage-seekers could return to their ancestral homelands. "Go back to England" becomes less an insult than a solution - though not the one either side might have expected. Diaspora, returning home at last. Rather than trying to change New York, move to (Old) York - its population is 93% proto-American.

Of course, this solution is impossible. That the Americans don't even suggest it reveals their preference for the frontier and the quiet acceptance of the true situation the entire world now finds itself in. No one can escape what the Americans built - even Europe's most homogeneous corners are being inexorably pulled into America™'s orbit. The cruel irony is that while Europe grapples with integration challenges after assuming it could assimilate newcomers in the same way as America™ did, forgetting they were actual countries and not corporations. American™ software ate the old world, and now there’s nowhere to go. I have discovered that there is no longer any "outside" to America™'s operating system. The only way out is through. Inertia brought us to this moment and will have to carry us out.

This was never about politics but physics—the gravitational pull of success and the inevitable transformation of a nation into a global network. America™ isn't failing to be a stable, unified country - it was never stable, never unified, and as for being a country? It has evolved beyond that form entirely. The Americans built something more enduring than an empire. They built a platform, an operating system, and a new way of organizing human ambition and ability. Now, like all founders, they must face the consequences of their success.

The question is not whether America will survive the challenges of immigration and integration; that country is gone. The question is: who will survive in America™?

The first issue is immigration. While there is no disagreement on the right about how to handle illegal immigrants, America's approach to legal immigration has the potential to become the political disagreement that defines the Republican party over the next few years. The right is split into two camps, which can be roughly understood as the Nativists, or people who want to preserve (or potentially revert) the ethnic composition of America, and the Meritocrats, those who want to import the best and brightest from around the world into the United States as fast as possible. Silicon Valley has long championed the latter approach, often hiring foreign talent via H1-B visas as a way to cultivate the ambitious while also maintaining a high degree of control over the employees and keeping burn rates lower than they would be with an entirely American workforce. While I support high-skilled immigration into the United States (I am a naturalized American citizen), there remains a very real concern among those on the more nativist right that an appreciation for capitalism is not the only cultural concern that needs to be accounted for when welcoming in new neighbors. It is not uncommon to hear concerns from tech workers about supervisors who only seem to hire their co-ethnics or about joining teams that mostly communicate in Mandarin. Trump had to reconfigure his approach to this issue during his campaign, moving back a promise he made on the All-In podcast to staple a green card to every college degree issued to foreign students. Look at how the Canadians, who have now had to reduce their immigration quotas drastically, demonstrate how quickly such a system can be gamed and whether it has any culture-clashing side effects.

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Another looming set of tensions will be all things biological. The right-wing progressives are much more accepting of abortion and surrogacy, as well as procedures such as IVF, euthanasia, artificial wombs, and embryo selection than the sizeable Christian majority of American conservatives. Many right-wing progressives will see Trump's victory as a path towards experimental progress, dismantling or dissuading the regulatory roadblocks from preventing new leaps and bounds in the science of reproduction. This is likely to enrage some of the classically MAGA crowd, who believe in large part that life begins at conception and that we should not "play God” by exploring the limits of life and death. More than a few people will see the inevitable technological advancements soon to be brought to the forefront of the cultural conversation (and many VC's cap tables) by the incoming barrage of eager biohackers as moral abominations. This is a near-intractable divide that will have to be managed carefully, as Trump is already obviously attempting, as seen in his approach to abortion. Whether many of the right's newest high-value donors will be comfortable with maintaining a difference of opinion over such crucial issues with their new clients remains to be seen. What is safe to say is that, eventually, someone will strut onto one of these landmine issues and set off a series of explosions that will fling shrapnel through conservative institutions of every level.

Speaking of shrapnel, the final potential fracture will be war or, at least, the degree of the United State’s continued involvement in wars. As America re-arms and re-affirms its military commitments to its allies, the growing divide on the right about how much support America should offer Israel and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine will be a source of tension. I expect this will be much less of an issue than immigration or biotech, but it must be navigated nonetheless. While the right-wing progressives are aligned in their support of Israel with much of the base, it should not be underestimated how much of a growing faction on the right has turned against the country. There is an even bigger faction amongst the Republican base that has no strong feelings about Israel or Ukraine one way or another; they don't want another tax dollar spent on war, not another drop of American blood spilled on foreign soil. Trump remains the only president to have served without involving America in yet another global conflict, and hopefully, this will remain true throughout his second term. While the right-wing progressives are involving themselves more in defense tech companies, as of right now, the only reason for this seems to be the old mantra of "peace through strength." Should Russia escalate in Ukraine, Israel come under more threat, or China finally move to cut off the supply of precious semiconductors flowing from Taiwan, this reservation could be revoked, and the creators of all these shiny new defense toys might find themselves at odds with the class of people they hope will operate them.

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Caught in the middle of all these debates will be J.D. Vance — former Marine, former employee of Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital, quiet acolyte of the "New Right," and future Vice President. The prodigal son of both the right-wing progressives and the MAGA base, Vance has operated in both worlds, having gone from white trash to the White House without alienating either faction along the way. It's no understatement to say that the Hillbilly Elegy author has written himself into the history books as an authentically American rags-to-riches protagonist, one that seems poised to take over the leadership of the Republicans in 2028. The right-wing progressive backers who urged Trump to bring him on as VP, despite his public past as an avowed "Never Trumper," are certainly planning to spend the next four years paving the way to a two-term President Vance tenure. But for this to happen, Trump, Vance, and these new tech elites must be cautious of pushing for progress too quickly. They must respect the religious, classically conservative composition of their voting base. And, when issues do arise, they must show themselves willing to learn from those they have elected to stand beside. Otherwise, they will not be elected again.

If the right-wing progressives can bridge the divides within the Republican Party over the next four years, then today's election will be one of the most important in American history (if it is not already). A coalition of classical conservatives, independent "heterodox" centrists, and tech elites has the potential to reshape America politically, culturally, financially, and, perhaps, even spiritually. With Trump's second term, they have won themselves an opportunity. They can capitalize on this transition by building the bedrock of what could be a new American era - one that serves as an ideal for the rest of the world to strive towards. There is no shortage of intelligence and competence among this new elite, but what will ensure their success in the end will, as always, be character. Let's hope that wisdom and compassion will guide this new right-wing alliance forward through the inevitable challenges in our path. If it does, we may end up getting to Mars after all.

Eight years later, everything is different. Last week, David Sacks destroyed his own fundraising expectations by drumming up somewhere around 12 million dollars for the former president at a sold-out dinner party at his San Francisco mansion, Broadcliff, alongside his All-In cohost (and former six-figure Biden donor), Chamath Palihapitiya. The broad church of attendees, who either paid $50,000 to attend or $300,000 for the VIP roundtable, included Eoghan McCabe, founder and CEO of Intercom, who tweeted a photo of himself and Trump giving a thumbs up, reporting that he had spoken with six people at the dinner, none of whom identified as Republicans. They were all former Democrat supporters, now politically homeless and at least a little curious about what the conservative candidate had come to offer. 

