@steveinpursuit case for optimism:
Turns out morality is this really powerful constraint on people's behavior that gets unbelievably deep into their psychology.
And when one is thinking about how to interact with the world, one is implicitly always checking with one's moral constraints.
And this is good. This is a feature. This is what we want.
However, as you said, you know, there are some percentage of people who don't have that moral constraint and it might even be more accurate to model them as saying they have embraced inverting the morality of regular folks to see that there are tactics and tools available to them that give them an enormous amount of power that other people are not participating in.
So I was, I was using the analogy of cake.
There's a certain amount of cake on the table.
And if you behave yourself, you eat the good cake.
And then there's the other people that are constraining themselves with morals or eating a good cake, and then they all leave.
And then there's like a ton of evil cake that's left over.
And all you got to do to eat the evil cake that's there is just, you know, loosen your moral constraints.
And you'll find there's, there's a bounty awaiting a waiting one for embracing evil.
So that is that is how I'm modeling things here.
At least I do think that's what we're up against.
That sort of makes sense that that space is going to be taken by some entities.
However, my point is to say, despite that, in the face of that, there's still cause for optimism.
Because even if in their diabolical schemes, they're trying to harm you and take your money and take your stuff and, you know, harm your neurology, whatever it is, it doesn't mean that even if they find some crazy legally, technically legal way of harming you and stealing from you, doesn't mean you have to go along with it.
So I don't want people to feel like they're locked in.
It's like, Oh, no, this, this criminal says he owns my house, and I'm just going to roll over and give him my house.
I don't think we have to live in that world.
Tulsi Gabbard didn't release the Fauci files to get justice. She released them to demoralize you while crowning herself a hero for people too lazy to ask one question. Why now? Why her last day?
Because the cage was already double-locked and she knew it.
Lock one. The statute of limitations on Fauci's cleanest perjury count ran out on May 11. He sat in front of Congress in 2021 and swore the NIH never funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan. That was the case. Rand Paul screamed about the deadline for weeks. Nancy Mace screamed about it. The DOJ sat on its hands and let the clock hit zero. The last window closes in July. It's almost gone too.
Lock two. Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci on his last night in office. So even if the clock hadn't run out, he walks. There was never going to be a trial. Not now, not ever.
Gabbard knows all of this. Her staff knows all of this. She waited until the man was untouchable by two separate failsafes, then strolled out the door and handed you the receipts like she just cracked the case. That's not courage. That's a magician showing you the trick after the show's over and taking a bow.
You're not getting accountability. You're getting a highlight reel. You learn just enough truth to feel something, then watch nothing happen, on purpose. That's the entire function. Outrage with no exit. Knowledge with no remedy. They want you informed and powerless, because a powerless informed population is easier to manage than an ignorant one.
If you're celebrating this, you're one of two things. You don't understand the process, or you're helping run the con. There is no third option.
And anyone who points to this stunt as a reason to back Tulsi for higher office should be disregarded on the spot. Not debated. Disregarded. Falling for the same trick twice is not a personality. It's not a badge. It's a disqualification.
I get that people make mistakes. I get that some of you just woke up. Fine. But the technocracy isn't waiting for you to finish your learning curve. The clock ran out years ago and we cannot keep handing the microphone to people who found the fight yesterday and want a medal for showing up.
We already lost three years to this exact play. Theater, delay, applause, nothing. I am not losing three more.
How is it 2026 and we’re still fighting to get mother pigs out of cages and horse-drawn carriages off the dangerous streets of New York City?
A society cannot thrive when powerful industries put profit ahead of public safety, human and planetary health, and the welfare of vulnerable animals.
The solutions are clear. The public supports them. The time for action is now.
NEW: Illinois is about to TAX @AllTrails $665,000 PER MONTH!!!! That's $8 MILLION/year. Their annual revenue is only $100 M (est). That's 8% of their revenue!!!!
This new law also taxes all other for-profit social media companies.
No I am not joking. And AllTrails is clearly in the definition.
A rough estimate via available data suggests AllTrails has 2 million users in Illinois.
A platform of this size has to pay "$165,000, plus $0.50 per month multiplied by the number of Illinois users over 1,000,000." That's $665,000!!!!
🚨🇺🇸 A terrified Bongino told Tucker that Trump shut down the Butler investigation himself.
Tucker says he accidentally obtained the Thomas Crooks social media posts the FBI claimed didn't exist, then called Kash Patel and Dan Bongino looking for answers.
Bongino, a friend of many years, allegedly became hysterical before finally telling him to take it up with Trump, who he said killed the Butler investigation himself.
Tucker says he still has every text exchange.
"There's no good explanation for shutting down an investigation into your own attempted murder.
This is not what we've been told it was."
