Trumpism: Can’t Get Fooled Again

Why EHC Endorses Kamala Harris to Safeguard Our Democracy

President Tandi, a half-Indian woman from Vault 15, a bunker defined by its extreme diversity. She founded the New California Republic, preserving civilization and Our Democracy in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout.

I am interested in things that normal people are not interested in. AGI might be just a few years away, killing everything or uplifting us to godhood; there’s nothing more important than figuring out AI alignment. I want to solve aging, and recently wrote a short guide on what you can do to help out with that. I want to radically enhance human intelligence - the sooner, the better. Smarter humans have a better chance of figuring out life extension, AI alignment, and other hard problems. I want to shatter the geopolitical primacy of the nation-state in favor of cryptographically secured voluntary societies, or “network states” as they are better known. These interests and concerns are almost completely orthogonal to normie politics and I would like nothing more than to allocate them the attention they merit (zero).

However, as the saying goes: while you might not be interested in politics, politics is interested in you. Americans will soon have to choose between a gray DNC apparatchik offering an “institutional” vision of uninspired normalcy, and a colorful showman/conman with “personalistic” visions ranging from transforming the US into a libertarian Tech Right playground to a Project 2025 dystopia with various shades of crony oligarchy in between. On account of its personalism, the Trumpist vision is defined by its high variance. Its most positive outcomes seem preferable to business as usual - Elon Musk goes on a DOGE run against overgrown regulations, while anti-immigration populists and bioconservatives are sidelined, having outlived their usefulness. The key question is whether this is also the likeliest outcome given what we know about Trump and even Musk. Many otherwise moderate techno-progressives have coped their way to this position, but it doesn’t strike me as inevitable or even particularly probable. Meanwhile, the more negative outcomes are as dire as they are dark.

Consequently, I am officially endorsing Kamala Harris for the US Presidency, and support voting for her in the swing states (AZ, GA, NC, NV, MI, PA, WI). Elsewhere, I endorse Chase Oliver (Libertarian) to send a message on the importance of free markets and freedom of speech, as well as a broader one on the need for Electoral College reform. I would sooner endorse not voting at all than voting for Trump, because the cynical populism and unabashed cronyism he represents has to be decidedly rejected for the sake of Our Democracy.

Politics & Institutions

Legions of journalists more specialized and eloquent than I from Applebaum to Zygar have already written reams about the damage that Trump will inflict on political norms and institutions - and it’s not like this is a particularly debatable point after what we saw in his first term and the attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election - so I will not spend much time on this. This is not to say that Trump is going to install a dictatorship - the chances of that are small, if not entirely zero. But putting him back into power will further normalize a style of governance that rejects traditional American civic norms such as honest governance and bipartisan opposition to open corruption in favor of the cynical and post-truth politics that prevail in the post-Soviet world, and could lead to very suboptimal outcomes in the post-Trump era.

There are good reasons to believe that a second Trump term will be worse than the first one. First, Trumpism has become normalized, and getting reelected would seal the deal on that. (This “boiling frog” effect is anecdotally a central element in the emergence of many authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany). Second, this time around Trump will enjoy access to many more levers to impose whatever vision he has on the country. JD Vance, his prospective VP, has publicly confirmed he would have refused to certify the results of the 2020 elections, as Pence had the strength of character to do. The Supreme Court has ruled Trump would have criminal immunity from any crimes committed in his official capacity as President. Most importantly, the Trump campaign now has access to a Cadres Department by way of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, their infamous roadmap for a new Republican Presidency. Trump entered his first Presidency as an outsider, and constantly had his authoritarian instincts frustrated by professional civil servants and even his own appointees, many of whom were left aghast at his indifference to democratic norms; suffice to say that half of his own former Cabinet now refuse to endorse him. Liberal commenters obsess over the extreme and legally dubious proposals in Project 2025 to implement a de facto national abortion ban by weaponizing arcane 19th century interstates commerce laws, but while bad enough, its real meat is a program to pre-vet MAGA loyalists and appoint them to high positions within bureaucracies that are otherwise going to be gutted (read: purged of career professionals).

Now to be sure, there might be a reasonable case to be made that the American bureaucracy can do with some pruning. Despite my libertarian inclinations, I don’t view this as a particularly pressing issue, because the share of US government employment is modest by OECD standards, and regulatory overreach isn’t a meme as in the EU. But even allowing that this is a big problem, I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that any such project should be done in an impartial and depoliticized way. Is this something that one can plausibly expect from a Trump administration? Trump has just promised to appoint RFK Jr. - a conspiracist and anti-vaxxer whose personal morality makes Trump look like a paragon of virtue by comparison - to head the public health agencies. Will expelling the experts and replacing DEI hangers-on with right-wing quacks, cronies, and ideologues be an improvement? Will these “reforms” even survive the Trump Presidency, especially in the event it collapses in scandal?

