I think Kamala Harris will be the next President of the United States. This is not just a knee-jerk reaction to the feel-good vibes after Biden stepped aside. Once it became clear to me that it was decidedly Joeover on July 18, I pegged her chances at 50-60% as opposed to 20-30% for post-debate Biden. Throughout my blogging career, I have always held to the position that the worth of any pundit reduces to their ability to make accurate predictions about the world on the basis that this is what separates purveyors of “alpha” from mere entertainers. And predictions are more meaningful when they involve “skin in the game”. So I made a symbolic $200 Kamala bet on Polymarket on July 24. This is in addition to having 25x that amount “invested” in a Kamala-themed shitcoin that I had accumulated from July 20, and which I expect to make further multiples as we go into November1.
In the rest of this essay I will go over the reasons why I expect Kamala to win.
Legacies: Brandon the Builder vs. Orange Cheeto Mussolini
Joe Biden has by any reasonable measure been one of the best American Presidents of the post-war era. Here’s a list of his greatest achievements:
(1) Tamed post-COVID inflation and presided over a booming economy with surging real wages. The SPX is at all time highs and Nvidia is worth more than the London Stock Exchange. Before you screech, “FIRE economy! It’s all fake!”, note factory construction has doubled since 2022 thanks to prodigious spending on chips and batteries. The competition is in shambles. “Europoors” are the butt of jokes about how they can’t afford air conditioners and young Japanese wistfully discuss flipping burgers in California for $20 a month.
(2) Checkmated Russia’s last dash for empire, exposed BRICS as a paper tiger, and deepened relations with India. China has been geopolitically hemmed in and sanctions on high-end chips have resulted, all else equal, in a 3x markup on compute costs for Chinese AI labs.
(3) Biden even oversaw Wokeness peaking c.2020 and then going into retreat. Walking around Berkeley in a MAGA hat was edgy and transgressive when I did that in 2016. Now tech bros are doing it with zero social sanction, as “anti-Wokeness” has expanded into a lucrative industry that keeps a horde of grifters unproductively employed.
(4) Crime has fallen precipitously as Woke retreats (Ferguson effect). Even San Francisco is finally cleaning up its act, with Gavin Newsom just announcing he is clearing out homeless encampments, and without visiting Chinese dignitaries to provoke the new spate of activity.
(5) The US is literally building God. And speaking of San Francisco, there is no likelier place in the world for the first AGI/ASI to appear.
Now it’s not as if Biden was personally responsible for most of these things, especially those that pertain to the economy and tech. This is extra relevant in Biden’s case, given what we now know about his accelerating cognitive decline over the course of his Presidency. (Though this kind of does validate the competence of the Deep State, no?). However, since crediting or condemning Presidents for secular trends that actualize or reach tipping points under their watch is standard practice, consistency forces us to do the same for Biden. It was a superlative Presidency by any reasonable measure. And now, Kamala stands to inherit it.
What baggage does Trump inherit from his Presidency? Four years of nepotism, cronyism, and attempts to undermine democratic institutions, happily made moot by Trump’s own laziness and incompetence. (Though there are now fears he is better prepared this time round, with Project 2025 provisioning a blueprint for replacing lifelong civil servants with MAGA ideologues). Uncharacteristically, a successful vaccine rollout - Operation Warp Speed - that he can’t even properly capitalize on because so much of the MAGA base are anti-vaxxers. No wall. A conservative Supreme Court that overturned Roe vs. Wade and made women across the country fear for their rights to bodily autonomy. To his credit as a politician, he is at least trying to distance himself from the abortion issue, but that’s a non-trivial endeavor when his main “intellectual” champions are the authors of Project 2025 and the most partisanly pro-Trump influencers have embraced open misogyny as a campaign strategy.
Finally, Trump is known for refusing to accept the results of elections that he doesn’t win, having incorrectly claimed that the 2020 elections were rigged, and tried to overturn them through a combination of political conspiracy and street intimidation that ended in a failed occupation of the US Capitol. Though he left what he know calls the “J6 Patriots” to rot in jail2, he continues to claim that his Presidency was stolen from him, and has appointed a VP who has gone from calling him America’s Hitler several years ago to obsequiously parroting his fables.
