Politics

January 9, 2026

They do not care about you

They do not care about you — you are expendable to them. They do not GAF. Especially now with AI — they are gonna replace you anyway brah! At best they are biding time putting you on a drip feed of murder porn and revenge fan fic until the moment they are completely certain they’ve hijacked the electoral system at which time you too, buddy, will be shown the airlock into a deep space void no one will ever hear you from because they have all the powers of the earth to override whatever puny narrative you may have had for yourself.

You will be crushed like a bug 1000x tinier than Kafka’s roach — millions at a time under the heels of casually sadistic billionaires many of whom were Democrats up until 5 minutes ago when someone offered them a deal to cut their tax bill in exchange for a measley few million dollars. It’s “irrational” to not take the deal. You have to take the deal. Your competitors have taken the deal. You’d be the only chump not taking the deal. It’s the Art of the Deal, right?

Deals are all that matter. Transactionality is all there is — including reducing the beautiful, awe-inspiring teachings of Jesus to a mere materialistic creed, draped in a flag, shouted from a bullhorn, fired into an already capsized boat, and shot into the heads of innocent bystanders if they don’t comply with conflicting directives.

January 6, 2026

Remembering January 6: Here’s how Jack Smith saw it

Jack Smith, Special Prosecutor in two federal cases brought against Donald Trump

Five years ago today, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. The man who incited them has since been re-elected president, which scuppered the investigation into him by Special Counsel Jack Smith. If that whiplash isn’t enough to give you vertigo, consider this: we now have sworn testimony, under oath, from the prosecutor who investigated Trump laying out exactly why his office believed they could convict—and why they were stopped.

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s December testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is the closest thing we’ll get to the trial that should have happened. In it, Smith methodically dismantles every defense Trump and his allies have offered, explains how the case was built on testimony from Republicans willing to put country over party, and makes clear that the evidence of Trump’s guilt wasn’t circumstantial—it was direct.

In this post, I’m breaking down the key takeaways from Smith’s testimony, sharing one of my AI #MiniHistory videos marking the anniversary, and giving you a way to interrogate the evidence yourself through an interactive NotebookLM bot. Because if there’s one thing the incoming administration is counting on, it’s that you won’t have time to read 255 pages of testimony. Let’s make sure they’re wrong.

January 6 in 40 seconds

But first, a J6 refresher course — again, for busy folks.

I’ve been into making these little AI #MiniHistory videos with Glif agents, trying to tease out important signposts along our road to dictatorship and other interesting moments in history to highlight. Here’s the one I did for today and the 5th anniversary of January 6, 2021:

Trump has still never been held accountable for his actions that day — the election of 2024 put a boot in the face of any hope for justice prevailing against the Chief Insurrectionist. Nevertheless, Jack Smith replanted a tendril of hope in his mid-December testimony to Congress with a scathingly clear broken record message that Trump was guilty and they had all the receipts they needed to prove it and then some. It lays down new tracks in the Congressional record that will be impossible to expunge, regardless of whatever trash MAGA fairy tale of J6 the right-wing goons decide to slather on the White House website.

Jack Smith testifies to Trump’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”

In eight hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17, 2025, former Special Counsel Jack Smith laid out why his office was prepared to convict Donald Trump on federal charges. Speaking under oath in a closed-door deposition — the Republicans who now hold the gavel had denied his request to testify publicly (after crying decades of crocodile tears over ‘transparency’?? truly?) —Smith called Trump “the most culpable and most responsible person” in the criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

January 3, 2026

The Quiet Part Loud: Why the right stopped talking about values

Liberal Tears illustrates the sneering cynicism of the right wing who refuse to articulate political values

There’s something conspicuously absent from American political discourse: actual discussion of values and the morals, ethical choices, and beliefs that go into the creation of good government policy.

Think about the last major political debate you watched, or the last campaign ad that stuck with you. How much of it was about what government should do versus who you should hate? How much was articulating a vision for society versus performing dominance over the out-group?

This isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.

When your policy positions are wildly unpopular — when majorities oppose you on healthcare, taxation, abortion, climate change, guns, and wages — you don’t engage on the substance. You change the subject. You make politics about identity, grievance, and tribal belonging. You turn every election into a referendum on vibes rather than vision.

The American right has become extraordinarily sophisticated at this evasion. They’ve built an entire media ecosystem designed not to argue for right-wing values, but to ensure those values never have to be argued for at all. And the Trump administration is chock full of people from that media ecosystem.

The Polling Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable reality the modern right has to navigate, and we need to trumpet: their actual policy preferences are not popular.

Exposed to the individual provisions of the Affordable Care Act, majorities supported them — even among Republicans. Majorities support raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting Social Security and Medicare, acting on climate change, keeping abortion legal in most cases, and implementing universal background checks for gun purchases. On issue after issue, when you strip away the partisan framing and ask people what they actually want government to do, the “conservative” position loses.

This creates a strategic problem. You can’t win elections by articulating positions most people reject. So you articulate… something else.

The Retreat from Argument

Meanwhile, the right-wing has indefensible values, which is why they no longer even bother to try to articulate them. Instead, they express them obliquely through “memes” and mores that evince cruelty, bigotry, narcissism, domination, supremacy, greed, selfishness, and contempt for vulnerability — all while maintaining plausible deniability through irony, “just asking questions,” and the ever-ready accusation that anyone who names the pattern is being hysterical or unfair.