All this goes to illustrate a deeper issue that I will return to again and again: Be careful what you wish for with Trump, you might just get it.

Economics

The most common elite argument in favor of Trump is that he will be better for the economy, and in most polls, a slim majority of Americans agree. This is the justification that Richard Hanania gives, regardless of his unflattering opinions about conservatives and the values they champion. In short, while Trump is a threat to democracy, American democratic institutions are resilient, while the Democrats are a threat to capitalism, and capitalism is much more vulnerable.

I think both premises are deeply mistaken. First, it’s quite well known that GDP has grown faster under Democratic Presidents than Republican Presidents. This is not even a point I want to belabor, because long-term growth is a secular process primarily driven by technological trends, and largely independent of politics. Or at any rate, the politics has to get very bad and abnormal before it starts becoming a serious factor. Personally, I think the chances of the US turning into Venezuela under the Democrats are not very high, by which I mean, about zero.

Second, neither is it obvious to me why Kamala’s policies are worse than Trump’s. To be sure, there’s the infamous promise to ban price gouging, as well as an unseemly commitment to subsidizing housing and Woke-pandering nonsense about protecting Black men’s crypto investments. These suggestions were almost certainly not included out of any serious commitment to realizing them, but because banning price gouging and subsidizing housing play well with the electorate. Otherwise, pro-Democratic economists have lined up to reject these proposals, which incidentally also shows that Democrats retain a strong immune response to overly demented ideas from within their own ranks. The chances that any price gouging laws will pass through the Senate and the courts are close to zero.

Trump wants to impose 10% or higher tariffs on America’s allies, implement mass repatriations of undocumented immigrants, and subvert the independence of the Federal Reserve. Each of these proposals, taken separately, is at least as bad as a ban on price gouging. Tariffs are one of the most regressive taxes, raising consumer prices across the board just to protect notable strategic industries such as toaster production. Mass deportations will raise the costs of services, in addition to the human rights violations and restrictions on human liberty they will entail. Central bank independence is one of the foundation stones of modern developed economies, and is so central to international credibility that even a strongman like Putin has to date avoided interfering with it. Furthermore, Trump’s bad ideas are far likelier to get these implemented, given the greater role of Presidential prerogative in these sectors and the collapse of any internal Republican culture of critique.

Hanania also makes a big deal about how Democrats are more accommodating towards unions than Republicans. But the gap is much lower than it once was. In line with educational polarization in electoral preferences, blue-collar union members now tend to favor Trump over Kamala, and the most egregious face of union thuggery, Harold Daggett - the neo-Luddite who recently threatened to close down the nation’s ports - claims to be friends with Trump. Vance has also spoken out in favor of unions. In fairness, out of all the supporters Trump is likely to backstab first, I would peg unions at just below the Muslim mayors who believe Trump will rein in Israel in the Middle East. So if unions really are your single issue, then voting for Republicans makes sense. But it would still be a weird priority to have, because it’s not like unions are prominent or a significant burden on the US economy as they are in, say, France or Italy.

I could go on about other aspects of economics from fiscal sustainability (on which Trump is far worse) to YIMBYism (on which Republicans are traditionally better). But at the end of the day, this would just skirt over the most important philosophical objection to Hanania’s argument, which pertains to the relative value of capitalism vs. democratic institutions. Almost all long-term growth is a function of total factor productivity growth - a measure of the efficiency with which labor and capital are converted into useful outputs - which in turn loads primarily on technological innovation. In turn, vigorous scientific and technological innovation only happens in countries that are already rich, retain strong independent institutions, and incubate sufficiently large concentrations of Elite Human Capital. Vote for capitalism over democracy, as happened in Russia in 1996, and chances are you end up with neither. Russia doesn’t particularly lack for high IQ individuals per se, but most of them despise Putinism, and are not rushing to open up businesses in a country where armed bands of men sponsored by a Chechen warlord and members of the Presidential Administration duke it out over its domestic analogue of Amazon within a 5 minute walk of the Kremlin. Cognitive elites despise MAGA, and the sentiment is mutual; almost all scientific innovation in America accrues to cities that heavily vote Blue. MAGA is by far the greater threat to EHC and the institutions it thrives under, and by extension, America’s leading status on the GDP per capita and innovation charts.

Foreign Policy

More than most, it seems to me that the discourse on what Trump will do about foreign policy is colored by people’s ideological preoccupations. Noah Smith worries that the US will retreat into isolation and abandon the world to the “New Axis” of China, Russia, and Iran (an entity that has almost as little real geopolitical coherence as BRICS, but that’s for another post). NAFO is panicking that he will fully abandon Ukraine to Putin’s mercies, while Z is salivating over that same prospect. Some particularly delusional people believe Trump will restrain Israel and be a champion for Palestinian rights.

