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Adam Peterson retweeted
To my friends on the left.
You're about to be sold the most elegant trap in modern history. It will come wrapped in everything you care about: the planet, workers, justice, the climate. If you buy it, it will deliver the exact opposite of everything you've ever fought for.
Let me show you where it comes from.
In 1944, two philosophers of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, wrote that reason and technology, the tools that were supposed to free humanity, had turned into tools of domination. Twenty years later, Marcuse argued that modern technology was the most sophisticated system of social control ever built. Brilliant men, with a real insight. But the lesson a whole generation of intellectuals took from them was simple: progress is suspect, and the machine is the enemy.
In 1968, the Club of Rome was founded. It was a small circle of industrialists, diplomats and scientists. Notice who was in the room. No workers, no farmers, no one from the slums. In 1972 they published The Limits to Growth. The message was that if humanity keeps growing, it collapses. So slow down, consume less, have fewer children, accept less.
Around the same time, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s.
Here's what actually happened. The Green Revolution fed billions. The mass famines never came. In 1980 the economist Julian Simon bet Ehrlich that resources would get cheaper, not scarcer, and he won. Extreme poverty went from more than a third of humanity in 1990 to under one in ten. That didn't come from degrowth. It came from growth, energy and technology.
The pessimists were wrong about almost everything. But they won something more important than the argument. They won the institutions: UN agencies, NGOs, university departments, think tanks, Brussels. Nobody needed to coordinate. The ideas simply became the water everyone swims in. Growth is guilt. Technology is danger. The answer is always less.
Less for you, that is. Never for the people at Davos who fly private to discuss your carbon footprint.
Now watch what happens with AI. They'll connect it to the planet. Data centers drink water, burn gas and raise your electricity bill. Some of that is locally true, and the people living next to those sites deserve to be heard. Last March, Bernie Sanders and AOC proposed a national moratorium on new AI data centers, backed by hundreds of organizations.
So ask the oldest question on the left: who benefits?
A moratorium on new data centers freezes the ones that already exist. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta already built theirs. A moratorium doesn't stop Big Tech. It crowns Big Tech. The startups, the public universities, the open-source labs, the countries of the Global South that were about to build their own are the ones who never get to. It's the greatest gift ever offered to an oligarchy, wrapped in green paper.
And here is what nobody tells you. AI isn't the planet's problem. It's the fastest path we have to solving the planet's problems.
AI is already controlling the plasma inside experimental fusion reactors. It has predicted the structure of nearly every known protein, which opens the door to enzymes that eat plastic and crops that need less water and less fertilizer. It has proposed hundreds of thousands of new stable materials for better batteries and cheaper solar. It forecasts weather and balances electric grids so renewables can actually work at scale.
Every problem you care about is, at its core, an intelligence problem. Clean energy, food, water, disease, poverty. Make intelligence abundant and those problems become solvable. Make it scarce and the solutions belong to whoever owns it.
That's the real trap. Fear of AI won't make AI disappear. It will only decide who owns it.
A world where intelligence is rationed creates a new aristocracy. On one side, a small class with unlimited cognitive labor at its command. On the other, everyone else, dependent on that class for their health, their education, their job, their permission to speak. No chains. Just dependency. That's how every modern form of servitude has worked, and the left used to understand that better than anyone.
Everything the left has ever wanted has never been closer: the end of poverty, healthcare and education for every human being, workers freed from exhausting labor, a planet that can breathe. Marx dreamed of a society where you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner. That isn't a world of scarcity. It's a world of abundance. Abundance is the only thing that has ever freed anyone.
So stay on the left if you want. Keep fighting for the poor, for workers, for the planet. Just fight with the most powerful tool humanity has ever been handed, not against it.
Because the people asking you to give it up already have theirs.
In the next ten years, humanity will make one choice that decides the next thousand.
Option A: an Orwellian world run by a tiny hyperclass that controls AI, owns every resource, and turns the rest of us into permanent dependents.
Option B: for the first time in history, a world where the systemic corruption that has ruled us for decades simply stops being possible.
Yesterday I wrote that Milei and Bukele exposed the empire of lies. Javier Milei reposted it. Today I want to explain why that post was only the beginning, and why I've never been more optimistic.
If you're on the left, or even the far left, read this one to the end. I'm not trying to convert you. The stakes are your future too.
Start from first principles. A system produces exactly what it rewards.
For decades, the Western system has been captured by one worldview: administrations, universities, NGOs, media, international institutions. The left didn't win the argument. It won the hiring committees.
Once a system is captured, its incentives flip.
You don't get promoted for solving problems. You get promoted for managing them. A solved problem kills a budget line. A managed problem renews it every year.
You don't succeed by telling the truth. You succeed by saying the right words. So hypocrisy becomes a career skill. The professor who preaches equality and runs the most closed network in the country. The politician who votes for open borders and lives where none of it ever reaches him.