@TuckerCarlson@TCNetwork
For those of you scoring along at home, the LA mayoral election has now moved from the "you have no proof of cheating" phase to the "okay fine, now you have proof, but there's nothing you can do about it" phase.
Senator Tom Cotton, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has advanced a provision in the FY2027 Intelligence Authorization Act that would require the President of the United States to expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel across a broad list of subjects.
The provision would also bar the President from suspending or materially limiting that intelligence sharing except on the basis of a specific and identifiable national security concern determined by the President.
Follow: @AFpost
BREAKING NEWS: Sen. Marshall (KS) — the former Senate sponsor of the "Save Our Bacon" Act — has had a change of heart. This is the most significant moment yet in the campaign to stop SOB. Credit where it's due: it takes integrity to evolve on an issue. Kansas farmers and animals are better for it. The momentum against SOB continues to grow.
Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI:
Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible.
1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun.
2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love.
Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI.
Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.
🚨Los Angeles Election Fraud Caught on Hidden Camera
LA election petitioners were caught on tape giving homeless individuals other voters' information, instructing them to forge voter names and signatures, and offering cash and drugs as incentives to register to vote.
Suddenly, you're 40.
You earn 6-figures. You feel rich. But there's never enough money. Worst of all, you never have free time. Always busy. Packed calendar. Endless meetings. An overflowing email inbox.
Most of it is meaningless.
When you really analyze where you're at in life, you realize your real hopes and dreams have been forgotten.
You had dreams of being an artist, athlete, or entrepreneur. Now you're just showing up to a desk and following orders.
It's painful. It makes you sad.
To recover, you take regular holidays and crave weekends. Netflix is an excellent escape too. The hard part is you can't see yourself continuing to live like this until 65.
It feels off. "Is this all there is?"
But nobody talks about it. Friends and family just pretend they're happy. They ignore talking about this existential crisis.
People think you're crazy if you dare talk about it.
The longer it goes on the more tired you get. Waking up gets harder. The temptation to eat junk food increases. And your desire for life slowly fades into settling for second best.
Around this time the pressure to own a home and have a family intensifies. It's expected. And you feel stupid for not doing it.
This makes you feel even more lost.
The solution I found at 40 is to stop lying to yourself. Admit how you feel. Write about it. Decide to do something about it.
It'll probably make you weird. You won't fit in anymore. But at least you'll admit what's really going on and have the chance to change.
The reality is unless you constantly open up to change and try new things, you'll never figure out what the hell you want to do.
Staying still is the real death. Commit to change. Experiment. Treat your life like an A/B test.
That's how you escape the meaning crisis at 40.
This is the most important week in the history of animal welfare: if the Save Our Bacon Act passes, not only will it kill the most impactful welfare-related laws of the past decade, it will also restrict any future progress.
The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill, so if you care about this stuff but have been waiting for the right moment to help, this is that moment.
If you want to fight this and can donate six figures or more, please DM me or Dwarkesh.
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In case it's helpful context, the SOB Act aims to block states from deciding their own laws about animal products sold within their borders.
This is massive federal overreach. But the meat industry supports it because they haven't been able to stop state-level ballot measures.
Take California’s prop 12. When it passed in 2018, it banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates, where they live in forced confinement for years without ever once being able to turn around (read Dwarkesh's tweet for a more detailed and horrifying description).
The industrial pork lobby fought prop 12 hard, and once it passed, they poured money into getting it struck down. They even brought it to the Supreme Court, where it was upheld.
So the pork lobby pivoted and now they're focusing on getting the SOB Act passed. If it passes, it would immediately unwind prop 12 alongside a bunch of other important state-level laws.
I want to spend the next decade building on the momentum of victories like prop 12, not just relitigating the same bills we spent the 2010s fighting for. That’s only possible if the Farm Bill passes without the SOB Act.
Spoiler Alert!
Spencer Pratt will be pushed into third place through overt election fraud and therefore removed from the runoff for Mayor of Los Angeles.
It's happening in plain sight.
Everyone can see it.
We all knew something was very wrong when both Laura Loomer and Netanyahu were calling for an end to U.S. Foreign aid to Israel.
What they were planning to do was (secretly) funnel that money through military infrastructure, binding both U.S. and Israel’s armies in unholy matrimony for decades to come.
They were counting on the fact that nobody in congress actually reads the massive bills they vote on, and they would have gotten away with it had it not been for citizen journalism.
An excellent breakdown of one of the most unpatriotic things in history that they just tried to do:
Truly disturbing that the American Veterinary Medical Association (@AVMAvets) is lobbying Congress to keep pigs in tiny crates.
Welfare scientist Donald Broom said it's "much worse than severely beating an animal."
Seems like a clear violation of the veterinarian's oath.