This account of Biden’s and Trump’s record isn’t meant to be a normative assessment or an endorsement of Kamala. (Though I do think it largely tracks reality, and my sympathies this election cycle should be quite obvious). The reason I wrote it out is that I do consider this to be an accurate retelling of the “standard narrative” of this election, and is probably near universally held amongst what I call “Elite Human Capital”. Even to the extent that some smart individuals still support Trump, it is not so much because they like or trust a serial conman, but because they privilege lower taxes and greater economic freedoms (classical Republicans), would appreciate fewer bromides against the tech industry and crypto (the Tech Right), or simply prioritize immigration issues above all others (the smarter Dissident Right). There’s also a distinct demographic of former centrists who have had their brains eaten by boomer anti-Woke memes, such as Elon Musk.
It is important to start off with this because many commenters on the right and even center assume that Trump has “momentum”, and will inevitably steamroll Biden’s “DEI hire” from peak Woke era. But even if we allow for that, it loads on a supporting assumption that the Biden administration was a failure and would be easy pickings for the Trump campaign. However, such attacks can be easily countered based on the objective record, and any baseline competent Democratic candidate would be able to make that case - so, 2020!Biden, and Kamala, though probably not catatonic 2024!Biden who “finally beat Medicare”. Now just to be clear, I’m not claiming that Kamala is a brilliant, charismatic, or very attractive politician. But I do not see how she is so uniquely bad - stupid, uncharismatic, extremist - that it would cancel out the advantages of the Biden legacy and Trump’s own toxic baggage, which now includes the hilarious irony of having built a significant part of his campaign around attacks on Biden’s senility only to himself end up as the oldest Presidential candidate in US history.
I will now assess how the candidates compare to each other side to side across various issues in order to validate my claim Kamala is the stronger candidate.
Frames: Copmala vs. Felon Trump
I was far from the first commenter to suggest that “Copmala” lean into her brutal policewomyn image against Felon Don, but I do appear to have been earlier than most, and I am glad to see this has become a popular take (e.g. Anna Gát, Francis Fukuyama).
This might be a shitpost, but the logic is crisp. One of the persistent and more legitimate Republican criticisms of Democrats is that they are “Woke” and lax on law and order, and this is not an undeserved reputation in light of all the “mostly peaceful” protests in the Summer of Floyd, decriminalized shoplifting in San Francisco, and Kamala’s own BLM-pandering history. If Far Left schizos want to help Kamala by whitewashing these unfortunate episodes and on their own time and dime, then by all means they should do so and thanks for all the fish.
What turbocharges the Copmala frame is that Trump is himself a convicted felon with a long history of scamming anyone who’s had dealings with him. This is not to say this is going to be a memetic assassin’s mace. American politics is extremely polarized, and even extreme events such as criminal convictions, failed assassination attempts, and the previous Dem candidate going full senile only produced modest, low single digit shifts in the polls. MAGA people live in a world where Trump is a cool outlaw waging battle against the deep state and the longhouse and the globalist elites and will vote for him even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue, whereas a large percentage of Dem voters are so repulsed by Trump that they would have voted for Biden’s corpse just to keep the Bad Orange Man out of power.
But this also limits Trump’s own ability to leverage his prodigious charisma to expand beyond the MAGA base. And besides, this is no longer 2016 when MAGA was something genuinely new and cool, propelled forward by Pepe, tendies, and the first Frog Posters… The movement in the Current Year is now defined by its anger and its conspiracism. The Woke “free speech” campaigners of yesteryear no longer have much in the way of SJW inanities and campus cancellations to highlight, and so have themselves started campaigning to have people fired for expressing their political opinions. None of this is to say that coconut pilling and brat posting is particularly funny or inspirational, but at least the millennial chicks into that are modestly endearing, which I guarantee is not something anyone will ever say of Ian Miles Cheong.
