Washington, DC
Joined June 2009
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Shallow State Operative retweeted
Nothing that is happening in DC will make any sense unless you first absorb one critical fact.
Both political parties have been replaced.
There are no Republicans. There are no Democrats. The stationary exists, but the political unity does not. They are pseudoparties.
There are not two political parties in America, there are three.
They are Nationalist Party, the Globalist Party, and the OogaBooga Party.
Nationalists are heritage Americans who want to restore American values, principles and greatness to America by running America as if it were just like every other country on the map.... a blood and soil nation belonging to and representing a people.
Example Nationalist politicians would be Pat Buchanan, Barry Goldwater, and Ross Perot. Examples Nationalist X accounts would be @AuronMacintyre, @romanhelmetguy, and myself.
Globalists are a loose coalition of those who will stop at nothing to loot the system and enjoy the managed decline for as long as possible. Their plans focus on keeping the cost of labor down and the price of land up by moving industries and people freely across national borders as needed.
Example Globalist politicians would be Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan. Example Globalist X accounts would @JoelWBerry, @benshapiro, and @ConceptualJames.
OogaBoogas are a collection of tribals wearing suits whose primary goals are self-enrichment, loyalty to their third world tribe of origin, and shared resentment of Western Civilization. They are also supported by dysfunctional bioleninists.
Example OogaBooga politicians would be Zohran Mamdani, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Barrack Obama. OogaBoogas don't really have the wit for prominence on X, but they have eleventy-billion small accounts.
Right now, the "democrats" are about to begin a power struggle between Globalists and OogaBooga, which OogaBooga will win, because all the things that make them win are unavoidable consequences of Globalists' cheap labor plan. The OogaBoogas are the golem that the Globalists have set loose to rampage in the streets, and they cannot fight it without abandoning their whole agenda.
Also right now, the "republicans" are in the early stages of a power struggle between the Globalists and the Nationalists.
This is why "republicans" appear to act like they don't want to win.
Because the struggle is not between republicans and democrats. It is between Globalists and Nationalists. The need to defeat "democrat" candidates so as to retain elected office is always balanced by the need to weaponize those same "democrats" against others in the "republican" party, and so to prevent Nationalists from having federal representation.
The fight for America's future is not between republicans and democrats for control of DC. It is between Nationalists and Globalists for control of the Republican Party.
This is why the "republicans" did nothing with a supermajority for 2 years.
There was no supermajority. Because there are no republicans. Only Nationalists, Globalists, and OogaBooga.
It is meaningless for "republicans" to win elections now. Because there are no republicans. There are Globalists. And there are Nationalists.
The Nationalists must win.
And the timeframe for the Nationalists to do this is determined by the other civil war... the struggle for control of the Democratic Party. The Globalists in the DNC will eventually lose to the OogaBooga that they brought in to line their pockets. They have no effective defense against OogaBooga because they have been preaching open borders, decolonization, and anti-racism forever.
They are analogous to the Jews of Prague in the old story, about to be murdered by their own Golem.
The Nationalists must win control of the Republican Party before the Globalists lose control of the Democratic Party.
Because Nationalists can beat OogaBooga, and Globalists can't.
If the Nationalists win in time, they can curbstomp OogaBooga, Bukele style, and we can have a proper country again. If they don't, the United States will become a third world country, and we'll have to take a couple hundred thousand rednecks and conquer New Zealand or something to create a metaphorical seed bank for Western Civilization.
The first step in winning is to understand who the enemy is.
Bukele showed us that the power of a unified state, supported by its people, can always clean out domestic enemies with swift and ruthless action.
The reason we haven't done that is that we have no unified state. Because of the true enemy.
The enemy is Globalists, not OogaBoogas. We must understand that Globalist "republicans" are not fellow conservatives who are mistaken about something. They not conservatives. They conserve nothing. They are the enemy.
We must purge ourselves of the enemy within. Then, and only then, can we defeat the enemy without.