You don't build fair systems. You build systems that look fair and quietly pay the people who run them. Inflation is a tax on the poor that funds the state. Programs fund the consultants who design more programs.
That's what "systemic" means. Nobody has to be evil. Honest people inside the machine either adapt or leave. After forty years, the ones still there are the ones who adapted.
Here's the irony. The first countries to break free were the ones at the very bottom.
Argentina was bankrupt. El Salvador was a graveyard. The system had nothing left to promise them, and that's exactly why they woke up. When the lie stops paying, people stop believing it.
No civilization is dead as long as its people can still see the problem clearly. Rock bottom is often where the rebound starts.
Now the West is caught in a vise.
On one side, AI. A technology that exposes managed incompetence. When a model can read a 2,000-page law, audit a national budget and compare outcomes across 50 countries in seconds, "it's complicated" stops working. The expert class loses its monopoly on knowledge.
On the other side, a generation of tech builders who think from first principles and don't owe their careers to the system. They have more capital, more talent and more reach than most countries. And they've seen up close how the machine works.
Put the two together and the old system is close to checkmate. It can't compete on results. It can't hide behind complexity. It can't control the narrative anymore.
So what does a system do when it can't win? It tries to own the thing that's beating it.
Listen to Marc Andreessen. He has said publicly that in 2024 he sat with Biden administration officials who told him AI would be two or three big companies working hand in hand with the government, that investors shouldn't even bother funding AI startups, and that parts of the underlying math could be classified the way nuclear physics was in the Cold War. He walked out and endorsed Trump. Former Biden officials now say that's not what was said. Read both versions and decide who you believe.
The logic doesn't depend on one lunch, though. Control three companies and you control the models. Control the models and you control what billions of people read, ask, learn and are allowed to say. Add a digital ID, a programmable currency and the scanning of private messages that Europe keeps putting back on the table. Then you don't need a Ministry of Truth anymore. A compliance department is enough.
1984 with a better UX.
And last Tuesday, Democrats took back Congress. This isn't theoretical anymore. The keys to the house are on the table.
Now imagine we don't hand them over.
Intelligence becomes almost free. Expertise stops being a privilege. A kid in a village in Brittany or a suburb of Lagos gets the same doctor, the same lawyer, the same tutor as a billionaire's son. The cost of producing almost everything collapses. And systemic corruption becomes nearly impossible, because anyone can audit every budget, every law and every promise, instantly.
For the first time in human history, a society that could be truly equal. The old left version was equality by sharing scarcity. This one is equality through abundance. A world where poverty stops being a law of nature.
Which is exactly what the left always said it wanted.
So to my friends on the left, one honest question. Which side actually leads there? The side that wants AI open, cheap and in everyone's hands? Or the side that wants it locked inside three companies and a regulator?
Milei and Bukele proved the impossible was possible at the scale of a country. AI is offering the same thing at the scale of civilization.
All we have to do is not give the keys to the people who were paid to keep the problem alive.
That's the choice. And I've never been more optimistic, because for the first time, we can all see it.
Adam Peterson retweeted
History will remember two men as the ones who exposed the empire of lies: Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele.
For decades, the same class of experts, NGOs, think tanks and international institutions told us two things were impossible.
That you could kill inflation without destroying a country.
That you could kill violent crime without "addressing root causes" for another 30 years.
Milei took the first one.
Argentina, December 2023: inflation over 200% a year, 25% in a single month. A central bank printing money to fund a state that had become a vote-buying machine. Every economist on TV predicted a social explosion if anyone touched it.
He cut the number of ministries in half. He balanced the budget in his first year. Monthly inflation went from 25% to under 2%. Poverty, which peaked at 52.9% right after the devaluation, fell to 28%, the lowest since 2018. It's not a straight line, poverty ticked back up this year, and he says so himself. But the point is proven: the "impossible" was possible all along.
The lesson is brutal. Endless money printing was never a technocratic necessity. It was a hidden tax on the poor, quietly paying for the people who designed the system and lived off it.
Bukele took the second one.
El Salvador, 2015: 106 homicides per 100,000 people. The most violent country on earth outside a war zone. Gangs ran neighborhoods, taxed every bus driver and every street vendor, and decided who lived and who died.
El Salvador, 2025: 1.3 per 100,000. Lower than the United States.
Every international expert said it couldn't be done. The NGOs called it barbaric. Salvadorans re-elected him with over 80% of the vote, because they're the ones who used to bury their kids.
And now his helicopters are in Haiti, pulling his own soldiers out of gang territory, telling the gangs: we finished with ours, we can finish with you.
So ask yourself the real question. If it was this simple, why didn't anyone do it?
Because an entire ecosystem lived off the problem.
Inflation funded the state that funded the clients that funded the elections. Crime created fear, and fear created demand for programs, consultants, studies, panels, subsidies and "experts" who never had to deliver a result. In Latin America it was the gangs. In the West it's mass immigration with no integration and crime with no consequences. Different symptom, same business model: the problem is never solved because too many people are paid to manage it.