This is the function of the perpetual rhetorical shell game: you can’t pin down a position that’s never stated plainly. The cruelty gets expressed through policy and aesthetic, but when challenged, retreats behind procedural objections or “economic anxiety.” The bigotry shows up in who gets mocked and who gets protected, but is never admitted as such — it’s always reframed as “common sense” or “tradition.”

December 21, 2025

Wealth Cult: The oligarchs influencing American politics from the shadows

Wealth Cult -- rich men behaving badly, by Midjourney

A network of exceedingly wealthy individuals and organizations have channeled their vast fortunes into influencing American politics, policy, and public opinion — they’ve formed a wealth cult. And they’ve leveraged that cult and its considerable fortune to influence and in many ways dramatically transform American politics.

The most succinct way I have come up with to explain American politics is that the wealthy are dividing us over race and religion. Today far more openly than in the past, where much oligarch shadow influence was delivered via dark money kept intentionally untraceable back to its origins.

The term “dark money” refers to political spending meant to influence the decision-making and critical thinking of the public and lawmakers where the source of the money is not disclosed. This lack of transparency makes it challenging to trace the influence back to its origins, hence the term “dark.”

And, it is dark indeed.

Wealth cult anchors the trench coat

The Wealth Cult is one of 3 primary groups or clusters supporting the right-wing and generally, the Republican Party. It anchors the trench coat by funding the 2 cults above it: the Christian Cult, and the White Cult.

Its story is stealthy and significant.

A bunch of billionaires toast themselves to themselves, by Midjourney

The wealth cult has funded disinformation campaigns, the spread of conspiracy theories, created fake social movements through astroturfing, enabled violent extremists to attack their country’s capitol, aided and abetted a convicted felon, cruelly deprived vulnerable people (especially immigrants, poor people, and women) of the kind of state aid granted generously throughout the developed world, bribed regulators, rigged elections, crashed economies, and on and on in service of their extremist free market ideology beliefs (which, by the way, have resulted in catastrophic market crashes every single time).

They believe in “makers and takers,” or Mudsill Theory, as it was once called by pedophile and racist Senator and slavery enthusiast James Henry Hammond. Some people were born to serve others, they say. Hierarchies are natural, they claim. Wealthy men should make all the decisions — because that’s what’s best for everyone, they say in paternalistic tones.

I don’t buy it. I believe all men are created equal. So did a certain Founder of our country.

December 20, 2025

Was the Civil War about slavery? Yes.

Slavery was the central question leading to the Civil War according to Abraham Lincoln, depicted here in a mini history video

But you don’t have to take our word for it — just ask the Vice President of the Confederacy what his reasons were in the infamous Cornerstone Speech of 1861, just a few weeks before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter:

“The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of . . . the equality of races. This was an error . . .

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
— Alexander H. Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original

The “States’ Rights” Contradiction

One of the clearest ways to prove the war was about slavery—and not abstract “states’ rights”—is to look at how the Confederacy treated the rights of Northern states.

The Fugitive Slave Act Paradox: Southern leaders explicitly opposed “states’ rights” when Northern states attempted to exercise them. When Northern states passed “Personal Liberty Laws” (exercising their sovereign right to not enforce federal slave-catching laws), Southern states demanded the Federal Government override these state laws.
South Carolina’s Declaration: In its “Declaration of Causes,” South Carolina specifically lists the failure of Northern states to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act as a primary grievance. They were not fighting for the right of states to choose their own laws; they were fighting for the federal government to enforce slavery across all states

The Rejection of the “Forever” Amendment (Corwin Amendment)

Perhaps the most damning evidence is the South’s rejection of the Corwin Amendment.

The Offer: In a last-ditch effort to prevent war, the Northern-controlled Congress actually passed a Constitutional Amendment (the original 13th Amendment) in early 1861. It would have protected slavery forever in the states where it already existed, guaranteeing the federal government could never abolish it.
The Rejection: If the South were seceding simply to “protect their property” or “defend against Northern aggression,” they would have accepted this victory. Instead, they rejected it. Why? Because the amendment only protected slavery where it was, but did not guarantee its expansion into new western territories. The South seceded not just to keep slavery, but to ensure it could grow into a continental empire

November 21, 2025

“A republic, not a democracy” came from segregationists

You’ll hear a common retort on the extreme right that now holds sway in the mainstream Republican Party, in response to protests about the dismantling of democracy in this country — that we’re “a republic, not a democracy.” Right off the bat, a republic is a form of democracy — so they are claiming something akin to having a Toyota and not a car. It’s a rhetorical trick, in which people who fully know better are hacking the simple ignorance of civics and basic political philosophy of the right-wing political base.

But it manages to get worse — the origins of the bully taunt “a republic, not a democracy” go way back — they’re actually located in the segregationist movement. Specifically, the concept comes from the pro-segregation book You and Segregation, written in 1955 by future Senator Herman E. Talmadge.

