There’s a lot of talk about socialism these days, despite it’s inherently flawed premise and repeated failures, resulting in millions dying, mass starvation, widespread human suffering, readers here already know the history. Unfortunately, it’s rising again due to new promotion from people who hate America, combined to create the perfect storm since we also recently stopped promoting the story of prosperity and our information ecosystems are deeply propagandized. Also, our biased education system simply ignores past examples that might challenge some of the ideals they’re so keen to promote, which I find both annoying and civilizationally suicidal. Perhaps this is cyclical, and every civilization has to re-learn forgotten mistakes (even though we have parables that try to help, but ofc they’re unhelpful if no one reads them). So all we can do is share stories which are more instructive than dry statistics.

Today we have a fun one which takes us back to the year 1825. Here, a wealthy Welsh industrialist named Robert Owen acquired a complete American town, a plot with 20,000 acres, 160-plus buildings, working mills, workshops, barns, farmland already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony, and 1,000 people showed up in year 1, most convinced they were present at the birth of a new way of running civilization. It’s also notable that Owen wasn’t some kind of crank, before ever setting foot in Indiana he’d already made his name running textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland with shorter hours, real schools, better housing, and the mills still turned a profit. For the early 1800s that’s really impressive and illustrative of his operator skills.

Although, his prior success is exactly what made him dangerous. Owen had convinced himself that people are basically a product of their environment, where you could rearrange the environment and you rearrange the person. Kill private property, kill competition, split the rewards evenly, and cooperation just... happens, naturally, without anyone having to be talked into it, which is of course idealist and ignorant of human nature. As is always the case, a very intelligent person is unable to model the behavior of others, many of whom simply operate differently.

The experiment pulled in serious people. Real optimism, real brainpower, real $ behind it. In January 1826 William Maclure floated an entire boat of scientists and educators down the Ohio River, historians still call it the “Boatload of Knowledge.” Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it, so was naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur along with Geologists, artists, educators, people like this. So this wasn’t some kind of backwoods commune of true believers with no credentials interested in getting high. It was, arguably, one of the highest concentrations of talent in America at that moment. If intelligence and good intentions were sufficient conditions for a new economic system to work, New Harmony had every box checked.

Unfortunately, it fell apart almost immediately. The hardest workers began to realize they were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who contributed much less while receiving the same rewards. Over time, those workers had less reason to continue putting in extra effort. The incentives that existed in a normal market system had been removed, and the results were predictable, and disastrous. Production declined, food became scarce, disagreements grew, and the community became increasingly divided over who was contributing what.

By 1827, residents were leaving in droves, with roughly 80 people departing in a single day at one point. Owen eventually found himself arrested in a financial dispute with his own partner, then spent another $200,000 of his own money paying off the community’s debts before finally abandoning the experiment.

Josiah Warren, one of America’s earliest libertarian thinkers, watched the whole thing from inside and later wrote that “the difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity.” He identified the incentive problem decades before Mises and Hayek would make it central to economic theory: when people are separated from the rewards of their own effort, incentives change. If additional work produces no additional benefit, fewer people will choose to do additional work. Human nature is undefeated, and most modern economists and behavioral scientists would have spotted the problem before the project began (that is, if they hadn’t been brainwashed by Marxist hogwash).

Owen’s own farewell address really shows a refusal to learn from failure, and I find it hubristic. Rather than conclude that the system itself had flaws, he blamed the settlers, describing them as “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality.” The implication was clear: the system would have worked if only the people participating in it had been better suited for it. Oh, how naïve. As has been said before:

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

This has been the recurring defense of socialist experiments throughout history. The theory remains sound: the problem was always the circumstances, the leadership, the timing, or the people involved. It’s basically the Tobias theory of life (from the show Arrested Development).

The irony is that Owen had already discovered what actually worked and I guess simply didn’t like the implications. New Lanark, his profitable mill town, proved decent wages, humane conditions, education, and improved quality of life could exist within a market system and everything worked well. Workers could be treated better while businesses remained profitable, he had built a model that successfully improved people’s lives, but he couldn’t accept his existing answer was the best one.

New Harmony had elite talent, abundant capital, a functioning town, and genuine goodwill, it wasn’t lacking intelligence or idealism. It was one of the most carefully constructed attempts to build a cooperative society in American history and it still failed within 2 years.

Every generation since has found a reason to believe the incentives can be solved this time, but the experiment itself has remained remarkably consistent: good intentions are valuable, but they are not a substitute for understanding how human incentives actually work and how humans behave in real world conditions. As we continually see, what works in the minds of academics and really smart people doesn’t work out so well in reality.

Socialism is evil and civilizationally suicidal, and we should stop pretending the same failed experiment will magically work this time.

Rose Horowitch’s new Atlantic cover story is a fairly comprehensive read of something I’ve been writing about for a while in various ways: Americans on the whole are getting dumber as we in fact do get richer.

The numbers are fairly stark, we’ll go through some of it in case you can’t access the essay. The share of Americans reading for pleasure dropped 43% between 2004 and 2023. Less than half of us read books anymore, even as we’re drowning in text messages, captions, and posts. NYT bestseller sentences have shrunk by a third over the past century (a proxy of complexity people are able to process, even when they do read).

The comprehension data shared here is also wild, almost 30% of adults can’t paraphrase or draw an inference from a few pages of text, up from under 20% in 2017. That feels way worse than people reading less, as it’s actually people losing capability. And it’s compounding downward: 4th and 8th grade reading scores have slid for a decade, and the share of 13-year-olds who say they rarely read for fun jumped from 8 to 29 percent since 1984.

My favorite, most damning part is the Harvard anecdote: some students now genuinely believe professors are “being unfair” by making them get information from a book instead of a summary, as if reading itself were an arbitrary obstacle rather than the whole point.

I’ve made the underlying case before: some friction is good. Reading a book is friction by design, and that resistance is exactly what builds the capacity to hold a complex argument in your head. Skip the struggle and you might save time but you also skip the workout. This is the same instinct I described in resist slop world: the outsourcing of the human parts of thinking to whatever’s easiest, until the muscle that used to do the work atrophies from disuse.

The downstream effects of this have broader implications for all of us. I’ve written before about how little today’s undergraduates actually know about history, and how comfortable large numbers of them are with censorship and even political violence. It’s hard not to connect that directly to a generation that never built the stamina to sit with a difficult book, wrestle with a hard argument, or hold 2 competing ideas at once long enough to reason through them. You can’t Socratic-method your way through an issue if you’ve never trained the underlying muscle on anything longer than a meme or Instagram photo caption.

The concerning part I took away from all this isn’t purely that people are reading less. It’s that an entire generation is growing up incapable of the deep, linear thinking that reading trains, at the exact moment AI can hand them frictionless summaries instead. Convenience and comprehension are trading off in real time, and convenience is winning.

This all makes me think we’re witnessing the beginning of a massive gap between people who read deeply (and can think deeply) and people who don’t. A huge new IQ study I saw recently brings this together. People who were read to more as children score meaningfully higher on IQ tests as adults, and the effect holds even after stripping out wealth and class. Reading early builds intellect that compounds.

The same dataset shows what happens on the other side of the trade. Lower scorers report more TV watching, more celebrity gossip tracking, more lotto playing, and more trouble filling out a complicated form. Most tellingly, they find it more boring to just sit and think. This is really the entire regression in one finding. The capacity to sit still with your own mind, without a feed refreshing in front of you, is itself a marker of the thing we’re losing, and the thing short-form content trains people out of.

The study also found that people with higher measured intelligence score much higher on “actively open-minded thinking,” the willingness to sit with evidence that contradicts what you already believe instead of closing the loop early. This describes a trained skill, and it’s the exact skill a difficult book forces on you page by page.

Interestingly, the same study found people with higher IQs are better at spotting pseudo-profound nonsense, grammatically correct sentences that sound deep but mean nothing. This is precisely the skill you need to survive an internet full of AI-generated summaries and synthetic insight. The people who never built that detector are going to be the easiest marks for the next decade of slop merchants.

AI has, perhaps counterintuitively, made long form reading more valuable since it’s now more scarce. The people who can wrestle with long-form ideas, synthesize information, and think critically will use AI as a force multiplier (or know when to skip it entirely). Those who rely entirely on summaries, short-form content, or AI to do their thinking for them will find it increasingly difficult to separate signal from noise or really provide much value to the world at all (these are the people who AI genuinely can replace). The future will be divided between people who can evaluate, question, and build on what AI produces, and people who simply accept it uncritically. Those capable of deep reading will possess a truly unfair competitive advantage.

I’ve been writing about the rot in higher education for a while now. In Half of Social Science Falls Apart Under Scrutiny, I covered how a massive seven-year DARPA-funded study found only half of social science papers hold up when tested, a consequence of the ideological monoculture I documented in Academia Is Exactly as Biased as You Think. In We Stopped Teaching the Story of Prosperity, I argued universities have quietly abandoned the intellectual tradition that built the modern world. And in The End of America’s Marxist Era, I traced how postmodern Marxist ideology, dressed up in corporate-approved buzzwords, embedded itself in American institutions. We’ve debated and discussed these previous topics, but taken together there’s a clear story our universities are ideologically captured. And if you still want to debate it’s not a big deal, at the very least you can acknowledge universities have failed to provide a bulwark in the broader culture against things we’re seeing play out now.

In our latest piece of evidence, Stanford goes and votes, nearly unanimously, to expand a mandatory freshman curriculum that perfectly illustrates everything I’ve been describing. Today I want to go into that briefly and hope people will read with an open mind, because I think it’s important we get everyone on the same page with this problem so it can be clarified and discussed.

A courageous Stanford accounting professor, Iván Marinovic, brought actual diversity of thought to his school by voting no to a new curriculum and wrote about it in the Stanford Daily. His piece is worth reading in full, but we’ll go through just a bit of it. The mandatory course Why College? is meant to introduce students to liberal education and the good life. It assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across an entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and “indigenous ways of knowing.” That’s an 11-to-1 ratio of, I would argue, ideas meant to undermine Western values and ideas that you and I would find honorable.

And it’s not like the canonical 45 pages are a greatest hits collection. Students get 8 pages of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a short Epicurus and Seneca selection, and a single Nietzsche aphorism. As Marinovic puts it: “There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom, none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.”

It truly is incredible that Stanford is charging students and their families a staggering amount of money for a mandatory introduction to the life of the mind, and the architects of that very tradition are essentially absent from it. What fills the space instead? Students are introduced to two flavors of determinism: biological (Sapolsky argues free will is an illusion) and social (Lowery argues the self is a social construction) and to a sustained critique of Western education as an instrument of power and oppression. That’s the philosophical orientation Stanford has chosen to hand to 18-year-olds in their first weeks on campus.

The epistemology section is quite revealing. Week 7 of the course assigns 50 pages arguing that Western scientific epistemology should be supplemented or corrected by “indigenous ways of knowing,” at the university responsible for a quarter of all Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to American institutions in the last half century. The students arriving at this university, many of them on their way to becoming the scientists who will extend the tradition being questioned, are introduced to that tradition primarily through its critics. This is a university that has been ideologically captured.

This is simply not a normal liberal education, it’s something else entirely. And I don’t even think it’s subtle. It’s written into the syllabus, ratified by a faculty vote that was nearly unanimous, and dressed in the language of liberal education while gutting its actual content. The replication crisis I wrote about earlier is deeper than a methodology problem, it flows from exactly this kind of intellectual capture, where a discipline becomes so ideologically uniform that weak ideas never face real challenge. What Stanford is now doing is taking a postmodern leftist monoculture and hard-coding it into mandatory freshman year curriculum before students have even had a chance to encounter the tradition being replaced.