Milei and Bukele didn't just fix two countries. They published the proof. Every politician who still says "it's complicated" now has to explain why a guy with a chainsaw and a guy with a baseball cap did in two years what they couldn't do in forty.
Thank you Javier Milei. Thank you Nayib Bukele.
The world is going to heal with your solutions.
Europe is next. We're waiting.
Adam Peterson retweeted
No they love scarcity, it's what creates the zero-sum conditions necessary for them to weaponize envy and grab power through emotional manipulation rather than competence
Of course they hate abundance – at Port St John, FL
Another good write up
Takes on the election
1. To a first approximation, Republicans lost this hard because voters lost confidence in the Trump administration, not because of a positive agenda from the Democrats. Favorability of the Democratic Party was negative (-5). But Trump told voters to “vote like he was on the ballot”, and they did. The NBC exit poll found that 37% of voters approved of Trump, and 63% disapproved (-26). There’s just no winning the national environment with these margins.
2. There were essentially two major issues that voters cared about: 1) cost of living and 2) government corruption, both of which ~90% of voters said were “crucial or a major factor”. AI was not *that* big of a deal in this election - 56% said it was “crucial or a major factor”, but it’s really hard to disambiguate what voters feel about AGI and catastrophic risks (if anything) from ordinary median-voter NIMBYism around data centers. (It will, however, likely be a huge deal in the 2028 election when the impacts of AI become much more visible). Immigration was also not that big of a deal. Voters actually slightly favored Rs on immigration (+2), probably thanks to lasting backlash from the Biden administration’s laxity on border enforcement. It's unclear to what extent the war with Iran contributed aside from it raising the price of gas.
3. Data centers are probably not over. In fact data center ETF $DTCR was up nearly 2.5% today! It’s hard to understand why this is the case, but one hypothesis is that markets think ultimately, elites’ recognition of the immense economic and national security importance of data centers will override voters’ desire not to build them.
4. On cost of living in particular: one of the most important questions now is to what extent Dems will embrace economic slopulism (think rent control, broad asset taxes, and subsidizing demand) vs. “abundance liberal” policies like building more housing, cutting regulations, and embracing economic growth.
5. Thermostatic backlash is real. Voters hate incumbents. Political majorities shift constantly. The blue wave of 2008 was immediately followed by the red wave of 2010. Anyone predicting a durable multi-decade supermajority for Democrats will likely end up being wrong.
6. “Woke is back” is exactly the wrong lesson for Democrats to take from this, and Ro Khanna posting “DEI is back” doesn’t help. Using transgender issues as a proxy for “woke”, 52% of voters said trans rights have gone too far, compared to just 26% who said they haven’t gone far enough. Deep-blue Washington voted to ban trans athletes in girls’ sports, and Colorado voted to ban trans surgery for minors. Successful Democrats mostly avoided culture war issues.
7. Similarly, a lot of moderate or even right-leaning downballot measures passed, even in blue states. Eight states voted to require voter ID. North Carolina voted to cap state income taxes. California’s billionaire tax is on track to fail by nearly 11 points. Wisconsin voted to ban DEI in state government. Voters largely do not like left-wing ideas.
8. On the other side, “Demographics is destiny” (i.e. America needs to be a white nationalist/nativist country and heavily restrict immigration) is the wrong lesson for Republicans. White voters shifted 13 points to the left. Whites under 30 shifted 30 points to the left. Hispanics and other non-white groups shifted massively towards the right in 2024, and can be encouraged to do so again.
9. Moderates outperformed; radicals underperformed. Dems won by 13 points nationwide. Roy Cooper won by 19.6 in North Carolina (where Trump won by 3.2 in 2024). Jon Ossoff won by 18 in Georgia, where Trump won by 2.2. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine, both Bernie-backed supporters of Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and wealth taxes, both underperformed the national margin. In fact, Maine shifted slightly rightward. Dems were able to win deep red states like Iowa, Kansas, and Mississippi by running moderate, Republican-presenting, pro-border-security candidates. I suspect this is the main reason markets are up today. (For some intuition on how insane it is for a Dem candidate to win in Mississippi, Trump won Mississippi in 2024 by a larger margin than Harris won California!)
10. One of last night’s biggest winners was Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Under his tenure, Florida has gone from slightly red-leaning to reliably red. Republicans swept every statewide office, kept every House seat, and kept their majority in the State House and supermajority in the State Senate. In January, Florida will be the only one of America’s ten most populous states to have a Republican governor. DeSantis is genuinely smart and nuanced, lacks the baggage of figures like Vance and Rubio who are associated with the Trump administration, and did a great job as an administrator running Florida (see its high rate of domestic migration, zero state income tax, very low debt per capita, high education rankings, state budget surplus, etc). I would be unsurprised if he decided to run for President in 2028.