Old Man Boden
One of the… trump cards of the Trump campaign was the catastrophic validation of Biden senility rumors in the debate - rumors which I, like Scott Alexander, had faded in the light of previous right-wing claims about Biden’s senility in 2020, and even in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. And it was disappointing to see Biden overstay his participation in the race, in defiance of reason and the will of most Dem voters, and in thrall to nepotism - smartest guy he knew Hunter and Dr. Jill - and his own narcissism. This ruled out a contested convention that could have produced a stronger candidate than Kamala.
However, consider the following points. First, in a stunning display of the unity and function that are integral to high human capital liberal elites, Biden was nonetheless successfully pressured into stepping aside by an alliance of Dem kingmakers such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, balking UHNWI donors in the Hamptons, and elite journalists and data nerds such as Nate Silver. To illustrate why this is important, just imagine the Republican response if it was Trump who went senile? To even ask this question is to answer it. The GOP is in thrall to a personality cult that transcends ideology and their professed Christianity. The Democratic “Machine” might not be especially competent, inspirational, or honorable - but it did demonstrate its capacity to respond to a crisis, avert the ruinous infighting and blame-shifting that would accompanied the Biden campaign had it continued, and demonstrated that none of its own functionaries are indispensable. This machine is to be faded at one’s own peril.
Second, the Trump campaign had made Biden’s advanced age a centerpoint of their rhetoric. When Biden was replaced, they screeched about a supposed “anti-democratic coup” no matter that it was supported by two thirds of Dem voters and that they themselves had demanded that Biden step aside for months prior. What this bad faith trolling concealed is that the Republicans were suddenly thrust into a much less favorable reality in which Trump, now the oldest Presidential nominee in US history instead of Biden, now has to run against someone who could credibly flip the tables on him on this issue.
Importantly, this also preempts any MAGA attacks on Kamala for concealing Biden’s deterioration. It’s not just that it would be seen as unchivalrous of them for attacking Kamala for loyalty to an old ailing man, not to mention an assault on patient confidentiality. It also opens the Republicans up to a killer comeback: “Speaking of senility, when are you guys replacing Trump?”
Cat Ladies Strike Back
One of the most under-remarked features of the Rightoid International as the extent to which it has become a multiracial attractor for low-status men for whom misogyny has emerged as the lowest common denominator (“Incels of the world, unite!”). Aside from the tradcon rhetorics descended from Daily Stormer “thot patrol” fantasies of the 2010s and lurid wet dreams about abolishing the 19th, it finds a more concrete expression in opposition to women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedoms, not to mention bioliberal values more generally. (Vance helping stymie access to IVF and Desantis banning artificial meat in Florida are of marginal political import, but are part of this general impulse).
Abortion rights are deeply popular in the US and are a central issue for many female voters. Republicans with hardline positions on abortion have been repeatedly trounced even in red states. The repeal of Roe vs. Wade by the conservative Supreme Court that Trump created has made women extremely wary about the danger of a broad rollback of rights they had taken for granted for more than a generation. Project 2025 waxes about using an archaic law to enact a nationwide abortion ban and obligate states to report miscarriages to Trump’s federal government, and just recently we learned about JD Vance’s lurid fantasies about Soros paying pregnant Black women to fly to California to get abortions. This isn’t something that only worries the blue-hair pronoun people; anecdotally, I have seen many wine upper-middle class wine mom types express concern about this as well.
In fairness, Trump has denied any connection to or even knowledge of Project 2025 and has vigorously attempted to distance himself from the more “out there” people. But this is a non-enviable task in light of the rhetorics of his most outspoken supporters. They have long attacked Kamala for having slept her way into politics several decades ago. Apart from literally nobody caring if Kamala was a slutty cop in her youth - and what’s the big deal about that, isn’t women sleeping their way into power as “trad” as it gets anyway? - it’s certainly a bold strategy to bring that up when your party is fronted by a guy who cheated on his wife three months after she gave birth with a porn star whom he paid off. More recently, they have started attacking Kamala’s fertility choices. This extends all the way up to JD Vance, who has called Kamala a “childless cat lady” who doesn’t have a “direct stake” in America. The problem with this, apart from the cruelty and factual inaccuracy - Kamala has two adopted kids - is that anti-abortionism coupled with militant natalism comes off as incredibly creepy and off-putting to many women, including many who are otherwise moderates or even conservatives who would vote for normal Republicans3.