John Birch Society loonies laud “a republic, not a democracy”

The “republic, not a democracy” meme would go on to be featured in the John Birch Society Blue Book — an organization so toxically extremist that even conservative darling William F. Buckley distanced himself from them. They feared the idea that increasing democratization would be a shifting balance of power away from white conservative men, and they spun numerous conspiracy theories to explain this as the result of nefarious undercover plot to overthrow Western Civilization.

In reality, the trend towards greater democracy is something the Founders themselves envisioned — though they likely could not have imagined how it would turn out. They believed fiercely in self-governance, and a clear separation from the tyranny of kings.

November 16, 2025

The Golden Rule

Watch: The Golden Rule — A Deep Dive into the Ethic of Reciprocity

Video Length: 6:36

⏱️ CHAPTERS:

0:00 – Introduction: One Rule to Guide Us All?
1:15 – Golden vs Silver: The Critical Distinction
1:54 – Around the World in 7 Religions
3:10 – Love as Action: The Good Samaritan & Rabbi Weiser
4:38 – Where the Rule Breaks Down (Shaw & Kant’s Challenges)
5:39 – Why It Still Matters: The Empathy Engine

What Is the Golden Rule?

The Golden Rule is a moral maxim that transcends religious, cultural, and philosophical boundaries. At its core, this essential mental model for the world states: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” This deceptively simple principle serves as a moral compass that has guided human interactions across millennia and continents.

The Critical Distinction: Golden vs. Silver

Not all versions of this rule are created equal. The key difference lies in whether the rule commands action or restraint:

The Golden Rule (Positive Form):

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
Demands proactive kindness and active good
Found in Christianity and Islam’s teachings
Requires you to get up and act

The Silver Rule (Negative Form):

“Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you”
Advocates restraint from harmful actions
Found in Confucianism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism
Can be followed through non-action

This distinction is crucial: you can follow the Silver Rule perfectly by sitting on your couch and doing nothing. The Golden Rule demands that you actively engage with the world.

A Universal Code: The Rule Across Cultures

What makes the ethic of reciprocity so remarkable is its near-universal appearance across human civilization:

Judaism: Hillel the Elder declared this the entire Torah in a nutshell—the negative version focused on avoiding harm.

Christianity: Jesus framed it as the Greatest Commandment, the positive version demanding active love.

November 6, 2025

Progressive Capitalism: A vision for the future

progressive capitalism as articulated by Ro Khanna as interviewed by Heather Cox Richardson

After last night’s solid trouncing of the entire GOP steez by the Democrats in elections coast to coast (p.s. don’t miss Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech — it’s a banger), the time is ripe for articulating a new vision of the American Dream. And the vision of progressive capitalism is sounding like the right tone for a nation state that wishes to remain the leader of the free world.

I believe there is pent-up energy in the Democratic reservoir — with a deep bench of political talent of people who actually seem to care about other people. And who actually understand and exalt the real promise of America — as a beacon of hope for a new experiment in self-governance — if we can keep it.

One of those politicians is Ro Khanna, who represents the bulk of Silicon Valley in his California district. He recently sat down with my favorite historian of all time, Heather Cox Richardson, to talk about the vision of progressive capitalism for lifting us out of this moment of reactionary pessimism and “nostalgia populism” — a promise he says is fake in the age of AI because it won’t generate real opportunity (I agree). The following video is a great introduction to this promising vision for a way out of the quagmire we feel ourselves in.

What is progressive capitalism?

Progressive capitalism summary

1. What Khanna means by “progressive capitalism”

Khanna argues that place matters: for decades, US policy has let capital go wherever it wants and told people in hollowed-out towns, “move if you want opportunity.”
His version of progressive capitalism says:
- Markets and free enterprise are valuable for freedom and innovation, but
- Government must intentionally invest in people’s health, education, and communities so they can actually develop their capabilities where they live.
He calls for a national economic development strategy — a kind of “Marshall Plan for the United States” — tailored to each region:
- Advanced manufacturing in some places
- Trade schools and tech institutes (AI, data, cyber) so people don’t have to leave small towns
- Jobs in healthcare, education, childcare, and elder care

2. Care economy and tech economy, not either/or

Heather Cox Richardson pushes him on care work (childcare, elder care, education), noting it’s already present in every community, dominated by women and immigrants, and chronically underinvested in.

October 31, 2025

Why is health care so expensive?

Why Healthcare Costs Stay High—And How the ACA Actually Helps Lower Them

America’s health care cost problem has a perverse logic at its core: we’ve committed to providing emergency care to everyone who needs it, regardless of ability to pay — but we’ve historically failed to ensure people have access to the preventive and primary care that would keep them out of astronomically expensive emergency rooms in the first place.

This contradiction creates a predictable—and expensive—spiral. Uninsured patients, lacking regular access to doctors, delay care until conditions become acute. They end up in emergency departments, where hospitals are legally required to treat them under EMTALA (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986). Those visits generate massive uncompensated costs that hospitals pass along to everyone else: insured patients through higher prices, insurance companies through higher premiums, and taxpayers through increased public spending.

The Affordable Care Act was designed, in part, to break this cycle by attacking the problem at its source. The logic is straightforward: expand insurance coverage, and you enable people to seek preventive and primary care before minor issues become medical emergencies. Fewer emergency visits mean less uncompensated care, which translates to lower costs for hospitals, taxpayers, and the broader healthcare system.