In my world model, there are two main things you have to know. First, Trump is always on Trump’s side, and everything else is downstream of that. For instance, perhaps Trump really will withdraw aid to Ukraine, in which case Russia probably ekes out a victory. But as I’ve been saying since last year, there’s another possibility: Trump offers Putin a deal - a great deal! the best deal in the history of deals! - which Putin haughtily dismisses, because he has no theory of mind and takes it for subservience. Next up: Anduril drones and hundreds of Abrams tanks on the Zaporozhye plains come summer 2026. This scenario does not strike me fundamentally less likely than the other, nor is this idea particular to me: Analysts as disparate as Philippe Lemoine, Velina Tchakarova, and Igor Strelkov have proposed similar scenarios. Historically, Trump was far more hawkish on Russia than Obama, selling Ukraine lethal weapons and trying to torpedo Nord Stream II. Contra stereotypes, MAGA voters are no more pro-Russian than Democrats, and for their part, traditional Republican elites will be happy to go along with a foreign policy line familiar to them from the Cold War. To the extent that the Kremlin is banking on Trump getting back into office - and rumors suggest that’s exactly what their “plans” reduce to - they should, as with the others, be careful what they wish for. Though speaking just for myself, I would argue that either decision - withdrawing arms supplies to Ukraine, and conclusively ending the cruel delusion that the US has its back; or multiplying arms supplies in order to force a Russian defeat - might well both be more ethical than the current policy of the Biden administration, insofar as it forces an end to this dumb and meaningless bloodbath that is now largely sustained by both sides believing they can still eke out a substantive victory.

Second, the Republicans have always been the more hawkish party. Any delusions that MAGA would break this pattern should have gone by the wayside after Trump’s first term, which saw hardline policies towards Iran - including the assassination of Qasem Soleimani - and, more portentously, the beginning of the Great Bifurcation of the world order between an America and China which is fast developing into a new cold war. Amusingly, I personally no longer hold this against the Republicans - the past few years have clearly demonstrated the ideological bankruptcy of the authoritarian Powers, and then there is also the prosaic realization that you can’t meaningfully decentralize political power within the liberal democratic world until the global enemies of liberalism are done away with (more details about this in The Soypill Manifesto). More concretely, the Iranian regime has proven itself a paper tiger, very brave at beating women and gays in Tehran, but skulking away in fear when Israel strikes it. Simply deleting Iran’s nuclear facilities and political leadership might unironically just be a good idea, and with any luck might even lead to regime change. Certainly there was no good reason for Biden to ease sanctions and give it back its money.

The final and most important piece of the puzzle is China policy. Neither MAGA nor Republicans are friends of China, to put it mildly. Vance in particular used to be an uber-hawk on China. The Tech Right, an important new Trump constituency, are American nationalists who correctly view China as America’s only credible competitor and would like to stymie its rise at all costs - even to the extent of advocating a reckless and probably suicidal race to AGI military supremacy that should just by itself be sufficient grounds to reject a Trump Presidency. American normies are much more innately hostile to China than to Russia, and in a crisis, xenophobia can always be inflamed by resurrecting a certain discourse on COVID origins. Consequently, even if there is a chance that Trump withdraws from Ukraine, the idea that there will be an analogous reversal of the Pacific pivot - a bipartisan linchpin of American foreign policy since 2009 - strikes me as extraordinarily unlikely.

I’m not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, it is clearly preferable that Taiwan endures as an outpost of liberalism and queerness in East Asia; it underwent ethnogenesis in the past two decades, and its fate under Chinese occupation will not be a happy one. On the other hand, a war between the US and China would obviously be very bad, and could go nuclear in the very worst scenario. Threatening to abandon Taiwan as some Republicans are doing is probably a bad idea, since it removes strategic clarity and increases the risk of a Chinese attack; on the other hand, perhaps that is what is necessary to cajole Taiwan into increasing its own defense spending, as Trump successfully did with Europe by hinting he’s considering leaving NATO.

Overall, it is foreign policy - the sector which causes many liberal pundits the most trepidation as regards a Trump Presidency - on which I am, ironically, most unsure and conflicted about. Nonetheless, when it comes down to it, I still have to give the edge to the Democrats. First, even though they might be more cautious than is optimal, caution is a good default to have in foreign policy more than in any other area of statecraft. Minor setbacks and “national humiliations” are greatly preferable to the catastrophic tail risks - local wars, World War III, nuclear war - that are incurred whenever rival Great Powers call or raise instead of folding. This is especially true now that Republicanism has become infused with Trumpist personalism, which adds a further element of unpredictability to the equation. Rightoids such as Joel Berry love posting misogynistic tripe about how women voting for “warmongers” is going to get straight Christian men like themselves drafted, but in reality, I suspect the US is far likelier to enter a war that ends up necessitating a draft under the Republicans they vote for, even if in absolute terms this probability is extremely low.