Here’s where I think the problem is. You can engage in stuff that tends to be off-putting to women in isolation and remain somewhat respectable. You can be a (1) frisky playboy like some Hollywood actor or Neil Strauss/the OG PUAs, you can be a (2) devout moral Christian like Pence who wouldn’t meet women alone away from his wife, or you can be (3) a secular pro-natalist type e.g. the “eugenicist” wing of the Natal Conference. But when there’s too much overlap… it’s bad news, folks. Many people are saying that. Very bad.
This January, Bitcoin/network states evangelist Balaji Srinivasan exclaimed - approvingly - that Republicans are “becoming the men’s party.” I have seen similar sentiments being echoed a lot the past few months by MAGA influencers. I suspect they’ll get what they wish for. I am almost certain that this election will have the biggest male/female voting gender gap in US political history, and this will redound to the benefit of the woman who put predators behind bars, not the guy who flew seven times on Epstein’s Lolita Express.
The Tech Right’s Faustian Bargain with MAGA
The single most impressive coup for the Trump campaign has been the successful poaching of Silicon Valley’s secular/anti-Woke technophile scene - christened the Tech Right by
- with names like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen publicly hopping aboard the MAGA train. This promises Trump an immediate influx of money from the same Big Tech sector whose market capitalizations have exploded under Biden4. In return, presumably under Thiel’s influence, the Republican Party has toned down its anti-abortion rhetoric and dropped opposition to gay marriage and anti-LGBT language from its platform5.More portentously, the Trump campaign has committed to a program to build up energy infrastructure for the trillion dollar cluster and to accelerate military AI. (Incidentally, I consider the latter to be extremely bad and basically an existential risk that could kill everyone within the decade, but that’s for another post). But as this pertains to elections, what this implies is that someone - probably Andreessen - has clearly been redpilling the Trump team on situational awareness.
This is a real accomplishment that strengthens the Trump campaign. In particular, it helps shore up the GOP’s primary problem, its lack of qualified cadres, because smart people are just not that enamored with COVID conspiracy theories, social conservatism, and visions of Islamic terrorists sneaking across the Mexican border. As
notes in his analysis of JD Vance’s appointment as VP, this might well be a Faustian bargain on the part of the Tech Right, and this is my ultimate expectation as well on the basis that leopards don’t change their spots. But in the short-term, it’s a major problem for the Democrats, and a largely self-inflicted one thanks to local governance failures in the SF Bay Area, heated anti-tech rhetoric, and opposition to crypto.I don’t want to defend the Democrats here because I do think they fucked this up, and I doubt they even learned anything from it. My sympathies here are pro-Republican, at least to the extent that I believe they will probably create an environment more conducive to the OOM-level increase in market cap that crypto needs to institutionalize the decentralized globalism we need to make DeFi self-sustaining and start dismantling the nation-state ah, never mind, we are just normie shitlibs around these parts… Back to programmed scheduling.
So here’s why the Tech Right’s open defection to MAGA, while bad, is not quite as bad as it appears at first glance.
(1) Silicon Valley is not the Tech Right. To be sure, supporting Trump is no longer taboo, as it was in 2016 when creative gadfly
was canceled for being an “Alt Right” artist by people who are now MAGA (center right were the real fash all along). As mentioned above, there are reports of tech bros openly wearing MAGA hats in San Francisco without social sanction. However, this is not the same as MAGA having gone mainstream. According to X polls I saw from a couple of AI risk people, it’s still very solidly Democrat ( - 67% for Biden, pre-debate; - Biden 2x as strong as Trump amongst tech startup workers; 4.5x as strong amongst other voters, who would probably be mostly EA/AI safety people in his sample). Big Tech in particular - Meta/Facebook, Apple, Alphabet - remain near uniformly Dem6.(2) There’s some very tentative signs Dems are warming up to crypto. At any rate, it seems that its higher human capital elements are realizing that letting Elizabeth Warren set their tone on the world’s fastest growing asset class isn’t a sustainable long-term strategy. 71 Dems including Schumer and my favorite inside trading KWEEN 👑 Pelosi joined Republicans in supporting the FIT21 Bill to bring regulatory clarity to crypto before Biden vetoed it. More recently, Kamala’s team was even mooting the possibility of her speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference, though this soon fell through, reportedly because Kamala considers Bitcoin to be “money for criminals”.
