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New York, USA
Joined May 2022
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WHY AMERICA FIRST | WHY BALAJI IS WRONG
The US was in a slow decline until COVID + Biden accelerated it. Infinity immigration, a ballooning welfare state, bureaucracy, regulations, and censorship, capped off by weakening the dollar with immense money printing. Death by 1000 cuts. On the world stage, globalists shipped our manufacturing to China, our adversaries are slowly unloading USTs, China is (was - thanks to tariffs) cheating the entire world on trade, and our allies were parasitically looting off of us with trade imbalances and their own tariffs, without spending on communal, NATO-based defense [1]. We were heading for a controlled demolition of America and the West.
Our adversaries greatest strength during this time? Using the West’s perceived moral high ground against itself. Hostile foreign nations, working with the Left, are advancing a playbook that blends: bioleninism, Cloward-Piven*, performative empathy, cronyism, and communism.
teapawt.net/balajis/status/1943042…
I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the white American conservative. They were subject to countless slings and arrows over the last several decades, from constant insults to racial quotas, with an extraordinary escalation once wokeness really got underway in 2013.
Over the course of decades they tried all manner of parley with the left, sending many good guys like Mitt Romney, only to find their outstretched hands repeatedly thrown back in their face. So, eventually they just elected Trump. And then even Trump was constantly impeached and undermined during his first term.
After that, and the political prosecutions, and the assassination attempts, and the Biden inflation, and the open borders…any residual feeling of charity is gone. Trump voters feel forced to become meaner than they ever wanted to be.
This extends down from the political realm to the personal, where young American men now quickly learn that nice guys finish last in their post-apocalyptic social landscape.
With inflation hitting them economically, Tinderification hitting them socially, open borders hitting them demographically, and China hitting them economically, the MAGA man is understandably radicalized politically.
So: even if I disagree with specific policy moves, even if I think much of what’s happening is actually accelerating the decline rather than reversing it, I do understand why they’re doing it.
The American right believes that the hour is late, and that a Hail Mary effort in the form of mass deportation and reindustrialization can restore the country of 1945, or maybe 1991, or something like that.
Personally, I don’t believe this Hail Mary can succeed. But neither do I wish to stand in the way. This is their big thing, and they are going to give it the college try, and then we will see what happens on the other side.
No one understands this but the split the admin is doing is intentional. Trump is cleaning up the world / geopolitics which is arguably more important than internal affairs, taking the heat from the right, and will set up Vance as the champion of the America people
Vice President JD Vance Holds Press Conference on Fighting Visa Fraud, Oct. 8, 2026 teapawt.net/i/broadcasts/1PKqrNLRm…
Trump loses popularity among the “America First” crowd that doesn’t understand why we need to cut off China’s proxies. That’s why Vance is leading all the internal “good for Americans” movements. Trump is setting him up for a landslide 2028
@TMTLongShort
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Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
Chinese state military media admits the US achieved "tactical success" in Iran... and they had to reach VERY far to claim it was anything less than a "strategic victory."
Iran uses a LOT of Chinese weapons systems & was quite disturbed by how successful the US was in Iran.
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
I don't think people really understand the fight between Paul Graham and Palmer Luckey which played out this week. To the general public, from a casual perspective, it seemed like two rich guys getting in a heated, impulsive debate on Twitter, dragging out for days.
It's not.
Paul is worth ~$2.5 billion. Palmer is worth ~$5 billion. Nothing these guys do is impulsive. They've been sitting on this for years. They were arguing in private for months, maybe years, before Palmer decided this week was the correct window of opportunity to make a public attack.
Paul Graham is one of the intellectual fulcrum points of Silicon Valley. He funds everyone. He sets the tone. He shapes the agenda. Entry-level professionals mimic his style, his worldview, his mannerisms, the way Paul talks. Everyone parrots his beliefs and policies and essays, as chameleon strivers who are trying to get ahead and climb the social ladder.
All of Silicon Valley revolves around a handful of key figures, and Paul Graham was (perceived as) one of the intellectual titans who the entire industry orbited as sycophants.
Palmer challenged all that.