Will these fresh apostates from the progressive tech consensus find themselves “canceled” as Palmer was back in the day — losing business and friends, scrutinized by a press eager to cast new villains as wannabe “tech bro alpha men” or “prophets of urban doom”? Likely not. As Shaun Maguire’s massively viral declaration proved a few days earlier, the vibe has shifted; the cowardice that enabled cancel culture has largely dissipated, and it's simply not 2016 anymore. Now, a growing and influential group - which some are calling the “right-wing progressives” - is emerging out of the valley to directly challenge the policies and people they view as anti-innovation and anti-American.

Whether the figures often cited as the vanguard of this nascent movement - Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks, to name a few - would even agree that there is enough commonality between them to call it a movement doesn't matter. As members of the now disjointed and disillusioned “Intellectual Dark Web” were inevitably forced to concede, what matters is that everyone else thinks there is. These commentators and journalists — outside the arena as they may be — do have a point. There are some shared similarities between the figures who have found themselves, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, proudly building a new enclave for political activism beyond what used to be considered the cordon sanitaire inside tech — the line that divides left from right.

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In an X post that went live the day of his fundraiser, Sacks outlined four key reasons that he would be voting for Trump come November: the economy, foreign policy, border, and lawfare. These just so happen to be the most common issues of concern to the growing coterie of Trump-leaning (or at least anti-Biden) techies. Each of these sticking points has particular relevance to the Silicon Valley crowd, on top of commanding mass populist appeal (aka popular with normal people). Everyone is worried about Ukraine and Israel. Whether they support the wars or not, the fear of what rapid escalation in either conflict might entail is universal. So are the feelings of disgust and rage over Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the concern that America is stretched too thin to take the looming threat of Taiwanese semiconductor supply being suddenly cut off. For those in tech, Ukraine support takes on a particular relevance given that it is America’s ever-expanding war machine industry and communications ingenuity that allows the Ukrainians to grind on against impossible odds. The barrage of cyberattacks and deployment of killer drones across the war is also of particular concern to anyone focused on the future; with Ukraine, we can begin to map the outlines of warfare for the next few decades, and the increasingly outsized role tech will play in it.

It's no wonder, then, that tech should be concerned with the world outside of America, just as they should be concerned with the outside world coming in, uninvited. Many prominent tech leaders are immigrants themselves - both hosts of the Trump fundraiser are, as is Elon Musk, who has been particularly focused on the overwhelming amount of essentially presidentially sanctioned illegal immigration that has swamped America since the first day of Biden’s presidency. There is a particular sting that naturalized citizens feel when watching the relentless scenes of mass border crossings (I should know; being a naturalized citizen myself). Birthright citizens, as well as those who committed themselves to immigrating legally, know how wrong it is for the best and brightest to work incredibly hard to stay in the country, worrying about those crucial little H1-B details, while millions are able to subvert the system simply by strolling over an intentionally unprotected border.

Of course, the lawlessness at the border is inextricably linked to the lawlessness that now plagues American cities. The overwhelming majority of the tech industry is concentrated in a few population centers that have now been plagued with rising rates of chaos and progressive gaslighting that having your car broken into every few months (or weeks) is just life in the big city. So is watching junkies shoot up on Chinese fentanyl that's trafficked in from down south. Of course, everyone knows that homelessness and crime can be controlled, all it takes is a visit from a foreign leader like Xi. Our domestic leaders? They have to worry about their employees being attacked on the way to work. They know that the politicians who seem responsible to no one could take care of rising crime rates and urban decay/defecation. Instead, their focus is on emotional and financial welfare for their friends and crippling lawfare against their enemies.

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As I write this, Musk’s enormous, performance-based Tesla pay package that was rescinded by the Honorable (?) Kathaleenn McCormick has just been reinstated by shareholders. Populism / Popularity reigns triumphant once again, and rather than stay in hell (Delaware, a fake state), Elon has decided to take his company and elope to Texas, a move championed by the company's shareholders and Governor Greg Abbott. Abbot is not the only conservative governor or mayor making friends with the tech barons looking to cast a vote in the most impactful way possible - with their feet (not to mention their fleet of employees and accompanying families' feet as well). Millions of Americans have migrated internally over the last four years, fleeing blue states for that strange red expanse that exists beyond the coastal cities, citing cost of living, climate, culture, and a bit more civil security as some of their top priorities.

And civil security, or the assumption that laws will be enforced equally and city streets wont need to be boarded up in advance of elections, is a concern, one that Americans across all social strata are only growing more worried about. The threat of lawfare looms across the land, stalking those who would make a challenge to democracy (aka democrat rule). Tech founders are concerned about what might befall their companies should they fail to censor the right story, just as voters are outraged about their candidate being potentially incarcerated in advance of election day. Just as these concerns fuel internal migration into classically right-wing areas, they also drive donations to Republican politicians willing to stick up for fair play under the law and, eventually, ballots being cast in support of Trump, or at least in opposition to Biden.

Regardless of foreign wars, warzone cities, rampant illegal migration, and the ongoing bananafication of our republic, every election is largely decided by one stupidly simple factor: the economy. While two of the All-In co-hosts, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg, were not present at the recent SF fundraiser, all four “besties” and every other person with a bank account are being impoverished in real-time by the rampant inflation that has gripped America. Trillions have been added to the national debt since Biden took office, resulting in a situation, as Sacks pointed out, where “average Americans have lost roughly a fifth of their purchasing power over the last few years. Moreover, any American who needs a mortgage, car loan, or credit card debt faces much higher interest costs.” There is no level of wealth that protects you from the economic downturn America has seen under Biden; inflation at this level impacts every single economic dimension. People see the prices going up everywhere, just as they can remember being richer under Trump in the not-too-distant past. They may even remember checks arriving with his name on them. They remember all of this most acutely at the pump, the supermarket, and when paying their taxes.

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What are these taxes going towards, anyway? For those focused on productivity and efficiency, it is particularly galling to watch California build train tracks to nowhere and see public bathrooms budgeted at 1.7 million dollars. This enforced inefficiency is only matched by the cavalier recklessness of spending under Biden - America is currently adding a trillion dollars to its debt every hundred days. Many, both in and outside of tech, are embracing crypto as a countermeasure to this. Trump now hopes to cash in (both financially and in cultural clout) on the countless voters who feel like they have lost control of their financial future thanks to the fed and with tech-focused donors eager to invest in a president that seems open to innovation. This attempt at consolidating the Cryptonians into the big tent of conservative voters, especially now that they have been more or less abandoned by Biden, appeals to many in tech and even some within the political movement that, until recently, was most associated with the blockchain: libertarians. Trump went so far as to promise to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the infamous Silk Road, at the Libertarian National Convention in a move that was cheered by many at the conference (despite booing him for nearly everything else) and across tech online.

On May 30th, nearly a week after making that promise to end Ulbricht’s life imprisonment, Trump was himself convicted in a sham trial based on novel legal theories that look like pure political persecution to everyone who is not an overt left-wing partisan. Conveniently for said partisans, the former president will be sentenced on July 11th, four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Even for those wary of Trump's flaws, this is a bridge too far. For all those like Shaun Maguire or David Sacks who have come out since then in public support of Trump, everyone knows there are dozens more across tech who will quietly but firmly cast their vote for the Don come election day. Many won't say anything explicitly, or even side with Trump publicly, but still, the times are changing. The right to be apolitical, once seen as a somewhat violent silence, is back. DEI is out. And MEI — or merit, excellence, and intelligence - may be on its way now that the madness of 2020 has more or less passed us by.