Disappointing. However, at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can expect from normies, and crypto is like the 20-30th most important issue in voters’ minds, and it also has to be said that the Dem base includes anti-crypto constituencies. Furthermore, Republican support for crypto is purely situational, having zero relationship to its underlying cypherpunk ethos, and will reverse at the drop of a hat (Trump is a boomer who until recently was hostile to crypto for threatening the dollar). I do think the Dems’ insistence on maintaining their snide attitudes towards Big Tech and especially crypto are a missed opportunity, and although they are numerically modest, the cryptosphere does contain a lot of very moneyed people who are also - by dint of their nouveau riche status - unusually willing to spend it on all kinds of political and philanthropic causes7. However, ultimately this will not be a deal-breaker since crypto is still very far from having the economies of scale needed to exert strong influence over nation-state politics.
The Right’s Human Capital Problem
None of this is not to say that Trump has to lose. I merely think that Kamala is likelier to win than not, and that betting markets currently undervalue Kamala at 2/1 odds. (The highest liquidity is on Polymarket, at once a testament to the triumph of crypto, but also likely a reflection of its understandably jaundiced views towards Dems). This is a function of the strong legacy that Biden bequeaths to Kamala, as well as the fundamental contrast between a just a more or less “normal” person who opportunistically and cynically engaged in some Woke shenanigans 4-5 years ago, and a serial conman, nepotist, and philanderer.
Just to wrap up, some important issues that I don’t think will be all that important:
(1) Immigration. Polls suggest Americans have become significant more anti-immigration in the past 5 years. I am pro-Open Borders, and don’t care for protectionism on either goods or labor. However, I acknowledge that a competent right-wing opposition could leverage Kamala’s record as “border czar” against her. The right-wing opposition as it really exists in the GOP makes wild dumb claims about Islamic terrorists infiltrating the US through the Mexican border and glories in its open cruelty, such as this recent ad from a Missouri GOP candidate in which he promises to deport illegals, with the Mexican translator getting upset and panicking at the end. Most normal Americans are OK with Latino immigrants, and cosmopolitan urbanites appreciate them. I don’t see this being the knock-out blow many expect it to be.
(2 Israel/Palestine. Elite Human Capital tends to skepticism towards Zionism, seeing it as just another brand of Far Right identity politics alongside the likes of MAGA, Brexit, and Putinism. Americans care far less about Israel today than they did even just a decade ago, regardless of your impressions from X’s right-wing bubble. Just as I predicted, right-wing attempts to strike back at Wokeness using the Israeli issue as a wedge - often involving the same kind of cancelation tactics once practiced by Wokes - have failed to make any inroads while losing them any high ground they might once have had with respect to freedom of speech. However, one big problem specific to the elections is that Michigan, a swing state, has a lot of Arab-Americans, and their support for Biden cratered in the wake of the Israel-Hamas War and what many of them saw as his complicity in Israeli war crimes. This might be idiotic in light of Trump’s positions on Palestine, which are genuinely extremist and bought by Miriam Adelson, but such are the wages of democracy8. However, the replacement of Biden by Kamala at least gives her the opportunity to turn a new sheet with Arab-Americans.
(3) AGW. The Republicans remain the party of climate change deniers in what is shaping up to be the hottest year on record. Now I don’t even think AGW is all that relevant because I expect machine superintelligence to kill us all and/or solve geoengineering well before the “zones of uninhabitability” thing gets going. However, this will be yet another opportunity for a competent Dem candidate to make hay against a GOP that has made its decision to become the party of science denial and obscurantism - as Elon Musk recently discovered when he took a break from posting Dark MAGA laser eyes and transphobia to agitate for carbon taxes9.