11. The other biggest winner was Jon Ossoff. Ossoff is a young, handsome, charismatic, moderate white male who won by 18 points in a state that went +2.2 for Trump in 2024. He achieved this in large part by focusing relentlessly on the two issues that mattered: the Trump admin’s corruption and the cost of living. He may very well be the Democratic frontrunner in 2028 (although, of course, it's far too early to make confident predictions about these things).
12. The biggest loser of all last night was Israel and the US-Israel relationship. Israel’s popularity in the United States has been in a steep, secular decline for years. Just 13% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans have positive views on Israel, and this is heavily skewed by age - younger voters are much more likely to oppose Israel. With Democrats taking both houses, it’s unlikely America’s level of political and military support for Israel will last for very long.
13. Gerrymandering doesn’t work under sufficiently strong margins for the opposing party. In political science, this is known as “dummymandering”. Dems are on track to flip 7 of North Carolina’s 14 House seats, shifting the balance of power from 10-4 Republican to 11-3 Democratic.
14. Trump quickly conceded that his party lost and he would be open to working with the Democrats. This was a positive update on Trump’s tendency toward authoritarianism. Many mainstream Republican figures, like JD Vance and Ted Cruz, quickly posted somewhat genuine mea culpas. There was a lot less coping than I expected. It’s possible that the loss had to be very painful for them to learn from it, and we wouldn’t have seen the same if Dems had won only 51 Senate seats.
15. Elections are truly a ton of fun to monitor live. There’s nothing like it. And prediction markets beat mainstream media in terms of timeliness and accuracy by FAR.
16. There’s a good chance none of this matters that much. Trump is still the president and still has veto power. Voters might turn on the incumbent Democrats in 2028. And historically, real GDP growth isn’t that different during eras where Ds controlled Congress vs Rs. Much of your probability mass should go towards “nothing ever happens”.
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Adam Peterson retweeted
We're in a new era of communication, and only one side seems to be living in it. The old guard consultant class is about to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If you think that high prices lost the election for the right, you don't understand marketing. Humans have no problem paying a premium for a good quality brand. Notice the word "brand", not "product". Are Nikes better than New Balance? Nope. But the brand is better. And notice what happened when they tinkered with the brand and screwed their core narrative? Nike stock fell through the basement. Did the product change? Nope. The brand did.
It's not the product, it's the brand. Results don't sell the product, the storytelling does. Will these newly-elected commies lower prices? Of course not. Are they gonna get you free healthcare? No, your insurance is gonna get even worse, just like it did the last time they tried socialized medicine. They're not going to do anything they've sold you, but...like Saul Goodman said: if you're committed enough, you can make any story work.
The committed storytelling of a couple insane podcasters was enough to fracture an entire political coalition from their own side in less than 2 years...they have zero power, zero credibility, they've never actually governed anything nor produced any results, but...they're good storytellers, and that's all that matters. Are they telling a good story? No, it's atrocious, but they're telling their atrocious story effectively and compellingly.
It is 100% true that everything's too damn expensive, and we all know that inflated prices are always sticky. Does anyone know that it's entirely the result of shutting down the global economy over the flu and (both naive republicans and democrats) printing infinity dollars for several years? Nope...because nobody has effectively told that story, and it's an unsexy story to tell. "Free stuff!" is a VERY easy story to tell, and when everyone's gotta take out a second mortgage just to pay their insurance premiums, "free healthcare" is an unbeatable story. It doesn't matter that "free healthcare" doesn't exist and socialized medicine is a terrible product...it's not the product, it's the brand. And "FREE!" is a great brand.
You can't get mad at people for having the financial literacy of a 9 year old. I mean, you can, but they outnumber you a million to one, so it's not going to be productive. You need to figure out how to make an unsexy story sexy, or else the "free stuff!" crowd is going to eat your lunch every time. If you give people a choice between earning a six pack on a treadmill or taking Ozempic, they're gonna choose Ozempic...they don't care about the side effects. If you give people a choice between fiscal discipline or free stuff...guess what they'll pick? They don't care about the side effects.
With projected growth of 5%, the economy right now is stronger than it's been in generations. Is that the story you hear? Nope. Is that the vibe you feel? Absolutely not, especially when every time you fill up your gas tank, it feels like a diesel enema.
It's not the product, it's the brand. A great product can fall into oblivion with bad messaging...a single bad review from one effective storyteller can tank a restaurant. The "influencer economy" is lucrative for a reason; everybody inherently understands the importance of effective storytelling...except the right. Zohran Mamdani gets it...he has an army of influencers on staff. In a perfect metaphor of this transitional phase of old guard vs new wave political messaging, Zohran nuked the Vice President into oblivion with maybe the biggest ratio in the history of the internet. By simply posting the subway assistant meme, Mamdani got 2 MILLION likes, quoting a post from the VP that had only 10K likes. If you're reading that sentence thinking "this is fucking ridiculous, you're talking about social media likes as political analysis now?"...you are the problem.
Yes, this stuff matters. Rizz matters. The President did a masterful job of this kind of retail politics in his historic 2024 campaign...you can be angry that this is what politics has been reduced to, but you can either adapt or die.
