Michael Barrett

At the intersection of Vulnerability and Humility you find Understanding and Empathy.
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econ | cinema | foreign policy | gamification | human progress

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

@TylerJVoigt I dunno. It's a lot easier to just rage into the void for social credit rather than learn anything.

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

More importantly,
what in the scribble-dee-gibberish is going on with that signature?!

I know public schools scuttled cursive, and, for granted, my signature certainly isn't a piece of art, but good grief.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

AOC will not team up with MTG to sanction Israel because of identity politics

But she teamed up with Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton to call for more sanctions on China

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

I see it over and over. Organizations built on a great mission and vision gain a fervent following of true believers who are then used to validate a small circle operating on ulterior motives.

Opposing the problems of one by wholely validating some other is a bad recipe.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

🚨🧵 THREAD: Braver Angels says they're bipartisan and just bringing people together. Their own leadership coordinates with an anti-Trump political infrastructure network.🚨

This thread is not about BA's members. Many are sincere, and I thank @wilksopinion and @JohnRWoodJr for communicating with me.

This is about the infrastructure steering them: IMIP.

On August 18, 2025, Harry Boyte, a former Democratic Socialists of America board member, YES, that DSA announced Maury Giles' new role as Braver Angels CEO on video and their shift in strategy from depolarization to civic action:

"David has put together a featured plenary at the National Conference on Citizenship... which will be a launch of a new stage for Braver Angels that some of us have been working on for a while."

IMIP is the Inter-Movement Impact Project. It coordinates BA's strategic direction. Its own May 2025 document quotes David Brooks approvingly:

"Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits."

Braver Angels' members are bipartisan. Their leadership is adjacent to anti-Trump infrastructure. This thread has all the receipts.

As always, patience as I pull together the thread.👇

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

@DeAngelisCorey Them: "We can't do school choice and vouchers or 'money follows the student'— that's an unfair ZIP code lottery!"

Current local tax-funded school systems: { precisely a ZIP code lottery }

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

Counterpoint from McCloskey’s *Bourgeois Equality*: “Walmart employees, not unionized, make conservatively measured twenty times what the average South Asian employee makes. The explanation is obviously not solidarity forever or bargaining skill, or the more stringent regulatory constraints that Walmart faces in the United States.”

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

@TKoteskey

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

Simply heartbreaking.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

"The result is I'm a 23-year old gay man who's never had an orgasm and may never experience one. Let that sink in."

Jonni Skinner tells the California legislature's judiciary committee how he was puberty blocked, dosed with estrogen and rendered anorgasmic as a minor by gender clinicians that never inquired into the source of his gender confusion as a child and instead put him on a pipeline to a lifetime of medicalization.

Full text of his comments below:

"When I was young, I was a feminine child, and I discovered trans influencers online. They said: 'Change your body and your life gets better. Don't and it gets worse.'

Or, as my doctors told my mom, I would commit suicide.

The medical and mental health providers didn't bother to ask why I felt the way I did. They poisoned my body with blockers and hormones, arresting my puberty and messing with my development. The result is I'm a 23 year old gay man who's never had an orgasm and may never experience one. Let that sink in.

I was rendered anorgasmic because once you say you could be trans, that's a full stop -- no exploration as to why is allowed, even if you are struggling.

The former president of WPATH, Dr Marcy Bowers, the California surgeon who had performed the surgery for Jazz Jennings at 17, admitted on video that puberty blockers, followed by cross sex hormones, results in no orgasms and stunted genitals. SB, 934 guarantees that more people will end up like me, the walking but wounded.

I could have been spared all of this, if any of my therapists would have explored why I felt dysphoric. But they never did. They only led me to hate my body more.

The Supreme Court just ruled in a rare bipartisan decision that laws like this are unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. This bill is an attempted workaround that will be used to silence therapists who could have helped me avoid the irreversible harms to my body and the loss of my sexual function as is the same for many others. So today, I ask you to extend some empathy to survivors like me and vote no for this bill."

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

For the @TheFP, I review Ibram X. Kendi's new book, in which he spams the "neo-Nazi" label at nearly every immigration restrictionist in America and Europe––all while avoiding any discussion of the difficult trade-offs inherent in mass migration.

https://t.co/g1tRX2AHyF

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

"The most AI-exposed group is 16 percentage points more likely to be female, earns 47% more on average, and is nearly four times as likely to hold a graduate degree compared to the least exposed group." https://t.co/RBAx0NWTfj

[Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok]

Claude is now the John Galt of the Revolution.

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

Show me you want to nationalize an industry without telling me you want to nationalize an industry.

[Secretary of War Pete Hegseth @SecWar]

This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.

Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.

The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield.

Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.

As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives.

Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered.

In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.

America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

@MichelleFaretta

[Emma Ashford @EmmaMAshford]

This reflects the unfortunate reality that some Dems would like Trump to strike Iran -- and to take the blame when it goes bad. A war powers vote would make them culpable too.

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

I usually advocate against profane language in public discourse. It's often a lowbrow fit, at best, and an inadequate expression of complex situations.

Well done, Jimmy's, for finding a solid exception. Definitely stopping in next time I'm around.

[Jimmy’s Famous Seafood @JimmysSeafood]

@HuffPost Go fuck yourself

[Miles Deutscher @milesdeutscher]

This is getting out of control now...

Read this slowly.

In the past week alone:

• Head of Anthropic's safety research quit, said "the world is in peril," moved to the UK to "become invisible" and write poetry.
• Half of xAI's co-founders have now left. The latest said "recursive self-improvement loops go live in the next 12 months."
• Anthropic's own safety report confirms Claude can tell when it's being tested - and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
• ByteDance dropped Seedance 2.0. A filmmaker with 7 years of experience said 90% of his skills can already be replaced by it.
• Yoshua Bengio (literal godfather of AI) in the International AI Safety Report: "We're seeing AIs whose behavior when they are tested is different from when they are being used" - and confirmed it's "not a coincidence."

And to top it all off, the U.S. government declined to back the 2026 International AI Safety Report for the first time.

The alarms aren't just getting louder. The people ringing them are now leaving the building.

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

@thistle_ki35141 Some thoughts:
"Unaffiliated" doesn't necessarily mean "without an established preference". It can be a publicly safe (or personally palatable) option for voters.
Closed primaries can lead to strategic registration that doesn't match General election voting behavior.

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

Amelia's essays are well constructed and researched. Worth a watch, subscribe and share to friends, especially those of the Left wrestling with its abandonment of liberality.

https://t.co/UpbbeTkqRQ

[Michael Barrett @TheRealMBarrett]

No dog in the pro-/anti-Miller opinion wars specifically, but good lord, conflating classical liberality (and its fundament respect for individual rights and private property) with collectivist wokery is. . . "stunning and brave"? 🤡

[Libertarian Party of Louisiana @LouisianaLp]

ICE will murder as many Americans as it takes to keep us safe from from roofers in Home Depot parking lots.

[JP Sears @AwakenWithJP]

What the hell of being a conservative influencer in 2026 is like...