Students deserve better. They deserve Aristotle on virtue before Freire on oppression. They deserve actual arguments for freedom before arguments against it. They deserve a university that trusts them with the real intellectual tradition, not a curated critique of it designed to turn students against the culture that built their society. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov warned us about all this, and we continue to ignore that warning. It’s hard to see how any rational person doesn’t see our culture is being subverted by our enemies, and even if that wasn’t happening, reality is indistinguishable from what they would do.

The faculty voted and we know where they stand. I personally wouldn’t want my kids attending a school like this, would you?

And how has all this been carrying over into the world? It’s not good:

You can see the “long march through the institutions” (a slogan coined by the German socialist student activist Rudi Dutschke to describe the strategy to create radical change) has trended actual, factual communism (not Nordic-style capitalism) higher across demographics. And yes, social media and economic conditions play a role too, but I don’t think you can just ignore the bias in our education system which heavily favors this ideology, and should really serve as a vaccination against this.

There’s a difference between not knowing what someone believes and not understanding why they believe it. Any shallow internet conversation on politics or really any hot topic treats these as the same thing, but they’re not, and confusing them causes a lot of problems.

Liberals aren’t confused about where conservatives stand on immigration, they know the position just fine. What’s frequently missing is any model of how a reasonable person actually gets there. So when you ask someone to explain it, the answer frequently devolves into “of course, they’re just racist.” Point that out and you’ll get a long thread about how desperate you are for approval, which is, ironically, just another version of the same thing. They can’t model your motive either so they resort to the same flattening move. It’s not that different from a lot of the takes I read online why the Dems lost the last presidential election, honestly. People weren’t confused about what voters wanted, they just never bothered asking why they wanted it.

The term for this is theory of mind. Not knowing what someone thinks is an information problem, but not knowing why they think it, what values or fears or tradeoffs actually produced that belief, is a theory of mind problem (this is also really just another form of context understanding). All behavior makes sense once you know enough about the person behind it, and political belief doesn’t get some special exemption from that. You need both because they’re different failures, and they get fixed in different ways.

Here’s a useful test, and from what I observe it’s a missing piece of what healthy debate actually requires. Can you argue the other side’s position as well as they’d argue it themselves, without sneaking in “and that’s why they’re wrong, dumb, or evil” as part of the case? If you can’t, you don’t really understand the debate.

We can crystallize the above with some examples. Let’s try it out on a conservative position, we’ll do an easy one: gun ownership. The steel man isn’t “they like guns” or “they’re scared of everything.” It’s that a population capable of defending itself is a check on state power that no law or court can fully replace, and that historical cases of mass disarmament before a crackdown looks, to someone holding this view, a lot less like paranoia and a lot more like pattern recognition. You don’t have to agree with any of that. But if your model of a gun-rights conservative is “gets off on feeling powerful” or “is horny to have a gun collection” you’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with a cartoon. And if you’re a reasonable person, you can’t honestly think another human being is a cartoon.

Now let’s try it on a liberal position, we’ll do another frequently debated topic: abortion rights. The steel man isn’t “they don’t value life” or “they’re selfish.” It’s that bodily autonomy, the idea that no one, including the government, can force you to use your body to sustain another life against your will, is treated sacred in almost every other context, including ones conservatives themselves defend, like the right to refuse medical treatment or decline organ donation. At its strongest, the pro-choice position is simply an argument for applying that principle consistently. Again, you don’t have to agree. But if your model of that position is “doesn’t care about babies,” you’ve skipped the argument and gone straight to the ending you already wanted.

None of this is both-sidesism, and it’s not even a request to be nicer to people you disagree with (or change your mind). Today’s thought experiment is merely a diagnostic tool I wish more people would use. If you can pass this test on a position you reject, you actually understand the disagreement, and you can fairly argue against it on its merits. If you can’t, what you’ve got isn’t a real political opinion, it’s a tribal marker and you’re basically just being an NPC. And the people who fail this test the loudest are usually the first to reach for whataboutism or another form of deflection the second you ask them to actually try it.

If more people did this before commenting on the news of the day, that alone might be most of what it takes to climb out of our ideological era and back into something that resembles a conversation.

Every candidate Zohran Mamdani backed in this week’s New York City congressional primaries won. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old doctoral student with no legislative experience who organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, attended a rally celebrating October 7, has posted that “Israel doesn’t exist,” backed convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh, called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag and refused in a recorded interview to say whether murderers should go to prison, just beat a five-term incumbent to go to Congress. Claire Valdez and Brad Lander won theirs too. DSA congressional representation is about to double. At the victory parties, crowds chanted “Free Palestine” and told Hakeem Jeffries he was next. I don’t even understand how we would allow anyone who hates our country (their own words) to hold office.

I’ve seen some right-wing triumphalism about all this online (because these people are so insane, they think it’s a win for the cons). But I’d issue caution. Have we learned nothing about the ratchet effect? The ideology that’s fringe today could be mainstream in two or three cycles. The “PR disaster” framing stops working the moment it becomes the normalized position of the opposition party. In a two-party system, a massive chunk of voters are better described as “anti-Right” than “pro-Left.” Whatever the Left becomes, that bloc follows. We are potentially watching normalization of civilizationally-suicidal beliefs and positions in real time, only if we’re all very lucky is it a self-limiting catastrophe.

But the people who should be most paying attention right now are normal liberals, as these people are not liberals. Liberalism believes in pluralism, free markets, rule of law, tech optimism, building things (YIMBY), boarders, police, capitalism being a force for good. The DSA believes in none of that. As I’ve written before about how we stopped teaching the story of prosperity, the catastrophic track record of socialist economics has been quietly edited out of the curriculum and the culture, replaced with vague moral hostility toward success and achievement. The result is a generation that absorbed one side of a debate and was told it was an education. Now 66% of Democrats view socialism favorably. The 20th century ran the socialist experiment at scale. It produced engineered famines, gulags, empty supermarket shelves, and tens of millions of dead. This is not an ancient tragedy, it’s the known destination, and many do not take history seriously enough.

The people driving this don't emerge from nowhere. They come from schools where anti-American professors, many funded by Qatar and China, have correctly identified the American university as the highest-leverage point for capturing the next productive class. This ideology has successfully shaped the activist core that now staffs the DSA machine, and Chevalier is herself a product of exactly this pipeline. The foreign funding of American campus radicalism is well documented and not a conspiracy theory, it's an ongoing influence operation and this week showed it's working. The same thing is happening online, and people are constantly falling for the op whether they listen to Tucker Carlson or any of the extremists on the left who want to capture or tear down our institutions.

The good news for normal liberals is that the math is actually not complicated. The country is not naturally socialist. Beating Republicans does not require any of the extremism, it’s actually much easier: it requires being reasonable, pro-growth, and genuinely interested in making people’s lives better. The Democrats would win in a walk if they simply acted like a normal party. Instead the machinery keeps selecting for whoever most aggressively signals opposition to American civilization, and the centrists keep complying rather than fighting. The question is whether anyone stops it before the ideology from people who vocally hate our country (their own words) becomes impossibly entrenched.

And again, if you’re a normal liberal reading this, I understand that many of you are advocating for something closer to the Nordic model. Those countries are capitalist market economies with strong welfare states and social programs. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen even addressed this during a U.S. visit, pushing back on the idea that Denmark is a socialist or planned economy. That is a reasonable political position to debate. The DSA is a different conversation, they openly describe themselves as a socialist organization, and their stated goals go well beyond the traditional Nordic welfare-state model. We need people to come to terms with this, that this group is not aligned with what you want.

Light spoilers ahead for Looper, go watch it if you haven’t and read this one after.

I watched the movie Looper the other weekend at the suggestion of a friend, and immediately knew I had to write about it. The flick gets categorized as a time-travel thriller, which is technically correct but sells it very short. The protagonist, young Joe, works for a criminal syndicate but methodically stacks his pay and runs the job cleanly unlike his peers, deferring gratification toward a specific endpoint: the day he retires, cashes out, and disappears to Paris to “live well” (do drugs and party). He’s deliberate, works carefully, and has a plan. But the end goal is pure hedonism, the good life as a destination you reach once you’ve finally saved enough at something you don’t really want to do. This all sounds really familiar doesn’t it? A lot of people are running this exact playbook right now in our actual reality, trying to score a big payday to “exit.” You see people doing this via day-trading, crypto moonshots, publishing make money online content, working jobs they hate, all with the goal of stacking enough money to finally live. Young Joe would fit right in on fintwit.

Then old Joe shows up: broken, haunted, driven by a grief young Joe can’t yet imagine, and the plan reveals what it always was: optimizing for the wrong thing entirely. Because what actually changed young Joe wasn’t the money, the escape, or Paris. It was love. A real thing, built with another person, that gave the future self something worth protecting. And none of that was in the plan, because you can’t really put something like that in a plan. You can only become the kind of person it finds (in the case of the movie, it was just by chance).

The diner scene where both Joes sit across from each other is the movie in miniature. Two versions of the same person, barely recognizable to each other, shaped entirely by the intervening decades. Old Joe doesn’t hate young Joe even if he’s frustrated with him. He simply knows exactly how little young Joe understands about what’s coming, and how badly the math of a life built purely around high risk accumulation and exit eventually fails you.

Most people are young Joe, they treat their future self as an abstraction. A person who will eventually deal with things. Someone who will get fit, sort out the finances, build career capital, develop the relationships worth having and the skills they really want to have …later. The future self becomes a kind of debt repository, and most people think ‘well, he’ll deal with those problems.’ They dump the consequences of present decisions there and don’t think too hard about it, because their future self feels far away enough to be theoretical.

Except they’re not theoretical. You will be that person, and you will live inside the accumulated residue of every decision you’re making now. The body you’re in at 55 is being built today. The financial position you occupy at 60 is being constructed incrementally across decades of small choices that compound in one direction or the other. The professional reputation you carry is being written by how you show up now, when fewer people are watching and the stakes feel lower. The skills you want to have to write a screenplay or compose an album need to be nurtured today if you want to do something meaningful there tomorrow. There is no reset, there’s only the loop closing.

This is what makes compounding such a useful concept beyond finance, though it works there too, dramatically. Neglect compounds, debt compounds, poor health compounds. So does skill, reputation, fitness, and emotional resilience. Even the way you make your money matters, it tends to inform how you act in other areas. And the math doesn’t care whether the inputs are positive or negative, it just runs. The only variable you actually control is which direction you’re feeding it.

What’s most interesting about Looper philosophically is that young Joe’s problem isn’t recklessness, it’s that he’s built an airtight case for a shallow destination. The self-control crisis is largely this: the present self reliably overweighs immediate reward and underweights future cost, and modern life is engineered to exploit exactly that tendency at every turn. But young Joe isn’t even failing at self-control. He’s succeeding at it, just toward the wrong end (I wrote about a hauntingly perfect real-world example of this before, it’s emblematic of so much). This is a different and more interesting problem, the exact one we see people suffer from constantly.

The good news is the intervention isn’t complicated, it mostly requires asking one question with some regularity: is what I’m doing right now making things better or worse for the person I’m going to be? Don’t do this in an anxious or pretentious way, just as a genuinely orienting question. Am I building something or consuming it? Investing or extracting? And more importantly: what am I actually building toward, and is that thing worth the compounding? If you’re merely trying to enact the circumstances for a pleasurable, hedonistic life you don’t have to do anything in, you should definitely think through that more. The check always comes due, and the longer you wait the more pain you’ll suffer later. Arriving somewhere with enough money to pay bills but no friends, no creative skills, no interests, no spouse might not be fun. You’ll be behind just in different ways, and might find money alone isn’t even the most difficult thing to make up time for.