Second, there is innate value to stringently following international norms and defaulting to a pacifistic course of action whenever feasible. The Iraq invasion undermined international perceptions of the US as a just and impartial geopolitical actor, and would subsequently provide rhetorical ammunition for irredentist regimes. Yes, Saddam was bad, and Iraqis ultimately benefited from liberation - even if there were a thousand things the US could have spent that money on more productively. But had the US not so egregiously violated this important international norm in 2003, and had it not lied so brazenly about the WMDs, then would Putin have dared to so egregiously violate international norms against irredentism in 2022, and lie so brazenly in turn about Nazis and biolabs in Ukraine? Who knows.

EHC Values

As I stated at the start of this essay, there are a number of issues which are of marginal interest to most voters, but are of much greater interest to me and presumably the audience I have cultivated. These issues I consider quite integral to Elite Human Capital values, in the sense that these are the values and policies that I would expect the most intelligent and enlightened individuals to adopt in order to front-run EHC and accelerate the actualization of a future society that does not view our current one with quite as much repulsion as it would have otherwise. These issue include extreme bioliberalism (of which abortion rights are a subset); Rawlsian biorealism; Open Borders; freedom of speech; and cryptographic freedom.

Bioliberalism

I contend that bioliberalism in the broad sense is a sine qua non of biological accelerationism, and that a stalwart defense of abortion rights is foundational to it insofar as it is the crispest and most tacit possible affirmation of a secular worldview that affirms the right to bodily autonomy on which everything else is built. I will not spend time on parsing Trump’s position on abortion because all his statements about it are a delicate balancing act between pandering to pro-life conservatives and not scaring the women away too much. As a playboy New Yorker and lifelong Democrat whose Christianity is patently performative, Trump’s private views are no mystery. Same can be said for Vance. He is too smart to earnestly believe in his own hyperbolic fantasies about Soros chartering planes to fly Black women from Red State ghettos to Planned Parenthood clinics in California. But none of this is all that relevant, because the first rule of Trump is that Trump does what is best for Trump, and on abortion, that could range all the way from sidelining the issue entirely as the Tech Right wishes, or adopting the pregnancy monitoring and cross-border controls laid out in Project 2025.

Speculation seems useless here. We don’t know if the uneasy alliance between the Tech Right and social conservatives will hold, or who would win out if it comes to a factional struggle. What we do know is that Republican positions on abortion are a deal breaker for many women, and that this is understandable, because the repeal of Roe v. Wade by Trump-appointed judges has resulted in real net restrictions on women’s reproductive freedoms and multiple harrowing stories of individual deaths because doctors were too afraid to treat life-threatening conditions in pregnant women out of fear of killing their babies. Just as MAGA used to mock Bernie bros - “No refunds!” - so women are right to be wary about just how far Republicans with control over all three branches of government will be willing to go to roll back their rights to bodily autonomy.

In a conversation with natalist activist Malcolm Collins a few months ago, he told me that he and Simone don’t really care about the abortion issue so long as IVF isn’t restricted and natalism is promoted in general. The problem is that even if you fall into that camp, the correlations are going to be working against you. Congrats to whoever foisted the idea of free IVF on the Trump campaign. But this is in the context of a party that consistently votes against pro-IVF bills and blocked a Democratic bill on IVF protections just a couple of weeks after Trump came out as a self-proclaimed “leader on IVF.” Conservative pundits tend to oppose IVF, Inez Stepman writing she doesn’t want a “bunch of Silicon Valley spergs playing Gattaca.” I am not even going to go into the Christian nationalists, tradcaths, and sundry legions of open misogynists and obscurantists that have made the GOP their home. The point is that any promises individual Republican politicians make on policies that advance reprotech and bio/acc are incredible in light of the company they keep and the constituencies they must pander to.

This concept of a rightoid “general factor” that loads particularly heavily on some common beliefs and behaviors (anti-vaxxerism/COVID denial, anti-abortion, conspiracism) and projects itself across a wide range of other issues isn’t sufficiently appreciated by rationalist/technology types who seek tactical alliances with them. Want to propound the hereditarian hypothesis? Liberals at least have a scientific mindset, whereas it is difficult to know where to even start with people who live in a pre-scientific world where demons are real. Want to select embryos for IQ? Have fun with the far more numerous members of your coalition who view all this nerd shit as a feminist-inspired eugenicist plot to genocide Black babies. Want to legalize assisted dying? Have fun making the case for “death panels”. Want to do LSD research like they do in EHC-aligned countries like Israel and the Netherlands? LOL. Want to alleviate animal suffering by developing artificial meat? Ron DeSantis recently made sure you can’t do that in Florida. But what about muh free markets you squeal?! Not when it involves “global elites”, bucko! In light of these demonstrated behaviors, there’s no limit to what you can expect from our rightoid friends. Stem cell research culture wars redux? Why not? Bans on radical life extension research? Wouldn’t surprise me! It’s an affront to “human dignity” after all.

