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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
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.
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
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.
Adam Peterson retweeted
Lower property taxes by cutting bureaucracy.
Lower electric bills by producing more energy.
Lower healthcare costs through price transparency.
All we need is a competent governor in the driver’s seat.
Adam Peterson retweeted
What the Dems did in Alaska, if it's true, is really dirty.
Nice job in this discussion, @andrewrsorkin
Adam Peterson retweeted
This is one of the better litmus tests for whether you’re pushing your use of AI enough or not.
Up until maybe six months ago probably the best you could do with AI was pull off something you already would produce, but just doing it a little faster. But now we’re entering a point where the output of working with AI can and should dramatically exceed what you would been able to do before, in a fraction of the time.
The product prototype should not only be fully functional and interactive, but it should probably have meaningfully better features than it would have had before. The engineering architecture should be able to deliver performance gains that you wouldn’t have been able to go after otherwise.
The research for a project should consume every single fact on the subject across every dimension of analysis possible. The business process you implement with AI should operate entirely differently and learn from all its past failures in a way no human could.
We’re unquestionably entering a period where AI will be smarter than us on most axes. Perhaps not on every dimension that matters (intelligence is still very jagged), but at least on enough dimensions that when we combine it with what we’re good at, you get qualitatively different outcomes.
So the simple test is: if you could have done what you’re doing before AI, you’re likely not pushing it enough.
Adam Peterson retweeted
A San Francisco Federal Reserve paper recently found that the influx of unauthorized immigrants under the radical left accounted for 20% of rent growth during the 2021-2024 Bidenflation surge.
By contrast, President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies are producing the opposite effect. State-level data show a strong association between increased immigration enforcement and more affordable rents.
@POTUS will always put American families FIRST.
Adam Peterson retweeted
🚨 NEW: HUD launches the Public Housing Authority Accountability Dashboard, giving the public direct access to housing authority performance and funding data.
This is the latest step in the Trump Administration's work to bring transparency to federal housing programs. app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJ…
Adam Peterson retweeted
The left claims the right is eroding democracy
I used to believe this
Now I strongly believe that the inverse is true, the left is eroding democracy
If you don't believe this, ask yourself:
1) why won't California pass a Voter ID law?
2) why does the left allow >10 million illegal immigrants into America?
3) why was President Trump investigated over classified documents but Biden and Clinton weren't (they both had classified documents)?
4) why did Democratic operatives find a second Dan Sullivan to run against the incumbent Dan Sullivan in Alaska?
5) how are the courts able to block the deportation of violent illegal immigrants who have deportation orders? (not all, the subset with criminal indictments)
From the mid 1800s until 2016 the left and right had roughly symmetrical powers
But the 2016 election fractured the right into two groups: the legacy Republican party vs MAGA
While they were fighting with each other, the Democratic party solidified an exceptional -- and asymmetric -- level of power
We see this in its most pronounced form in the courts today; but the trajectory is a uniparty
This would effectively be the end of Democracy in America
If the Democrats want my vote again then do the following things:
a) pass a voter ID law
b) make electoral college and congressional power proportionate to *citizen population* rather than *total population* (including illegal immigrants)
c) remove threats to pack the Supreme Court (and in a perfect world pass legislation capping the Court at 9 judges)
🇺🇸
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
Adam Peterson retweeted
wild to hear the word "authoritarian" from a man supporting a party openly committed to packing our supreme court, abolishing the concept of private property, and jailing men throughout the tech industry explicitly to scare others from working for republicans