Most people know the answer when they ask it. They just don’t ask it very often, and they refuse to answer it honestly. Old Joe, by the time we meet him, is trying to fix his accumulated damage through sheer force of will across a time loop, the kind of solution available only in a science fiction flick. In real life there’s no closing the loop on a past version of yourself, you just carry forward whatever was built. The better intervention is the boring one: become the kind of person your future self would be grateful for, consistently, before it becomes urgent.

Young Joe eventually figures this out. It costs him everything. You don’t have to wait that long.

Innovation in bits can happen anywhere, a great engineer with a laptop and internet connection can build something world-changing from Tulsa or Taipei. But innovation in atoms: rockets, chips, biotech, etc, still requires physical co-location. The same way the industrial clusters of 19th-century Britain weren’t accidents, neither is what’s happening right now in South Texas.

Starbase, Texas is real. In May 2025, local voters (nearly all SpaceX employees and their families) ratified their new municipality by a 97% margin, 212 to 6. When’s the last time you saw that level of civic consensus on anything?

Boca Chica was a sleepy coastal hamlet with no particular destiny before SpaceX arrived. What happened next echoes the great company towns of the past except with one crucial difference: nobody had to be there. These are engineers who chose to work, live, and now govern a place built entirely around a technical mission. Post-IPO many are now millionaires, and even on IPO day were still hard at work. You love to see people this focused on the mission (and rewarded for it).

But this is also what Balaji has been pointing at for years: ambitious people will eventually stop trying to fix captured institutions and simply route around them. Move to the place that wants you and isn’t yelling that you’re somehow “the problem” or whatnot because you have ambition to build things and advance industry.

California used to be that place, but it’s trending in a direction that isn’t anymore. The Google founders just left, quietly shifting dozens of personal and business entities out of state ahead of a proposed billionaire’s tax, as California perfects its art of making life difficult for precisely the people who generate the most value. High taxes, regulatory paralysis, a political culture that thinks punishing productive citizens is virtuous. The talent has noticed, the capital has noticed and even many of the companies have moved their headquarters.

Green energy capacity tells the Texas growth story nicely. Without even having a formal climate mandate, Texas overtook California in utility-scale solar generation in 2025 for the first time, and it's not close on wind, where Texas generates nearly 3 times more than the next closest state. The state is also set to account for roughly 40% of all new utility-scale solar capacity coming online nationwide in 2026.

It’s sadly not just California, there are other places that seem to be promoting an odd strain of what I feel is fairly anti-American. Seattle elected Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist, on a platform of new payroll taxes and capital-gains-style levies, layered on top of Washington’s new 9.9% “millionaire tax.” Business leaders noticed: a large share say they’re considering leaving, and some major employers are already shifting jobs to Bellevue or out of state. I even got my liberal friend Ken to agree it’s very bad. Meanwhile Delaware, the state that wrote the rulebook for American corporate law, watched one Chancery Court ruling against Musk’s pay package set off a “Dexit” wave to Texas, Nevada, and Florida who are all consistently pro-business.

Capital and talent don’t leave overnight. They leave after years of accumulated signals. A regulation here, a tax increase there, ongoing unhinged anti-capitalist speeches and quotes, and a culture that increasingly views builders as something to be controlled by the state rather than partners in creating prosperity. Eventually, entrepreneurs stop trying to convince institutions to change and simply move to places where the incentives are aligned with what they’re trying to build.

Texas is a shining example of such a place, and has no income tax, functional governance, and, crucially, a willingness to get out of the way. The formula isn’t complicated: freedom of movement + economic opportunity + civic participation = the conditions where innovation actually compounds. Silicon Valley was built on exactly this. Permissive regulation, abundant capital, a culture that treated risk as respectable. That environment has since been regulated and taxed into something that’s quite the opposite of what created its abundance, but its venture community clearly enjoys living there so it will continue, I just always wonder how much pain they’re willing to take. NorCal for certain has nicer weather during the summer, but weather doesn’t build anything, functional institutions do.

As The Economist recently noted in a story (I’ll paste the important part here since it’s paywalled):

Technology professionals have to stop accepting the premise that they’re obligated to fight for cities that have decided to fight them. Tech firms and entrepreneurs should vote with their feet. If you can, move to a place where the culture reflects and encourages what you’re trying to build. It’s way more fun than fighting Marxists.

Starbase is that place in its purest form, while the entire Texas triangle is pro-technology, growth and innovation (and a big reason I moved here to the Austin area).

Innovation in atoms needs a home. Increasingly, that home is Texas.

Fun bonus for today’s story: check out this video from Core Memory on how an entrepreneur in the middle of nowhere, Texas has become a telescope rancher, it’s pretty neat (and profitable). What if you used your imagination and built something similar?

I also understand this type of thinking, in a way I used to be like them and incapable of believing I could be incorrect on certain investments (to my own detriment). I don’t hold losing stocks anymore either, it’s much better to live this way. Cut your losing positions and ideas! I cannot stress to you enough how much easier things become after. “We cannot change the wind we can only adjust the sails” is a good way to live your life. You can be wrong, just don’t stay wrong.

Let me help you with what some of you want to say before you comment, because you don’t have to use every social network, and no one is forcing you to like every one either. I think TikTok and Instagram are dumb, but I don’t declare them dead (they are indeed quite popular). I just think they are rotting your brain. Easy enough to say something like that, at least it’s honest. Just please stop gaslighting us.

So now we’ll share some stats, which I’ll let speak for themselves. Recent eMarketer analysis (below) shows US unique visitors from June 2025 to March 2026: X holding steady around 130 million while Threads collapsed from 12.4 million to 7.1 million, less than a rounding error in Twitter/X’s shadow. Bluesky, the other would-be replacement, sits at 1.5 million (but it’s still at least a real community, niche communities are great, maybe they don’t have to be billions of users).

The second chart from Apptopia is even more telling: X daily active users up 44% since May 2025, Threads down nearly 50%, Bluesky down 85%. As the headline on the eMarketer chart puts it, and you really couldn’t write it better, “X is outlasting its would-be replacements.”

As for web, Twitter remains a top 10 website in the world according to multiple sources which are all as valid as you’ll get from sampled data (here’s similarweb below). But even the people who work internally there have posted they’ve hit several ATHs in usage, which would be the most valid numbers of all.

Meanwhile, what about Threads, the Meta clone that was supposed to finally kill Twitter? I wrote about its existential problems when it launched, and nothing has really changed. Whatever user numbers Threads posts need a large asterisk: this is part of a company with billions of existing users across Facebook and Instagram, with every incentive and algorithm at its disposal to funnel them into a new product. Of course it has downloads, that’s what you can do when you have a captive audience. But the user behavior tells the real story: Threads users spend an average of 3-5 minutes daily on the app versus ~31 minutes for Twitter. The discourse there is exactly what you'd expect when you populate a network by dragging Instagram users into a text box: shallow, empty, throwaway (I’ve still never seen a serious screengrab from a Threads post shared elsewhere, other than to poke fun at it). These are not proper posters. There's no edge, no real debate, no one saying anything of consequence. Threads has bodies in seats, Twitter has a community. You cannot manufacture what Twitter built by importing Instagram accounts and calling it microblogging, and no amount of Meta's traffic funnels will change that.

The media’s relationship with this story has been pretty crazy. The same outlets that spent years writing Twitter’s obituary are still posting their scoops there first, embedding tweets in their articles, and using it to build sources. The cognitive dissonance required to repeatedly call something dead while also treating it as part of your reporting and marketing infrastructure is remarkable, though by now, not surprising.

I also wrote at the time that the “Twitter killer” narrative fundamentally misunderstood what the product is. It’s not a feature set. It’s a specific concentration of people who actually care: politicians, journalists, founders, researchers, anon weirdos all in one place, in public, in real time. You cannot recreate that by pressing a button in Menlo Park.

On management: I’m actually a fan of what Nikita has been doing as product lead (if you don’t follow him, he’s personally nuking spam/grifter accounts, very satisfying). He’s one of the best people in social, visibly uses the product, and clearly cares about it in the way only actual users can. That’s rarer than you’d think in this industry and it shows if you’re paying attention. I do think they could fix the algorithm but that’s a different team, and I mostly don’t use that part of the product, I browse who I follow and lists I curate, which is a much better way to use social. Other social products don’t let you do that, LinkedIn for example might have a decent network, but they don’t let you customize your feed at all, making it a toy in comparison.

As for the broader Elon derangement syndrome that colored so much of the "Twitter is dead" discourse, it’s also something I noticed when I bought a Tesla and some people lost their minds about it. The same strain of irrationality: people who couldn't name the CEO of their bank, their health insurance company, or the firm that made their laptop's chips, suddenly developing a specific, burning need to lose their minds about this one product from this one person (meanwhile these teams all have many people working on them, some of them might even be your friends). They’ll all still use Starlink on an airplane and simply not tell anyone.

Maybe my friend Morgan Housel, author of Psychology of Money can help some of you understand leaders with extreme personalities better (I’ve queued up the time). I’d really recommend watching this if you are someone who sees red whenever you see Elon’s name, perhaps this will help.

The weirdest part of the whole saga to me was watching people insist Twitter was dead for reasons that had nothing to do with whether anyone was actually using Twitter/X. Usage became secondary to symbolism. The platform wasn’t being judged as a product anymore but as some kind of political Rorschach test (meanwhile, I actually see people across the political spectrum there). Once that happens, evidence stops mattering as every data point gets filtered through identity first and reality second. That’s why so many people were able to confidently predict Twitter’s collapse and then simply ignore the fact that it never happened.

The “it’s over” crowd was wrong in 2015, 2018, 2020, 2023, pick a year they’ve declared it dead (it’s happened so many times!). They’re still wrong now. And again, it’s okay to be wrong, no one bats 1,000, just don’t stay wrong.

I previously wrote what turned out to be a very popular piece about Reddit’s descent into madness, how a platform that once hosted genuinely diverse, chaotic, interesting discourse was slowly captured by a small class of ideologically-motivated moderators until it became a monoculture. Since that story resonated with many readers, today I want to talk about how something similar is happening on Wikipedia, far more subversively, with even more dangerous consequences.

Many people don’t know any better and treat Wikipedia as a “neutral” starting point. Reporters cite it, students build papers from it, it’s become ubiquitous in our culture. And increasingly, this is the part that should most concern you, Wikipedia is one of the most influential information sources represented in many AI training datasets (concerningly, Reddit is too). It’s now far more than simply an encyclopedia “anyone can edit” (casual contributors will find their edits reverted quickly, even if true), it’s become operating infrastructure for how internet users (try to) understand reality. Increasingly they do not.

Which is why two recent investigations deserve your attention, and there could easily be 100s if not 1,000s more if people bothered to look.

Ashley Rindsberg at Pirate Wires published a detailed investigation into how a coordinated group of roughly 40 Wikipedia editors systematically worked to reshape the Israel-Palestine conflict narrative: delegitimizing Israel, softening the portrayal of Hamas, and pushing fringe academic positions into the mainstream of articles read by millions. Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter (the one calling for the killing of Jews and destruction of Israel) from the Hamas article entirely. A separate group, Tech For Palestine, ran a parallel campaign coordinating edits across an 8,000-member Discord server in open violation of Wikipedia’s own policies. When a blogger discovered what they were doing, they panicked, deleted their talk pages and sandboxes, and one editor wiped her entire chat history. That’s not the behavior of people confident they were doing something legitimate.

The Cipher Brief just went further, examining how anonymous Wikipedia editing is now directly shaping AI systems and global narratives, including an investigation into how Al Jazeera’s Wikipedia entry was systematically reshaped, with downstream effects on how every search engine and LLM now characterizes Qatar’s state-funded media network. By the way, this problem isn’t confined to one conflict or one topic.