The Susie Wiles corruption leaks just keep coming. The Republican establishment intentionally lost the midterms, they refused to pass legislation or allow Trump recess appointments for 2 years, they intentionally lost Texas. Now it's backfiring hard as Susie Wiles corruption probes are getting started and all of her allies are getting purged from the White House.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
I'm a storyteller.
I will tell you a story.
Not a thinly veiled allegory or analogy. Not a fable. Not a parody or a satire, or some smug little parable featuring characters "Ronald Grump" and "Alan Tusk".
No, this is a true story, and it means what it means, with no hidden symbolism whatsoever. It contains only facts, and general principles to derive from them.
It is a story about Rome.
We all know what Rome was. It was a republic, then an Empire, then nothing.
But every time we ask why, historians wish to tell us it is complicated, and that we desperately need historians, such as themselves, to sort it all out.
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was not complicated.
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire can be explained in two words.
Cheap labor.
The Romans, as you know, had two classes, the patricians and the plebeians.
The patricians ruled Rome. But the plebeians were Rome. And the patricians forgot this.
Around this point in the story, you may be thinking you understand me already. You may think you have anticipated where I am going with this. You may think that this is going to be some general polemic about the importance of remembering the little people.
It is not. I have a very specific meaning, and I always choose my words very, very carefully.
Two words.
Cheap. Labor.
The Romans patricians, like the old and the rich of any society, owned land, and sold goods. To do this, they bought labor.
The Roman plebeians, most especially the young, sold labor. So that they could buy goods and land.
So, it should go without saying, but often doesn't, that it was in the interest of plebeians that goods and land be cheap, and labor be expensive, and in the interest of patricians that land and goods should be expensive, and labor should be cheap.
Now, markets have natural cycles. The price of every thing fluctuates up and down, looking for an equilibrium which is only ever temporary.
Sometimes goods and land are cheap, and labor is expensive. Then the plebeians become fat and prosperous, and they marry pretty girls and have lots of healthy children.
Sometimes goods and land are expensive, and labor is cheap, and patricians amass vast fortunes and build fine estates and eat honeyed dormice.
To every thing, there is a season.
But the patricians controlled Rome. Not fully or directly, not in theory, but they had money. And money buys power. Just as power buys money.
And the temptation, in the long run, became irresistible. To buy political power, and put the finger of that political power on the scales of the market.
To make sure the cheap labor stays cheap forever.
In Rome, cheap labor meant slaves. Elsewhere, it has meant other things.
In Rome, slaves kept labor cheap not only because slaves don't get paid, and can't quit, but also because every plebeian who sells labor must compete with the slave on price.
Little by little, this took away from the plebeians, not only because real wages were depressed, but more importantly because there were no seasons of labor scarcity. No cycles in the market where wages went high.
No fat seasons for the plebes, just an ever-increasing drought.
And, while the patricians controlled Rome, the plebeians were Rome. It was their blood, shed in the legions, that conquered the world. Their sweat that built the shining city of seven hills.
And their patriotism that defined what Rome was.
The patricians ruled Rome. But the plebeians were Rome, and when they ceased to bear allegiance to Rome, Rome ceased to exist, because the only thing that Rome ever was, the only thing that any city or nation ever is, is its people.
A man who has no work, a man who must compete with slaves, a man who is beaten down to want the hungriest beggar will take, is a man who cannot have a home and a family.
Not only because he cannot afford such things. But because no woman will have him. No woman will bear his children.
The ultimate expression, after all, of female lust and admiration, is "I want to have his babies".
Fewer people seem to realize that the reverse is true.
I was told once, by a man who should have known better, that Rome fell because the Romans forgot what it meant to be Roman.
Nonsense.
Rome fell because Romans knew exactly what it meant to be Roman. Which meant they knew that to be Roman meant to be replaced by slaves.
The patricians bore no allegiance to Rome, because it was cheaper to replace the Roman workers with slaves, and the Roman legions with mercenaries.
