Last week I was in Madrid when Spain beat Argentina to win the World Cup.

The atmosphere was festive and replete with national pride.

Spanish flags and jerseys dotted the landscape.

There were Argentine flags too, which made sense.

Madrid has one of the largest Argentine populations of any city outside Argentina.

But there was one flag I didn’t expect to see.

“Must everything be about Palestine?” I exclaimed to a friend, almost involuntarily.

There, at a soccer celebration, was a Palestinian flag.

Early in 2025, when anti-ICE protests were at full blaze in Los Angeles, I attended one such demonstration downtown.

Unsurprisingly, Mexican flags were the most common.

Surprisingly, the second most common flag, and by a narrower margin than one might expect, was not the American flag.

It was the Palestinian flag.

At an American protest.

In an American city.

About American immigration policy.

And the flag of a territory seven thousand miles away was more visible than the flag of the country whose laws were the entire subject of the demonstration.

In this essay, you’ll learn:

• Why local American politicians are making high-stakes promises about international policy they have zero legal authority to enforce.

• How a single foreign conflict transformed into an all-encompassing ideological purity test for domestic politics.

• The stark difference between political performance and practical, real-world outcomes.

• How to spot when a political movement starts valuing ideological alignment over actual competence.

The Promise

In December 2024, Zohran Mamdani sat down with Mehdi Hasan and was asked whether he would welcome Benjamin Netanyahu to New York City.

He said that as mayor, New York City would arrest him.

He repeated it through the campaign.

He won in a landslide.

Netanyahu is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly in September.

On Tuesday evening, Mayor Mamdani posted a video announcing that his administration had reviewed every avenue under applicable law and concluded that the city does “not have the independent legal authority” to enforce the ICC warrant.

In the same video where he conceded he could not do the thing he promised, he called Netanyahu a war criminal, called him the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people, said he was not welcome in New York City, and called on the federal government to arrest him instead.

Mamdani is a generational political talent. He has extraordinary intuition about how to use social media.

And he deftly managed to shift his audience’s attention away from the fact that he wasn’t going to fulfill his promise and toward a fresh round of condemnation — and to shift fulfillment of his own promise from him to Trump, without naming Trump.

It worked. His base loved it.

Politically speaking, it was skillfully done.

It Was Obvious the Whole Time

Zohran isn’t even the thousandth politician to make a promise he didn’t keep.

That isn’t unique to him, or the left, or socialists.

What’s worth commenting on is that the promise was such a powerful political tool in the first place.

Because it’s a promise he never should have made.

A mayor has no authority to enforce an international court’s warrant.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, which is the treaty that created the ICC and obligates member states to arrest people it charges.

No mayor can convert an ICC order into a New York warrant by executive direction.

He did not need to be in office to know this.

It’s both intuitively and legally obvious that a mayor of a city can’t arrest the prime minister of a country.

Other Democrats knew it too.

During the campaign, the Manhattan congressman Jerry Nadler said the proposal was simply unrealistic, and that “The City of New York has no jurisdiction to do such a thing.”

His own party said it.

It didn’t matter.

Zohran promised something there was no way he could deliver, about a matter that isn’t part of the New York City mayor’s role.

He got all the upside of making a promise, and none of the downside of keeping it.

And people are willing to overlook it, because Palestine is such an emotionally charged issue that they are abandoning rationality.

And if the reporting is right, this wasn’t just a calculated move.

It was calculated before Zohran was ever in office.

I didn’t know that until I went digging, and I found it the way I find everything now. Through Ground News.

The moment a story like this breaks, social media makes it worse. Louder, more confident, more contradictory. You can scroll for an hour on the Mamdani video and come away knowing less than when you started, a little dumber and a lot angrier.

So I track these stories on Ground News instead. It’s been my favorite news app for two years, since well before they ever sponsored me, because it hands me the high-level picture without the scrolling and the mental pollution that comes with it.

I pulled up the Mamdani story and it showed me 80 different sources covering it, and it tags each one with its bias right on the card.

That’s where I found the thread. A Vanity Fair piece, tagged left. That matters here. When a publication sympathetic to Mamdani is the one reporting the pivot was premeditated, that’s not partisan spin. That’s a friendly outlet telling on him. And seeing the bias on every source means you absorb the slant on purpose instead of by accident, which is the whole game I’ve been showing you in this piece.

I clicked through and read the Vanity Fair piece in full, because I always verify before I put something in front of you.