And the data backs this up. Research consistently shows that after the ACA’s implementation, emergency department visits by uninsured patients declined significantly. More people with insurance meant more people managing chronic conditions, catching health problems early, and avoiding the emergency room when they had other, more appropriate care options. The shift from reactive emergency care to proactive preventive care doesn’t just improve health outcomes—it fundamentally reduces the financial burden on everyone in the system.

an infographic showing some of the key outcomes of the ACA health care law including lower taxpayer costs and more preventive care

The image above captures the four key outcomes: more insured people leading to fewer ER visits, lower taxpayer costs, and increased preventive care. Understanding this mechanism reveals why expanding coverage isn’t just a moral imperative—it’s a rational economic policy that makes the system work better for everyone, including those already insured.

But how exactly does this work in practice? And if the ACA helps lower costs, why don’t more people understand this benefit? Below, we answer the most common questions about healthcare costs, the hidden “emergency room tax” that everyone was paying before the ACA, and why the law remains one of the most misunderstood cost-saving policies in American history.

Why is health care so expensive in America?

Because hospitals must provide emergency care to everyone under EMTALA (1986). When patients can’t pay, those uncompensated bills ripple into higher local taxes and insurance premiums. It’s the costliest way to fund care.

October 31, 2025

Common Sense Review

Common Sense pamphlet by Thomas Paine that changed the world

Common Sense Review: The Original Viral Manifesto and What It Teaches Us About Revolutionary Rhetoric

A reading guide for the disinformation age

There’s a certain type of political document that doesn’t just argue for change—it manifests the psychological conditions that make change feel inevitable. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is the template for this genre, and if you’re trying to understand how populist movements gain momentum, how institutional legitimacy crumbles, or how a pamphlet can reshape a nation’s self-concept in under 50 pages, you need to study this text like it’s a masterclass in persuasion engineering. And we’ll help you do just that in this Common Sense Book Review.

Published in January 1776, Common Sense sold an estimated 500,000 copies in a population of 2.5 million. Do the math: that’s a 20% penetration rate in an era when literacy wasn’t universal and distribution meant physical printing presses. In modern terms, Paine achieved what every content creator dreams of—he didn’t just go viral, he became the conversation.

But Paine wasn’t writing for the Continental Congress or the educated elite debating in Philadelphia drawing rooms. He was popularizing revolutionary ideas among ordinary colonists—farmers, tradesmen, shopkeepers—transforming an elite political dispute into a mass movement. This wasn’t theory; it was a manual for collective action that an entire society could rally behind.

The Structural Genius: Four Pillars, One Conclusion

Paine’s architecture is deceptively simple:

Government vs. Society – Establishes the mental model that government is inherently suspect
Monarchy is Absurd – Demolishes hereditary succession through both scripture and reason
The Case for Independence – Makes reconciliation seem more radical than revolution
America’s Material Capability – Provides the practical roadmap

He doesn’t start with independence — he starts by reframing how you think about authority itself. By the time you reach his actual policy proposal, your conceptual framework has been rebuilt from the foundation up. This is first-principles argumentation at its finest.

And the foundation he’s building? It’s the core democratic principle that the law should rule, not hereditary dynasties. Not kings, not aristocrats, not whoever was born into the right family. Paine is arguing for a system where the law governs consenting people who agree to the terms of mutual self-governance—even when they disagree on specific policies. This is the actual American political tradition, and reading Common Sense is the perfect antidote to the current disinformation campaign claiming “the US is a republic, not a democracy!” Paine clearly articulates what the public sentiment actually was at the founding: a forceful rejection of monarchy and inherited power.

Before we dive deeper into the specifics, here’s a video overview:

Mental Model: The Overton Window as Battering Ram

What Paine understood—and what every effective propagandist since has internalized—is that you don’t persuade people by meeting them where they are. You move the window of acceptable discourse so dramatically that your previously extreme position becomes the moderate compromise.

In 1776, most colonists still considered themselves British subjects seeking redress of grievances. Independence wasn’t just radical—it was treasonous. Paine’s innovation was to make continued loyalty to Britain seem like the radical position:

“As well can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress, as the continent forgive the murders of Britain.”
Continue reading Common Sense Review

October 28, 2025

Peter Thiel FAQ

Peter Thiel sits in a far future, under an all-watchful digital eye

Peter Thiel FAQ: The Contradictions of Silicon Valley’s Dark Philosopher

Peter Thiel occupies a rarefied place in the modern pantheon of tech billionaires — less the tinkerer or engineer than the theorist-king of the movement. A venture capitalist, PayPal co-founder, Facebook’s first major outside investor, and the billionaire backer of numerous reactionary causes, Thiel has built a career at the intersection of money, ideology, and myth. He is the financier of futuristic dreams — and dystopian nightmares.

Born in Frankfurt and raised in California, Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford, where he was captivated by the writings of Leo Strauss and René Girard. These thinkers — one obsessed with the hidden logic of political elites, the other with the contagious nature of human desire — shaped Thiel’s enduring worldview: that civilization is locked in cycles of envy and collapse, and only an enlightened few can see beyond the herd. In this sense, Thiel has always seen himself less as a businessman and more as a philosopher of power.