The plebeians bore no allegiance to Rome, because Rome bore no allegiance to them.
And so Rome simply ceased to be.
The outward forms hung around awhile, until the mercenaries, bearing no true allegiance to Rome, realized they didn't have to wait to be paid. They could just... take.
The patricians destroyed Rome because they thought like politicians instead of kings.
A politician buys a crown by offering the most to those whose support is most in doubt.
A king knows that crowns and thrones are only symbols, and power comes from armies of loyal men, whose loyalty must be bought with loyalty in turn. Not table scraps.
The Roman plebeians didn't want, and couldn't survive on, free bread and circuses. They needed work and land and incomes to have families and happy lives.
But no Caesar emerged in time.
Tick tock, Mr. Vance.
Tick tock.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
You absolute midwit. Congrats on repeating the Wikipedia "Nazis were far-right, end of story" summary you absorbed between TikToks.
Yes, the Nazis crushed independent unions, jailed and murdered communists and social democrats, and Hitler liquidated the Strasserite "left" wing of his own party in the Night of the Long Knives. That part is not in dispute. They were not Marxist class-struggle socialists. They hated Bolshevism as a Jewish plot and treated international socialism as the main enemy. Fine.
What your middle-school history class skipped is that they still ran a National *Socialist* state: private property existed only as long as it served the Führer’s racial and war goals, wages and prices were controlled, industry was cartelized under state direction, profit was subordinated to the party, and the economy was planned for autarky and rearmament. That is not free-market capitalism, liberal conservatism, or classical right-wing economics. It is the same family of state-directed, anti-liberal, collectivist economics practiced by every other fascist and "national socialist" regime. The name was not a prank; the 25-point program and the early rhetoric were full of anti-capitalist planks precisely because they were competing with the actual socialists for working-class support.
Your North Korea comparison is the usual gotcha and it is only half-clever. Yes, names can lie. But the NSDAP did not merely call itself socialist while secretly running a Rothschild hedge fund. They nationalized, directed, rationed, and regimented. The difference from Soviet socialism was mainly that the Nazis kept the owners as managers under party orders instead of shooting them all and installing commissars. Both systems produced shortages, secret police, and mass graves; one just had better uniforms and Wagner.
Elon pointing out the obvious—that "National Socialist" is not an ironic branding exercise and that the regime was economically left of any classical liberal or conservative—does not make him a moron. It makes him less obedient to the post-1945 academic consensus that insists every totalitarian who isn’t a full Marxist must be filed under "far-right" so the left never has to share the body count. Money didn’t buy him a brain; it just bought him a platform where he doesn’t have to pretend your selective reading of 1930s Germany is the complete picture.
Keep yelling "far-right fascists" while ignoring the actual economic policies and the party’s own name. It is the historical equivalent of covering your ears and shouting.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.
When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.
These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.
When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.
We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.
We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.
Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.
They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.
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Shallow State Operative retweeted
I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road.
France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything.
In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism.
It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything.
Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street."
We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed.
At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.
And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue.
Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home.
Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live.
The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system.
In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us.
Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine.
We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build.
But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap.
Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise.
Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
Who’s ready for some real talk on Social Security?
Here it is: you didn’t “pay in” to Social Security, there’s no deposit account with “your” money in it, and every single dime of Social Security taxes you’ve paid in your entire life went directly to someone else or was frittered away by Congress.
For many decades after the program was created, there was more money collected in Social Security taxes paid in than money spent on benefits. This was due to the demographics of the country at the time: in 1950 there were 16 workers paying Social Security taxes for every 1 recipient of benefits, whereas today there are fewer than 3 workers per beneficiary.
So obviously, all that extra money collected for decades when there were more taxes collected than benefits paid was set aside and invested, right? LOL. If only.
Instead of setting all that extra money aside and protecting it for future beneficiaries, Congress spent it. Every last penny. Every dollar that has been collected in Social Security taxes has been spent. What Congress did instead of saving money was create a massive IOU which it dishonestly called the Social Security Trust Fund. Except there’s no trust and there’s no fund. It’s just a gigantic IOU, like in Dumb and Dumber. There’s no numbered account with money in it waiting to be withdrawn.