The headline oversells it, but the reporting underneath is damning. His own communications director says the pivot was planned during the transition, before Mamdani took office.

At best, he made an irresponsible promise.

At worst, he knowingly made a promise he couldn’t fulfill, per the Vanity Fair reporting.

I don’t read Vanity Fair.

So Ground News handed me a thread I’d never have found on my own.

You can get the full picture across the spectrum for 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx.

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What the Warrant Actually Is

While we’re here, it’s worth clarifying what the International Criminal Court did — because it did not designate Netanyahu a war criminal.

Under Article 58 of the Rome Statute, an ICC Pre-Trial Chamber can issue an arrest warrant when it finds reasonable grounds to believe a person committed a crime within the court’s jurisdiction, and that arrest is necessary to secure their appearance.

That is a threshold finding to compel appearance. It’s roughly analogous to probable cause in the American legal system.

It is part of the investigative process.

There has been no trial and no verdict.

People are entitled to think Netanyahu is a war criminal.

That’s just not what the ICC has said yet.

Palestine Is No Longer a Topic, It’s a Worldview

I’m not going to litigate the conflict here.

I’ve commented on it a few times tangentially. I’ve said what I think Israel needs to do better.

I’ve commented on statements like this one from Ben-Gvir, a high-ranking member of Israel’s government, which is a profoundly destructive and psychopathic thing to say.

I’ve also pointed out that for all the condemnation the pro-Palestine movement has for Israel, very little focus seems to be on Hamas — which kills its own people, hides in civilian clothing, and plants infrastructure among civilian neighborhoods.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have marched against their own government’s handling of this war.

I have never once seen a Free Palestine march in the West turn out against Hamas.

Many more Israelis are visibly holding Israel accountable than Free Palestine people are holding Hamas accountable.

The suffering in Gaza is catastrophic, and being horrified by it is the correct response.

And horror doesn’t build a solution. It’s fuel.

But a movement that runs on outrage alone, that never turns it into pressure on Hamas — which shares responsibility with Israel for endangering Palestinian lives through terrible leadership — isn’t helping the people it grieves for.

A serious peacemaking effort has to address the excesses and responsibilities of both parties, even if you think one is more culpable than the other. The Palestine movement isn’t doing that.

So that’s what I’ve said so far. I may comment more on the conflict itself, but it’s not the focus of this article.

What I primarily want to comment on here is the fact that Palestine has become a worldview in and of itself, and it is distorting American politics for the worse.

From here, you’ll learn:

• How a rising progressive star got targeted by his own organization over a single trip, and what it reveals about modern political purity enforcement.

• Why political candidates with massive personal red flags can still dominate primaries simply by signaling the right tribal allegiance.

• The simple analytical framework that transforms complex local issues like housing, rent, and policing into black-and-white moral tests.

• How real-world peace deals and hostage returns actually get negotiated—and why ideological movements struggle to acknowledge practical wins.

• Why statements routinely made by Democratic leadership a decade ago are now treated as political heresy within their own party.

Read more

We are 105 days from the midterms.

Prediction markets give Republicans a ~17% chance of keeping Congress.

The single most likely outcome on the board is Democrats taking both chambers, at 48%.

Losing one chamber would be a serious blow to Trump’s ability to deliver anything he promised.

Losing both would be catastrophic.

That’s the backdrop for everything that follows — keep it in mind.

Because Thursday night, Trump gave a primetime address about the 2020 election.

He’s right about what we need to do — pass voter ID.

He’s fighting a worthy battle.

But it comes at the expense of the war.

The war to solve the economic problems that most Americans actually care about — and that are radicalizing the youth.

One more thing before I start.

If you’ve noticed I’ve been pushing back more on figures on the right lately, there’s a reason.

It’s a specific kind of reasoning I want to name — a reflex to treat suspicion as evidence, to turn every irregularity into a conspiracy.

It’s the claims that the election was stolen from Spencer Pratt.

It’s the claims Candace Owens is making about Charlie Kirk’s death.

It’s the claims Trump has made about the 2020 election.

The issue is not making claims.

It’s that the way the claims get made lacks intellectual rigor.

And I think it’s genuinely damaging — to the credibility of the right with independents, who are now the largest political bloc in this country, and to the many correct points people on the right are actually making.

I’m saying this as someone who agrees more with the right than the left.

Someone who voted for Trump, who doesn’t want to see the right lose the midterms, and who doesn’t want to see a Democratic Party that’s drifting further left gain more power in this country.