His ventures, from PayPal to Palantir, form a kind of metaphysical architecture of control. PayPal, the proto-financial infrastructure of the internet, made Thiel his fortune. Palantir, as explored deeper in What Is Palantir?, has monetized the surveillance state. In between, Thiel cultivated a cadre of disciples — the so-called PayPal Mafia — that went on to dominate Silicon Valley. His investments in companies like Facebook gave him not only wealth but leverage: a front-row seat in the grand experiment of data-driven social engineering.

Peter Thiel at an imaginary round table of Peter Thiels

But Thiel’s influence extends far beyond technology. He bankrolls candidates, think tanks, and movements aimed at reshaping our very democracy itself. In Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, I explored how Thiel’s quasi-religious futurism blends techno-eschatology with authoritarian politics — a longing for an end-times “reset” that he sees as necessary for renewal. His protégés, like Palmer Luckey and J.D. Vance, carry forward the same paradoxical ethos: rebellion against democracy in the name of “freedom.” As I argued in Palmer Luckey, Peter Thiel, and the Welfare Queens of Defense, his ventures often feed off the very government systems they publicly scorn.

October 28, 2025

Warning Signs of Fascism

What is fascism, and what are the signs of fascism? The fascist form of government is a complex and multi-faceted ideology that can manifest in various ways, making it challenging to pin down with a single definition.

Fascism resists simple definition precisely because it’s a syncretic ideology—adaptable to different contexts while maintaining core structural features. Rather than a fixed doctrine, it operates as a political methodology characterized by specific power dynamics, rhetorical strategies, and institutional patterns.

Structural characteristics of fascism

These are the ideological foundations and belief systems that define fascist movements—not merely policy positions but the fundamental orientations toward power, identity, and social organization that shape how fascism understands the world and its place in it.

Authoritarian Consolidation: Fascism centralizes power through the dismantling of horizontal accountability structures, typically concentrating authority in a charismatic executive who positions themselves above institutional constraints.
Ultranationalism as Identity Politics: Goes beyond patriotism to assert inherent civilizational superiority or racial supremacy, often manifesting as collective narcissism where national mythmaking replaces historical accuracy.
Militarized Social Order: Valorization of martial virtues, hierarchical discipline, and violence as political tools. Fascist movements frequently draw from veteran communities and paramilitary traditions.
Anti-Intellectualism and Epistemic Closure: Systematic devaluation of expertise, academic inquiry, and empirical reasoning in favor of intuition, emotion, and revealed truth. The “coastal elite” or “ivory tower” becomes a rhetorical enemy.
Ethno-Nationalism and Boundary Enforcement: Xenophobia operating through strict in-group/out-group categorization, often targeting immigrants, religious minorities, or racialized “others.”
Reactionary Temporal Orientation: Deployment of a mythologized past as political program—the promise to restore a golden age that never existed, weaponizing nostalgia against pluralism.
Anti-Leftist Mobilization: Positioning communism, socialism, and progressive movements as existential threats, often conflating disparate left ideologies to create a unified enemy.

The Us vs. Them Architecture: In-group/Out-group dynamics as core infrastructure

Fascism doesn’t just exploit social divisions—it requires their constant production and intensification as its primary source of political energy. While most political movements contain some degree of group identity, fascism is structurally dependent on a stark binary between insiders and outsiders, making this dynamic its foundational operating system rather than an incidental feature. The movement coheres not around shared policy goals or governance philosophy, but around the ongoing project of boundary maintenance: defining, defending, and purifying the “us” against an ever-present “them.”

October 16, 2025

Peter Thiel and the Antichrist: 5 Weirdo beliefs driving the new tech right

Peter Thiel at Isengaard looking into the Palantir

Peter Thiel has a plan to save the world, and it looks like a nightmare. He’s casting around for scapegoats, but perhaps Peter Thiel and the Antichrist are one and the same.

The PayPal co-founder, Facebook‘s first outside investor, and Silicon Valley‘s most influential political operator has spent years developing a political philosophy so strange that most people assume it can’t be serious. Democracy and freedom are incompatible, he says. Global cooperation is the Antichrist. The only hope for civilization is absolute monarchy modeled on tech startups. And he’s not just theorizing—he’s building it.

Thiel has poured millions into political campaigns, funded think tanks, mentored a generation of “New Right” intellectuals and alt-Right screeders, and cultivated politicians who share his vision. He’s amplified fringe thinkers like Curtis Yarvin (the blogger behind “Neoreaction” who openly advocates abolishing democracy), but Thiel’s worldview is uniquely his own—a bizarre synthesis of Christian eschatology, corporate governance theory, and techno-authoritarianism that’s far more sophisticated and disturbing than anything coming from the intellectual dark web.

This isn’t just eccentric billionaire philosophy. Thiel’s protégés include a sitting Vice President (J.D. Vance) and multiple Republican senators. His ideas circulate through conservative think tanks and Trump‘s inner circle. What sounds like science fiction is increasingly becoming Republican policy doctrine.

