2024 Was the Year I Didn't Change Much

Reflections on what I've been right about, and a 20% off promotion for new subscribers

In 2022, we had the Year of Fukuyama. Chinese Zero Covid plus the Russian debacle in Ukraine, along with the lack of any evidence American society was falling apart, led me to conclude that normie political science got a lot of things right, and this was especially true if you make comparisons to its most virulent critics. America has continued growing at a healthy pace and there’s no indication that democracy is in crisis outside of the imaginations of misanthropes disconnected from reality, and so my confidence in this view has only increased.

There hasn’t been any change in my worldview nearly as drastic this year. Up until a few days ago, I would have said that the major shift in 2024 was that I had become somewhat disillusioned with the Tech Right. If the old twitter regime allowed journalists and academics to share their thoughts in real time and reveal how out of their minds many of them are, we’ve seen the same process unfold with rich guys in tech. As I wrote in my article on the Catturd to Silicon Valley pipeline,

My view was always that the Tech Right could help solve the right’s human capital problem by making conservatives smarter. But what I didn’t anticipate was that being in right-wing circles makes even the smartest people dumber. Successful businessmen who are publicly supporting Trump regularly fall for fake news and conspiracy theories, and we can watch their transformations online in real time. Twitter has become a cesspool, with the worst accounts profiting off lies rocketing to the top of the algorithm.

I thought we might be headed towards a place where there is a new Republican leadership that was higher IQ but basically used its intelligence to just reverse engineer sensible sounding justifications for whatever Laura Loomer types happened to believe. Then, on Christmas Eve, a war broke out between Elon and his friends on one side and the worst accounts on X on the other. At the beginning I had a bad feeling about this, and expected the Tech Right to get rolled, the way that they all started talking about how maybe we haven’t been told everything we need to know about mRNA vaccines. But Elon kept pushing back and although what exactly happened is murky, it seems that he started suppressing anti-Indian accounts. The H1B question turned out to be different from vaccines, etc., as tech guys have direct experience with the issue and it touches on their own interests.

I’m reminded of what I wrote last year about how and why the Tech Right turned against woke.

A belief in natural inequality causes the Tech Right to also oppose wokeness when it comes to affirmative action and diversity. A lot of liberals work in areas like activism, academia, or government, where there aren’t good objective measures of success or failure, except perhaps the ability to produce a lot of paperwork. This leads to an assumption that there isn’t that much of a tradeoff between diversity and what we want institutions to be able to accomplish. People with backgrounds in business, particularly industries that produce tangible products, tend to take a different perspective.

Now, Elon and others are turning on their right-wing allies for the exact same reason. People who have never run anything in their lives say that instead of bringing in the best talent from India and China all you need to do is remove the structural discrimination faced by overweight middle Americans, and you can be just as likely to solve aging and get to Mars. The economy is a fixed pie where one group can only gain at the expense of another. Humanity doesn’t have a shared interest in more convenience, individual freedom, and longer lifespans, but in seeking out a set number of jobs are reduced to tribes of apes fighting to gain control over a fruit tree.

This perspective is even more dangerous than that of wokes, because leftists have never suggested anything as radical as removing close to half of the scientific and tech talent in this country and replacing them with people who are less competent. That is, less competent as determined by market processes, which is the only standard we should be considering here. Immigrants make up 46% of Fortune 500 CEOs, have won 40% of Nobel Prizes in the US since 2000, and are 44% of the founders of Unicorn companies. Furthermore, people who lose out domestically to affirmative action can be almost as productive in other fields. What economic nationalists want to do is completely banish talent from the United States, and send it to Europe or Canada at best or let it almost completely go to waste in the Third World at worst.

Restrictionists have these complicated arguments as to why talented people founding companies and pushing the frontiers of science and technology are actually bad. They’ll say “we’re a nation, not an economy,” which is little more than a white nationalist dog whistle, as it provides no objective measures we can use to judge outcomes or the wisdom of policies. The economic arguments they make are basically textbook cases of the lump of labor fallacy.

Some people oppose immigration because they’re consistent leftists, who have a zero-sum view of economics. More commonly on the right, you get people who are either pro-market or indifferent to economic issues and start talking like Bernie Sanders when the issue of Indian immigration comes up. I find the Nick Fuentes position that it’s all about race and that’s all there is to it much more honest and intellectually defensible. The mainstream right-wing position of “capitalist when it comes to blacks and socialist when it comes to Indians” reveals the intellectual and spiritual hollowness you end up with when you care more about identity than ideas, and aren’t even courageous enough to do so openly.