Somewhat adjacent to all this is the topic of natalism. Global fertility decline has accelerated in recent years, and what was once the preserve of demographics nerds (as well as some more unsavory characters) has seen an influx of interest. Ironically, I no longer consider it to be as important as I did several years ago because AGI will probably make it irrelevant within the decade. And besides, I have also always held that quality is more important than quantity, hence my long-standing advocacy of human intelligence enhancement through reprotech. Nonetheless, it’s obviously correct that countries with declining and aging populations are going to be poorer and less innovative, and that Open Borders - while desirable - is no panacea in light of lower Third World IQs. There are some reasonable measures ranging from the prosaic, such as free IVF and generous social allowances and paid paternity leave, to more ambitious ones, such as artificial wombs, that can be expected to have pro-natalist effects while expanding, not restricting, personal freedoms and autonomy. The question is whether you want the guys - it is all guys - who call childless women “cat ladies” and make unsolicited impregnation proposals to Taylor Swift to be the ones fronting these initiatives. Why yes, I'm sure four years of “have more babies” and “population collapse!” will do wonders coming from Musk and Vance. They're the Elvis Presleys of our generation; young womyn positively swoon over them!

The Mierdas Touch Candidate

Or perhaps not. This brings us to what I consider the single strongest argument against Trump, which is this interpretation of him as the ultimate Mierdas Touch candidate. One who sullies, defiles, enshittifies any cause you care about, tars you by association, and then somehow skitters away from the whole thing all clean and pristine on to his next set of marks while you are left to sift through the consequences. Just ask Rudy Giuliani and the so-called J6 patriots.

Oxford right-wing philosopher Nathan Cofnas perceives a Trump administration as a breakwater against Wokeness. To be sure, Wokeness is epistemically bankrupt, and a net negative for global welfare. For instance, race differences in aspects of physiology and personality are real, and can be relevant in certain situations; a lack of sufficient Black representation in biobanks and data access restrictions lobbied by anti-racist activists limits the range of treatments that reprogenetics companies can offer them. It is therefore useful to be able to discuss such issues without getting shouted down and calumnied by Woke activists. Despite having incurred greater harassment for my own hereditarian views than most right-wing commenters, at the object level I will say that the so-called “Woke mind virus” isn’t the worst thing in the world, and it probably peaked in 2020 anyway. My base case scenario is that Wokeness will fade away like a bad dream, much as Democratic politicians like Kamala now pretend she never said “everybody needs to stay Woke.”

However, I also suspect this will only remain true if politics doesn’t provision the dry tinder for Wokeness to reignite. Just as Scott Alexander correctly predicted of the first Trump term, I suspect that if anything can salvage militant Wokeness, it is a second one. To cite one example, he recently ascribed “bad genes” to “immigrants” and claimed that they are “poisoning the blood of our country”. This isn’t being “HBD pilled”, “race realist”, or whatever - it is the ramblings of a cynical dilettante who doesn’t so much hate as just not care. Once Trump moves on, it's the usual suspects - politically powerless bloggers, intelligence researchers, human enhancement activists - who are going to be left holding the toxic baggage. Trump is for Trump, he will be fine. It is you who are going to be indiscriminately targeted by the Woke backlash that the petty stupidities and legal nihilism of a second Trump administration will unleash. As always with Trump, careful what you wish for - you might just get it.

You might support immigration restrictionism. As an Open Borders advocate, I disagree. I don’t think huge clunky bureaucracies are particularly good at filtering human capital efficiently - strange that otherwise outspoken anti-statists such as Musk and Balaji Srinivasan think otherwise - but obviously my view is a minority one. Half of Americans (and 79% of Republicans) now support rounding up undocumented immigrants into “militarized camps”. In this context, a reversal on immigration policy is near inevitable under any government. This can happen under the party of normalcy. Or it could happen under the party whose activists dream of militarized deportation squads, invent data about illegal crime rates out of whole cloth, and spread blood libels against the ethnic minority du jour, such as when Chris Rufo and other conservative activists spread fake news about Haitians eating cats and dogs, which Trump amplified it in his failed debate with Kamala. This is not even so much a question of morality as one of viability. Do you want to base anti-immigration policy on sound arguments - and these do exist, even if I disagree with them? Or do you just want to have fun inciting pogroms? Many, apparently, prefer the latter.