Where does this leave us? Beginning around 2020, payroll taxes collected were no longer sufficient to pay for current Social Security benefits, so money had to printed or borrowed from elsewhere. As more and more money has to be borrowed to pay current benefits, the Social Security Trust Fund balance is reduced.
Once it reaches zero—and right now that is expected to happen within the next 10 years—the government is legally prohibited from paying out more in benefits than it collects in Social Security payroll taxes each year. And that will mean an instant cut in Social Security benefits of around 20 percent. By the year 2100, expected benefits will be just 65 percent of promised benefits.
As of today, a 75-year-old who worked for 50 years and earned the median salary will have paid close to $100,000 in Social Security payroll taxes over his life. Based on average life expectancy of another 12 years, he will collected more than $500,000 in Social Security benefits, and those payments will come not from a savings account somewhere, but from taxes paid by his children and grandchildren. But when it comes time for the people paying directly for his Social Security checks to receive their benefits, they won’t get nearly as much as he gets, because the Trust Fund will be bankrupt.
The people paying for the Social Security benefits of Baby Boomers today will pay significantly more into the system than the Boomers ever did, but will receive a fraction of the eventual payout.
Does that seem fair? In light of those facts, is it really accurate to say you “earned” that Social Security payment? Of course it isn’t. Social Security is welfare for American retirees. And it’s a welfare system that is not only a total waste of money designed to give Congress an even bigger budget to fritter away (if you invested your Social Security taxes, your lump sum at retirement would be 5x higher than your expected lifetime benefits from Social Security), it’s also deeply immoral.
Because of the current demographics in the country, Social Security takes money from workers today so it can give retirees 3-5x more than they ever paid in AND will pay out significantly less when it’s time for the people currently paying into the system to collect their own benefits.
Boomers receive 3-5x more than they paid in, while their grandchildren will receive 35 percent less than what they were promised. They originally called this the New Deal when it was created, but it’s a raw deal for everyone currently being forced to pay into it.
So let’s stop with the pretense that Social Security is anything other than a poorly designed welfare scheme for retirees.
How bout a compromise. We enact Bernie's wealth tax, with the concurrent stipulation that members of congress are personally responsible for .1% of the national debt they add under their leadership each year. Deal?
At around $2 trillion a year, the 535 members of congress would each be on the hook for about $3.7 million a year in debt tax. It's just .1%. Pay your fair share, Bernie!
If Bernie’s 5% a year billionaire wealth tax had been enacted in 2012, Elon Musk would be worth less than $365 billion instead of the $1 trillion he’s worth today. He’d still be the wealthiest man alive & every senior in America would have dental, vision & hearing under Medicare.
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Shallow State Operative retweeted
This is how Christianity failed.
Believers see Christianity as revealed truth, but whether you believe or not, religion serves an earthly purpose, and that purpose is to hold civilization and the family together.
Understand this — we can argue all day about whether a creator god exists. You think yes, I think no, we debate.
But that debate is inconsequential. It's just the high-IQ equivalent of a pick-up game of basketball. Because it's not important what you believe... it's important what your beliefs make you do.
For over a thousand years, Christianity held the family together by tying sex to family responsibility, through marriage.
And for over a thousand years, Christianity held civilization together by tying marriage to male productivity and prosocial behavior.
These two links forged a chain that ran directly from "building civilization" to "getting laid".
Men who helped civilization along got laid. Men who didn't, didn't. This supported civilization in two ways. First, in the individual lives of men, it was motivational. Men worked hard and did useful things because that was how you got a pretty wife who was nice to you. Second, across generations, it was eugenic. Anti-civilizational men didn't get to have as many children.
That's how Christianity helped build civilization in the West.
Now, any religion could have done this, so long as it had certain traits. And in other places and times, other religions did do this. But in the West, it was Christianity in particular that did this job.