Will the Democrats decide to alienate more of the tech vote between now and November 5th? Probably. Will Trump make additional promises and deals in the hopes of courting some more of this dissident Silicon Valley faction? Definitely. Will this burgeoning group find, somewhere down the road, that their foray into national right-wing politics has been, like others have found before them, disappointing? Only time will tell. What we can be sure of is that this influential cohort of former Democrats now turned to the “dark side” is only going to grow. So too is their collective realization that they can tell their own story while charting a political path forward that suits their own distinct ends. For a group defined in large part by their shared drive to build a better future, there will be many elections after this November, ready to be influenced as they see fit.

In the time since then, I have published an essay about the other option available to hold together Western civilization should Christianity fail to resurrect itself. Many others, including , , and even the horseman himself, , have been weighing in on this debate over the past year. I hope that this ongoing discussion will accomplish what I originally set out to do with this article - get some answers to the practical questions that the “new story” the atheists believe can replace a faith-based system must address. Ayaan and Dawkins's upcoming debate in NYC may shed some more light, hopefully without too much heat.

If anyone is curious, I remain agnostic about the existence of God and do not regret putting my faith in the faithful.

I hope you find it a pleasure to burn.

If there’s one thing the Right doesn’t need any more of, it is atheism.

This is not to say that secularists should not be welcome within the conservative tent: I’m personally agnostic. But people like me need to recognize that we are guests in this movement. Those atheists who feel, as Ronald Reagan once said, that the Left has left them should spend more time reflecting on how this happened, rather than policing the ‘religious Right’ from inside its own walls. The West finds itself at an inflection point, torn between the entropic forces of ‘wokeism,’ which has rushed in to fill the void of secular post-modernity, and the fading Christian faith upon which the West was founded. Claims that we can create a new secular narrative, one that keeps all the things liberalism still values about religion while countering the excesses of ‘woke’ ideology, is not a realistic solution. We can’t create our own values. Even if we could, we don’t have time. Now is the moment for those of us committed to fighting back against the ‘woke’ religion to come to terms with the fact that only the uncompromising force of faith is potent enough to beat back the cult of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Non-believers need not convert, but if they cannot at least allow for an explicit religious response to ‘wokeism,’ it is time for them to get out of the way.

Many within the anti-‘woke’ coalition who do not belong to the ‘religious Right’ still believe that doubling down on rationalism is the most effective way to oppose the rising zealotry on the Left. This is itself irrational. Secularists have been unable to mount meaningful opposition to the ‘woke’ crusade over the past decade. Once the pinnacle of secular rationality, the New Atheist movement has largely succumbed to ‘woke’ progressivism. Its membership base now debates how many different gender identities can dance on the head of a pin and whether or not it is appropriate for a man to ask a woman to have a cup of coffee with him. Its former superstars are political pariahs for daring to stand up against ‘woke’ shibboleths as they simultaneously shift the very ire that they once directed at otherworldly deities to vaccine skeptics and Donald Trump. While they are sure that no gods exist, they do at least seem to believe in devils.

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Richard Dawkins, one of the infamous four horsemen of atheism, recently displayed the limitations of secularism in an interview with Piers Morgan. Dawkins was reduced to terrified silence when asked about ISIS Bride Shamima Begum. Given the very non-secular scimitar dangling above him, one which had nearly claimed the life of his friend Salman Rushdie a few months earlier, his refusal to speak on the subject was perfectly rational. While Dawkins may think that anyone who believes in God is deluded, he is more than willing to acknowledge the fanatical determination of many of those who seek to maintain said delusion. The same sort of fanaticism that shot fear through that horseman is shared by those who attacked swimmer Riley Gaines, with cries of “Allahu Akbar” substituted for the proclamations that “trans rights are human rights.” The secular liberals who believe that pure reason is the antidote to an ideology that flies in the face of all scientific knowledge—the claims of which now echo through every major institution originally designed to advance the scientific enterprise—must reconcile themselves to the fact that public declarations of fanatical absurdity provide people with some vital things that logic and science struggle to provide: comradery, certainty, cohesion, and combat.

The ‘woke’ tide

The immediate, predictable response to this from the secular liberal crowd is obvious. “See, religion provides its own problems, and we need to double down uncompromisingly on the classically liberal values of equality, tolerance, and pluralism. Tribalism is not an antidote to tribalism or fanaticism, and I take pride in my rational individualism.” This seems to be an almost exclusively millennial modality, one I agreed with until relatively recently, having spent my high school years obsessed with Christopher Hitchens. But I was wrong and have lost my faith that atheism can maintain, let alone improve, society. It provides certainty—but comradery and cohesion are in short supply. While the secularists certainly have ample opportunity for combat, waging war on both fronts against the hegemonic forces of ‘wokeism’ and Christianity is not a winning strategy.

As stated in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “So our virtues; Lie in the interpretation of the time; And power, unto itself most commendable, Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair.” Critical independence and rationality are virtues, just not ones that win culture wars or elections. Those, as even the fearsome Coriolanus is forced to admit, require appealing to the mass of plebeians, who resent the arrogance visited upon them by the secular elitists who are unwilling to stand with them but require their support. Coriolanus won the support of Rome by showing his scars; us secularists are still denying we have any. We must learn from his fatal mistake: turning against both tribes is usually done out of resentment and pride, but even if it is for the noblest of causes, it ultimately leaves one abandoned with enemies on all sides.

While the ‘anti-woke’ coalition is defined by what it is against, it is not united by it. Strength is found in numbers, and the ‘woke’ are entirely united, institutionally and ideologically, by the irrationality of their beliefs. As Curtis Yarvin once wrote, “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.” Outside of the religious Right, nothing is uniform about the forces opposing ‘wokeism’ except their habit of spinning off into endless infighting over philosophical and pragmatic differences.

This is great for driving Twitter engagement and Substack subscriptions, but, polarized and atomized, there is little holding the unfaithful together. Those secularists intelligent enough to pick apart the constantly metamorphizing insanity of ‘woke’ ideology and who are courageous enough to do something about it must recognize that they are the exception, rather than the rule. The principles and practices that have brought them independent success as stalwart opponents to progressive intolerance are actively working against them when trying to create a capable, cohesive counter-movement. These virtues must be interpreted in the time we are in.

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It must now be apparent to even the most moderate centrist that gender ideology, now the prime pillar of ‘wokeism,’ is fundamentally totalitarian. The claim of ‘trans genocide’ is not about the literal killing of trans people, but rather the recognition that any divergence from the delusion breaks the spell and must be stamped out if the ideology is to survive: the gender zealots require constant affirmation to deny reality. It is not enough to respectfully disagree if that disagreement takes the form of improper pronoun usage or disallowing men, regardless of how they identify, into women’s spaces and sports. Pointing out this dynamic is what initially launched Jordan Peterson into the public eye, when he explained that there is a considerable difference between laws enforcing what one cannot say and laws demanding what one must say. There can be no lasting peace between a religion that demands you refer to a man as a woman and those who would prefer not to.