"No the problem is, you didn't deliver enough for the American people!" Are you a moron? Since when does anybody care about that? What have democrats delivered for Californians in the last 20 years? Unmitigated wildfires, homeless drug zombies everywhere, roads that look like Fallujah in 2004...people don't care about results. They think they care about results. That want you to believe they care about results, just as Nike wants you to believe their shoes are better than New Balance...but at the end of the day, all people really care about is the swoosh.
Adapt or die.
Guys, I hate to break it to you, but most political advisors are so bafflingly incompetent, it would make your head spin. All the talented communicators go work in Hollywood or at Saatchi and Saatchi, and these political bros never tap these agencies for help...I've connected several campaigns with literally the best marketing geniuses in the game, got them discounted rates, even...and they just never even bothered calling. It truly feels like a lot of consultants and candidates just want to lose.
You ever wonder how my ads went so massively viral, but there's not been a single candidate who's come close to it? It's their dumbass advisors. I didn't go with any political advisors, and they were SO mad about it. I partnered with a filmmaker and marketing wizard, instead of political grifters. Why? Because I wanted our messaging to be effective. Political ads suck. Nobody watches them. I wanted people to want to watch my ads. The fact that nobody else understands this is...I honestly don't know how to explain it, other than they want to lose.
There are a bunch of candidates who love it when their party loses power. It takes all the heat off them, because then they can't be expected to pass legislation when they're in the minority, plus they can fundraise way better off of the rage when the opposition is running roughshod over the country. Baffling to watch.
Some the write ups are getting good.
Matt Walsh calls this the most honest assessment he has read. You should all read it. And then maybe you will see what honesty requires and that both of these men refuse to do it.
Start with Vance's method. A team of data analysts obsessing over electorate composition, pollsters asked to explain the loss after it happens, a survey handed to defecting voters asking what would bring them back. This is the technique of a pragmatist. A man of principle could not care less about polls. He cares about ideas and whether they are right or wrong, and he would rather lose every election in his lifetime doing the right thing than win a single one doing the wrong thing. He holds a standard, measures his actions against it, and knows before the returns come in whether he governed by it. Victory means nothing to him if the price is his principles, because a victory won by abandoning what is right is a defeat in everything that matters. That is not what is happening here. These men are asking the crowd what it feels because they have no idea what is true, then adjusting their convictions to match the answer. Ayn Rand named this method decades ago. When men abandon reason as their guide, the opinion survey becomes their substitute for thought.
Observe what the assessment leaves out entirely. Not one word about tariffs, a tax on Americans that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional and the administration reimposed under a different statute, running through two years of roughly 6% cumulative inflation. Not one word about roughly 30 government equity stakes in private companies, which is socialism practiced by the party that claims to oppose it. Not one word about a brand new universal entitlement, two trillion dollar deficits, or a 40 trillion dollar debt. "Focus on cost of living" appears as a polling answer with no causal analysis attached, because the causal analysis indicts their own record. The most honest assessment somehow misses every policy the voters threw them out over.
Then Vance's 4 conclusions which are out of context slogans which are meaningless as such. The reason we lost is the war. Half true and twisted. Hitting the regime that has waged war on us for 47 years was right and four decades overdue. What voters watched afterward was the goal line surrender, a so called deal championed by the appeaser Vance, who stood at Lake Lucerne praising the framework as the foundation for a final agreement while it waived Iran's oil sanctions and released $12 billion in frozen assets to a regime left standing, with our forces still taking fire in the strait. The failure is not that we fought. The failure is that we paid the enemy and called it peace while they still shoot at us to this day. And buried at answer four is the actual agenda, change our relationship to Israel. This disgusting faction of the Republican party that cannot define socialism while its administration practices it has one firm conviction, pushing away the only free nation in the region, our one reliable ally against the theocracy we are trying to buy off, just as Obama did. At least Obama dropped the pallets of cash for all to see.
This is why Republicans and Democrats keep winning in alternating cycles while freedom loving Americans lose a little more freedom each time. Both parties govern by the same premises, spending, controls, entitlements, state stakes in industry. Neither offers an alternative, so voters punish whoever stands closest to the wreckage while the wreckage keeps growing.
The pollsters then measure the anger and recommend sharper messaging, and Walsh pronounces the measurement honest.
Honesty is the refusal to fake reality. An assessment that evades tariffs, socialism, and a bought off theocracy while blaming the one thing done partly right is not honest. It is a crowd reading performed by men who long ago stopped checking their premises against anything but each other.
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Certainly not a strength of a republic or democracy; voting cycles in America prioritize short term wins and even theatrics more than long term solutions.
Last night is exactly why no President has dealt with Iran before now
We don't reward Presidents for acting in the best long-term interest of the country
We reward them for avoiding difficult decisions if it means we don't have to make any sacrifices during any given 2yr period
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Fun read
What an absolute, unmitigated, motherfucking disaster.