So why is the non-believer praising Christianity? Because I'm a non-believer, not an angry reddit church-hater. I'm interested in what's actually going on. If Christianity does a good thing, I'm going to say so.
Unfortunately, the praise stops here, because the reverse is also true. We have to fearlessly look at where Christianity failed, and why it no longer serves the civilization and family preserving functions that it once did.
Having created these two causal links:
"If you get married, you can have all the sex you want."
and
"If you work hard and do the right thing, you can marry a desirable woman."
... Christianity's responsibility was to preserve them.
The driving force behind civilization wasn't religious zeal. It was always the male libido.
(And yes, later, also love for your children. But that's a different topic for another day.)
So long as these two things remained true, the powerful engine of male libido would continue to pull the train of civilization.
The responsibility of Christianity, as an earthly institution, was to make sure these two things remained true forever, regardless of what changes technology wrought.
It failed.
Christianity failed to preserve the second link in its chain. Here's how and why.
In any agrarian society, from the neolithic era to early America, a teenage boy is functionally a man. He can do farm labor, he can fight wars, he can serve an apprenticeship and become a craftsman.
So if he wants sex, and what teenager doesn't, he can get married. Because he is a productive, respected member of the community, and all the women are socialized to want exactly that.
This is no longer true.
Christianity failed to defend marriage, because it thought "defending marriage" meant lecturing young people about getting married, instead of making sure they could.
Christianity sat by while women entered the workforce and earned as much as men. It sat by while women amassed more political power, social status, and respect than men.
When this happens, men can't marry, because women are genetically programmed to marry up.
Not down.
Not across.
Up.
If the average woman regards the average man as her equal, weddings are going to become increasingly rare. And the average Western woman does not regard the average man as her equal. She regards him as her inferior. She is egged on in this by every Hollywood movie, every show on television, every book in the bookstore, every story in the newspaper, every speech by every politician, on both sides of the aisle.
Christianity failed to stop this.
Worse yet, Christianity allowed the age where a man could even afford to marry to increase from 15 to 20 to 25 to 30.
With enough lectures and social pressure, you can stop teenagers from having sex until they are 15. In strict religious communities full of zeal, you might even hold some of them back until 18 or 20.
But if dudes can't afford a home or a wife until 30 or 35, what the hell do you expect them to do? Of course they're going to fornicate.
But Christianity did nothing about this either, because that would have meant taking on people with serious economic and institutional power, the scribes and Pharisees of our day.
It was much easier to lecture young people, because young people don't have any power.
So the Christians fought a culture war with the left, a war of condom-based sex education versus abstinence-only sex education, over who was better at preventing "teen pregnancy".
And no one stood up and shouted the obvious truth, like this:
"Teenage girls are supposed to get pregnant, you fucking noodle! What the hell do you think they get horny for?"
Nature, or god if you like, programmed teenagers to be horny so that you can have more humans. The command is right there in the bible "Be fruitful and multiply."
But somehow Christianity, the earthly institution, twisted this into "keep it in your pants".
No religion can fight human genetic programming and win.
It's not supposed to. It's supposed to work with that programming, not fight it. It's supposed to channel those instincts into healthy ways of life, not suppress them.
But lectures were easier.
Christianity forgot that traffic laws are not a highway. You cannot drive on a lecture about traffic safety and get to where you are going. You have to actually maintain a fucking road.
The path forward for young men's sexual urges no longer runs through work, marriage, and children. It runs though pickup artistry and looksmaxxing and hookup culture.
Christianity is perfectly willing to take on all of these things, but it is unwilling to pick a fight with the real political, economic, and institutional powers that gave rise to them.
This is why young people abandoned the church in droves, generations ago. Churches simply no longer had answers to the problems that they really had, and the needs they really felt.
Now they're all on reddit making edgy posts about how god is a monster, but that's only what they think they mean.