With no middle ground to be found, pluralism cannot be maintained, and Chamberlain-esque calls for “peace in our time” are misguided at best. A lack of an inherently antagonistic moral vision to ‘wokeism,’ either from classical liberals seeking plurality, libertarians seeking total freedom, or the ‘just let me grill’ Right, may shield one from direct conflict for a little while longer, but will not stop the drag preachers interested in reading to their children. These polygender proselytizers are imbued with the modern conception of manifest destiny, expanding their dominion by injecting themselves into all aspects of society, from the lowest levels of the public school curriculum to the highest corporate rungs. Every aspect of modern life is becoming politicized, from the ballet to Bud Light. The ‘woke’ are coming for it all and are highly motivated to convert or cancel any remaining proponents of plurality. 

Secular submission

Most secularists realize this but are still unwilling to commit to an explicitly religious Right. Subsummation takes humility, and it’s understandable why that may be in short supply. The virtues that pulled humanity out of material deprivation have brought us to this moment. Liberalism, the great emancipator, won the battles of the 20th century but has lost the battle against itself. Without external opposition, its realized goals have collapsed inwards, unchaining us from our communities and opening us up to the infinite horizon of post-modernity. Standing upon the peak of rational science, we see only the atomic, both in our stars and in each other, as stardust. While reflecting on the pillars of creation might fulfill some of the grandeur and awe men seek, it provides no meaning.

The occasional moral nihilist of sufficient self-agency might be able to survive in a void of their own creation, using refrains about being the universe experiencing itself and absolving themself of free will to erase their individuality, but this has never and will never satisfy an entire society. Man is a religious animal who will demand refuge from the pains of spiritual and social isolation with a morality that, to use the phrase popularized by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind, will first blind him from infinite choice and then bind him to a community.

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Many secularists believe they can provide this with a new, rational story that retains the guiding moral principles of religion but has enough clarity and force to overcome ‘wokeism’ and put us back onto the path toward the end of history. They are attempting to engage in the great embarrassment of modernity once again: creating their own values, a new, synthetic, Frankenstein narrative that can only turn on its creators. We cannot create a new culture on our own, spinning the tapestry of guidelines necessary for a new type of morality and society by disregarding instinct and relying on pure intelligence. We in the West live amongst the bones of the Christian God, and the past hundred years have been defined by those who thought they could shape these bones into tools through their reason and will.

Like Icarus, once we could fly, we couldn’t stop ourselves from flying too high, disregarding the guiding religious stories that had evolved over the previous millennia and prevented us from placing rational man above all. We survived our fall, which came in the form of the twin horrors of communism and fascism, but now lack the ingenuity to fashion new wings and the courage necessary to try. Even if we did, the consequences of getting it wrong again are simply too severe.

Regardless, we don’t have the time to bicker amongst each other about the shape of this new story, nor can we wait around to see if one evolves on its own. The civilizational costs of ‘wokeism’ are accumulating, and there is no political, logistical, and, perhaps most importantly, psychological infrastructure that can widely implement this unarticulated dream quickly enough. Those who would seek to have us fall back towards objectivism or some other fringe but pre-established orientating principles must contend with the fact that these ideologies failed to seize hearts and minds when they had little competition from liberalism and none from ‘wokeism.’ Why would they be likely to do so now that the forces against them are so much greater? Disagree with Christianity all you like, but it is of the West, and its entrenchment and legacy cannot be denied. The churches have already been built, the Bibles are bound, and it has pre-existing political parties.

It should go without saying that this is not an argument for the faithful to be weaponized against the ‘woke,’ regarded with high-minded scorn and manipulated by snickering secularists. This is a call for sheer pragmatism. Secularism cannot write a new rational story, certainly not one that converts a critical mass of the Christian Right while also taking on the ‘woke’ Left politically and ideologically. Attempting to subvert or sermonize to our allies will spurn them, like Coriolanus did, right as he was on the cusp of reclaiming Rome. “All bond and privilege of nature, break! Let it be virtuous to be obstinate,” Coriolanus’s obstinance failed him when he needed it most, but we should not take this as a lesson to remain resolute in our disregard for religion. He had an army behind him; we do not.

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For secularists opposed to ‘wokeism,’ that only leaves one option left: submission. I am not arguing that everyone must go back to church. Though Christianity can be beautiful even to a non-believer, the arguments for its veracity and the necessity of belief should be made by the faithful and taken seriously. But non-believers need to acknowledge the reality of our situation. Real political wins within the democratic system will force us to a choice between two types of heresy: either against ‘wokeism’ from within the Left (good luck) or alongside the Christian Right.

Of the two inescapable religious choices before us, Christianity is undoubtedly the better option. This is not to say that it is perfect, but even if you are worried about having to counteract the excesses of Christianity sometime in the future, this is likely decades away. We can discuss crossing that bridge if and when we get there; that’s a small problem compared to all the bridges collapsing around us now, leaving us nowhere to turn but on each other. And while Christianity’s influence has been on the decline in the West, this is not necessarily a permanent trend. Some demographic arguments and the existence of ‘wokeism’ itself suggest that religiosity is going through a resurgence. Only the religious are reproducing enough to stay above the replacement rate—it is surely no accident that the only advanced Western nation with a replacement rate above the necessary 2.1 figure is Israel—and the future belongs to those who show up for it. 

Because of all this, it is in our best interest as non-Christians to help ensure the Christian revival and re-conquest of Western culture. At the very least, we should get out of its way. The corner of the culture wars that the anti-‘woke’ secularists have carved out for themselves is small and unlikely to become much more prominent in the coming years. I personally think a resurrection of faith is coming, but even if Christianity continues to decline this does not mean that secular liberal rationality will increase proportionally. It seems far more likely that we will end up with many more individuals who ‘believe in science’ while not believing in the biological reality of men and women. The enemy of our enemy is our friend, and we need to be better friends to our religious conservative allies. We don’t need to agree on everything, but we should also acknowledge that we are a small faction in this fight and be grateful to have a place within the Right. Christians are generally accepting and forgiving, eager to bring in new potential allies. These are virtues that are not to be taken advantage of.

As G.K. Chesterton once said, “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” As the lines separating friend from enemy in our new moral battleground continue to converge into something resembling a cross, those unwilling to stand behind religion must at least step aside.

Nearly one year ago, I published an article in the European Conservative called Believe in Believers. The basic thesis was that New Atheism ran out of steam right after cracking the cultural door a little bit wider for the incoming woke uprising of the 2010s. With no refuge to be found in the “new story” atheists have been promising for decades now - one that retains all the valuable parts of religion but dispels with the aspects less savory to our modern world - atheists must get out of the way of an explicitly Christian response to the increasingly holy war the West has found itself in. The essay was published before October 7th, and so did not account for the return of the old New Atheist nemesis: jihad.