I am a big proponent of cryptographic techs, including cryptocurrencies, and view them - despite their regrettable association with scams and rugpulls - as the most promising route to decentralized politics and a world in which privacy protections and transparency can be reconciled. This is not to claim that the Democrats are any good on crypto. They allowed Elizabeth Warren to set the tone on the world’s fastest growing asset class, earning the active enmity of much of the crypto community in the process. But this does not imply that Trump will be better for crypto in the long-term. Just a few years ago, he was lambasting Bitcoin as a “scam against the dollar”. But the Tech Right likes crypto. And even more importantly, Trump found that he can make money off MAGA cultists by peddling them his NFTs and scamcoins. So now he portrays himself as the biggest champion of crypto without actually understanding anything about it beyond that it’s a convenient vehicle for his grifts. Crypto doesn’t need politicians shilling it to flourish, it just needs to be left alone to build its own thing without developers getting harassed by banks and imprisoned abroad on American money laundering charges just for writing code for a decentralized tumbler.

Speaking of which, can we expect Trump to pardon Tornado Cash dev Alex Pertsev? Let’s consider. Last time around, he had four years in which to free or pardon the likes of Ross Ulbricht, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden - all men in prison or prosecuted on grounds that many “cypherpunks” - advocates of cryptographic freedom as a way to effect social and political change - consider to be illegitimate or not entirely justified. Did he? LOL! If anything, the Trump administration aggressively pursued them; Assange described the Trump administration as “wolves in MAGA hats.” And look, OK - I don’t blame Trump for this. The state doesn’t like cypherpunks and leakers, the sentiment is mutual, and a representative of the state such as Trump has no reasonable obligations to them. What I take issue with is the sheer gall of presenting Trump as some kind of champion of cypherpunk values. Not that the Democrats are exactly aligned with them either - but in fairness, it should at least be noted that Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning, and Biden was the President who offered a plea deal to Assange. Who did Trump pardon? A couple of criminal rappers, and Rod Blagojevich, a Democratic politician whose main “qualification” in the eyes of Trump is presumably the very fact of his indictment for corruption, which makes him a kindred spirit of sorts, unfairly persecuted by the deep state.

Elon Musk and the MAGA brigade on X proclaim Trump to be the free speech candidate. The “really existing” Trump openly and incessantly fantasizes about locking up people who defy him. He has recently suggested that critics of his judges who overturned Roe v. Wade should go to jail. Both Trump and Vance suggested criminalizing the burning of the American flag. I am not sure how that’s consistent with freedom of speech, or basic property rights for that matter, but perhaps I am missing something. In any case, the idea that MAGA - one of the dumbest, most criminalized, and most authoritarian political movements in American history - stands for the principled free speech absolutism of its propaganda is incredible a priori, given the close correlation of free speech values with IQ. Again, this is not to say that Democrats are stalwart advocates of free speech either - that would be absurd, and Walz for his part has openly stated his anti-Constitutional view that hate speech should be illegal. However, I refuse to be gaslighted into thinking that Republicans are somehow different or better. There is no credibly consistent freedom of speech constituency in the US apart from the Libertarians. If you’re going to make free speech your single issue, then you should vote for Chase Oliver.

If you sleep with dogs, expect to wake up with fleas. So far as I can see, all the issues here that I care about and consider important, and which Republicans claim to support, they are only doing so situationally, where they are following through on them at all - and that’s before they get elected and don’t have to worry about keeping their promises for the next four years. In the meantime, aligning with them incurs severe reputational costs. As I told Hanania, you’re not even getting respectable scientific racism with MAGA, but just normie racism of the pogroms-stirring variety. Sad as it is, but the cryptocurrency sphere already has a well-established reputation for fraud and get rich quick scams; it would be nice, as Vitalik Buterin counsels, to at least not add authoritarianism and political cronyism to that list. Finally, probably nothing has done quite as much to make even rationalists and genuine liberals have second thoughts about the value of absolute “free speech” as the politicized trainwreck that X has become under Musk’s partisan management. “But true free speech has never been tried,” I cry out, forlornly. But nobody cares any longer.

The Tech Right Strikes Back

The Biden administration's hostility to Big Tech and crypto was an epic own goal that spurred many of them into defecting to Trumpism. Richard Hanania christened them the “Tech Right”. They like Trump’s promises on lower corporate taxes and deregulation, and resent the Wokeness and anti-tech/anti-crypto rhetoric directed against them under the Democrats. Their guiding light is the Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen; their popular movement is e/acc; their memetic star is Beff Jezos on X. Probably a majority of them can be described as American nationalists - they are proud of the Stars and Stripes, and committed to US military primacy. Some of them are somewhat disturbed by MAGA populism and the influence of social conservatives; most of them are liberals on LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, and almost all of them oppose serious protectionism and immigration restriction. Evidently, they consider it a manageable risk, though. And why wouldn’t they? This faction are now the brains and wallets of the MAGA machine. In the last two months of the campaign, Elon Musk has basically taken over the running of the Trump campaign, and for many people in the Tech Right, this election is no longer even so much Trump vs. Harris, as Technoking Musk vs. Harris. Surely this will give them an outsized say in the next administration, right? Right!?