Soon, the Trump administration will have to govern. The high-skilled immigration issue is basically as black-and-white as things can get, and this is a cause I’m excited to be a part of. Hopefully, Elon ruthlessly purges the rightoids. Getting rid of the Indian haters will also remove the antisemites, the Putinists, and the antivaxxers, as they’re all the same people. I’ve never been an absolutist on free speech when it comes to private companies, and the experience of X since Elon bought the platform has reinforced my view that a completely unregulated marketplace of ideas turns into a sewer.

One thing that’s been encouraging is that I’ve seen people adopt my talking points about the right being a bunch of low IQ losers.

Last year, I had a very well-known female columnist come up to me and say that I opened her eyes to right-wing stupidity, and now she can’t unsee it. Now Elon Musk is explicitly calling these people retarded, and Vivek is using typical culture of poverty arguments and directing them against the chuds.

It’s difficult to prove the degree to which my influence has caused this shift, but I do believe it has been significant. Early on, I saw that there was this inherent tension between the populist right’s Nietzschean aesthetics and the reality of the movement, which appeals to the dumbest people and encourages them to indulge in a victimhood mentality. Here’s Bannon now talking about how Kendi doesn’t go far enough in demanding more blacks and Hispanics in Silicon Valley. I saw this early, I harped on it, people tell me I’ve changed their outlook, and now I see many repeating my arguments, even manifesting the spirit in which I critique those I hate. It’s all very rewarding.

Speaking of influence, my reach continues to expand. In absolute terms, 2024 has been the best year of growth on both X and Substack by pretty wide margins. You limit your audience when you believe both that: 1) the left is deeply mistaken about politics, ethics, and the way the world works; and 2) the right is morally and intellectually inferior. There are theories out there that this is some kind of 4D Chess to gain attention and followers, but they reflect a complete misunderstanding of how human psychology and how the marketplace of ideas work.

I’m not aware of a single other prominent intellectual who took the position that Trump should be in jail but he was still better than Kamala. Some may believe that privately, although even here there are fewer than you would think because humans really aren’t wired to go that far in decoupling. I’ve lost a lot of friends, and some donors too, over my inability to overlook the flaws of Trump and his movement, or even be slightly more diplomatic in expressing my contempt.

There was a groupchat I was in that started after a business mogul who was stepping into the political arena wanted me to connect him with some of the smartest conservatives I knew. I did, and, reflecting my politics in 2022, they leaned towards the Nietzschean chuddery that I now detest. Others in the group spent more and more time kissing up to the rich guy and telling him he was brilliant as he dived into almost every rightoid rabbit hole and progressively got stupider, though he thankfully never became a right-wing socialist, while I argued with them about topics like immigration, white nationalism, and the resentment based political outlook that I was growing increasingly disillusioned with. I eventually left the group in mid-2023 and the rest of them continue chatting as best buddies without me. Of course, I’ve been completely vindicated, first by the triumph of the Catturd demographic, and now by rightists embracing Kendism on steroids.

Through this experience and others like it, I’ve realized that I am completely incapable of kissing up to people who could help me or maintaining potentially valuable relationships, if doing so requires compromising my intellectual integrity. Who even talks in terms of “intellectual integrity” today? Truth and virtue matter, without these things there would be no point to any of it. And it’s genuinely fun! I sometimes think of myself as brave, but then I remember that I really am incapable of behaving differently. It’s not that I feel the fear and then say what I believe. It’s more like I’m overcome with feelings of disgust towards all forms of stupidity and collectivist egalitarianism, and deeply in love with the vision of myself as a lone truth teller, and there aren’t even difficult decisions to make.

That said, I’ll still accept the label of brave. To deny it would be to punish myself for my virtues. The man who loves truth and hates falsehood so much that his path is predetermined is in many ways more honorable than the one who feels fear and then pushes forward anyway, even though both deserve admiration.

And also paid subscribers! Money isn’t as important to me as most people, but the main personal goal I have in the coming years is to convince my wife to have at least one more kid. That might take a bigger house. In the hopes of incentivizing more of you to give me money, I’m offering a 20% off for life promotion for those who become paid subscribers by January 1. Click below to take advantage.

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In the coming months, I’ll be finishing my book on Elite Human Capital. I’ve also been reading everything I can from Ayn Rand, and will be releasing a few pieces on her philosophy, epistemology, and role in our culture. I was able to take time away from my normal writing to do this thanks to a donation.

If anyone else out there wants me to write about a specific topic and it’s one I’m interested in, please reach out. How much money I make from paid subscribers is unsurprisingly strongly correlated with how much material I paywall, but I’d like to keep as much of my work freely available as possible. I prefer taking requests on topics I’m already interested in and then making the resulting products free over putting more behind the paywall. How much money I need to be induced to write about any particular topic will depend on my interest in it and how much work it will take.

I don’t plan to publish anything else this year other than the December links on Monday. Thanks to all the readers out there who make what I do possible, and I look forward to a wild year of engagement with ideas and the wider intellectual culture as we head into the second Trump administration.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.