The media often portrays Thiel as an enigmatic libertarian or contrarian thinker. But that framing misses what’s actually happening. This is a systematic rejection of 250 years of democratic governance, wrapped in theological language and corporate efficiency rhetoric. And it’s weirder and more methodical than most people realize.

Peter Thiel and the Antichrist in 8 minutes (video)

This NotebookLM video does a great job explaining the background and impact of Thiel’s dangerously apocalyptic rhetoric inspired by Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt — and below it you can find a deeper explanation of all major points:

Here are the five interlocking beliefs that form Thiel’s vision—and why each one should terrify you.

1. Democracy Is the Bug, Not the Feature—Replace It With a Tech Startup Dictatorship

Thiel doesn’t just critique democracy—he’s concluded it’s fundamentally incompatible with freedom. In a 2009 essay, he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Not ideal partners; not in tension — but incompatible.

His alternative is coldly corporate: run countries like founders run startups. One CEO. One vision. Absolute authority. No consensus. No debate. No democracy.

October 14, 2025

Gazprom

The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of Gazprom: What the World’s Biggest Gas Company Teaches Us About Power, Monopolies, and Strategic Failure

How a $360 Billion Giant Lost 90% of Its Value—and What It Reveals About State Capitalism

In 2008, Gazprom was worth more than $360 billion, making it the third most valuable company on Earth. It was Russia‘s energy monopoly and largest gas company, and one of the largest companies in the world. Today? It’s worth $34 billion—a staggering 90% collapse that tells one of the most fascinating stories in modern business history.

This isn’t just a tale about natural gas and pipelines. It’s a masterclass in how monopoly power, geopolitical weaponization, and strategic overconfidence can destroy even the most seemingly invincible empires. And in an era where AI, tech platforms, and energy systems are being disrupted faster than ever, the lessons from Gazprom’s trajectory are surprisingly relevant.

Let us take you inside the story of Russia’s energy leviathan—and what its dramatic arc teaches us about power, strategy, and the dangerous illusion of permanence.

The Ultimate State-Owned Monopoly

First, let’s grasp the sheer scale we’re talking about:

17% of the world’s proven natural gas reserves
180,600 kilometers of pipelines (the world’s largest network)
Production of 414-500 billion cubic meters annually
Operations in 20+ countries, supplying 100+ nations

Gazprom didn’t just dominate Russia’s energy sector—it WAS Russia’s energy sector. Born from the Soviet Ministry of Gas Industry in 1989, it became the first state-run private enterprise in Soviet history, even before corporate laws existed in the USSR. That’s how strategically vital it was.

The Russian government maintains 50%+ control through various entities, making Gazprom the textbook example of a “state champion”—a privately structured company that serves as an extension of national power.

Energy as Geopolitical Weapon: The Gazprom Playbook

Here’s where things get interesting from a strategy perspective.

Gazprom wasn’t just selling gas—it was wielding it. The company’s toolkit included:

1. Strategic Supply Disruptions
Cut off countries that didn’t play ball politically. Ukraine, Belarus, and others experienced “technical problems” with their gas supply that mysteriously coincided with diplomatic disagreements.

2. Pricing Manipulation
Friends got sweetheart deals. Adversaries paid premium rates. Simple, effective, brutal.

3. Infrastructure Control
Build the pipelines, control the flow. Europe became dependent on a single supplier for 40% of its natural gas by 2021.

This is the “monopoly network effects” mental model taken to its extreme: Once you control the physical infrastructure, you don’t just have market power—you have geopolitical leverage that can shape foreign policy across an entire continent.

The Nord Stream Strategy

The Nord Stream pipelines perfectly embodied this approach. By routing gas directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea, Gazprom could:

Bypass unreliable transit countries (Ukraine)
Lock in Germany as a dependent customer
Divide European unity on Russia policy

It was strategic brilliance… until it wasn’t.

The Fatal Flaw: Mistaking Leverage for Invincibility

Charlie Munger often warned about “incentive-caused bias“—the tendency to believe your own narrative when you’re winning. Gazprom fell into this trap spectacularly.

The company’s leadership made several critical miscalculations:

1. Weaponizing Your Product Destroys Trust

Using energy as a political weapon worked… until customers decided they’d rather pay more than remain vulnerable. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Europe went into overdrive finding alternatives.

Result: Gazprom’s European market share collapsed from 40% to 8% in just one year (2022-2023).

2. Infrastructure Becomes a Liability

That vaunted 180,600 km pipeline network? Much of it now represents stranded assets. You can’t exactly redirect physical pipelines when your largest customers ghost you.

Meanwhile, competitors with LNG terminals can ship to whoever’s buying. Flexibility > fixed infrastructure when geopolitics get messy.

3. The “Too Big to Fail” Illusion

Gazprom assumed its monopoly position was permanent. Major gas fields hit production peaks. Investment in new fields (requiring $50+ billion for Yamal or Shtokman development) was delayed. Technology partnerships with Western firms provided crucial expertise.

When sanctions hit, the company faced:

Asset freezes
Technology transfer restrictions
SWIFT banking isolation
Loss of Western expertise and financing

Suddenly, “too big to fail” looked a lot like “too rigid to adapt.”

The Pivot to Asia: Too Little, Too Late?