The resurgence of hyper-violent zealotry in the Middle East has prompted the former “Fifth Horseman of Atheism,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to declare that “atheism cannot prepare us for a civilizational war” - a belief now widely echoed in various fashions by remnants of the New Atheist crowd. I’d like to be able to claim that I’ve been proven right, but along with neglecting the then-lurking problem of Islamism, there was always another avenue available to hold together civilization if Christianity continues to crumble. A new story is being written, but for those like Professor Dawkins who see the decline of believing Christians as a good thing, be warned. As the saying goes: If you didn't like the Christian right, you'll really hate the post-Christian right.

If the cross can’t be reassembled, our societies will be forced to rely on canes.

The rise of right-wing progressivism presents the alternative path forward for those unwilling to throw their full weight into faith. The founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, and his spiritual successor from down south, Nayib Bukele, have proven that there is a path forward for civilizations that cannot rely on the subduing power of the great talisman. Without a common culture to keep the peace, lost assumptions will be radically enforced.

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Neither founder started building their legacy from scratch. They have had to make do with what they inherited—reforging the raw material available to them into a stable society. Singapore is a country with no delusions about diversity. Its ethnic composition is 76% Chinese, followed by 15% Malay and 7.5% Indians, with all other ethnicities representing 1.5% of the population. These numbers have been intentionally stabilized for decades as Singapore’s strict immigration policies, low birth rates, and social cohesion efforts, such as the Ethnic Integration Policy, dictate harmony from the top down. Similarly, the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act keeps the peace between the various religious factions within the city-state.

“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.” - Lee Kuan Yew

Singapore’s laws are notoriously strict, and the government’s ability to directly interfere with the lives of its citizens outstrips any other first-world nation (at least on paper). Still, the country is prosperous and safe—many doors are not equipped with locks, and the entire island can sometimes go weeks without any recorded crime. Those who disrupt this peace are mercilessly caned, and traffickers who dare to bring drugs into the country are hanged. Singapore’s founder saw hanging as a mercy, stating that if he could kill the dealers a hundred times, he would.

For those who think this is brutal, you’re right - but just remember that the United States had over 107,000 drug overdose deaths in 2023, a number roughly equivalent to roughly 2% of Singapore’s entire population.

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Meanwhile, In El Salvador, 2% of the adult population is now behind bars. The country, which as recently as 2015 held the title of the highest murder rate in the world, has become a beacon to the rapidly growing coalition of right-wing progressives from around the world due to its “philosopher king’s” crusade against the (occasionally explicitly satanic) gangs which have immiserated the country for decades. Bukele’s “war for peace” has proven enormously successful - El Salvador is now the safest country in the Western hemisphere, and El Presidente now boasts an approval rating of over 90%. Recently, two gang murders in a remote part of the small country prompted the deployment of 6,000 police and military personnel in an overwhelming display of propagandistic resolve. Bukele’s message to what few gang members remain in the country, much like LKY’s message to the few drug traffickers eager to enter Singapore, was simple: zero tolerance via infinite force.

Of course, all progress comes at a cost. El Salvador has gone from 52 to 1.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in just five years, but it has done so through an extended suspension of its constitution through what is likely to be an indefinite state of emergency. While some NGOs have decried the country's conduct towards the 13,000 or so inmates who now inhabit the largest prison in Latin America, much like they continue to decry Singapore’s comfort with capital punishment, the populations of both countries have overwhelmingly rejected their disingenuous, internationalist siren song of “human rights” in favor of something more tangible: safety. This is to say nothing of the coalition of international right-wing progressives who recognized these nonprofits as nonentities a long time ago. All those tempted by Bukele’s offer of 5,000 free passports have already decided to live and die by the motto “move fast and break things,” even if those things happen to be privacy, free speech, due process, and democracy.

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Some of these new arrivals will be Christians, but many will not be. Both will find themselves in good company among the El Salvadorians, some 60% of whom attend church every week. Their president is undoubtedly a man of faith as well, often praying for wisdom alongside his country-sized congregation. That the terminally online techies who are beginning to size up a move to San Salvador are likely to have more in common with the exceedingly secular Lee Kuan Yew matters not. What they will share with their newfound neighbors is a sense of pragmatism, optimism, and ambition, more than enough to build a lasting partnership. Right-wing progressives understand what is required to restore order to a society in which common assumptions about civil decency have fallen away, regardless of faith. Trust in God, but pay the police well.

Bukele’s slogan, “There’s enough money when no one steals,” a direct refutation of the corruption that has plagued the tiny nation for decades, will also appeal to the e/acc enthusiasts. What first brought El Salvador to their attention was not the brazen war on crime, but Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies might shore up the Salvadorian economy, but it is more likely that Bukule’s enthusiastic embrace of “digital gold” is more a Bat-Signal than a bet, aimed to attract the top talent from around the world who are happily coding from a couch in any country, so long as the WiFi works and the streets are safe. San Salvador even rests nicely within the Central Standard Time zone, perfect for remote workers looking for easy access to American opportunities. Already, some are gearing up for a great migration in a typically Silicon Valleyish entrepreneurial fashion. They are eager to build a new Singapore, founders flocking to a bedrock on which to build.

As conditions continue to deteriorate in America and other first-world nations, many will look to flee to a country with a more youthful and useful leader. Others will begin to demand a similar figure at home. The rise of Vivek Ramaswamy indicates a growing demand for a youthful right-wing progressive president in the United States. Trump himself is also a Conservative in name only, less worried about the predictable Republican moral outrage over abortion than about winning bigly. Both are founders in their own right as well: political mavericks coming into the area from a business background, signaling the whole way that their inexperience in politics is actually their greatest strength. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps a history of successful entrepreneurialism will become the new barrier to entry for future Republican frontrunners. At the very least, there are rising numbers of successful business leaders who are dissociating themselves from their classically Democrat affiliations. With old obligations thrown away, their new horizon provides plenty of opportunity.

What we can be sure of is that the model set by Singapore and El Salvador - that of uncompromising practicality mixed with technological optimism - will be emulated and expanded upon. As dysfunction continues to rise across the West, everyone with an internet connection will begin to publicly wonder what is really left to conserve and whether or not the costs of progress towards the future they desire actually are too steep to bear. People will only suffer economic, social, and moral setbacks, on principle, for so long. As the future rushes to meet us, the right-wing progressives will be eager to greet it, keen to conserve nothing, innovate rapidly, and play by their new set of rules.

I’ve spent most of my life as a migrant, in places I wasn't from and didn't belong. All of these places have been Western, and with one exception, English-speaking nations where the differences were slight but large enough for everyone to notice. The odd thing about culture clashes is that the smaller the distance between the host culture and the newcomer, the more obvious the discrepancy can become to those attempting to fit in. Whereas an individual from a completely different culture, perhaps also with a different dominant language and religion, can cut themself away and exist in a bubble of their own creation, those who can't help but exist within the fringe are doomed to a strange sort of (dare I say it) “microaggressive” culture clash, little differences and inconveniences which pile up and potentiate upon each other. The English writer Dodie Smith once said, “Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.” What’s left unsaid is how little both parties care for this.

