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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.

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Jul 27·edited Jul 27

Harris will have to pay occasional lip service to the woke mob. She can't TOTALLY condemn them. But otherwise I totally agree

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It’s not merely lip service. She clearly believes at least some of the woke platform. The question is which of her beliefs are genuine.

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Yet, her ancestors owned slaves.

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not much of an own on someone to say "your slave ancestors were raped by your slave owning ancestors"

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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.

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Two wars, mass illegal immigration across the southern border and beyond. Now suddenly a Cartel leader is arrested in El Paso less than a week after Biden is replaced by Harris..the cynicism of that should be jaw dropping. The IQ gap between Democrat voters and the Republicans.....really ?Oh I got it now it's only the white and Jewish voters of each party who are being compared. But wheres that inclusivity gone leaving out the Hispanics and Blacks..And even everyone's favourite punchbags the incels have somehow been dragged into the analysis. Dishonesty and disingenuousity litter your analysis. If Harris does win it will simply be down to the exact same intersectional feminism that placed a 5th rate white female in charge of the US secret service.

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The funny thing is that MAGA Blacks are almost certainly the lowest IQ ethno-political demographic in the country. Their faces are former BLM activist Royce White and dinosaur truther Candace Owens.

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Well if we’re willing to get even more granular I’d suggest Dem-voting Jehova’s Witness black ladies are the lowest

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When you use ad hom attacks, it means you can't articulate an argument.

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This is the most racist thing I’ve read on Substack hands down.

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So you have had access to their IQ tests? IQ hasn't as much to do with it as life experiences and sources of information.

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And the 11 million illegal non-citizens who have been registered to vote and provided free picture IDs.

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Do you have any evidence of this

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Two wars that the US didn't start and that feature no Americans dying in, a border situation that has mostly gone away thanks to the US negotiating with Mexico to clamp down on their own border (and which almost got fixed until Trump personally torpedoed a bipartisan border security funding bill). These just aren't serious issues for smart people to talk about.

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Has the US left NATO?Have they stopped arming Israel?No Americans dying in those two wars ?Forgetting about those dual Israeli American citizens?A border situation that very definitely hasn't gone away and that bipartisan border security funding bill was cynical in the extreme only kicking in when the number crossing the southern border exceeded 5000 per day which would still have meant up to 1.83 million entering the US via that entry point, all without counting the 10s of thousands of undocumented flying directly into the cities of the North and North East. The purpose of which was to create millions of new Democrat voters to try and cancel out the MAGA cohorts effect in future elections. "These just aren't serious issues for smart people to talk about ".You mean you want people to ignore what the Biden/Harris regime has chosen to do and not to do for the past 3 and a half years.

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Apt analysis, and thank you for not forgetting history. Still not sure who is going to win, but I’m sure that all of it will continue to be as fake it as it always was.

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That's a safe bet.

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Fantastic analysis!

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Totally wrong in every respect. Kamala will fail badly in her first debate. She's a vapid vessel.

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She's a Marxist--the daughter of a Marxist professor.

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Posts didn't age well.

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Update: Revising my assessment to a Trump victory.

Thread: https://x.com/powerfultakes/status/1849537817493291446

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Kamala's ancestors owned slaves—not Trump's.

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her ancestors were slaves raped by their owners, not sure this is the dunk you think it is

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No. Her ancestors own slaves.

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8. “Arabs, being very smart”

LOL. How many have you met bro?

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I think he was being sarcastic

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Ah, yes. My bad.

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BTW Trump was in no position to pardon Jan6 protestors including Assange and Snowden because Mitch McConnell threatened him with conviction if impeached. I know people who were there at that time.

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> Republican support for crypto is purely situational, having zero relationship to its underlying cypherpunk ethos

Can you say more here? What do you think drives it?

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Mostly the fact that Dems and esp. Elizabeth Warren hate it so Republicans reflexively support it part of conservative oppositional culture: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/conservatism-as-an-oppositional-culture

The party that created the PATRIOT Act, wants to intrude on private affairs in matters of bodily autonomy, acts as an attack dog for copyright holders, etc. has nothing to do with the cypherpunk values that underlie real cryptocurrency culture (as opposed to the fake one of Bitcoin maximalism and shitcoin pumping associated with it in the copyright culture). This is of course also not to say that Democrats or any other political force except possibly Libertarians are cypherpunk-friendly either.