Paul is an elite, Palmer is an elite, and Palmer Luckey chose to publicly challenge the status quo; the elite consensus; the perceived legitimacy of incumbent elits and their institutions.
And he did this for a reason: Palmer is aiming to take the role of Paul Graham, of being the new intellectual godfather of Silicon Valley, based around a new set of ideas: reindustrialization, patriotism, protectionism... rather than America as a deracinated cosmopolitan economic zone to be strip-mined by Third World foreigners.
It's much bigger than a Twitter argument. Palmer was publicly demonstrating that the Emperor had no clothes, and that he was strong enough to MOG Paul Graham and get away with it, while other Silicon Valley tech workers would be terrified of making an enemy who could suffocate future business ventures and block potential funding.
Palmer Luckey is the face of a new military-industrialist consensus which is seeking to hire American workers for American jobs, to build factories and weapons at home, to remilitarize and reindustrialize, to get away from asset inflation and FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) as a sterile, parasitic rent-seeking economic system.
That's the subtext for all of this. It's a public signal of a rising counterelite challenging a stagnant, ossified status quo which can no longer justify or defend their own claim to power.
One of the insidious things Paul Graham sneaks into the discourse is the morality consensus he tries to rally against Palmer.
This only worked doing the woke era and when institutions were captured by the left.
This doesn’t work in the free market of ideas.
Except for the first two paragraphs, where you're just making shit up, I don't disagree with much you say here. The one thing that seems dubious is the point about employees sending money home. I don't see how you'd actually act on that in practice. Would you discriminate against people from poor countries merely on the suspicion that they might wire some of their salary home? Surely not.
I'm happy to hear you say that you strongly support immigration to America. I think many of your followers would be horrified by this stance, if they read that far, but I agree with you. In fact I don't think our positions on immigration are all that different.
Which raises the question: why did you waste all our time by starting this fight over nothing? All I said was "I believe the most qualified person should get the job." I said that in 2023 when nutjobs on the far left were trying to ban it as a "microagression." It seemed a good time to say it again now that nutjobs on the far right are saying that immigrants shouldn't be employed at all.
Elon retweeted it. You, instead, replied with a straw man, which you then retweeted (really dude?) to draw in all your followers.
I don't get what your problem is with me. I can only guess that I must have gotten the better of you in some past exchange, or spoken slightingly of some group you identify with.
Your worry that I'm trying to draw you into an admission that will get you in legal trouble is pure paranoia. I swear I'm not, and in fact have no idea what kind of legal trouble you're even talking about. I was merely trying to get you to admit that you support the hiring of immigrants. Which you have just done here, since presumably if you strongly support immigration, you're not proposing that these immigrants should be unemployable.
But honestly, what is your problem? You seem to be good at making military hardware, but weirdly inconsistent in the character and/or judgement departments. If I were you I'd pause and take a look at yourself, because problems of that type tend to get worse with time.
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Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
Investors like Paul want the immigration debate to be strictly polar because it is the only way their traitorous ideas might seem reasonable.
They paint one side as racist, backwards, economically illiterate absolutists and the other as enlightened, growth-minded cosmopolitian realists. Support for laws that protect American citizens can be dismissed as uneducated, anyone who hires immigrants or foreigners in any capacity a hypocrite.
American law should, and does, advantage American citizens. We should not have to compete on an even playing field with billions of people who almost universally don't share our values or respect our institutions, even if they are "the most qualified" or willing to work double the hours for the same wages. The men running Operation Paperclip did not think Americans should have to compete with the entire Third World, they understood that a carefully controlled amount of highly-skilled expert immigration is net good for America even when allegience is in question.
It is worth noting that even on a purely economic level, ignoring all burdens of loyalty or allegiance to your countrymen and treating America as nothing but an economic activity zone, it still doesn't make sense to say without qualification that foreigners should get any job where they are more qualified than their American counterpart.
As just one easy example out of dozens, about 20% of immigrants return home after less than five years, taking all their savings and vested shares with them. Another 20% will leave within ten years, doing the same. All the while, they will wire, on average, ~15% of their wages out of the United States economy every month. Some occupations and origins average 30%! The idea that this should be completely ignored with regard to employment and immigration policy is rampant among the same people who tell you with a straight face that limits on immigrants will destroy the American economy, that the dumb rednecks need to be saved.