Facing European abandonment, Gazprom is desperately pivoting eastward:

Power of Siberia 1: Operational pipeline to China (38 bcm capacity)
Power of Siberia 2: Planned pipeline through Mongolia (50 bcm capacity)
Expanded LNG operations: Playing catch-up in a market they largely ignored

But here’s the problem: China knows Gazprom is desperate. Beijing isn’t paying European prices. They’re negotiating from strength while Gazprom negotiates from necessity.

This illustrates the “alternative available” principle—your leverage is only as strong as your customer’s next-best option. Europe had alternatives (LNG from US, Qatar, etc.). Russia? Not so much for customers.

From Profit to Loss to Profit Again: The Volatility of State Champions

The financial swings tell the story:

2021: Record profit of 2.68 trillion rubles (during European energy crisis)
2023: First loss since 1999—629 billion rubles
2024: Back to profit—1.2 trillion rubles

This wild volatility reflects a fundamental truth: When your company serves political objectives first and commercial objectives second, financial performance becomes subservient to state goals. Sometimes that works (2021 energy crisis). Often it doesn’t (sanctions, market loss).

Strategic Lessons for the AI Era

So what can we extract from Gazprom’s saga that applies to today’s rapidly evolving landscape?

1. Network Effects Work Until They Don’t

Gazprom’s pipeline monopoly seemed unassailable—until geopolitical shifts made customers willing to pay the switching costs.

AI Parallel: Today’s AI models and platforms building “moats” through data, compute, or user lock-in should remember that trust, reliability, and user sovereignty matter. Abuse your position, and users will fund alternatives.

2. Geopolitical Risk Is Business Risk

Gazprom learned this the hard way. Over-optimizing for one strategic relationship (Europe) without diversification created catastrophic vulnerability.

Content Creator Parallel: Platform dependency is the same risk. Building your entire business on YouTube, or Instagram, or any single platform means you’re one algorithm change or TOS update away from collapse. Diversification isn’t optional.

3. Asset-Heavy Models Lose Flexibility

Physical infrastructure becomes a liability in fast-changing environments. LNG companies with flexible shipping could adapt; Gazprom with fixed pipelines couldn’t.

Digital Business Parallel: Heavy CapEx models and legacy infrastructure become anchors. The future belongs to modular, composable, rapidly adaptable systems—whether that’s in content creation, AI deployment, or business operations.

4. The Innovator’s Dilemma Applies to Nations Too

Gazprom focused on protecting its existing business model (pipeline gas) rather than aggressively pursuing LNG and diversified markets. Classic Innovator’s Dilemma.

When you’re dominant, investing in what might disrupt you feels unnecessary… until it’s too late.

The Future: A Giant at a Crossroads

Gazprom in 2025 faces questions that will determine Russia’s economic future:

Can they truly pivot from European to Asian markets?
Will their aging infrastructure support next-generation needs?
Can they adapt to climate pressures and carbon transition demands?
How do they compete without Western technology and financing?

The company’s 2024 return to profitability might suggest resilience. But structural challenges remain: aging fields, massive investment requirements, geopolitical isolation, and customers who’ve learned not to trust a monopoly supplier.

Final Thoughts: The Illusion of Permanence

Gazprom’s story reminds us that nothing is permanent—not monopolies, not market dominance, not even control over critical resources.

The company went from seemingly invincible to struggling for survival in less than three years. That’s faster than most product cycles in tech. It’s a humbling reminder that in an interconnected, rapidly changing world, strategic rigidity is fatal.

For anyone building in digital media, content creation, or AI-driven businesses today, the lessons are clear:

✅ Diversify your dependencies
✅ Trust and reputation are assets, not tactics
✅ Flexibility beats fixed infrastructure
✅ Geopolitical and platform risks are real business risks
✅ Never mistake current dominance for permanent advantage

The same forces disrupting Gazprom—technological change, strategic competition, trust erosion, and rapid market shifts—are reshaping every industry. The question isn’t whether disruption will come. It’s whether you’ll see it coming and adapt fast enough.

In the age of AI and digital transformation, being the biggest doesn’t guarantee survival. Being the most adaptable just might.

October 9, 2025

Is America a Christian nation? No.

The Founders knew acutely the pains of centuries of religious warfare in modern Europe and resoundingly did not want that for their new nation. Many of them moreover knew religious persecution intimately — some whose families fled the Church of England for fear of being imprisoned, burned at the stake, or worse. Is America a Christian nation? Although many Christians certainly have come here, in a legal and political sense the nation’s founders wanted precisely the opposite of the “Christian nation” they were breaking with by pursuing independence from the British.

Contrary to the disinformation spread by Christian nationalists today, the people who founded the United States explicitly saw religious zealotry as one of the primary dangers to a democratic republic. They feared demagoguery and the abuse of power that tilts public apparatus towards corrupt private interest. The Founders knew that religion could be a source of strife for the fledgling nation as easily as it could be a strength, and they took great pains to carefully balance the needs of religious expression and secular interests in architecting the country.