In addition to foreign adversaries shaping narratives and perceptions, the domestic political bias in Wikipedia is also widespread. A study covered by National Review found evidence suggesting what critics have argued for years: Wikipedia skews demonstrably left across political topics. Libertarian writer John Stossel documented the mechanisms: the editor demographics, the sourcing hierarchies that privilege certain outlets over others, the way “reliable sources” gets defined in ways that systematically exclude center-right perspectives. This bias is hardly accidental, it’s baked into who edits, what counts as a credible citation, and who has the time and motivation to fight edit wars until the other side gives up.

Now consider who ran Wikipedia before becoming CEO of NPR. Katherine Maher led the Wikimedia Foundation, then went on to run public broadcasting’s flagship network, which if you’ve listened to has a very clear ideological slant. Anyway, in a 2022 TED Talk she gave while running Wikipedia, she said this: “Perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

Read that again if you didn’t carefully enough, or better yet watch her say it. The person running the world’s most-cited reference site believed that truth was getting in the way. This is not some peripheral figure, nor a fringe view held by a lone editor. This is the institutional philosophy, stated plainly, by the person at the top. It explains a lot of what’s wrong with our digital information ecosystems, which are seriously polluted, as many others editing the web hold this same perspective. If you don’t yet see these people as the enemies of our civilization they are, you should start to before it’s too late. To my dedicated liberal readers, I find nothing about these people actually liberal, they are not on your side and represent something else.

There’s more subtle things that are awful happening here too I personally have noticed. There's a thriving academic industry (that would applaud Maher’s post-truth ideals) dedicated to finding historical figures "problematic," and its output flows directly into Wikipedia as citable sources, which then flows into AI. For a project I was interested in a quote from William Osler, the father of modern medicine, who invented the residency program and transformed how physicians are trained worldwide, and then went to look him up. His Wikipedia page calls him a "renowned practical joker" in one paragraph, then in another cites a 2020 grievance paper that uses his satirical fictional alter ego (a fake character invented specifically to prank colleagues, whose writings were never meant to be published) as evidence of racism. The same page, the same man. Wikipedia isn't noticing the contradiction because it's not trying to give you a coherent portrait; it's a document with many authors and many agendas, and the grievance authors are always the most motivated ones in the room and get consistently high placement. One citation at a time, great figures get quietly stamped "problematic" in the infrastructure that trains your AI. Osler quite literally willed his personal library to McGill University and spent his final years building the institutions that train physicians to this day, the idea that future doctors should encounter his name bracketed by a caveat about a joke he played on a colleague in 1884 is honestly vandalism.

And it’s not just how Wikipedia treats the historical dead. It’s also how they treat living, demonstrably notable people who don’t fit whatever invisible checklist their editor class has decided matters. A friend of mine Barry Schwartz has covered search engine optimization and Google’s algorithm changes longer and more consistently than virtually anyone alive. He founded Search Engine Roundtable, has been cited as a primary source by journalists, researchers, and industry professionals for over two decades, and is widely considered one of the most important chroniclers of the SEO industry’s entire history (this is a multi billion dollar sector). His Wikipedia page was deleted anyway, not once, not twice, but three times. If you go read the deletion discussion, you will spend the next twenty minutes shaking your head. The editors debating his “notability” write with the confidence of people who have never heard of him, which is itself the tell. There are Wikipedia pages for moderately trafficked food blogs and mid-tier local politicians, but the most prolific SEO journalist of his generation doesn’t clear the bar. The criteria aren’t applied consistently because the criteria aren’t really the point, the point is who controls the room. Danny Sullivan, who helped build the search marketing industry alongside Barry and works at Google, called it out plainly: Barry has made a recognized contribution to the historical record of search longer than almost anyone. That apparently isn’t enough. What’s particularly rich is a possible outcome here, if someone wrote a definitive book on the history of SEO, Barry would get a page the next week. The encyclopedia would credit the book and the book would have gotten half its material from Barry. You see how absurd all this is, I hope.

The uncomfortable truth about Wikipedia is the same as the uncomfortable truth about Reddit, about academia, and about many previously prestige information institutions, and it’s not some grand conspiracy. They became captured through neglect. Organized groups with strong ideological commitments and moderators on egotistical power trips simply showed up, consistently, until they set the defaults. The rest of us naively assumed the system was self-correcting, but it isn’t always that way.

Use Wikipedia to find out the year a movie was released or about a breed of dog. For anything touching politics, history, foreign policy, so-called ‘notable’ figures, or contested science, treat it the way you’d treat any other source with a known point of view. Read it, note who wrote it, check what it’s citing, and don’t let it be the last stop. It’s not special, you should be skeptical, and you definitely shouldn’t blindly trust it. With certainty we can say Wikipedia is a reason why many people are misinformed about the world, and their management would consider that of greater importance than truth (their own words).

The encyclopedia that trained your AI has an editor class with a subversive agenda, and it’s one the majority of Americans don’t agree with. What we really want is Veritas, but you won’t find it on many parts of that website.

Many people have anxiety issues in modern times, it’s understandable, although solvable once you understand what’s actually happening. If you’re someone who suffers from this, let’s share some brief research with you today to help (if you go to the gym regularly you likely already suffer from this less).

A paper I found published in Behavior Therapy tracked the actual outcomes of worries in people diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, a population whose entire psychological profile is organized around anticipating bad outcomes. Using ecological momentary assessment, researchers had participants log their worries in real time, then tracked what actually happened over 30 days. Independent raters coded the results.

The finding: 91.4% of worry predictions did not come true. The most common outcome per person was a staggering 0% accuracy, meaning the majority of participants had not a single worry materialize into reality. Even more damning, participants’ expected likelihood of their worries coming true was dramatically higher than the observed rate. The anxious mind is confidently and systematically wrong. And most importantly: the more people recognized this inaccuracy during treatment, the faster their anxiety symptoms dropped.

Now consider those participants are professional worriers, the clinical worst case. If the people most practiced at worrying are wrong 91% of the time, the rest of us should assume our own predictions are at least as unreliable (we simply have fewer).

And yet the modern world is engineered to keep the worry machine running hot. The internet delivers a fire hose of amplified catastrophe from across the entire planet 24 hours a day. Certainly, there’s always something you could worry about, and algos will find it. You did not evolve for this environment, in fact your evolutionary instincts are working against you here. Further, the smartphone collapsed the boundary between work and home, creating an ambient anxiety of 24/7 notifications many people don’t turn off. Making things worse, AI anxiety is now layered on top of legitimate financial precarity, meaning people are genuinely unsure whether their job will exist in a few years. These are real pressures, and I won’t be annoying today and fully dismiss them.

But here’s the thing: even with all of that, most things are fine. The constant emails or Slack notifications don’t ruin you, the financial news doesn’t wipe you out, the outrage on social media doesn’t exist if you log off and go for a walk. Most of the worst-case scenarios your brain rehearses at 2am simply do not arrive. The data on this is clear, your brain is a catastrophizing machine making you consider worst case scenarios or stay in fight or flight because it’s wired for survival, and the modern attention economy figured out how to monetize that anxiety and pipe it into your eyes all day.

Worry feels productive or perhaps like preparation, but it’s neither. It’s expensive cognitive overhead burning your focus and peace on outcomes that, in the vast majority of cases never happen.

The practical move is simple once you understand the above: treat your anxious predictions like your favorite bad forecaster you’ve caught being wrong over and over. You wouldn’t keep listening to a pundit who was wrong 91% of the time, would you?

We’ve written before about how doomerism is a mental illness, a hardened state of despair no amount of good news can penetrate. We’ve also written about permabears, those constitutionally committed to the dark side of every ledger, for whom every green shoot is a trick and every recovery is a setup for the next disaster. Depression about life, economics, anything really is a choice. You alone are responsible for your own happiness or sadness. It’s called being an adult.

Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic has combined both pathologies into a single 3,000-word essay titled in a way that infers all is doomed, forever. She’s coined the term “permacession,” a permanent recession that, by her own extensive admission in the very same piece isn’t actually happening, in an economy she herself describes as “pretty darn great.” In America, the country that has lapped the entire developed world economically for two straight decades.

Let’s go through her story point by point, because when you see what’s really happening if you were actually upset about things you should be less so after.

Claim: Consumer sentiment is at its lowest since 1952. This is very alarming.

University of Michigan sentiment surveys measure feelings, not facts. Feelings are downstream of media consumption, tribal identity, and what your TikTok algorithm decided to show you this morning (still suggest deleting it). The author eventually cops to this herself, she just buries it in paragraph 15 after spending paragraphs 1-14 treating the sentiment data as gospel.

You cannot simultaneously argue sentiment surveys are capturing some profound economic truth AND that social media is poisoning people’s perception of economic reality. You have to pick one, and she picks both.

Claim: People feel worse now than during the Great Inflation, the Volcker shock, the 2008 financial crisis, and the early COVID months.

This is actually a more interesting data point in the piece, and the author basically shrugs and moves on after noting it undermines everything she thinks she understands. If people felt better when mortgages were at 18.6% and the unemployment rate was flirting with 15%, the obvious conclusion is that sentiment surveys are measuring something other than economic conditions. Political polarization and media negativity are the variables that changed. But these are hardly economic facts.

Claim: “I found that my usual explanations fell short.”

At least she admits it, credit where it's due. Unfortunately her response to this admission is to invent a new word ("permacession") instead of updating her priors. A scientist runs an experiment, the results contradict the hypothesis, and instead of revising the hypothesis she names the anomaly herself and brands it terminal. This is precisely the pattern we wrote about recently with biased academic research: the conclusion comes first, the framing follows.

Claim: The economy is delivering real improvements but people won’t admit it. This is a serious problem.

So she’s saying things are getting better? Yes. Inside her gloom piece is a genuinely brave acknowledgment that the American economy is working for most Americans. The Federal Reserve’s own data shows the net worth of the bottom 50% has risen dramatically in the 2020s, up from roughly $1.9 trillion pre-pandemic to over $4.2 trillion today, more than doubling. Near-full employment. Low-income wage growth outpacing high-income wage growth for an extended stretch. Americans spending more on restaurants, vacations, cars, and wellness. The median household net worth hit $193,000 in the most recent Federal Reserve survey, up 37% from 2019 in real terms, the biggest jump on record.

The author knows the economy is not in complete shambles. She just won’t let herself feel okay about knowing it. Physician, heal thyself.

Claim: Europe’s GDP per capita was 77% of the US in 2008. “Now, the continent is half as productive.”

This is one of the most staggering economic facts of the 21st century and it gets one sentence in a doom piece. As of 2024, the US GDP per capita sits around $86,000. France is at $39,000. The UK is at $48,000. Mississippi, America’s perennial last-place state by this measure, has a higher GDP per capita than France, the UK, Italy, and Spain. The American economic model: messy, unequal, chaotic, and constantly criticized by unemployed people in the EU, has so thoroughly outperformed every major allied competitor that France and Britain would be among America’s poorest states if you transplanted them here. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, the US runs about 38% higher than the EU average, and the gap is widening every year. This is the part where a normal person says “holy cow, we’re doing something right.”

Claim: Inequality is the fundamental problem. The top 10% make as much as the bottom 90%.

Inequality is a real issue worth discussing. But it’s also been a fixture of American life for decades, and the piece offers no real explanation for why it would suddenly be causing record-low sentiment specifically right now, when by the author’s own admission low-income wage growth has outpaced high-income wage growth in recent years. The inequality argument actually cuts against the permacession thesis if you follow it honestly.

And if you turn off social media, which has industrialized the constant comparison of your life to everyone else’s curated highlight reel, inequality stops dominating your daily emotional experience. Comparison is a thief of joy. We’ve written about this. The fix is really easy, deleting Instagram.