Source: Financial Times (graph). The past four years saw a sudden bifurcation in American tech support for Democrats and Republicans.

The magnitude of this Tech Right defection shouldn’t be overstated. As I noted in my previous post, Silicon Valley at large remains predominantly pro-Democratic. For every prominent Tech Right tycoon - Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Brian Armstrong, David Sacks - you have a stridently anti-Trump Paul Graham or Vinod Khosla, and many more who are just hedging their bets, like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Amusingly, political donations from Musk’s own companies overwhelmingly favor Democrats. Even on X, despite its sharp tilt to the right, opinion surveys by tech-adjacent figures tend to show strong Democratic support: Liron Shapira - 67% for Biden, pre-debate; Zvi Mowshowitz - 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; @yashkaf - Harris 2x as strong as Trump amongst the TPOT crew. Nonetheless, these differentials would have all been on the order of 10x back in 2016, when as a Trump supporter I marched in a MAGA cap through Berkeley’s streets in an act of performative transgression that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows today.

Consequently, for technophiles of a more “Slytherin” disposition - perhaps somewhat libertarian and/or with lingering affinities to the (much smarter) Alt Right of the mid-2010s - pivoting to Trumpism now might seem a tempting proposition. And this time around, you won’t even get sanctioned for it by polite society (if not by young women). So if you want to, by all means go ahead and throw the dice on making Elon Musk the Gray Cardinal of the White House. But first, you should consider a couple of questions. Can the Tech Right be expected to retain political influence once Trump is in power? And is Elon Musk himself “aligned” with what you wish to accomplish?

The first rule of Trump is that he does what is best for Trump - when you shake hands on a deal with him, count your fingers afterwards. Tech Rightists with one or two standard deviations in IQ over him might believe they will be calling the shots as an increasingly senile Trump rots away in front of Fox News, but Trump himself probably has other ideas. The history of his first term is replete with individuals who fancied themselves smart, tried to puppeteer or “manage” him for their own ends, and ended up getting fired and disgraced. Favored courtiers today become “losers” and “nutjobs” tomorrow, and aspiring gray cardinals discover they are all cloak and no dagger. Just a couple of years ago, Trump was dissing Musk as a moocher of government subsidies who makes “rocketships to nowhere”. What happens if this conflict reignites? In a political contest between the two, I am betting on Trump’s every time.

The second issue concerns whether Musk is still on the same page, and by same page, I mean stuff like, “Is he OK up there?” or has he OD’ed on red pills? Are we voting for an actual Technoking, or just the latest Paul Nehlen or Ron Unz, aspiring right-wing politicians who started out sane and reasonable before going off the conspiracy deep end? Elon’s X feed is a unremitting torrent of standard right-wing bromides against immigrants, vaccines, transgender, the “Woke mind virus”, and globalist elites. He advises his followers against going to college (advice he wouldn’t take himself in a million years), and courts the attention of the most repugnant factions in the Trumpist coalition with fake news about Democratic policy on abortion and soft signaling against universal suffrage.

It would be one thing if Musk contained his takes to just his own X account, but he has let these obsessions color every aspect of X and his political activism. When Musk bought Twitter, he stated that it would be politically neutral - committed to “upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” In practice, while it retains islands of excellence, the main feed has been taken over by grifters ranting about FEMA conspiracies and how Tim Walz is a pedophile, random new accounts with 200k followers who make the case for Hitler and repealing the 19th, AI slop, and Musk himself and friends. Turning the platform into just a much larger right-wing echo chamber like Parler, Gab, or Truth Social doesn’t seem like a good long-term business plan, and indeed there is evidence that organic usage is falling off, with the decline being especially precipitous amongst academics. The worst part of it is that this isn’t even a function of a genuine commitment to free speech maximalism - though I fully expect it to be portrayed that way by leftists. Although Elon’s regime is undoubtedly freer than the old one, people do continue getting banned for protected political speech, with one of the most notable and egregious recent cases being the temporary suspension of journalist Ken Klippenstein for “doxxing” i.e. posting a link to public information about JD Vance.