We got our asses kicked. We got politically disemboweled. We got dragged through the electoral wood chipper, and the Republican establishment stood there with its collective thumb up its ass wondering why the fucking machine was running.
And now, right on schedule, the excuses are pouring in.
The war. Gas prices. Bad candidates. Historical trends. Voter frustration. Bad messaging.
Jesus fucking Christ, SHUT UP.
We had the majority. We had the presidency. We had the opportunity to deliver. And these incompetent, spineless, self-serving Republican bastards managed to turn political power into a fucking participation trophy.
Let's start with John Thune.
You spectacularly useless son of a bitch.
You had the Senate majority. You had an election integrity bill conservatives desperately wanted passed. You had millions of voters begging Republicans to demonstrate that winning elections actually meant something.
And what did you deliver?
A fucking master class in legislative impotence.
The SAVE Act became another monument to Republican paralysis while the people who elected you watched Washington's favorite collection of overpaid assholes explain why accomplishing anything was just too goddamn complicated.
You had power, John.
HAD.
And now Democrats get to enjoy the congressional authority your leadership helped squander.
What a magnificent fucking achievement. You couldn't have served Democratic interests more effectively if you'd shown up to work wearing a DNC name tag.
And don't think the rest of the Republican establishment gets a free pass. Every useless bastard who spent these last two years hiding behind parliamentary excuses, protecting his precious committee assignments, and treating the Senate like a retirement community deserves the same political eviction notice.
Get the fuck out.
Then there's Iran.
And this is where I have absolutely zero patience for the Monday-morning military strategists pretending the nuclear threat was some imaginary problem.
IRAN MUST NEVER, EVER GET A FUCKING NUCLEAR BOMB.
Not tomorrow. Not ten years from now. Not under some worthless diplomatic agreement held together with wishful thinking and another round of international bullshit.
Never.
We're talking about a regime with a long history of sponsoring terrorism, threatening Israel, brutalizing its own population, and pursuing nuclear capabilities that could fundamentally alter the security of the Middle East.
A nuclear-armed Iranian regime is a nightmare America has every reason to prevent.
And if military action was necessary to eliminate that threat, then the mission needed a clear objective and the determination to achieve it.
Destroy the nuclear weapons capability. Prevent its reconstruction. Make damn sure the regime cannot simply wait out another American administration and resume the same dangerous ambitions.
Finish the fucking job.
Because if Americans endured war, economic disruption, and soaring gasoline prices only to discover Iran could eventually rebuild its nuclear weapons program, then what the everlasting fuck was the point?
I can accept political costs for a mission that makes America and its allies safer.
I cannot accept strategic confusion, endless uncertainty, and politicians who seem incapable of explaining what victory actually means.
And here's the part Republican leadership should have understood before this election became a political slaughterhouse.
Americans were paying the price at the pump while Democrats were pounding them over affordability.
Groceries. Gas. Housing. Insurance. The cost of keeping a fucking roof over your family's head.
Democrats hammered those issues relentlessly.
And Republicans?
Apparently they were too busy measuring the drapes in their offices and scheduling another goddamn television appearance.
How fucking stupid do you have to be to watch voters struggle with household expenses and fail to understand what they're telling you?
Then came the candidates.
James Talarico winning Texas. Abdul El-Sayed winning Michigan. Susan Collins losing Maine.
An electoral fucking earthquake.
And the Republican establishment somehow managed to look surprised.
Surprised?
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
You could practically hear the political foundation cracking for months. Warning signs were flashing everywhere, and these arrogant, complacent jackasses behaved like victory was something they were entitled to receive in the mail.
At some point, incompetence becomes so breathtaking that you begin wondering whether anybody in Republican leadership has ever successfully managed anything more complicated than ordering lunch.
And now comes the part that really makes my fucking blood boil.
The conservative influencer circus.
Bannon. Tucker. Candace. Megyn. Flynn. Alex Jones. Jack Posobiec. And every other self-appointed political messiah whose microphone somehow became more important than winning elections.
Here come the emergency broadcasts. The finger-pointing. The infighting. The hysterical accusations. The endless fucking circular firing squads.
Another catastrophe, another opportunity to turn conservative frustration into a revenue stream.
How many fucking subscriptions does it take to rebuild a political movement?
How many podcasts does it take to pass a bill?
How many goddamn livestreams does it take to win a Senate race?
Apparently nobody knows, because we've spent years watching people get rich explaining why conservatives should be furious while the actual machinery of Republican politics keeps breaking down.
Enough of this shit.
And spare me the conservative celebrities who spend more time attacking other conservatives than figuring out how to defeat Democrats.
Your personal feuds are not a political strategy.
Your fucking podcast ratings are not election results.
And your ability to scream into a microphone for three hours doesn't qualify you to lead anything.
Meanwhile, Democrats just demonstrated that winning elections is still considerably more useful than winning internet arguments.
Imagine that fucking revelation.