Furthermore, I consider downside risk to be much higher for Trump:
(1) Trump is much older than Kamala. He retains a gift for zingers, but has no capacity to construct logical chains. If Kamala can do that, she owns any future debates. I discussed the senility issue above, so I won’t further belabor the point. Sadly, age-related cognitive decline is real, and tends to accelerate after the age of 70. The question of how badly Biden collapses in the second or third debate with Trump now applies to Trump himself. Perhaps he just refuses to debate now.
(2) There is also the problem is that MAGA is on average just a stupid movement. Just as the voting gender gap is extremely big, so is the voting IQ gap (albeit with the partial and important exception of the Tech Right). Opinion polls suggest that college graduates are the main demographic with whom Biden hadn’t lost support, whereas blue-collars, Blacks, and Latinos have been trickling over to Trump. Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the RNC convention and yelling something based about Trampamaniacs running wild is certainly very amusing, but if you cosplay Idiocracy and cater your political aesthetics to the dumbest of the dumb then there are going to be two important sets of consequences to that.
The first set of consequences are purely electoral. Lower IQ people view democracy with more skepticism and subscribe to conspiracy theories such as that the election results are preordained. As such, they are less likely to turn up, reasoning that Trump will win or lose without them, dependent on whether the elites decide to falsify the vote or not. Now couple this with the fact that 2024!Biden was an unusually uninspirational candidate whom many voters found it cringe to publicly support - many would preface any such declarations with complaints about Dem incompetence and how they’re only doing it because Trump is just so bad - while being a MAGA supporter is no longer the social taboo it once was, even within the liberal heartlands such as San Francisco where wearing a MAGA hat is no longer transgressive. Consequently, just as the “shy Trump voter” upstaged pollsters in 2016, so I allow this election might see the emergence of the “shy Kamala voter” who upsets the models in the opposite direction.
The second set of consequences relates to the sharp downside risks of allying with amoral cretins. Some examples of this from the MAGA chronicles. You make the right noises on abortion, and then some underling goes all Leviticus on you. You boast about Operation Warp Speed, best vaccine rollout ever, many people say so, and then you get booed by your own Orc hordes for being a stooge of the WEF. Your media champion Tucker Carlson becomes an evolution skeptic and your strongest Black woman soldier becomes a Flat Earther and Holocaust denier. You get a chance to make hay over the Dems concealing Biden’s senility and endangering national security, but then your Orcs spend it on conspiracy theories about a coup against Biden and seething at women. It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for Trump. Almost.
There’s a Russian saying that goes something like “better to lose with a wise man than to win with a fool.” Smart allies can respond adaptively to setbacks, such as with the coordinated Dem response to Biden’s candidacy after the debate, and emerge the stronger for it. With fools, even if you luck out and win, you will very quickly come to wish that you hadn’t since it just sets you up for an even greater doom. Am I going to be wrong about this election? It’s absolutely possible! I am uncertain about Kamala’s ability to win debates and the Dems aren’t insured against downside risk either (even if time has run out for the most obvious ones like a recession). Though I will say that if I am wrong, this will be only the second time I will get a US election prediction wrong since I began doing them in 200810.
Disclaimer: Not financial advice. I bought Kamala on Polymarket at $0.37, which I believe is a discount over its “true value” of $0.6 and which will net me a 2.5x if my intuitions/analysis are validated. Since all prediction market participants are gamblers by definition, it is not unreasonable to seek out even higher r:r and “degen” plays. There is a “family” of Solana memecoins dedicated to lampooning politicians and other public figures featuring a specific artistic style and humorous misspellings of their names, of which the most prominent is (was) $BODEN (Jeo Boden). Its market cap went from zero to $650M at its all time high this April before collapsing back down to $10M as first the alts market and then Biden himself collapsed. The Solana shitcoin $KAMA (Kamala Horris) now has a market cap of $30M. I bought 2x lower on average, but I believe that it will still do at least a 20x and possibly a 100x because of a confluence of surging election excitement through to November and female TikTokers playing a tight meme game in shilling Kamala.