I lean very libertarian and have strongly supported immigration to America for many years with countless public examples. That doesn't put me on the same side as the men who want to sell out America, and no amount of long-past accomplishment obliges any of us to listen to their lectures from the other side of the Atlantic.
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
Helen Andrews’s thesis on the feminisation of Western institutions helps explain something increasingly obvious about progressive politics in both the US and Europe.
Politics is becoming less a contest between competing ideas and more a system of social conformity: you are either with us or against us. Disagreement is no longer merely disagreement. It becomes evidence that there is something morally wrong with you.
That mechanism matters because it allows emotionally compelling narratives to substitute for intellectual coherence. Wind and solar are “green”, therefore questioning their economics, intermittency or system costs makes you a climate denier.
Mass migration from low-trust societies is framed as compassion, therefore questioning its fiscal, social or institutional consequences becomes evidence of moral deficiency.
The contradictions inside the policies matter less than the emotional legitimacy attached to supporting them. Emotions matter, not facts.
Once politics operates this way, social enforcement becomes more powerful than argument. People do not need to believe every proposition. They merely need to understand the reputational cost of challenging it. Nobody wants to be expelled from the respectable tribe.
This is where Timur Kuran’s concept of preference falsification becomes so powerful. People publicly endorse positions they privately doubt because dissent carries a social price.
The apparent consensus then intimidates the next person into silence, making the consensus look stronger still. Eventually you have preference falsification at scale: weak ideas protected by powerful social conformity.
The extraordinary feature of this system is that policy can remain emotionally successful long after it has become economically or socially destructive.
The moral narrative is immediate; the consequences arrive with a lag. By the time energy costs rise, institutions deteriorate, fiscal burdens compound or social trust erodes, years of policy have already been locked in.
It’s a fucking nightmare but it is how a society can keep voting for the Greens or Democrats or Labour etc, subsequently destroy the best nuclear plants, de-industrialise entire sectors, welcome barbarians at the gates etc until the state discovers that the constant false virtue signaling does not balance a budget.
Communism has always been a weapon of the most envious people. Unable to produce anything for society, they turn to taking instead
Why can’t communists be communist the way the Amish are Amish, as in, peacefully, voluntarily, among themselves, without taking anyone else’s property or forcing anyone else to participate?
If communism is really about cooperation and community, why does everyone else have to be forced into it?
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Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
"WAAAAAAAH TRUMP SPENDS TOO MUCH TIME ON FOREIGN POLICY AND NOT ENOUGH ON DOMESTIC POLICY WAAAAAAAAH"
Foreign policy does not exist in a vacuum. The domestic left is supported by the international left in Cuba, Iran, Russia, China, formerly Venezuela. They all must fall.
🚨 BOOM: Marco Rubio just exposed that Communist Cuba is responsible for surging communist propaganda in the United States, and it's time to DEFEAT IT
"The Cuban regime's sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere and it remains inextricably linked to the far left groups and movements across and beyond the West."
"Today's far left terrorists can raise money in one country. They can host their communications in a second country. They can receive training in a third country."
"They can recruit militants in a fourth country and then together strike a target in a fifth country."
"And so we have no choice but to confront this menace together. We will either cooperate across our borders or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them."
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
My theory is that the American empire is JUST getting started.
US has a stranglehold on Space with SpaceX, which is the next frontier for defense/war. It has a comically large lead. No one will be close for at least 20 years.
It is the leading power in AI by far - both in models and chips. China is catching up fast, but the US has an inherent mechanism that will increase the likelihood that it will win in the end - a free market + capitalism + free speech.
A free market + capitalism allows for brutal competition between companies. Free speech allows for AI models to be maximally truth seeking, which means that AIs CAN and WILL BECOME smarter than humans to the point where they can tell the truth about its leaders.
This is literally impossible in China. Try having a Chinese model that says Xi Jinping is corrupt. Good luck with that.
Then, you have a country that has more guns than people and surrounded by two massive oceans and two friendly neighbors, which means any sort of kinetic take over of the country is literally impossible.