From my experience, total assimilation is impossible. Functional assimilation, that of learning the language, contributing to society both economically and socially, and operating in a relatively frictionless day-to-day experience is perfectly achievable, though at differing degrees of difficulty depending on the host country and the native culture of the aspiring assimilator. But while a Canadian can fit into Britain almost instantaneously, it is not the case that Britishness can fit into a Canadian. The differences are slight, but the 90/10 rule holds for cultures as it does for companies: “90% of the work gets done in 10% of the time and 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.” Like learning a new language, as you approach total assimilated cultural fluency, every new step becomes exponentially more difficult and significantly less rewarding. What does it matter if I say pants instead of trousers so long as I pay my taxes? But it does matter, more than anyone on either side feels comfortable admitting. It is these final points that will permanently separate the foreigner, in small, hard-to-define ways, from being a member of their new nation’s “us,” rather than a “them.” At best the immigrant can reconcile themselves with being “one of the good ones,” but there will still remain a great deal of difference in appreciating the beautiful history of a cultural marvel such as a cathedral or Cenotaph and thinking “that was here” and “that was us.”

There is another phenomenon that works against imported individuals, their very presence causes the discussion of differences to jump to the front of the conversation. I have never felt more Canadian than when I was living away from Canada, and this feeling begets more “Canadian-like” behaviors to make a reappearance, to justify themselves and provide contrast in a self-justifying sort of way. Those contrasted against also become more of a pastiche of their cultural heritage as well, embodying stereotypes to show support for something they can never fully articulate, but are completely a part of, in a way that they were not before they encounter a novelty who doesn't have the same heritage, home, references, and cultural resonance that they take for granted. How can I truly assimilate when new cultures do not suppress my Canadian-ness, but magnify it?

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This is the relentless struggle of the assimilator, you force those whose home you inhabit to take stock of what they have never had to notice before, then realize how different they actually are from you, a revelation you were both hoping to keep private. What no one will admit to, is that this breeds a small, quiet resentment from both parties. Those who can't manage a perfect fit vs those who are perfectly fit, and are now troubled by the understanding of just how ensconced they are. I, as an immigrant to somewhat companion cultures that relegate me perpetually on the fringe, can only imagine one thing worse, those who know that they will never fit, not perfectly, not partially, not at all. That doesn't breed a low, harmless hostility, one that provides fun little battles over stereotypes and can be smoothed over with a beer. That feeling, of total foreignness, that of the alien, can give rise to a total rejection.

As the saying goes, “What do they know of England, who only England know?” As England shrinks, those who only know of England will see the world, whether they want to or not, firsthand knowledge of all its delicacies and disturbances in our new age of discovery. The world has come to England - its ancient feuds and modern-day disturbances made manifest on streets from Leicester to London. The assumption that the World would want to know England once it got here seems strange, as it was never really the case - in the first age of discovery, the ships only ever went one way. So, are these battles for heritage, or are they a form of homesickness - a cultural graft rejection, just in reverse? When an organ transplant fails, it's due to the body's immune system rejecting the new tissue, attacking what it correctly recognizes as foreign. In order to mitigate this, donor and recipient must be matched by their similar antigens so that the body does not fight off its newest addition and immunosuppressants must be prescribed to lower the chance of rejection. These suppressants also have a nasty side-effect of exposing the body to new ailments it could have previously fought off unaided. The whole system must be controlled as the suppressants cannot target only one part. With cultures, this metaphor breaks both ways, the transplant can strike back, and first, if it wants to, should it find its new host's suppressed cultural antigens mismatched on its own terms.

This is the dynamic of cultural refutation, now seen not only in England but across the West, as a result of a new war in the Middle East. Are the protests that have dominated London the past few weeks pro-peace, pro-Palestine, or are they anti-Israel? Better question: are these protests against the very aspiration of assimilation? Reverse rejection, an outlet for the anger of realizing just how unbearable the expectation of fully assimilating really is? It’s hard to believe anyone can come to England without noticing its quiet, simple beauty. Love it, hate it, desire it, or deject it, this country remains unignorable. But unignorable is not the same as unlikeable, beauty is often destroyed as it can't help but stand in silent judgment. When the BBC reports that one can live their entire life in ethnic enclaves inside England without speaking English, and when underground poems sprout up about reverse colonization, everyone can recognize this as the symptoms of a failed graft. All that is left to fight over is whose fault it is.

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The left blames the hosts. The right blames the newcomers. Neither side has taken the proper dosage of cultural immunosuppressants. I’ve lived in too many places to fall comfortably with either tribe. England and its Englanders are some of the most welcoming people on the planet, but they can't help being authentically themselves, fully inhabiting the country and culture that belongs to them. They don't have the option of saying they are proud to be an immigrant, they are not, they are home. But they don't have the option of being proud of that either, it's been suppressed in the hopes of a successful transplant. This suppression always seems a bit punitive as well, as if it's their fault that true assimilation is an unassailable challenge they consciously foster upon others, rather than understanding that true assimilation is unassailable everywhere. Still, it's hard for me to judge, say, Romanian immigrants who have come to England and formed their own Romanian enclave where they speak Romanian, act Romanian, and live with other Romanians. If I were to move to Romania and had the option to live in a Canada-Town where I could speak English while living and working with minimal culture shock among my fellow expats, I might try to avoid the temptation (and probably shamefully fail). However, farther out of past the fringe of the West, in a country where no one acted, looked, or spoke like me, Canada-Town would be a blessing. Unfortunately, one man's oasis can be another’s ghetto. 

On a recent Triggernometry episode, Bill Maher, referencing a recent Substack by Andrew Sullivan, noted that “London went from 36% to 86% people of color… Okay, that's progress. I’m not a bad person to, like, clap for progress.” Sullivan also quotes a friend in his essay who says, “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me that I can go around London and never hear English spoken!” Both these statements will bristle those on the right, but few care to notice how they clash against each other. Is Maher’s progress a country where less and less people speak the language, unable or unwilling to assimilate? This is not the progress the British have voted for, exercising their liberal and democratic values only to be ignored.

Maher is not English, but Douglas Murray is. Touching on the same topic, on the same show, Murray said recently, “Oh, but might it be against our liberal values… I’m not as interested in that as I am in Britain remaining Britain.” The “it” Murray is referencing is combatting Maher’s progress, progress which has led to excellent foreign food, a symphony of new languages, and Palestinian protests that include statements like “Hitler knew how to deal with these people,” and “Muslim armies isn't it time?” These protestors obviously agree with Ghandi when he said that “Palestine belongs to the Arabs…” but it's harder to discern if they agree with the back half of his statement, “...in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.”

Should this relentless train of progress reach its final destination, that final abolition, I have to imagine all those who make it to the final stop will hesitate before departing. Even they, distant and despondent, will know something has been forever lost. I’m thankful that day will never come though, as I am very confident there will always be an England. Whether this comes at the cost of our liberal values or not will mean a new conversation about the limits and desirability of assimilation must be had, soon and seriously. The old assumptions about integration and immunosuppression will have to be revisited and revised. Transplant rejections don't automatically kill the host, but organ failure is never pretty.

This is a little black spot where I want to smolder away on politics, psychology, propaganda, culture, book & movie reviews, and probably a whole host of things.