Claim: The cost of housing, child care, health care, higher education, elder care has crept up faster than inflation for two decades.

This is true, and worth being angry about. You know what caused most of that? Massive government intervention, regulatory capture, and the deliberate restriction of supply. This is a policy failure people mistakenly believe is a market or “capitalism” failure. The solution is to build more, regulate smarter, and get government out of the way of housing construction (NIMBYs are the actual villains, we’ve covered this).

Diagnosing the problem and then using it as fuel for generalized economic despair rather than specific policy reform is the Atlantic’s entire model.

Claim: Republican/Democrat economic sentiment gap has grown from 20 points to 50 points. This is distorting everything.

This is the most honest and important observation in the piece. Partisan identity is now so fused with economic perception that roughly half the country will describe the economy as bad regardless of the data, depending purely on which party holds the White House. If you don't believe me, note that Republican sentiment cratered the moment Biden was inaugurated and skyrocketed the moment Trump won, with zero underlying change in economic conditions at either specific point. This is a psychology and media phenomenon.

And if sentiment is 50% political theater, then sentiment surveys should be weighted accordingly when making policy, or writing 3,000-word Atlantic essays about economic despair.

Claim: Sam Peltzman at UChicago found a “happiness crash” — a historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness since 2020.

It is fascinating research, and here’s the variable that explains most of it and that the author dances around without landing on: smartphones + social media. The happiness crash begins exactly when algorithmic social media achieved mass adoption and started optimizing for outrage engagement. Jonathan Haidt has been screaming this from the rooftops for years with extensive data. The economy didn’t make people unhappy, too much screen time in the attention economy did. These are very different problems with very different solutions.

Claim: “We never got back to socializing in person after COVID.”

Actually, the more I think about it, this one is just wrong. No one is wearing masks anymore, airports are full, people are going to concerts and traveling. For the people who are still socially isolated, this is pretty sad. But again, not an economic problem. An atomization problem, a cultural problem and a device addiction problem. Will be solved in time.

Claim: TikTok and Instagram are giving people “money dysmorphia” and a distorted sense of economic doom.

She looked up “how jobs are doing” on TikTok and got fed crypto spam and AI apocalypse content and, I cannot stress this enough, she included this as evidence in her argument. TikTok’s algorithm is not economic data. Using your For You Page as a research tool for an Atlantic story is silly analysis which shows you what we’re dealing with. Ironically, this is exactly how these sites manipulate people, and probably why the author herself feels things are permanently hosed.

Claim: “In a roundabout way, the country’s affluence might be contributing to its pessimism.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is actually the thesis that explains everything and the author stumbles into it 2,800 words deep. Ronald Inglehart’s postmaterialism theory is real and well-documented: as societies get wealthier, they shift from survival concerns to identity and meaning concerns, and the goalposts for “good enough” move to places they can never realistically reach. Rich people in rich countries are not grateful for being rich people in rich countries. They are furious about the remaining problems in their rich countries (everything amazing, these people aren’t happy). This is a spiritual problem people need to solve for, it’s actually not that hard, and it’s amusing (and on brand) that an intellectual at The Atlantic can’t offer a good solution.

Claim: “I don’t see an easy salve for what’s ailing us.”

Here’s one: buy the S&P every month, and stop publishing 3,000-word essays in major national magazines telling people the economic vibes are permanently bad when you’ve spent the entire piece demonstrating that things are actually pretty good.

Media that profits from anxiety is part of the negative feedback loop Lowrey herself identifies. The Atlantic gets clicks when people are scared. TikTok gets engagement when people are outraged. Politicians raise money when the base is terrified. The permabear industrial complex has a business model, and understanding the op is step one. The call is coming from inside the house.

On the title itself: “Permacession”

Nothing in a dynamic market economy is permanent. That’s definitionally true, it’s what makes it a market economy rather than a planned one (which is what these people actually want, what better way to get there than constantly preach doom about what we’re doing?). The word “permacession” is doing the same thing “vibecession” did: giving an emotional state an economics-y name. Except vibecession made sense (I’m a big fan of Kyla who coined it), and permacession doesn’t.

The Great Depression ended. The Volcker recession ended. The dot-com crash ended. 2008 ended. COVID ended. Every single one of them ended because that is what economies do. They adapt, they grow, and ultimately confound the people who named the bad thing themselves. Eventually, even in a raging bear market (which we don’t even have) the short sellers who aren’t complete morons flip long.

America has the most dynamic, innovative, and resilient economy in human history. It has outgrown all the haters. It keeps doing it. The people who have been betting against it in markets, in policy, in prestige magazine essays have been wrong consistently for 250 years. Permabears recognize no such track record. They just invent new words for the same bet.

As always: stay curious, ignore the doom merchants who profit from your misery, and remember that things can be imperfect and still be extraordinary.

When a person sees some topic of discourse they don’t like being noticed, the following is what happens after. First, they say: it’s not happening. Then, if that doesn’t work: okay, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal. If that doesn’t stick: why do you even care about this? And the latest one, which might be my favorite for sheer audacity: yes, it happened, but it’s over now, so you can stop talking about it. Ironic that the expiration date on noticing a thing is set by people who didn’t want you noticing in the first place.

This is a fascinating little behavioral loop that amuses me when I see it, and it’s happened enough times I wanted to put it down in a post so I’d have a reference point (and you can too). Each stage of dismissal is essentially a ratchet, when one position becomes untenable, it’s quietly abandoned and a new one takes its place, all without acknowledging the previous denial ever happened.

I’m hardly alone in noticing this phenomenon, Rob Henderson posted about a variation of this which is similar enough years ago (I personally notice steps 3 and 4 vary a bit, but mostly say the same thing). Clearly there is some psychology on display here, and it’s very similar to one of those the steps of grief flow charts.

What strikes me most, though, is the reaction baked into all of this: the instant assumption because I’ve written about something, I must be a committed partisan of some side or cause. I write something noting a cultural shift, and suddenly someone thinks that means I’m endorsing of an entire buffet of other ideas I’ve never endorsed. I observe something odd in how institutions behave, and I’m assigned a tribe because I’m not precisely on the side of people who think they’re “the good guys” who are beyond critique. The idea that someone might simply find a thing interesting and worth examining or simply worth articulating seems almost incomprehensible to certain people. The sin of noticing, apparently, is itself a political act requiring justification.

I write about what I think is pertinent or interesting and what I see as true or important. The blogging project which I’ve done for nearly two decades now has always been about trends, culture, and the occasional uncomfortable observation. I don’t have a specific political agenda but do have a low tolerance for things that seem strange that I don’t see enough people talking about, and a habit of writing them down. If a pattern in culture is worth examining, I’ll examine it because I think it’s worth our time and notable. Usually, it’s because I think we can do better. And I don’t think certain topics are off limits, because I don’t look to a tribe for approval. You should live like this too. Think for yourself, it’s great.

I’m actually not calling out commenters today, the people willing to debate things in public here are mostly good faith. The most interesting replies are via email privately. What I find most telling is that the volume of the reaction tends to be proportional to how much the observer doesn’t want the thing observed. If it were truly not a big deal, why the energy? The ‘stick to sports’ people, as I wrote before, reveal themselves precisely by showing up. Silence is the response to things that don’t matter. The dismissal cycle above is the response to things that do.

So no, I won’t stop noting things when told they’re supposedly over. That’s not how observation works, and it’s a great way for us to forget and repeat past mistakes. And unfortunately, I think a lot of bad ideas have deep tentacles into our world and we’re going to need to do more work to fully extract them. Of course some might simply be terminal philosophical battles, and that’s fine too. But don’t dismiss things you don’t like or call people names, engage with the issue like adults.

There’s a series of events that happens in America every time we want to do anything new. Someone proposes building something useful, and immediately a coalition of NIMBYs materialize, clutching save the whales posters, demanding “more studies,” and generally making the permitting process so miserable that whoever wanted to build the thing goes somewhere else or gives up. We’ve seen this movie with housing for decades, in fact I’ve even written on it before. The sequel is data centers, and the script is nearly identical. Several of you asked me to cover this topic, so let’s go into some more detail today, as the panic is clearly manufactured (and quite silly).

Opposition to data center developments across the U.S. has exploded over the past year. One tracking site shows that while only 8 different local and state government efforts to enact moratoriums or bans were active in May 2025, that number has swelled to 78 in just a year’s time. Clearly there’s coordination here. And like its housing NIMBY cousin, it wraps economic protectionism and reflexive anti-progress sentiment in the language of “environmentalism.”

The Utah situation is the clearest example of how unmoored from reality this has gotten. Online posts claimed a new AI data center in Utah would raise nighttime temperatures across the state by more than 20 degrees, with some versions citing 28-degree increases. This is pure fiction being shared online, with people simply lying to try to create fear of progress. For reference, wildfires burning thousands of acres of land reach temperatures near 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and still don’t shift a state’s temperature by 28 degrees. The people sharing these insane stats are clearly not thinking critically, which is the defining condition of any modern online panic. I don’t know if they are even capable of independent thought, much of this happens on TikTok after all.

Who feeds this stuff? Two parties are clear: engagement farmers who figured out that “tech is poisoning your water and cooking your state” generates online engagement, and adversaries who have a direct strategic interest in Americans turning against the infrastructure of their own technological future. China is racing to build data centers and they’re not holding community forums about them. If you can convince a significant portion of the American public building compute infrastructure is an environmental crime, you don’t need to outcompete us. We’ll just do it to ourselves. In 2025, local opposition to AI data centers led to the delay or cancellation of projects totaling $156 billion. That is an extraordinary amount of infrastructure to forfeit to a manufactured panic.

On the water front, researcher Andy Masley did the actual math that nobody in the outrage ecosystem bothered to do. His conclusion, covered in Pirate Wires: data centers are not taking all the water, they’re not projected to, and sometimes they’re even improving water access. He went further and audited a popular book making the rounds that claimed a data center was using a catastrophic amount of municipal water he found the author was off by a factor of 4500, apparently confusing cubic meters for liters, making the city appear to use 1,000 times less water than it actually does. This is the research that gets turned into memes and Senate testimony. On the national, local, and personal level, AI is barely using any water, and unless it grows 50 times faster than forecasts predict, this won’t change.

As for electricity: yes, data centers use power. So does every factory, hospital, and car charger you’ve ever benefited from (and yes, you benefit from data centers too, the fact that you use the internet to read this already proves it). A University of Southern California professor recently presented research showing data centers are responsible for only a 0.007% to 0.08% increase in residential power bills. The hysteria isn’t remotely proportional to the impact. And in many cases, they are now bringing their own power supply and improving grid infrastructure.

I can’t help but notice the resurgence of antisemitism we're seeing also follows the same playbook as the data center panic: enemies of progress, real or foreign, spread disinformation until an irrational mob forms around a fake threat. Throughout history, Jewish people (or now Israel “controlling our government”, it’s really the same thing) have been blamed for whatever people feared most: controlling finance, corrupting culture, running institutions. The specific accusation shifts but the template is constant. Data centers get the same treatment. Poisoning your water, raising your temperatures, stealing your land. The constant is a common so called “evil” enemy to rally the mob that is easily stirred to fear, even if that fear is not real.

What we’re actually building with this infrastructure is the equivalent of the electrical grid in the early 20th century. People opposed that too: the noise, the lines, the unfamiliar hum of something new and large. It seems almost comical now. The people fighting data centers today will look the same to anyone reviewing this period twenty years from now, when AI-assisted medicine is diagnosing diseases earlier and the compute that made it possible was built despite the protests, not because of them.