What they actually mean is that the church failed them.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
I will no longer be debating Lindsay Clancy supporters. I will just be posting this video in reply to any of them.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
I don't think people really understand the fight between Paul Graham and Palmer Luckey which played out this week. To the general public, from a casual perspective, it seemed like two rich guys getting in a heated, impulsive debate on Twitter, dragging out for days.
It's not.
Paul is worth ~$2.5 billion. Palmer is worth ~$5 billion. Nothing these guys do is impulsive. They've been sitting on this for years. They were arguing in private for months, maybe years, before Palmer decided this week was the correct window of opportunity to make a public attack.
Paul Graham is one of the intellectual fulcrum points of Silicon Valley. He funds everyone. He sets the tone. He shapes the agenda. Entry-level professionals mimic his style, his worldview, his mannerisms, the way Paul talks. Everyone parrots his beliefs and policies and essays, as chameleon strivers who are trying to get ahead and climb the social ladder.
All of Silicon Valley revolves around a handful of key figures, and Paul Graham was (perceived as) one of the intellectual titans who the entire industry orbited as sycophants.
Palmer challenged all that.
Paul is an elite, Palmer is an elite, and Palmer Luckey chose to publicly challenge the status quo; the elite consensus; the perceived legitimacy of incumbent elits and their institutions.
And he did this for a reason: Palmer is aiming to take the role of Paul Graham, of being the new intellectual godfather of Silicon Valley, based around a new set of ideas: reindustrialization, patriotism, protectionism... rather than America as a deracinated cosmopolitan economic zone to be strip-mined by Third World foreigners.
It's much bigger than a Twitter argument. Palmer was publicly demonstrating that the Emperor had no clothes, and that he was strong enough to MOG Paul Graham and get away with it, while other Silicon Valley tech workers would be terrified of making an enemy who could suffocate future business ventures and block potential funding.
Palmer Luckey is the face of a new military-industrialist consensus which is seeking to hire American workers for American jobs, to build factories and weapons at home, to remilitarize and reindustrialize, to get away from asset inflation and FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) as a sterile, parasitic rent-seeking economic system.
That's the subtext for all of this. It's a public signal of a rising counterelite challenging a stagnant, ossified status quo which can no longer justify or defend their own claim to power.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
If an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans.
The Trump administration is proposing a new six-figure fee for H-1B visas that would apply to most new applicants, not just those applying from abroad, replacing an earlier plan to charge $100,000 for the visa that was struck down by the courts on.wsj.com/4gNSGVQ
Shallow State Operative retweeted
Ro Khanna’s solution to taxing illiquid billionaire founders is so stupid it sounds like satire.
Say you founded a private company valued at $5 billion.
You do not have $5 billion (surprise).
You own shares that might eventually be worth $20 billion, $500 million or zero.
Government says congrats, pay up.
You say, “Cool, except I don’t have the cash.”
Ro’s fix? Pledge the shares to the government and borrow the money to pay the government.
This idea is absolutely bonkers.
The government decides what your private company is worth, taxes you based on its estimate, lends you money against it, and then takes the money back as taxes.
You now have debt against the government for imaginary taxes and if you don't pay you forfeit and the own a share of your company.
The government is now an appraiser, bank, creditor, tax collector and shareholder. Maybe we can fund more Learing Centers (I digress).
AND...it gets even dumber.
Under current federal tax rules, absent some special exemption, handing over collateral to satisfy nonrecourse debt is generally treated as a sale, which means another tax.
So California lends you $250M against startup shares so you can pay California its wealth tax. Ten years later the company is toast. You can lose your company, lose your shares and still owe taxes on money you never had.
And who exactly is valuing all of this?
Professional investors struggle to value private companies when they have data rooms, preferred terms, board access and actual money on the line.
Now government is supposed to put an annual mark on founder common and tax it?
A $10B preferred financing round does not mean founder common can actually be sold at that valuation. Different share classes exist. Liquidation preferences exist. Dilution exists. Secondary discounts exist. Sometimes there isn’t a buyer at any remotely comparable price.