Trump had two weeks of the Presidency left in which to give his “J6 patriots” blanket pardons, but he skunked away and maintained a low profile until the end of his term. Trump doesn’t pay his contractors, scams his most enthusiastic fans, and leaves no good deed unpunished when his own skin is on the line.
Right-wingers have very weak theory of mind. This is why one of their most common failure modes is that they do and say things that repel women, and then attack women for not voting for them, and thus repel women even more in a vicious cycle. This describes Poland (anti-abortion), South Korea (MRA stuff), and the US (both). Conversely, countries where right-wingers don’t tend to do that - the UK, France, Hungary, even Russia to the extent elections there have any validity - also don’t have big gender gaps in support for the national conservative parties/candidates.
Elon Musk promised $45M in monthly contributions to pro-Trump Super Pacs, though he later quietly reduced that number.
EHC 💯 works in mysterious ways, but the final destination 🌐🏳️🌈 is programmed. 🎯
Amongst the Indian-American tech people, for every Balaji and Naval Ravikant there is a Vinod Khosla, Dwarkesh Patel, and Krishnan Rohit.
If there was one piece of advice I could forward to the Kamala campaign, it would be for her to consider speaking at ETHGlobal San Francisco this October. The Ethereum community is more liberal than Bitcoiners, and she would be expected to find a warmer reception there than at a Bitcoin conference.
It’s highly amusing that Arabs, being very high IQ and politically smart, actually started to support Trump more over Biden’s “betrayal” on the Palestine issue (Biden’s support amongst Arab-Americans collapsed from 59% in 2020 to 18% by 2024) - no matter that Trump uses “Palestinian” as an insult, promises to give away Gaza waterfront property to Kushner, and has as good as committed to Israeli annexation of more Palestinian territories after Miriam Adelson paid him $100M for it. Meanwhile, Jewish support for Trump fell from 30% in 2020 to just 23% in 2024. Trumpism being the ideology of corrupt morons, smarts are universally repelled by it, and Jews, being very smart, are hard to buy off with performative ethnonationalism - even when it benefits “their” group. An immense credit to the Jews.
This is kind of an aside, but it continuously surprises me how so many smart people don’t understand the concept of audience selection. What exactly was Musk expecting posting about carbon taxes? Why did Ron Unz expect to have a normal conversation about COVID vaccines after making his site into a hub for Holocaust denial?
I was correct on the results of all US elections since 2008 with the exception of 2016, where I however gave Trump much better figures than the blowout that much of the media expected. (I also predicted that this election would be a repeat of Biden vs. Trump back in October 2021, which would have been correct had it not been for Biden’s accelerated cognitive collapse).
Good analysis. Agreed on most all of your points though I'd put it closer to 50/50 right now and things can still change. If Dems are smart they need to keep a lock down on the Woke antics and call out and condemn any excesses. Woke shit was a gift to the GOP and their whole platform is essentially being anti woke, so if they don't have that and also no longer have old senile Joe to compare to, they're going to be at a loss for how to frame themselves.
Also most of the normie public and especially women actually have no exposure to or awareness of the incel adjacent aspects of the online right, and if they become aware bc of talking points based on Kamala's sex life 30 years ago, it's not going to go over well. Young psycho wokistas putting their pathos on full display to the public since 2020 was a huge boon to the right. If the pathos and woman issues of the right goes on display in a similar manner, they're toast.
I agree on the conclusion but not on many items in your analysis. Crime - you haven't been in Chicago lately. I am afraid of staying in the south part of the Loop area past 6pm. It is as bad as it gets. Check the Russian industrial output numbers, especially steel, these do not agree with what you are saying. Inflation: try buying a house, or getting CRE insurance. Trump is an empty windbag, Kamala is the same. The race is neck to neck simply because both candidates are downright mediocre.