Communities already have zoning laws, they have noise ordinances, they have environmental review processes. The top complaints from communities near potential data center locations include noise and light impacts, land use, water use, infrastructure and traffic, energy and grid capacity, and environmental worries, all of which are addressable through the regulatory frameworks we already have. The answer to “do it right” is not “ban it everywhere”, which turns the process into a weapon (the exact NIMBY playbook).

The enemy here is a fake, manufactured villain assembled from bad statistics, engagement-optimized panic, and the same reflexive opposition to progress that’s made housing unaffordable and permitting a decade-long ordeal. Meanwhile, other countries are building. The question isn’t whether this infrastructure gets built, it’s whether it gets built here. If not, we could easily lose our status as a top competing economy, and that’s something you should actually be concerned about.

Some sentences in modernity have become sacred phrases, talking points we’re not supposed to question repeated so often they turn into mindless slogans. “Diversity is our strength” is one of the largest. Challenge it and you’re “the problem.” But slogans aren’t arguments, and when you actually pressure-test this one you see how ridiculous it is on its own. Read the underlined parts of the above article from the NYT in 2007, back before the media didn’t suffer from an odd brand of political correctness and people could share things that were plainly true. There’s plenty of data here against the slogan that’s repeated by people operating at the level of trained circus seals.

So let’s talk about this more, because, and you might be surprised to hear this after the last paragraph, but diversity can be good. Different inputs, different perspectives, different experiences, these things together can produce better outcomes. But can isn’t always does, and that’s where the conversation usually gets abandoned in favor of applause.

Consider a portfolio. Any serious investor will tell you diversification matters, but not all diversification is equal. A portfolio stuffed with low-quality, money-losing assets across different sectors isn’t diversified in any meaningful sense, it’s just broadly bad. The goal was never variety for variety’s sake, it was finding the best opportunities across a wide range of sources, then being selective. Indiscriminate spreading of bets is a bad strategy, as any investor who has lost money will tell you a bad asset doesn't become good just because it sits next to a different kind of asset.

Think about a jazz ensemble. The music works because every player is excellent at their instrument and genuinely listening to the others. The “diversity” of sounds: trumpet, bass, piano, drums, creates something greater than the parts. But only because each part clears a high bar. Fill those seats with people who can’t keep time or aren’t proficient with their instrument, and the diversity of instruments collapses into a cacophony.

Or, look at the Navy SEALs. The teams are among the most effective fighting forces ever assembled, and they draw candidates from every conceivable background, race, socioeconomic status and geography. That diversity is real and welcomed. But it's downstream of something else entirely: a selection process so brutal that roughly 75-80% of candidates don't finish. The people who make it through share a near-identical psychological profile of tolerance for suffering, team orientation and the ability to perform under extreme stress. The diversity of backgrounds is real, but the homogeneity of standards is what makes the machine work. Nobody gets a seat because of where they're from, they earn it the same way everyone else does.

Systems that actually perform comprised of teams, companies and institutions may be diverse, but they also must be very intentional and held to high standards. They have to select for merit and compatibility above all. They must maintain a coherent culture while integrating the best ideas and people from a wide range of sources. That’s a fundamentally different thing than a Marxist checkbox exercise, and there is a difference.

The media industry offers a case study in what happens when the slogan becomes policy. Jacob Savage's reported piece in Compact documented the shift in newsroom hiring over the DEI era, including a quote from a senior hiring editor at a major outlet that's a telling admission: "It was a given that we weren't gonna hire the best person." And remember, that’s not a critic of the policy speaking, that's someone who administered it. The outlets that operated this way didn't get stronger, they got ideologically narrower, financially weaker, and less trusted by the public they were supposed to serve. The diversity box got checked but the product got worse. That's exactly what happens when you optimize for the ingredient and forget about the judgment.

The problem with turning “diversity is our strength” into a bumper sticker is that it obscures all the other variables that actually matter. It suggests the presence of difference is sufficient, that the work ends once you’ve assembled a varied enough room. It doesn’t.

Real strength comes from clear expectations, honest standards, and deliberate choices. Diversity could potentially be one of the ingredients. But ingredients alone don’t make something great, judgment does.

Repeat a phrase enough and it becomes a substitute for thinking. This one deserves more scrutiny than it gets and if you understand this nuance and this post doesn’t bother you, congrats, you aren’t part of some kind of cargo cult. If you’re someone who is bothered here, ask why that is.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how we’ve stopped teaching the story of prosperity, on how capitalism’s extraordinary track record has frequently been edited out of the curriculum/conversation, replaced with a vague hostility toward success that believes it’s morally superior. Normal liberal friends I speak to are also concerned here, as they love builders and economic growth. This was recently an entire thesis by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. But we constantly see examples of so-called liberal politicians going the other way. We should wholly reject this. I want to talk more about this topic today and some of what I’ve noticed lately, particularly among leadership in America.

I recently saw an (economically illiterate) argument from AOC (which the internet resounded rejected) that billionaires are by definition thieves, that you cannot “earn” that kind of wealth, that every large fortune is by definition evidence of exploitation (what about Beyoncé or Taylor Swift - they never mention those names, of course, it’s just big bad business people). Leaving aside they get the definition of billionaire wrong from the opening sentence (net worth in assets is not cash in an account), the deeper problem is the zero-sum framing underneath it all. The implicit assumption is that value is a fixed pie and that for Elon Musk to have more, someone else must have less. This is simply not how economies work. SpaceX didn’t redistribute the cost of launching a kilogram into orbit, it collapsed it, from roughly $54,000 to under $3,000. The real question critics never want to engage is: who should be deciding where capital goes? The historical options are the state, committees, or people who’ve proven they can allocate resources effectively. The 20th century ran the state experiment at enormous scale. The results were famines, shortages, and mass death. The market, for all its imperfections, at least has a feedback mechanism where eventually bad allocators go broke.

AOC is hardly alone. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist, was asked at a public forum whether she was worried millionaires might leave Washington over the state’s aggressive new tax climate. Her answer, delivered with a laugh: “Bye!” The audience cheered. Washington had just passed a 9.9% income tax on income above $1 million, which the Tax Foundation warned would create the highest top rate on wage income in the entire country. The results are already arriving: Starbucks is expanding in Nashville, committing 2,000 jobs and $100 million to Tennessee, and Seattle could lose up to $750 million in tax revenue as the company grows elsewhere. Fisher Investments left for Texas. Jeff Bezos left for Florida. Wilson, meanwhile, joined a Starbucks picket line after winning her election. That’s the governing strategy: antagonize your city’s largest employers and celebrate when capital exits.

In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed a video on Tax Day outside Ken Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse, staging it as a campaign-style announcement for a new pied-à-terre tax on luxury properties. Griffin’s response was immediate: Citadel filed new building permits in Miami and began shifting investment there, with Griffin saying Mamdani had made it clear that New York “doesn’t welcome success.” Apollo Global Management is now planning a second headquarters in Florida or Texas. Every time one of these politicians waves goodbye to a producer, they act as though the tax base is permanent and the people funding it are optional. They aren’t.

But California may be the most instructive case of all. A coalition of labor groups and activists are currently pushing a ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% tax on billionaire net worth including unrealized gains, meaning assets that haven’t been sold and may not even be liquid. Think about what that actually means in practice. A founder with wealth tied up in a private company or early-stage equity would potentially have to sell assets, possibly losing ownership stakes or voting control, just to pay a tax bill on paper wealth that may never materialize. The state doesn’t hand you money when the stock drops, it just locks in your liability based on a snapshot valuation and wishes you luck. Before the initiative even made the ballot, California’s three wealthiest taxpayers publicly announced their departures, representing, by one analysis, 38% of the state’s entire billionaire wealth walking out the door. As if this all wasn’t bad enough, we even just discovered there was a CCP spy who was mayor of a California city, there’s so much evidence we are (intentionally and otherwise) undermining our own country from the inside.

Let’s zoom in on one specific person in California, Sergey Brin, because it’s just too good of an example to ignore. Brin, who fled the Soviet Union with his family in 1979 as a child, relocated out of California ahead of the wealth tax deadline and issued a rare public statement: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.” Think about the arc of that story for a moment. A man escapes one of history’s most brutal experiments in state control, builds one of the most valuable companies in human history in the freest economy on earth, mints untold millionaire employees and enriches countless public market shareholders and then watches that same state inch toward the ideological conditions he once fled. He’s now poured $57 million into campaigns to stop the tax and has shifted his political support significantly rightward. When someone with lived experience of actual socialism looks at what California is doing and says it reminds him of home, that’s a warning from someone who knows what the destination looks like.

The irony runs even deeper when you look at housing, because the same political movement that celebrates chasing away employers and investors also blames actual builders for the housing crisis their own policies created. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who represents Seattle, recently posted: "Seattle has one of the worst housing crises in the country... Teachers, nurses, and transit workers who can't live in the city they serve... We built this crisis by choosing developers over people." Leaving aside that Democrats have governed Seattle continuously since the late 1960s, the diagnosis is precisely backwards. Seattle doesn't have a housing shortage because it chose developers, it has one because it consistently chose not to. Zoning restrictions, permitting delays, and decades of neighborhood opposition to density are what built this crisis. California tells the same story, where environmental review law was routinely weaponized to block new development, making it one of the most expensive places in the country to live. Meanwhile Austin, also a liberal city, tried something different: they cut parking minimums, reduced lot sizes, and let builders build. Median rent fell more than 16% and the city added 120,000 units in under a decade. In 2024 it led the entire country in affordable housing construction. The difference is whether you treat builders as partners or enemies.

What connects all of these stories of tax flight, the wealth tax, the housing crisis that blames builders while blocking building, is a single recurring error: the belief that prosperity is something to redistribute rather than produce, and that the people doing the producing are the problem. The productive class, given sufficient provocation, will simply go somewhere else, and they are. The politicians left behind will have the satisfaction of their misguided ideals and a shrinking tax base to fund them. That's not a trade any serious person should be proud of.

I’m sorry to write on politics again this week but we have to talk about the situation in Maine, as I talked to a friend yesterday who is my barometer of where the normies are at, and he hadn’t heard about it. It’s an almost unbelievable story.

First, some quick context. As a Jewish person who has watched with genuine horror as antisemitism has been laundered through podcasters and institutional leftism (students barricaded in rooms, campus mobs, Ivy League administrators dragged before Congress, Americans fed years of Middle Eastern propaganda repackaged as social justice), the Graham Platner situation is simply too clarifying to ignore. I wrote about the broader pattern in my story on the end of America’s Marxist era. Against that backdrop, what is happening now is not even really an outlier, and shows exactly where we’re at as a country.

For those who haven’t been following: Platner is the Maine Democrat running for Senate against Susan Collins. He’s a marine veteran and oyster farmer. Also the man who called the Virgin Mary a “skank,” described a Hamas attack on Israel as “a damn fine looking and successful raid,” and told raped women to “take some responsibility.” Oh, and he has a Nazi tattoo. Not something nebulous either, he has a Totenkopf: the insignia of the SS units that ran the Nazi death camps. This is the specific emblem of the executioners, the same badge worn by men who murdered millions.

His explanation is that he got blackout drunk in Croatia in 2007 and grabbed a random skull off a tattoo parlor wall. But a former acquaintance recalls Platner referring to it as “my Totenkopf” in a joking, cutesy way at a DC bar over a decade ago. CNN’s KFile found deleted Reddit posts where he discussed Totenkopf symbolism by name years before he claimed ignorance. As Jim Geraghty noted in National Review, it’s hard to square the “I had no idea” story with the fact that Platner is a self-described military history enthusiast, “a bit odd that a military history buff would look in the mirror for 18 years and never recognize the symbol of the SS, recognizable to anyone who’s watched any World War II movie.”