So how do you solve this @RoKhanna?
We already know how wrong these marks can be. Roughly 67% of unicorns that IPO’d in 2025 priced below their last private valuation.
Yet somehow government is going to know the “correct” value every year.
You take the risk. You quit the job. You work for years. You take dilution. Most startups fail and your shares go to zero.
Government doesn’t share that downside.
Then policymakers look backward at Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and Jensen, the handful of guys who actually won, and use them to rewrite the economics for every kid deciding whether to take the same swing.
Heads, the company dies and government says “no crying in the casino.”
Tails, you actually win and suddenly you’re an evil tech billionaire who owes government 5% of the paper mark every year.
GGs.
Ro has to defend the moronic economics. Bernie’s job is to make sure you’re too angry to examine them.
“Fair share.” “Billionaire class.” “The rich.”
Instead of asking whether taxing unrealized ownership makes sense, Bernie changes the question to whether billionaires have too much money.
Don’t discuss liquidity. Show the mansion.
Don’t discuss valuation or incentives. Show the yacht.
That is class warfare.
And it matters before the company even exists.
Nobody knew Bezos would become Bezos when he started Amazon.
Nobody knew Facebook would become Meta.
Nobody knew Nvidia would become the most important chip company in the world.
Policy written around the winners changes the economics for the next generation of potential founders.
You aren’t only taxing Zuckerberg after Facebook worked. You’re changing the math for the 24 yr old kid deciding whether to spend the next decade trying to build the next one.
America works partly because ambitious people from all over the world come here believing the upside is worth the risk.
Leave the comfortable job. Start something. Raise money. Fail. Try again.
And if it finally works, own a meaningful piece of what you created.
If the new deal becomes “you eat all the downside, but if your paper equity gets big enough we start taking 5% every year,” don’t act shocked when some people stop taking the risk or take it somewhere else.
Bernie and Ro love showing you the lifestyle and telling you what they deem “excessive” wealth. What they rarely show is everything sitting underneath it.
Take Bezos.
Show his net worth going up $20B and ask why one guy needs all that money.
Alright champ, let’s zoom out.
Amazon employs more than 1 million people in the United States. Independent sellers using Amazon support more than 2 million U.S. jobs and paid more than $100B in wages in 2024.
So before you even get to Bezos’ personal tax return, millions of people are earning money because this company exists.
Those wages generate income taxes and payroll taxes.
Amazon’s sales generate sales-tax revenue.
Amazon itself pays corporate income taxes, employer payroll taxes and state and local taxes.
In 2025 Amazon reported roughly $12.4B of federal income-tax expense, $7.9B of federal employer payroll and other taxes and fees, and $7.5B of state and local taxes.
Then there’s another $24.8B collected and remitted on behalf of employees and $33.4B in sales taxes.
Roughly $86B moved through those reported tax categories in one year.
Did Amazon itself economically bear all $86B? Obviously not.
Customers pay sales tax. Employees pay their withholding.
That's how this all works. The company created the jobs, wages and transactions that created the tax base.
Bernie wants you staring at Bezos’ personal tax return as though none of that exists.
The million-plus employees, sellers, suppliers, truck drivers, warehouses, contractors, construction crews, software companies and retirement accounts all disappear.
And quick reminder: Bezos getting $10B richer because Amazon had a good day in the market does not mean $10B landed in his bank account. The market repriced stock he already owned.
When he actually sells appreciated shares, that generally creates a capital-gains tax bill.
Jensen Huang got insanely rich because Nvidia became insanely valuable.
Nvidia also employs roughly 42,000 people, around 31,000 in R&D, and paid more than $20 BILLION in cash income taxes in its latest fiscal year.
Nearly $17B went to the federal government alone.
It also reported roughly $7.9B in taxes tied to employee stock plans.
So Jensen got richer. Shareholders got richer. Employees got richer. Government collected billions.
All four things can be true at once.