And speaking of Democrats, can we appreciate the sheer comedic absurdity of what just happened?
Donald Trump, the man they've spent years calling a dictator, fascist, authoritarian, monarch, and existential threat to democracy, just watched his party lose control of Congress through an election.
A fucking election.
The most terrifying dictator in American history apparently forgot the most important chapter in the dictator's handbook.
CANCEL THE GODDAMN VOTING.
What a fucking embarrassment for the professional hysteria merchants.
Apparently American democracy was healthy enough to deliver Democrats a massive victory after all.
Somebody call the Nobel Committee. Democracy has miraculously survived another Tuesday.
But here's where the laughter stops.
Because this defeat is serious as hell.
Republicans lost power. Democrats gained it. And the people who spent years warning us about the consequences of losing these midterms now have to explain why they were so spectacularly unprepared to prevent it.
And I don't want to hear another fucking word about how everyone needs to unite behind the same failed leadership.
Unite behind WHAT?
More excuses?
More broken promises?
More leadership elections where the same collection of useless bastards rearranges the nameplates and congratulates itself on a fresh start?
Fuck that.
I want a political reckoning so thorough that every complacent Republican incumbent starts checking whether his local voters are recruiting a primary challenger.
Every single one.
I want records examined. Promises compared with results. Leadership positions challenged. Failed candidates replaced. Party organizations rebuilt from the ground up.
And I want Republican voters to stop treating incumbency like some sacred fucking birthright.
You want loyalty?
EARN IT.
You want donations?
SHOW RESULTS.
You want another term?
EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK YOU ACCOMPLISHED WITH THE LAST ONE.
Because the era of handing out political participation trophies to career Republicans needs to end.
And don't give me that tired bullshit about how difficult Washington is.
We know Washington is difficult.
That's why we elect people who promise to fucking fight.
If you wanted a comfortable career collecting a government paycheck while accomplishing absolutely nothing, you should have applied for a job as a congressional office fern.
At least the fern produces oxygen.
Now, I know what some people are thinking.
It's over.
MAGA is finished.
Trump is politically crippled.
The country is lost.
BULLSHIT.
Absolute, defeatist, self-pitying BULLSHIT.
Yes, we got our asses kicked.
Yes, Democrats are celebrating.
Yes, the next two years are going to be harder than they needed to be because Republican leadership apparently couldn't pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel.
But since when did one election determine the permanent fate of the United States of America?
Obama's Democrats lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats in 2010.
Did the Democratic Party disappear?
Did progressives pack their bags and surrender?
Of course fucking not.
Political movements survive defeats when they have the courage to confront their failures and the discipline to rebuild.
And that's exactly what conservatives need to do.
Because here's what I refuse to believe.
I refuse to believe that millions of Americans who love this country, believe in secure borders, want safe communities, demand responsible government, and expect their elected officials to put American interests first suddenly ceased to exist because a bunch of Republican politicians fucked up an election.
I refuse to believe that the people who stood by Trump through investigations, indictments, impeachment battles, media hysteria, and years of political warfare are suddenly going to surrender because Democrats won Congress.
And I sure as fuck refuse to believe that the future of American conservatism belongs to the same failed political establishment that helped create this mess.
Maybe this election was the wake-up call.
Maybe God looked down at the Republican Party, watched the arrogance, complacency, backstabbing, cowardice, and endless fucking excuses, and decided these people needed a lesson in humility delivered with a goddamn sledgehammer.
Maybe the message was simple.
YOU AREN'T GOOD ENOUGH.
Your leadership isn't good enough.
Your candidates aren't good enough.
Your organization isn't good enough.
Your results sure as hell aren't good enough.
FIX IT.
And maybe that's precisely what needs to happen.
Tear down the complacency. Destroy the culture of excuses. Replace failed leadership. Recruit candidates who actually know how to win. Build organizations capable of turning conservative principles into electoral victories.
Stop expecting Trump to carry every worthless Republican politician across the finish line like some exhausted political pack mule.
Trump has already done more than enough heavy lifting for people who seem incapable of carrying their own fucking briefcases.
And guess what?
TRUMP IS STILL PRESIDENT.
That little detail seems to have escaped the champagne-soaked Democrats dancing on MAGA's supposed grave.
He still occupies the White House. He still has constitutional authority. He still has the ability to shape foreign policy, defend American interests, and pursue the priorities that brought him back to office.
And if Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions can be permanently eliminated, that achievement will matter long after every smug political analyst has forgotten the election-night graphics.
But Trump also needs a Republican Party capable of surviving politically without him.
Because 2028 is coming.
And when it arrives, the movement needs more than nostalgia, slogans, celebrity endorsements, and another fucking collection of candidates who think putting MAGA in their social media biography qualifies them for public office.
We need competence.
We need discipline.
We need courage.
We need people who understand that winning an election is a responsibility, not a fucking lifetime achievement award.
And we need Republican voters willing to hold their own side accountable with the same ferocity they direct toward Democrats.