There are only 2 possible explanations: either he’s supportive of actual Nazis, or he’s someone who accidentally got a Nazi death camp tattoo, spent 20 years calling it by its German name, and somehow never Googled it. But here’s the thing, both should be disqualifying for the United States Senate (in fact, his degenerate behavior without the tattoo should be by itself).

Democrats have spent years turning “Nazi” into ambient noise. Elon Musk throws his arm out at a rally, the same gesture caught on camera from Obama, Clinton, and half of Congress, and the discourse machine runs it for months. As Geraghty put it in the same piece, the OK hand gesture was treated as a symbol of hate worthy of suspicion, while later an actual, factual SS tattoo is now “allegedly no reason for suspicion,” revealing that for many, “Nazi” has simply become a term for “someone I disagree with at the moment.” Notable how the most deranged and degenerate people succeeded in trivializing this term.

As covered in Marginally Compelling, prominent Democratic voices shockingly lined up to defend Platner: Matthew Yglesias called it a “non-specific” reflection on his character, while Jon Favreau dismissed critics as intellectually dishonest for raising concerns at all. Meanwhile, Tim Waltz is already campaigning with him and official Democrat party social media accounts are actively promoting him. The diagnosis in the piece linked above is correct: none of this support happened by reasoning from facts toward a conclusion. The conclusion of win the Maine Senate seat came first and every argument was built backwards from there.

What’s actually unsettling here isn’t just Platner himself, it’s the stress test he represents, and how many people failed it. Every movement claims moral clarity when the cost is low. The real measure is whether that clarity survives contact with the real world in politics: power, elections, coalition maintenance. Groups that once spoke about antisemitism or even just basic morals in absolute terms have suddenly found room for nuance at the exact moment those standards became inconvenient to apply. The same people who insisted that symbols, rhetoric, and coded language always matter, now squint at one of the most explicit symbols imaginable. Then again these very same people think degenerate streamer Hasan Piker is “not the enemy” and suddenly Nick Fuentes is oddly promoting democrats, so perhaps all this is unsurprising.

While Democrats spend their energy rehabilitating Platner, American Jews are living through one of the most violent, hate-filled periods against their community in recent history. In 2025, a gunman shot two Israeli embassy staffers dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., shouting “Free Palestine” as security dragged him away. A firebombing at a Boulder vigil for Gaza hostages killed an 82-year-old woman. Someone torched the Pennsylvania governor’s residence during Passover because he’s Jewish. In New York City, Jews, which are 10 percent of the population, accounted for 57 percent of all hate crime victims in 2025, targeted more than every other group combined. 91% percent of American Jews now say they feel less safe in this country. Through all of it, the same institutional left that floods the zone when a conservative sneezes wrong has had remarkably little to say, for example, when a DSA faction publicly cheered the DC murders, the organization took nearly a week to issue a condemnation. That is the backdrop against which Democrats are asking Jewish Americans to trust their judgment on a Senate candidate with a Nazi death camp tattoo. The gaslighting is breathtaking.

If you don’t think this matters for you because you’re not Jewish, you’re wrong. Jews are a canary in the coal mine for the health of a civilization, with the woke right and woke left converging on blaming us for all problems and viewing our people as evil. Jews can do their fellow citizens a favor by identifying the sources of cultural poison before the toxicity turns fatal, since we’re generally attacked first, but eventually the grifters and degenerates will turn on you, too.

Democrats spent years saying they were the last serious people on antisemitism, and I’m constantly told it’s actually just a “far right” problem. But as someone who has lived through their version of “inclusivity” curdling into open institutional hostility toward Jewish people, I can tell you: they were not. The institutional support of Platner is an extraordinary example. It’s an odd time to be alive.

The DOJ blocked the JetBlue–Spirit merger in January 2024 on antitrust grounds. Now 17,000 jobs are gone, ~80 airports and hundreds of routes won’t be served, and consumers in smaller markets are left with fewer and more expensive options. The airline that pioneered budget travel in America and let millions fly who previously couldn’t afford to is liquidating (I ran simulations suggesting that, had the merger gone through, the added revenue scale would have provided a meaningful buffer). Multiply that by a few more examples and a picture emerges.

The government recently also blocked Adobe from acquiring Figma for $20B, a deal 2 years in the making, because regulators decided the future of design software competition was better managed from Washington than from the market. They blocked Kroger–Albertsons, a $24.6B merger that would’ve built a genuine rival to Walmart at scale. And then there’s iRobot. The FTC under Lina Khan, cheered on by Elizabeth Warren, killed Amazon’s $1.7 billion acquisition of the Roomba maker and celebrated it. They said so publicly. The outcome? iRobot is now Chinese-owned, Shenzhen Picea Robotics assumed 100% of its equity. Chinese brands already held over 60% of the global smart vacuum market before this, now they own the most iconic American brand in the category too. A stunning outcome driven by deeply flawed policymaking.

The aggressive interventionism of the last several years has a home: it lives in the progressive wing of the democratic party and in organized labor. Lina Khan’s FTC and the DOJ under Jonathan Kanter treated merger enforcement as ideology, funny how pervasive that’s become and how it never leads anywhere good. Warren wrote the FTC urging them to block the iRobot deal not because of any careful economic analysis, she did it to score populist points against Amazon. The result was predictable: in their rush to hurt Amazon (an American success story they absolutely loathe), Warren and Khan chased iRobot out of Massachusetts and straight into China’s hands. Worth noting: iRobot is headquartered in Massachusetts, Warren’s home state. Those laid-off workers are her constituents.

Unions play their own version of this game, they oppose consolidation because it threatens existing labor arrangements and dues-paying membership counts. The UFCW spent nearly two years organizing opposition to Kroger–Albertsons, running press conferences, Senate hearings, and media campaigns to kill it. The argument was dressed up as “protecting competition,” but the underlying force was protecting institutional power. Meanwhile Kroger argued the opposite, the merger was the best path to securing union jobs, having added over 100,000 union positions since 2012.

When Democratic Socialists who hate free market capitalism push to block deals, they do something worse than inconveniencing shareholders, they hurt the workers they claim to represent. iRobot’s own co-founder called the bankruptcy “a very powerful cautionary tale of what happens when the government forgets that its goal is to strengthen the U.S. economy.” The jobs that vanished, the equity that evaporated, the routes that disappeared, they’re the cost of policy driven by ideology rather than outcomes. Of course, we know the reason why.

You can be for antitrust in extreme cases, I fully agree something like Apple and Microsoft shouldn’t be allowed to merge, and in fact they already wouldn’t try. But these small/mid-sized pieces of M&A make no sense to block. This should all be businesses as usual. Our economically illiterate policymakers changed the rules to make deals that would’ve passed 10-15 years ago instead to be flagged, expanded the presumption of illegality and broadened theories of harm, including things that may or may not actually happen. None of this is good policy, it prioritizes government control of market structure and “power” over the older Chicago School view focused on prices, which actually affect consumers. It’s interventionist, Ayn Rand villain type stuff.

In this new world, regulators take a snapshot of reality: who the players are today, what the market looks like this quarter, and then freeze it. As if the world is going to sit around and wait. It never does.

The Spirit case is actually the clearest example. The big four carriers: American, Delta, Southwest, United, already controlled about 80% of the U.S. market before the block. The government’s theory was that blocking the merger would protect competition. What it actually did was remove the one lifeline available to a marginal carrier in a brutally capital-heavy, thin-margin industry. Spirit kept fares below competitors on routes it flew. Studies have found that when ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit enter a route, fares can fall meaningfully, often by double digits across competing airlines.

Regulators looked at the deal and said that this merger reduces competition. What they produced instead: zero competition, zero service, zero jobs, and higher fares. The analysis was wrong, the model was wrong, and nobody is being held accountable for it. This outcome was predictable: the DOJ’s intervention didn’t eliminate consolidation, it just ensured it happened via bankruptcy instead of a structured merger where workers and routes could have survived and the other large airlines would have had a new proper competitor. The DOJ feared harm; the counterfactual delivered more of it. As usual, when regulators feel the need to look busy and justify their job by doing something, they end up hurting everyone.

The Adobe–Figma block was regulatory intervention in one of the most dynamic categories in software. Product cycles are measured in months. There are many competitors, open-source alternatives and different choices always just a click away. AI is already compressing entire creative workflows and the competitive landscape was shifting under everyone’s feet while regulators ran a multi-year review process.

About 90% of startup exits are M&A deals which is a big part of the engine of the venture ecosystem. When regulators treat large acquisitions as presumptively anticompetitive, it’s way worse than just killing one deal. This actively chills VC investment: if investors expect regulators to block high-growth acquisitions, they invest less in startups, the ROI equation that funds the whole system gets thrown out of balance, and we all get less innovation. iRobot’s co-founder said his outlook on exit strategy is now permanently shaped by what happened, and that precedent ripples outward to every founder and VC pricing in the possibility that their expected exit won’t come through.

The Kroger–Albertsons block rests on a specific assumption: that preserving today’s grocery market structure is the correct call. Walmart has kept expanding, Amazon has kept building, Costco trades at ATH, regional players keep evolving, there are any number of food and meal delivery startups, the competitive dynamics don’t freeze just because regulation wants to. What the block actually preserved was Walmart’s existing advantage, which is a strange outcome for a policy supposedly designed to protect consumers. Notable leftist politicians have been yelling about grocery stores for some time, and never once mention their razor-thin profit margins. None of the businesses in this sector are the evil, greedy corporations they are caricatured to be.

Our regulators have simply become overzealous in their desire to control the world. Free markets—left to innovate, build, and adapt—self-correct in ways government intervention almost never does, while regulation locks in a snapshot and delays adaptation. And when it’s wrong, when the model didn’t account for fuel prices, or AI, or Chinese manufacturers moving up the value chain, or any of the thousand things that make dynamic markets dynamic, there’s no mechanism to reverse the damage fast enough to matter. Mucking with the engine that makes America run, frequently by people who have never even built anything and constantly demonize businesses, is incredibly shortsighted. Look, when policymaker social media feeds are just a constant squawking about their disdain for successful people and companies, you know they’re deeply unserious. I don’t understand why anyone would trust these people (or anyone under them) to make real decisions.

The reflexive interventionism that’s been normalized in progressive regulatory circles, wrapped in “consumer-protection” language while union lobbyists and political point-scorers cheer from the sidelines, keeps producing results that hurt everyone. And the people who pay are never the politicians. They’re the workers who lose jobs, the founders and employees whose equity disappears, and the consumers who pay higher prices, frequently for scarce or worse products.

At some point the question isn’t “should this deal happen?” It’s whether we trust markets or bureaucratic committees more to allocate the future, and if we want to take a step towards freedom or tyrannical state control. Committees don’t have a great track record or even the right incentive structure to make the right calls. They’re working from static models in a dynamic world, insulated from consequences, with every institutional incentive to intervene, score political points and look busy mucking with a productive system — and none to ever admit they were wrong. On the other hand, the freer American markets are and people actually in the game building the world aren’t nanny-stated to death, the more we all prosper.

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When my older adult son was going through a particularly rough patch, what concerned me most was his lack of curiosity. He was inquisitive as a child, but as he entered his teens, those qualities declined. After graduating from high school, he decided to drop out of college after his first year and struggled for a few years. As he was figuring out what he’d do for a living, we’d often have debates on all kinds of topics. But he rarely showed genuine interest or intellectual curiosity beyond getting his opinions verbalized and expressed. Over time, his situation improved, and I found our conversations more balanced, less intense and less confrontational. He still doesn’t ask a lot of questions, but he shows more curiosity than he did during the years when he struggled. It’s progress.

This always stuck with me for some reason.