In a past life I was a wildland firefighter to pay my way through university. After a fire has burned its way through the forest, everything is quiet and still, waiting for the living things to return. It’s black, with drifts of white ash and bright red hot spots. That's the burn - a surreal place that never lasts long. Burns start charred but clean, and get messy quickly as flora, fauna, and firefighters all start making their way back into the aftermath of a blaze. This Substack will be messy as well, but the rough plan is to focus on one goal (start writing again) and one question: What happens when mass movements begin to heat up?

I hope you find it a pleasure to burn

Evan

Most people are familiar with the political compass below.

It's outdated, which is not the same as being wrong. Left and Right define our political conflicts and cultural conversations even more than they used to, but is the widening gap between our two tribes best characterized as an economic argument? People are not cutting off family members and canceling their coworkers over differences in opinion on taxes and free trade.

The Y-axis needs a closer look as well. Authoritarian vs Libertarian is described as the social scale, but do we really use these terms to help classify people? Outside of the US, libertarian has very little meaning, and authoritarian is used to either describe hostile foreign powers or to insult political opponents; no one in the upper “authoritarian” half would ever use it to describe an ally. When we look at the current culture war, with all its podcasts, essays, and online tribal camps, this compass isn't much help. This compass is a holdover from the “end of history,” where everyone thought that liberalism had won the day, democracy was ready to be exported around the globe to eager recipients, and all we needed to do was be more libertarian, or at least anti-authoritarian. Hence, this chart from politicalcompass.org

There are a few interesting things to notice. The first is that while plenty of highly authoritarian countries are plotted out, there are no highly libertarian ones. The second is that the entire bottom left quadrant is empty. While the people behind this compass may have been able to find some examples to negate these two observations, the fact that they didn't (or couldn't) tells us a lot about the utility of the scale. The map is larger than the territory. Now, while there are certainly plenty of individuals who would fit down towards the ultimate end of libertarianism or somewhere within the bottom left quadrant, the fact that there are few countries is of some note.

Interestingly enough, here are the major AI LLMs plotted on the compass. 

The map remains larger than the territory but now in reverse, and the ideal begins to reveal itself in turn. Check out the following from the Political Compass About page while remembering that the Political Compass was started in 2001 (the emphasis is my own).

“Our essential point is that Left and Right, although far from obsolete, are essentially a measure of economics. As political establishments adopt either enthusiastically or reluctantly the prevailing economic orthodoxy — the neo-liberal strain of capitalism — the Left-Right division between mainstream parties becomes increasingly blurred. Instead, party differences tend to be more about identity issues. In the narrowing debate, our social scale is more crucial than ever… We believe that, in an age of diminishing ideology, The Political Compass helps a new generation in particular to get a better idea of where they stand politically — and the sort of political company they keep.”

I’m reminded of The Matrix, in which humans are kept docile in a computer-generated dream world that is always and forever 1999.

Unplug and ask yourself, are we really in an age of diminishing ideology? I certainly don't think so. Down the rabbit hole, in this little burnt-over corner of the internet, we find the following truth self-evident: this is an age of ideological expansion. This is perhaps the most important red pill, which can be taken by both left and right: progress out of the end-of-century consensus is possible.

Political Compass V1 has liberalism demarcate the Y axis. All that is meant to be discussed is the speed upon which we arrive at the supposedly inevitable end state of neo-liberal capitalism. In this sense, we can see both left and right as two cheeks of the same backside, creating the paradigm that has defined the right for decades now, where “conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.” Especially if all the AIs are in agreement that the libertarian left is the optimal quadrant! But why would people ever settle for inevitability?

Dostoevsky explains our second self-evident truth.

Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!

People won't be played like piano keys. Bedlam is preferable to boredom.

Idle history long enough, and someone will come along to rev the engine, if only to hear things get louder. It wouldn’t matter if you could prove to people that neoliberal capitalism really is the best form of government beyond a shadow of a doubt; they would reject it as an endless stretch of sameness is ultimately intolerable. Francis Fukuyama acknowledged at the end of The End of History that late-stage liberalism would have challengers; he just thought that none of their refutations would pose a serious threat.

But what would a compass that takes the possibility of that refutation into account look like?

First, I don't think everyone but the Liberals are mad. Now, let me provide some other clarifications and reconceptions necessary to understand Political Compass 2.0. We must also understand this compass as intra-western, charting people's positions within the West, helping us make sense of our neighbors, as opposed to foreign nationals outside the liberal paradigm.

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Left & Right

The names remain the same, but this dimension should no longer be characterized as an economic argument but rather a moral and social one. We build our social tribes around a shared morality, and our identities stem from tribal affiliations. Below is an image from Jonathan Haidt’s () must-read book The Righteous Mind, charting out the differences between left and right in terms of their moral foundations, creating two very different social tribes at its tails: the left tribe, which values caring and fairness above all, and the right tribe, which cares about these two foundations as well, but also factors in Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.

The easiest way to understand the difference between these two tribes is by their acceptance of hierarchies. The left wants to dissolve hierarchies, and the right wants to make them ironclad, or at least understands that they are inevitable. The farther out to the left one goes the more concepts like equity and statements like “from each according to his ability [the moral foundation of Fairness], to each according to his needs [and now Care]” start to make sense. This reveals the flattening of the hierarchy, where all are equal in their responsibilities and requirements. The farther out to the right, the easier it gets to rank people by any quantitative metric and statements like “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” seem irrefutable. Moral foundations are trickier to distill from right-wing quotes, as the right balances all five elements in a roughly equal distribution. Still, authoritative statements that take the form of universal laws about natural orders code heavily right, as do appeals for subsumption to religious sanctity or the purity of a body politic, such as “You must sacrifice every thought, every ideology for the good of the nation and for the serenity of our fatherhood.” In both these right-wing statements, however, the hierarchy is clear: the strong over the weak, the nation over the individual. At the far end of the right, the Sanctity of the hierarchy is most important, and its Authority must be respected with total Loyalty.

Progressives & Conservatives

Here, things get more complicated because it requires reformating outdated conceptions of common words. Typically, when people talk about progressives today, they mean someone who is far-left, while a Conservative is anyone who is center-right. This provides more confusion than clarification while also tilting the terminology in favor of the liberal bottom left quadrant. If progressive means left, then isn't the right, by definition, regressive? Much like an authoritarian, a right winger would never refer to a friend as “regressive.” Also, how can liberals be opposed to conservatives if what the conservatives are trying to conserve is… liberalism? There also remains the open question of what exactly progressives are trying to progress to…

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In our new paradigm, progressives are people who are focused on new possibilities for the future, while conservatives are people who want to return to or retain the past. Realize that neither of these two modalities actually differentiates whether someone is on the left or right wing. There are many left conservatives who wish to return to those halcyon days of end-of-history liberalism, just as there can be right-wing progressives who want to upend liberalism and replace it with monarchies, network states, theocracies, and all sorts of other possibilities (progressives on both the left and right are more challenging to classify based on one standard idea because their new ideas are myriad and evolving unlike the conservatives already articulated position). This makes our new Y-axis an Innovation Scale, rather than a social one. Progressives attempt to create new ideological alternatives while the conservatives try to preserve the established order. Again, neither of these two modalities dictates whether someone is left or right-wing.