No, the main problem is the decision to make X into a propaganda bullhorn that shills Musk’s preferred political candidate to an extent that would have made Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey blush in 2016. This crudeness is reflected in Musk’s political activism in meatspace. The America PAC, which was given the @america handle on X, has taken over the Trump campaign’s ground game in the swing states and hands out $1 million prizes to supporters who sign a petition in support of the First and Second Amendments. Another Musk-funded PAC recently ran parallel ads telling Pennsylvania Jews that Kamala supports Palestine and Michigan Muslims that she supports Israel. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the cynicism and unseemliness of these tactics seems unprecedented to me within the living memory of American democracy. But it does seem strongly redolent of the vote-buying and post-truth politics that characterize democracy as it is practiced in dysfunctional post-Soviet polities such as Moldova, where votes are bought and parliament is sometimes occupied by folks unhappy with the election results. I don’t think it’s a terribly attractive model to aspire to.

Can’t Get Fooled Again!

So here’s the fundamental problem with coping that a vote for Trump is really a vote for the rule of Tech Right philosopher-kings, government optimization, and Mars colonization. You don’t actually have access to what’s going in Elon’s brain. Perhaps all this rightoid posting really is a Big Brain stratagem to get the Orc votes, and he will revert to being a sage Technoking once Trump is propelled over the finish line. But you have to balance it against the more pessimistic interpretations. As someone who has spent considerable time exploring the Orclands, I can recognize social media radicalization when I see it - there are so many telltale signs that Elon is your uncle who spent too much time on interesting corners of Facebook and developed very strong opinions about COVID transmission and the world’s secret rulers. We even have a very plausible explanation for what provoked this radicalization: Shock and denial about his daughter’s change of gender identity.

I realize that there are many other explanations. Matt Yglesias in particular pushes the notion that Musk’s activism is driven by commercially “rational” reasons centered around Trump’s tariffs being good for Tesla and more government contracts for SpaceX. Many Tech Righters ascribe it to the petty slights and roadblocks that Democrats have inflicted on Musk over the years. I don’t think this is very plausible. Musk spent a lot of money on buying Twitter, but he isn’t running it in a way consistent with long-term profitability, or arguably even viability once its brain drain reaches a critical stage. I believe the Twitter acquisition was always a primarily ideological project, initially I think with dreamy utopian aims such as embedding free speech into the lightcone which reportedly confused Twitter employees, subsequently diverted into creating a right-wing echo chamber. More importantly, Tesla is the central node of Musk’s industrial empire. Tesla cars are (were) bought by moneyed liberals in California who like technology and the environment. They detest Trump. And they have become leery about buying Tesla cars for political reasons; sales of Tesla cars in California fell 17% this year, even as other brands surged ahead. Consequently, if I can identify any pattern in the past two years, it’s one in which economic rationality has been abandoned in pursuit of political and ideological goals with no clear payoff even if Trump wins. Hey - Trump has his own Truth Social scam to pump!

I could of course be wrong about this. But if there is one thing I learned from having made poor political choices in the past, such as supporting Trump in 2016-18 and Putin in 2020-22, it is that it is a waste of time to advocate on behalf of kooky authoritarians whose venality and defects of character are patently visible to anyone who cares to look and not deny the obvious. To “steelman” their arguments is to put words in their mouths just because you want them to be true in order to validate your own worldview. As a rule, they will not appreciate your efforts, because they dislike weird nerds putting words in their mouths, and because they much prefer flunkies and coat-lickers who toe the party line and don’t speak out of turn anyway. Meanwhile, you get all the opprobrium for associating with them as they “really exist” and not as your idealized image of them, which nobody except you actually cares about. Cringe as they were, #Resistance grifters of the first Trump Presidency were correct: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” The “really existing” Musk today is a right-wing ideologue and B-tier shitposter whose main technological obsession, going to Mars, is irrelevant on anything but centennial timescales. And one who I suspect is under heavy delusions of his own with respect to his prospects of playing a leading role in the Trump administration.

As for Trump, I can still understand why I supported him in 2016 - he seemed to represent a breath of fresh air at a time when Wokeness was on the advance, neocons were defecting to Hillary Clinton, and “right-wing dissidence” was still a genuinely interesting and irreverent community. Besides, Trump was really funny, and still is - I enjoyed his interview with Joe Rogan. Though I was quite heavily disillusioned by 2020, I still endorsed Trump just on account of BLM extremism (although not the fraud claims). But it’s now 2024, Woke is in decline, and MAGA furnishes the loudest and most annoying grifters. Back in the first Trump Presidency, they pulled stunts like memeing Taylor Swift into /ourgal/. Today’s MAGA chuds join Trump in screeching about how they “hate” Swift for having… loosely normie lib views. It’s now a very angry, very conspiratorial, and much lower IQ movement (even as it’s come to profusely use “low IQ” as an insult). It is headed by a scammer who rants about the globalist elites who are ripping you off while selling his NFTs and shitcoins, a stable genius who went bankrupt running a casino, a felon who enjoys  overwhelming support from felons across all creeds and races.

Twice burned, thrice shy. As noted philosopher Dubya said, “fool me once shame on you, fool me - you can't get fooled again.”