Outside my family life as a father to two GenZ sons, a husband to my wife, and a dual dog owner, I probably spend too much time immersed in the tech world, both at work and off the corporate clock. I spend time reading and writing about humanity’s relationship with technology and, of course, how AI is changing the game before our very eyes. I find myself having philosophical conversations with all kinds of colleagues, friends, and even the president of the practice I work in, and oftentimes, when talking about the impact of AI on our work, society, and world—I sometimes feel pressured to “pick a side”; i.e., view AI primarily through the lens of flowery optimism or dreary pessimism.

This instantly makes me feel uncomfortable. While so much of what’s presented in the media about AI often does feel like one extreme or the other, the polarization of thought just feels too simplistic and inadequate. I remember telling our president, who is also a friend, at a time when there were several big AI stories all of our peers were talking about, that I remained curiously skeptical...

I am generally an advocate for AI. I recently launched my first Claude Code project, and the technology feels like magic to me in so many ways. I’m also skeptical about the long-term tradeoffs that come with it. I become skeptical when I see utopian OR dystopian visions of the future. In my nearly fifty-five years of life, if I have learned one thing, it is that life rarely fits into the clean and tidy partitions and frameworks we want to assign to it. It’s far messier, human, imperfect, and unpredictable.

Intellectual sparring with the sword and shield of curious skepticism

Being curiously skeptical sounds like an Oxymoron—as if the two are incompatible with one another, like Jumbo Shrimp, bittersweet, or deafening silence, but they actually go really well together, and we’d be well-served to combine them when we dare discuss and debate issues of consequence. Permission to use a flawed metaphor, but for some reason, I was compelled to talk about this using the example of a sword and shield, which, taken at face value, makes this feel like we’re going into battle.

Well, no and yes.

Think of the Sword of Curiosity from a sparring perspective, where the goal is to improve yourself and test your opponent in friendly “competition”. A sword can be used to push, probe, and understand how your opponent functions. How will they “attack and defend” themselves? Where are they most formidable? Where are they most vulnerable? Again, I want to reinforce the context: sparring vs. a life-or-death battle.

In the context of intellectual sparring, the Sword of Curiosity is a diagnostic tool instead of a weapon meant to cause damage. Rather than dealing a finishing blow, you use it to map an opponent’s logic through:

- Probing: Tapping their guard to test structural integrity—seeing if their stance is built on solid evidence or assumptions.

- Binding: Maintaining contact with their strongest points (steel-manning) to “feel” the weight and intent of their convictions.

- Feinting: Using hypotheticals to observe cognitive agility—discovering if they double down under pressure or pivot with grace.

This is the “gym,” not yet the “coliseum,” the goal is a mutual refinement of skills where the “salute” ensures the relationship survives the exchange.

Now let’s take a look at the Shield of Skepticism, where, again, in my highly imperfect metaphor, I am framing it within a certain context. Here, our shields represent “cognitive reasoning”. Think of our shields of skepticism as filters, with a default setting that keeps our minds’ “lids” at the halfway point between open and shut. Sometimes our shield of skepticism is used just enough to ensure we don’t take things at face value, and other times, we are fully protecting ourselves from nonsense we feel like we have enough facts, evidence, and, yes, intuition to counter, which requires us to protect our own intellectual resilience. A shield of skepticism is useful for:

- Tactical Parrying: Deflecting bad-faith arguments or logical fallacies once intuition or evidence confirms they are non-viable.

- Neutral Quarantine: Using the shield to “catch” and hold foreign concepts for inspection without immediately integrating them into your core beliefs.

- Resilience Preservation: Fully closing the lid when necessary to guard against cognitive overload or bad-faith exhaustion.

A call to arms

Here’s where I am going to shift from the training gym to the coliseum. There is an opponent, but it’s not who you think. Depending on the content of Hot Takes, you might think it’s Adam on some days, or someone like him. You may think it’s the person who shares political beliefs or even societal values that are in opposition to yours. Or maybe it’s just an AI expert hustling to get you to buy their training course while they evangelize the utopian world of automation to come. The call to arms I’m talking about is a resistance movement against a world that reduces every complex thought to its lowest common denominator.

Forget soundbites, we’re way past those. We’re now operating in a world where nuance is practically extinct, people only talk past each other (if they talk), and the media only demonstrates skepticism when covering a story that challenges their core beliefs, and that goes for the bifurcation of media because there really isn’t objectivity in media anymore — it’s more of a reinforcement of strongly held beliefs by the viewer/reader/listener which media gladly reinforces.

There’s a saying I keep seeing more of online these days: "Idiocracy was a documentary.” The sword and shield of curious skepticism is my call to arms to combat that, as imperfect an analogy as that might be. Staying curious is how the resistance ignites and grows, while learning when, where, and how to remain skeptical is how we preserve our intellectual resilience over time.

If I had to design a medieval-style crest for myself these days, this would be it.

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

—Winston Churchill

I saw a fairly alarming stat the other day: 62% of Americans under 30 now express a favorable view of socialism, according to a Cato/YouGov survey. This is not just one survey, the results are similarly mirrored by data from GALLUP, and if you’re observing what’s happening around us (some American politicians explicitly promoting socialist ideas tried and failed in the Soviet Union) it could actually be around this high. Two-thirds of young Americans warming to an economic system with a body count that dwarfs history’s worst catastrophes is …concerning to say the least. Some of you might be sitting here wondering why, although I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious.

At least one main answer is obvious: we’re failing to educate young people about the global successes of capitalism, both in school and in the culture. As a story in the Wall Street Journal by Samuel J. Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute recently noted, students are, and I’m quoting from the article: “arriving to campus not only skeptical of free markets, but openly embracing socialist ideas. The problem isn’t that students have rejected capitalism. It’s that many have never been taught how it works or why it matters.” This is a generation that was handed one (continually failed) side of a debate and had it branded education, never having the full story. In just 2 centuries, capitalism has driven extreme poverty down from over 80% of the world to under 10%, doubled global life expectancy and lifted billions out of subsistence, arguably the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. And people think this is evil!

Sober professors across the country are starting to admit the problem. Jonathan Zimmerman, a 30-year Penn faculty veteran, recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that despite universities' stated commitment to "critical thinking," they "typically present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and call it a day." He calls it not just political bias, but "a mark of bad teaching." Predictably (and depressingly) his colleagues responded to his call for self-examination at a conference with silence, followed by a language policing session. An institution that can't handle one dissenting professor in a conference room has no business claiming it's training students to think freely. Just read this passage from the story and see if you can honestly say these people haven’t lost the plot (it’s almost like they’re cult members). It’s perfectly emblematic of the problem, and it’s widespread across our universities and in the broader culture. Yuri Bezmenov tried to warn us.

We’ve talked about the academic bias data before, where a peer-reviewed Oxford study of roughly 600,000 social science abstracts found that approximately 90% of politically relevant research leaned left, in every discipline, every year studied. And we shared analysis of Buckley Institute’s undergraduate survey, where 46% of students think nations like Cuba and the Soviet Union offer a better economic model than the United States. Cuba, where the average monthly salary is around $20. Venezuela, which sat on the world’s largest proven oil reserves and still managed to produce mass starvation, empty supermarket shelves, and a refugee crisis of millions. The Soviet Union, which killed tens of millions of its own people through engineered famine, gulags, and political terror before collapsing under the weight of its own inefficiencies. These are the destinations that central planning reliably reaches. This is real socialism, and it’s been tried.

What's particularly striking is that the socialist sympathies don't exist in isolation, they're part of a broader ideological package students absorb on campus (and online, before they graduate high school). As we've covered in the DEI era's postmortem, the dominant campus framework in many universities for the past decade has been fundamentally Marxist in structure: society divided into oppressors and oppressed, America cast as a colonial villain, and Western institutions treated as the root of all suffering rather than the source of most of the world's hard-won freedoms. When that's the water you swim in, rooting for authoritarian socialists is where you can easily end up. A generation trained to see their own civilization as uniquely guilty is naturally more sympathetic to regimes that oppose it, even when those regimes would jail or kill the very students championing them. It’s how you get kids openly rooting for terrorists and sympathetic to regimes that are openly hostile to liberal democratic values.

As commenters here have pointed out before, and I agree with them on, most students thankfully don’t grow up to become political zealots (note how it’s mostly senior citizens who even go to protests, as one example). But it’s naïve to ignore they are at the very least being nudged one particular direction, the data from pretty much every source reads this cleanly. Anyway here’s what normal students actually want, and we should work to deliver on: they want affordability, fairness, and economic security. About three-quarters of Millennials and Gen Z see the costs of healthcare, college, and housing as a serious problem for a stable society, and all of those costs have risen considerably in real terms. The frustration is real and it deserves serious engagement.

But the answer to expensive housing isn’t a system that produces no housing. The answer to unaffordable healthcare isn’t a system that produces no medicine worth having or starts promoting a system like Canada’s MAID program (so incredibly dystopian). The answer to inequality isn’t a model whose primary historical output has been equally distributed misery. Ironically, it’s forms of government intervention of free markets, poor policy decisions and artificial restriction of supply that cause most of our problems. Capitalism is great and what actually works, when our leaders and institutions don’t get in their own way.

The students aren’t the problem. The gap in their education is, as are institutions which continually spread anti-capitalist messaging and mistakenly believe their own country is evil and oppressive. A generation that genuinely understands what markets do (how they allocate resources, generate innovation, lift living standards) and what happens when governments replace them, would not be this confused. The data is in, and it’s been in for decades. Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union ran the experiment at enormous human cost so we wouldn’t have to. The least we can do is teach it, so we are not doomed to suffer through this historic mistake.

I previously wrote about how social science research is 90% ideologically uniform. A new Nature piece shows something else: a massive seven-year project examining 3,900 social-science papers found that researchers could replicate the results of only about half the studies they tested.

The initiative, called SCORE, funded by DARPA and involving 865 researchers across 62 journals, tested three things: reproducibility, robustness, and replicability. The results at each step were unflattering. Of 600 papers where researchers attempted to reproduce the original data, only 145 contained enough detail to even try, and of those, just 53% matched precisely. Among the subset of studies that were fully replicated from scratch, only about 49% held up with statistical significance.

This isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention and seen odd stories shared online. I mentioned the replication crisis briefly in my last piece, and here it is in full color. The question is whether people are willing to connect the dots between the two stories, because they are deeply intertwined.

When a field is ideologically homogenous, and we established that social sciences lean left with a correlation so tight it’s essentially a monoculture, you lose the adversarial pressure that makes science work. A heterodox researcher asking uncomfortable questions, demanding better methodology, or refusing to accept a fashionable conclusion is exactly the immune system science needs. Remove that person through self-selection and you get a literature that feels like it’s settled but isn’t. As one Stanford meta-scientist put it, the SCORE results are “not surprising,” consistent with every smaller study before it. The field has known. It just hasn’t fixed it.

Part of the failure is lack of care: many papers simply don’t share enough data or detail for anyone to verify their work. Publish fast, publish positive, don’t invite scrutiny. But ideology and sloppiness compound. When peer reviewers share your priors, a weak study with the right conclusions will clear the bar. When your entire discipline does, the weak studies accumulate into a body of “evidence” that informs policy.

And that’s why this matters beyond the ivory tower. Research on immigration, education, criminal justice, housing, all of it flows downstream into real decisions affecting real people. If the underlying literature doesn’t replicate, the policy built on top of it ends up harming all of us.

There’s a sliver of hope: a separate analysis found that papers from 2022–23 reproduced at 85%, suggesting newer transparency norms are helping. But that progress doesn’t rehabilitate decades of literature already embedded in textbooks, policy briefs and what people believe when they talk about many topics online and in person. And if you sit and think about it for a moment, you realize the bias piece and the replication piece aren’t really two separate scandals. They’re both part of same one.