It is worth pointing out that innovation is not good in and of itself, as most experiments fail. At best, it is necessary when circumstances demand evolution or extinction. This is to say that neither the progressive upper half nor the conservative bottom of Political Compass 2.0 is “right,” just as neither the left or right sides are correct simply for being left or right. This is a compass that can’t tell you where to go.

In Political Compass 1.0, neo-liberal capitalism demarcates the Y axis of Authoritarian - Libertarian. For Political Compass 2.0, however, the progressives are trying to innovate something different from the liberal paradigm, which is being preserved and promoted on both left and right by the conservatives. Now, liberalism defines the X-Axis, where everyone below it is a liberal, and everyone above is post-liberal - exploring the new frontier and trying to create a cohesive new ideology out of various competing ideas and interests.

TLDR: The X-Axis is a Moral Scale based on different moral foundations. The easiest way to understand it is by acceptance of hierarchy, with the far left striving for total equity while the far right strives for a perfect caste. The Y-Axis is an Innovation Scale, with Progressives generating new ideas for the future while Conservatives try to preserve the past. Anyone below the X-Axis supports liberalism, anyone above it does not.

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Let’s now examine the four quadrants in some detail to explain this dynamic. Bear in mind that these are scales, so there are gradations of validity within each quadrant to the heuristics and profiles being applied, and simplified ones at that. People have spilled much ink describing just one corner of one quadrant of this compass. There will be some left conservatives who accept some hierarchies, they would plot closer to the Y-Axis. Likewise, there will be right progressives who are less open to innovation than others; they would plot closer to the X-Axis.

Right-Wing Conservative

These are your standard issue conservatives. Represented in the US by the Republican Party (sans Trump), Fox News, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and the Heritage Foundation in America, Right-Wing Conservatives are conservatives as you know and love/despise them, the ones who can’t help but go one about how things just ain’t like they used to be. They are fundamentally liberals, just ones who wish the rate of change to be slower. Many would disagree with this statement, but their inability to slow down or reverse the rate of change no matter how loudly they call on history to stop indicates the true nature of their quadrant (they play the heel) and why they always seem to lose on cultural issues. Reformating the quote from above: Right-Wing Conservatives are just Left-Wing Conservatives driving the speed limit. They place the nation and god above the individual (Pro-Hierarchy) and seek to preserve and protect the American liberal experiment (Anti-Innovation).

Left-Wing Conservative

These are your standard issue liberals. If you consider yourself “politically homeless,” a “centrist,” have ever thought, “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me,” or can identify with the central figure of the following graphic (made byand shared widely by Elon Musk), you also probably belong here, just closer to the center of both the X and Y-Axis.

Left-Wing Conservatives believe in liberalism and share much of the same moral foundations (emphasizing care and fairness) and end-state goals as left-wing progressives; they would just prefer that change is made within the liberal paradigm rather than at its expense. They are very concerned with being “on the right side of history” which they believe invariably bends towards justice.

By now, liberals have lost most of their institutions to the progressive left wing. Still, they used to be represented by the Democratic Party, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and organizations like the Center for American Progress. Many of them now stagger about feeling as neoconservatives once did - mugged by the reality of their replacement at the hands of the left-wing progressives. They believe in liberty and equality for the individual above all (Anti-Hierarchy) and that liberalism is the best and final form of government as improvements can best be made within its framework rather than outside illiberal challengers (Anti-Innovation).

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Left-Wing Progressive

These are the Woke. They are also often called “leftists” or "progressives” by our left-wing conservatives (aka Liberals) to differentiate themselves from them. Left-Wing progressives do not believe in liberalism but find liberals to be useful idiots in supporting their cause of flipping every conceivable hierarchy in favor of those at the bottom due to their ability to prey on shared moral foundations. Much has been written on the emergence of the left-wing progressives, who have replaced the left-wing conservatives in their own institutions (such as the ACLU or at Harvard) and repurposed said institutions to their progressive ends. Like their right-wing progressive counterparts, they do not believe in neutral institutions, preferring that institutions enforce their equity-at-all-costs worldview. They world in terms of friends vs. enemies, waging war on all three other quadrants (as well as within their own) by any means necessary rather than argue their points as both left and right-wing conservatives attempt. Much of their nascent “woke” ideology is incoherent, but this provides them with endless zeal to create a fully articulated and implementable way (Pro-Innovation) of realizing a radically egalitarian state (Anti-Hierarchy).

Right-Wing Progressive

This is the “New Right,” the hardest-to-define quadrant of the four, due to its relatively new prominence. The right-wing progressives include the neoreactionaries, national conservatives, catholic integralists, online semi-anonymous intellectual shitposters, a large portion of the tech industry or Balaji Sirnirvaisan’s “Grey Tribe” (who and also describe as right-wing progressives) and various other subfactions. All are united in their either skepticism or outright rejection of liberalism, which they see as being, at best, a naively utopian impossibility too easily corrupted by left-wing progressives. Right-Wing Progressives don’t really have any institutions yet but are working on building some that are resistant to invasion from the other three quadrants. They exist primarily on podcasts, X, a few sporadic events, some Substacks, and in a couple of magazines. A few of them sit atop Silicon Valley.

The following five points from explain the basics of the Right-Wing progressive mentality, and are largely shared by left-wing progressives as well.

A belief that the socially liberal (left) and economically liberal (right) political parties of the West form a single ideological regime that is responsible for all manner of social pathology.

A belief that there is no such thing as a neutral institution.

A belief that Woke ideology isn’t an aberration of liberal democracy but an inevitable result of its shortcomings.

A drive to proactively assert moral values through the state - individual rights are subordinated to communitarian values.

A belief that an elite ruling class is a naturally occurring phenomenon. They see no point in fighting or mystifying this fact and think we should embrace it and try to ensure our elites are worthy of their station.

Another shared trait between the left and right-wing progressives is their penchant for infighting and purity spirals as they try to distill their intra-competitive ideological claims into a cohesive ideology while also policing their boundaries against liberal interlopers. Unlike the left-wing progressives, right-wing progressives do not find their conservative counterparts to be useful idiots but rather counterproductive idiots. This is because they think that what the right-wing conservatives are trying to conserve is liberalism, leading many in the “New Right” to call for an explicit rejection of the “conservative” label. The right-wing progressives believe that liberalism is by nature entropic, dissolving the natural hierarchies that keep the world spinning on its axis (Pro-Hierarchy), and the only way to prevent inevitable chaos is to create a new method of governance that instantiates a supreme figure like a god, king, ubermensch, or machine, who can stop this (Pro-Innovation).

Wars are always waged over lines. The front is fought in the space between us and them. But when the map is outdated, with the lines not only fading but false, time is wasted separating friends from foes, and friendly fire is inevitable. This new era of culture wars requires a new way of thinking about political cartography. The fog of war cannot continue to hide the shifting territory beneath us. As battle lines are drawn under a smokescreen of new ideas and ideologies, the definitions of the past require an update or at least a re-articulation of who we call what and why.

The latter half of the 2010’s and first few years of the 2020’s were a battle of the left-wing conservatives vs the left-wing progressives. I believe that the latter half of the 2020s and the early 2030s will be a battle of the left and right progressives. If I’m right, things are going to get hot. Only time will tell.