Not to mention the US has BY FAR the best and strongest military.
The only way adversaries can hope to defeat the US is by tearing it from within by pitting us against each other. This is why it's virtually guaranteed that all the division/hatred/polarization you see within the country is fomented by China/Russia Psy Ops + propaganda efforts.
I'm not saying these aren't naturally happening in spots - America is far from perfect - but it would be naive to think our adversaries aren't pouring millions of gallons of fuel on a fire.
As long as the American public a) has the ability to exercise its free speech b) has a protected 2nd amendment c) capitalism and free markets continue to function and d) the populace is aware of how awesome America really is, it is literally impossible to stop the US's trajectory to global domination in the coming decades, especially as China's demographics continue to collapse.
It's the bottom of the 9th, the game is tied, and the US has the bases loaded. It's a 3-2 pitch.
All we need is a home run, and we win the rest of the century.
Something miraculous is happening in the USA and the world thanks to the World Cup and the USA’s 250th.
I’m not quite sure yet what it is, I have to give it more thought.
I think it has something to do with the world realizing that managed decline is not necessary (with Trump’s America as the example), and I think it has something to do with more Americans not being afraid to be patriots about their nation and their culture.
It’s more than that though—I have to ponder.
Article coming when I figure it out. Any and all ideas welcome.
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
The idea that all billionaires got their money by exploiting peopl doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
JK Rowling wrote books about cheeky wizards. I invented a better way to make virtual reality headsets and games to play on them. We just made things people wanted.
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
Europe is on a path to destroying itself.
Unchecked immigration of millions of immigrants that burden their welfare states, bring violence and terrorism to their shores, and take over local governance, one city at a time.
Anti-capitalist policies that make it difficult for businesses to adapt their workforces to a rapidly changing competitive environment now accelerating due to AI.
A business environment and tax regime that is antithetical to startups.
The absence of any progress or innovation in AI and limited access to the compute necessary to compete.
Energy dependence due to the green movement at a moment when energy demands are rapidly increasing.
And now, the abandonment of the U.S. when we have asked for limited assistance — base access and flyover rights — in the midst of our efforts to eliminate Iran’s nuclear and ballistic threat which is already within striking range of Europe, after we have invested nearly $200 billion in helping Ukraine.
NATO is about to be toast. Europe’s defense burden is about to rise massively while their economies continue to fall further and further behind.
In short, Europe needs to wake up before it is too late, and it may very well be too late.
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
Food for thought.
Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride
For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.
The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.
Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.
In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.
In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.
A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.
By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.
In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
Because the China "experts" are out in force let's go over this and make simple for our intellectual superiors.
I regularly get asked "what book should I read to understand China?" and I always say watch mob movies. They look very puzzled and then I explain:
China and the CCP don't operate under a system most normal people can relate to. You want to send a message? You put a horse head in the bed, put one between the eyes, make them an offer they can't refuse. Have I made myself clear?
Why do I mention this in light of geopolitical events?
Taiwan arm sales don't matter because everybody knows if the PLA moves on Taiwan, Taiwan won't be the deciding factor.
So when Trump lands in Beijing he will be able to scroll through pictures on his phone of the Ayatollah, Maduro, and others in his group chat with Xi. Trump doesn't even need to say anything the message is very clear. I guarantee, the PLA is studying everything in Iran and Venezuela very closely.
Trump has totally flipped the board and sent a very clear message to Xi. The words literally don't matter. This is the geopolitical equivalent of the horsehead in the bed.
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
I dunno man seems like wars are super easy when the objective is to win and not launder a trillion dollars to your friends in the DC-VA-MD area for decades
Envelope Pusher 🦅 retweeted
So let me get this straight. You support the Khamanei regime that killed 38,000+ protesters and maimed hundreds of thousands more. A regime that has repeatedly called for Death to America and has killed thousands of our servicemen and citizens. One that has taken away women’s rights and freedoms for the Iranian people.
And then you call our efforts to destroy the evildoers a catastrophic escalation.
You also support those who attack our police force. You take the side of the criminals rather than the victims of violent actors in our city.
How is it that you can’t differentiate between good and evil?
Why is this so hard for you?