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Seeing as how crypto has been treated as some kind of substitute for the gold standard and comports well with the wily, entrepreneurial petty bourgeois ethos of many Republicans, I think it’s less oppositional and more ideological

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It's the Uniparty that is the problem.

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I can see that.

Can you say what makes bitcoin maximalism fake?

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Too long to go into here but the vibes are cultish as opposed to the open and curious spirit of cryptographic exploration that defined the early Bitcoin era and Satoshi's own interactions.

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Hardly.

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I'm here as promised. Stop overcorrecting, you are making a fool out of yourself.

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We are now in a tribal civil war so the real numbers are 45-45 plus statistical noise, bad methods and sample choice.

It all hinges on turn out and how the civil war plays in the swing states.

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This is interesting, though it leaves a lot on the table:

-Harris polled poorly throughout her tilt at the primaries and as VP. That she was broadly accredited as too unpopular to take a fight to Trump was, convention upholds, one of the primary drivers of Biden's aides' hesitance to hit the big red button. I don't see how this will have reversed given she has for the last three weeks been running a vibes campaign (by leveraging the same resources that H. Clinton used to alienate swathes of the swing-base, and even though the aforementioned polling suggests Harris does not have a strong enough base of affinity to run that kind of a campaign) with no particular signal policy directed towards the kinds of people unlikely to vote as the meme blows.

-Measured against the present conventions of American presidential debates, I do not expect Harris to come out on top in a 1-to-1, unless she has taken a radically different approach to public speaking appearances than she did previously. Never been to Europe, indeed.

-This is conjectural but I would assert that it was far more of a social risk to be MAGA in 2016 than in 2024. Then it was considered the realm of philosophical deviants from Breitbart and the deplorables. In 2024, having seen how essentially moderate a lot of Trump's policy directions were set against Republican precedent (set apart from his presidential conduct, which is another thing), supporting him can be attributed/written off as being a vote in favour of some of the pretty conventional totems he's now associated with, as opposed to singularly and unequivocally being a vote of membership into a right fringe club, as it seemed then. (You note that Trump-adjacency has been de-risked in the Silicon Valley section, though earlier on you also say that MAGA, "defined by its anger and its conspiracism", is no longer as "new and cool" as it was in 2016 and thus less appealing).

-I don't think the augury that Trump's positions on women's issues put him out of favour with everyone from "blue-hair pronoun people...[to] wine upper-middle class wine mom types" suggests the width of disapprobation it probably is supposed to. Those are the two demographics everyone would expect Trump to be (possibly intractably) least popular with, at least insofar as the latter are metropolitan upper-middle-class. If Trump had said something that put him out of favour with working class men, we might be on to a swing, but the fact is he just got shot and got up and shook his fist at the shooter and immediately went back to work; there will be many male voters even who despise Trump's policy stances and/or conduct who identified with that (many women too).

-I don't think the movement of some tech types to Trump support makes any real difference, except insofar as it demonstrates that supporting him is no longer unacceptable for people whose work and social lives put a premium on maintaining the right signalling. If non-fanatical publicly visible people are no longer wary of declaring their support, you can bet this will be reflective of similar movement in an unspecified swathe of people with no public profile to defend and no particular need to broadcast their leaning.

-I'm not sure suggesting immigration as a non-factor is anything other than fanciful, unless you're suggesting there's already maximum polarisation on this issue and there are no more politi-transmittors for any further uptake to either position to be possible. If so, maybe immigration has already played the entirety of its present part, but either way that part is not no part.

-I wouldn't leap to fully crediting the polling that suddenly puts a previously non-beloved former VP ahead of the cultified former incumbent who just survived an assassination attempt. Big swing events in major(-feeling) campaigns often prompt a change in polling methodology, and where these happen they usually reflect the media's desire to fool itself about developments. Exactly this happened in 2016 in two major elections (i.e. Trump and Brexit).

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So where Kamala is going wrong is siding with big business. The best thing about Joe Bidens policies were his anti trust efforts and Kamala seems to be going a different direction while trump want to keep going with Joes head ways into this issue.

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Very interesting; Karlin, but I still believe Trump wins by ~2 points. Biden could pass himself as a moderate; there's no way Harris can. It's instructive to look at the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018 or the Wisconsin Senate race in 2022.

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