Americans sought religious freedom

The main impetus for a large percentage of the early colonists who came to the Americas was the quest for a home where they could enjoy the free exercise of religion. The Protestant Reformation had begun in Europe about a century before the first American colonies were founded, and a number of new religious sects were straining at the bonds of the Catholic Church’s continued hegemony. Puritans, Mennonites, Quakers, Jesuits, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Amish, Lutherans, Moravians, Schwenkfeldians, and more escaped the sometimes deadly persecutions of the churches of Europe to seek a place to worship God in their own chosen ways.

By the late 18th century when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, many religious flowers were blooming within the 13 colonies. He had seen for himself the pitfalls of the experiments in which a unitary control of religion by one church or sect led to conflict, injustice, and violence. Jefferson and the nation’s other founders were staunchly against the idea of establishing a theocracy in America:

The founding fathers made a conscious break from the European tradition of a national state church.
The words Bible, Christianity, Jesus, and God do not appear in our founding documents.
The handful of states who who supported “established churches” abandoned the practice by the mid-19th century.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that his Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was written on behalf of “the Jew and the gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu and the infidel of every denomination.” In the text he responds negatively to VA’s harassment of Baptist preachers — one of many occasions on which he spoke out sharply against the encroachment of religion upon political power.
The Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for holding foreign office.
The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
There is a right-wing conspiracy theory aiming to discredit the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” by claiming that those exact words aren’t found in the Constitution.
- The phrase comes from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, wherein he is describing the thinking of the Founders about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which Jefferson contemplates “with sovereign reverence.”
- The phrase is echoed by James Madison in an 1803 letter opposing the building of churches on government land: “The purpose of separation of Church and State is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”
The 1796 Treaty of Tripoli states in Article 11: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” — President George Washington first ordered the negotiation of a treaty in 1795, and President John Adams sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in 1797, with this article widely interpreted to mean a reiteration of the purpose of the Establishment Clause to create a secular state, i.e. one that would not ever be going to holy war with Tripoli.

Critical Dates for Religious Freedom in America

From the very beginning the Founders made clear they did not want to repeat the mistakes of Old Europe. They established a secular government that offered religious freedom to many who had felt persecuted in their homelands — for generations to come.

Get a quick overview of some of the most important moments in American history and its founding documents with our interactive timeline below.

The Founders were deists

Moreover, the majority of the prominent Founders were deists — they recognized the long tradition of Judeo-Christian order in society, but consciously broke from it in their creation of the legal entity of the United States, via the Establishment Clause and numerous other devices. The founders were creatures of The Enlightenment, and were very much influenced by the latest developments of their day including statistics, empiricism, numerous scientific advancements, and the pursuit of knowledge and logical decision-making.

What Deism Actually Meant: Deism in the 18th century was a rationalist religious philosophy that accepted the existence of a creator God based on reason and observation of the natural world, but rejected supernatural revelation, miracles, and divine intervention in human affairs. Think of it as “God as clockmaker” — God designed the universe with rational laws, set it in motion, and then stepped back. This was a radical departure from traditional Christianity.

The Enlightenment Context:

The Founders were steeped in Enlightenment philosophy — Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume. They believed in:

Empiricism over revelation — knowledge comes from observation and reason, not scripture
Natural rights derived from human nature and reason, not divine command
Social contract theory — government legitimacy comes from consent of the governed, not God’s anointing
Scientific method — Newton’s physics showed that the universe operated by discoverable natural laws

This was a revolutionary shift. They were designing a government based on Enlightenment principles in an era when most of the world still operated under divine-right monarchy.

The European Church-State Problem They Rejected:

The Founders had vivid historical examples of why mixing religion and state power was dangerous:

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) killed roughly 8 million Europeans in religious conflict
The English Civil War was fought partly over church governance
The Spanish Inquisition showed what happens when church and state merge
Various European states still had official churches that persecuted religious minorities — prompting many of them to consider a new line in the American colonies

They saw how “established” (government-sponsored) religions inevitably led to:

Religious tests for public office
Tax support for churches people didn’t believe in
Legal persecution of dissenters
Corruption of both religion and government

Thomas Paine’s Radical Vision:

Paine went even further than most Founders. In “The Age of Reason” (1794), he argued:

All national churches are “human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind”
Revelation is meaningless — “it is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other”
True religion is simply “to do justice, love mercy, and endeavor to make our fellow-creatures happy”
He predicted that as education and reason spread, traditional organized religion would wither

This was considered extremely radical — even scandalous — at the time. Yet Paine was celebrated as a hero of the Revolution and widely read. He once lamented that “Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.”

The Structural Safeguards They Built:

This wasn’t just philosophy — they built specific mechanisms:

No religious test for office (Article VI)
Establishment Clause — no official national religion
Free Exercise Clause — no prohibition of religious practice
Disestablishment at state level — states gradually abandoned their established churches (Massachusetts was last in 1833)

The framers of our Constitution who established this nation distrusted the concept of divine right of kings that existed in Europe under its historical monarchies. We fought a revolution to leave all that behind for good reason. They were adamantly against the idea of a national church, and were clear and insistent about the necessity of keeping the realms of religion and politics independent of each other.

It is the Christian nationalists who have it backwards — America was never a Christian nation that lost its way. Rather, the United States was founded as a secular nation and has become truer to fulfilling that mission over the centuries. It is the Project 2025 folks who are engaging in revisionist history, inventing a mythical past for the country that simply didn’t exist.