Meta spent more than $72B on capex in 2025. That money went into chips, data centers, power, construction, engineers and contractors.
Not Zuckerberg’s checking account.
A lot of people make money when successful companies make money.
That story just sucks for class warfare. It is much easier to show the billionaire’s net worth and pretend his gain was everyone else’s loss.
And federally Sanders and Khanna want to do this every year.
A 5% annual tax on wealth.
So forget the valuation mess for a second and just run the math.
Your assets make 8% and government takes 5% of the asset value?
That 5% tax just ate 62.5% of your 8% gross return, before income or capital-gains taxes.
Make 5%? Your entire nominal return is gone.
Make 3%? You’re selling principal to pay the tax.
Obviously people react to that. Investors demand more return, founders rethink where they live and capital goes looking for better economics.
Which is a bizarre experiment to run when America is already winning on startups and innovation.
The U.S. has roughly 950 private unicorns and produced more than half of the world’s new unicorns in the first half of 2026.
California attracted roughly $191B of venture investment in 2025, ~60% of the U.S. total.
Other countries spend decades trying to manufacture this ecosystem. Startup visas, tax incentives, special programs, anything to attract founders and capital.
We already have it. Maybe don’t fuck it up.
Bernie calls it “fairness.” Fine. Define fair @BernieSanders
The top 1% earned roughly 21% of U.S. adjusted gross income in 2023 and paid roughly 38% of federal individual income taxes, about $823B.
Washington spends $6.28T, annually, and already has a $1.8T deficit through July.
I don't think you need more money.
Before inventing another tax base, maybe explain where the money already goes and what outcomes we're getting for it.
California spent nearly $24B on homelessness and nothing got better. Billions lost to medicare fraud. There is reported $200-400B of what we know lost to it each year.
Not sure giving the government more money, especially California is a good idea.
But taking another dollar out of productive private capital does not magically make that dollar better allocated.
Other developed countries have already wrestled with this too.
The number of OECD countries with individual net wealth taxes fell from 12 in 1990 to 4 by 2017.
Maybe they all got captured by billionaires. Or maybe they learned something.
Valuing private assets is messy. Liquidity matters. Capital moves. People move. Incentives matter.
Tax income. Tax realized gains. Close actual loopholes. Audit the stuff you already spend.
America became the world’s innovation engine because people came here, took huge risks, raised capital, built companies and owned the upside when it worked.
You want more people making that bet.
Not fewer.
Be very careful messing with that machine, especially when the people asking for more of the capital are already almost $40T in debt.
“He can afford it” is not economics.
“Fair share” means nothing until you define it.
And envy is a terrible tax policy.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
These two images should be iconic. They tell the story. On the left: a young woman, who had been cheerful and happy, apparently on her way to visit a sick friend or relative. On the right: a degenerate black man, angry and volatile, 14 prior arrests, wandering around the streets, rambling nonsensically, violently assaulting any white woman he comes across. The two happen to cross paths and this is the aftermath.
For years now, our laws and institutions have dedicated themselves to protecting, coddling, and indulging the person on the right, often at the immediate expense of the person on the left. It was decided that the person on the right must be free, must be comfortable, must be cared for and fed and clothed, literally no matter what the cost.
A functional society organizes itself the opposite way. The priority is protecting the person on the left — the innocent woman (or child or man). The person on the right — the chronic, degenerate, dysfunctional criminal — is rightly seen as having no value to society, a net negative, and is thrown in a cage forever or simply executed. A functional society gives all the benefit, all the leeway, all the priority, to the person on left. But we don’t live in a functional society anymore.
Shallow State Operative retweeted
I have taken a deep dive into Diquan Hunt, the man who began beating women on the streets of Charlotte NC.
What I found is so horrifying, I can still barely believe it.
He has been arrested 14 previous times with INSANELY LOW BONDS and just took a PLEA DEAL in March for assault.
You think you're angry now?
Trust me, you're not angry enough... it's so much worse than you could possible imagine.