That means primaries.
That means challenging incumbents.
That means getting involved locally.
That means demanding actual accomplishments instead of accepting another round of bullshit fundraising emails promising that victory is just one more donation away.
I'm sick of the excuses.
I'm sick of the cowardice.
I'm sick of watching Republican politicians campaign like warriors and govern like frightened little bureaucrats terrified of upsetting the Washington cocktail circuit.
And I'm especially fucking sick of being told that criticizing Republican leadership somehow makes you disloyal to the conservative movement.
No.
The people who squandered their opportunities owe voters an explanation.
The people who made promises and failed to deliver owe voters accountability.
And the people who believe Republican voters should simply shut up, open their wallets, and keep electing the same failed leadership can go fuck themselves.
We've got two years.
Two years to clean house.
Two years to rebuild.
Two years to recruit candidates who can actually win.
Two years to prove that conservatism is bigger than any one politician, any one election, or any collection of self-important assholes occupying leadership offices in Washington.
And yes, I'm furious.
I'm absolutely fucking livid.
I'm disgusted by the incompetence. I'm embarrassed by the squandered opportunities. I'm enraged that so many people who demanded our trust treated that responsibility like a goddamn inconvenience.
But I'm still here.
And so are millions of Americans who believe this country is worth fighting for.
We're still breathing.
We're still voting.
We're still organizing.
And we're still perfectly capable of telling every useless politician in Washington exactly where to shove his excuses.
America has survived wars, depressions, assassinations, national catastrophes, and political upheavals far worse than one disastrous election.
We'll survive this.
But surviving isn't enough.
We need to learn from it.
We need to rebuild.
And we need to make damn sure that the next time Republicans are entrusted with power, the people holding it actually know what the fuck they're doing.
So congratulations, Democrats.
Enjoy your victory. Pop the champagne. Dance on the political graves. Write your obituaries for Trump and MAGA.
You've earned your celebration.
But don't confuse a devastating electoral defeat with the permanent death of a political movement.
And to the Republican establishment, here's your message.
The fucking gravy train needs to stop.
No more automatic loyalty.
No more free passes.
No more protecting failed leadership because somebody has been warming a Senate chair since the invention of electricity.
No more treating voters like gullible idiots who can be placated with a flag pin, a campaign slogan, and another goddamn promise.
You wanted power.
You got it.
You squandered it.
Now answer for it.
And to every conservative wondering whether to give up, I have one final thought.
FUCK GIVING UP.
Fuck surrender.
Fuck political despair.
Fuck the idea that one election gets to decide whether we still believe in our country.
The fight for America's future didn't begin with Donald Trump, and it sure as hell doesn't end with a Republican defeat in 2026.
We lost a major battle. We haven't lost the country. And we haven't lost the right to fight like hell for its future.
So bury the excuses.
Fire the failures.
Challenge the incumbents.
Build something stronger.
And when 2028 comes around, make sure the Republican Party has learned the one lesson its leadership apparently needed an electoral ass-kicking to understand:
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T OWE YOU A GODDAMN THING.
Earn their trust.
Earn their votes.
Earn the right to govern.
Or get the fuck out of the way.
11
Adam Peterson retweeted
This is the only issue that matters, and Dems want to destroy the most potent technology of all time that could rise everyone out of poverty and misery
They would rather rule over the ashes of the empire rather than see it flourish out of their control
This is an example of capitalism at its finest. Things change. Companies need to re org. This one did it with humanity. Well done @canva
Canva is laying off 22% of its workforce which is 1271 employees, and this is what their CEO said.
We need more founders like thissss.
1
24
This remains a problem. @claudeai seems to have flagged my account and won’t let me upgrade my personal account beyond Pro.
@claudeai won't let me upgrade my personal account from Pro to Max. I've tried 2 cards and also apple pay. No go. Called the card company - no attempts for a payment are being made. And my cards are saving in Claude, which itself is kind of an auth. Any ideas?
25
Adam Peterson retweeted
I have voted Dem all my life, and only in this most recent cycle voted Republican.
I have to say, Republican voters handle total annihilation way better than dem voters. The discussion is about how badly the GOP fucked up, not about wanting people to die or anything like that. And nothing gonna be set on fire.
Adam Peterson retweeted
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
Adam Peterson retweeted
Charlie Kirk was assassinated by the left
Yet people still voted for it
Says a lot
Adam Peterson retweeted
To win the Senate, Democrats must flip seats in states the president carried by double digits two years before. How often does that happen?
Answer: Not often — only five times throughout all the midterms since 1990! That speaks to the scale of a wave they'll need to do it.
Adam Peterson retweeted
Sorry to break character but I have to say it.
I am a Lifelong moderate liberal.
With Democrats nominating radicals like Abdul El-Sayed, and Democratic Party leaders cheering him on, I think this is the year where it makes sense for all common-sense, moderate, reasonable Democrats like myself to vote straight ticket GOP.