I’ll explain what I mean at the end. But first, let me tell you where Trump is right.

1. Where He’s Right

Trump is right: We need voter ID.

Not because the last election was stolen.

Because a democracy runs on trust, people have little, and it needs to be restored.

When a large share of the country doesn’t believe the results are clean, that belief is a crisis on its own — whether or not it’s correct.

Voter ID is part of how you rebuild it.

It’s cheap, it’s simple, and roughly 8 in 10 Americans support it.

It’s a no-brainer.

The argument that people have made against the SAVE America Act is that it doesn’t require any old ID — it requires proof of citizenship: a passport or birth certificate.

The former, many have never owned, and the latter can be tedious to get, particularly for poorer people and those with less time.

But getting a birth certificate is a solvable hurdle, not an impossible one.

Where it’s genuinely hard, fund it and make the document free. Lower the cost of clearing the bar. Don’t pretend the bar shouldn’t exist.

This should already be law, and the Democrats are in the way.

He’s Also Right About the Media

ABC and NBC declined to carry the president’s address on their primary broadcast networks.

The sitting president of the United States addresses the nation about the integrity of its elections, and two major networks decided you don’t get to see it on the channel that actually reaches you.

Networks have editorial discretion, and they should keep it.

They should not lose their licenses for this, as Trump has threatened.

But their job — the entire reason the profession exists — is to give people the most relevant information and the context to process it.

When the president speaks to the country about something this fundamental, that should be aired, on the main channel, no matter what you think of him.

If what he’s saying is false, your job is to put it in front of people and counter it — in real time, with your best reporters and the truth.

You don’t fight falsehood by suppressing it.

That just guarantees the claims spread everywhere without fact-checking.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes people stop trusting the press.

They didn’t protect the public.

They made a decision on the public’s behalf about what it could handle.

Paternalism instead of journalism.

2. The Battle and the War

But while Trump is spending massive amounts of public attention and patience on this battle, he is losing the war of public opinion, and losing political capital.

And the polling reflects that.

The energy he’s pouring into this fight — the primetime slots, the declassified document drops, the running war with the networks — is energy not spent on the thing that actually will decide the midterms, and his ability to execute his agenda.

To the public, it looks like he is majoring in the minors.

The war is not with China, which he’s newly accusing of “compromising” the election.

The war is not with the Democrats, who he accused of stealing the election.

The war is with the economic problems that will make Americans sympathetic to both of them.

It’s that young people can’t afford a home. Can’t afford groceries. Can’t afford gas.

That’s the fertile soil that socialism is growing in.

That’s what makes the Chinese model increasingly appealing to young people, regardless of what China does.

That’s what makes Gen Z — a demographic Trump made historic gains with in 2024 — increasingly far left.

When people feel the system isn’t delivering, they go looking for something — anything — that promises it will, whether that’s a foreign model or a domestic one.

The affordability collapse is the war.

And right now people see the president focused on skirmishes.

3. The China Chapter in the 2020 Election Saga

Look at the address itself through that lens.

Trump released hundreds of pages of declassified intelligence and made three claims.

1. China illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files.

2. The intelligence community buried it, filtering China out of his briefings while an FBI official texted that she was running a “shadow government.”

3. Venezuela ran an experiment swapping votes on its own machines. The implication is that this could happen on our machines.

Then he told Congress to pass the SAVE America Act.

Now watch what’s happened to Trump’s election claims over time.

He changed the enemy. For years, the story was that Democrats stole the election. Thursday night, the villain was China.

He softened the claim. For years, the word was “stolen.” Thursday, it was “compromised” — the system has holes.

Those are different accusations, and “compromised” is the weaker one.

He kept the spectacle, but weakened his claim.

This is not mere semantics.

Look at the statement from John Solomon — the man Trump brought into the White House last month to run this release.

Shortly after the speech, on camera, he admitted the intelligence community has “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ‘22 or ‘24.”

The full document-by-document audit is in the paid section.

So here’s the pattern:

First the election was stolen; now it was compromised.

First it was the Democrats; now it’s China.

It’s whack-a-mole — and every version proves at best intent to meddle, never a stolen vote.

Which, I speculate, is why they swapped “stolen” for “compromised.”

To be clear: we should assume our rivals always want to influence our elections — including China.

That’s a great argument for voter ID. It creates more trust in the eyes of voters.

It is not a reason to keep telling the country its elections were stolen when the government has not presented sufficient evidence six years later.

And it is not a reason to keep spending so much of the public’s attention and limited patience on what is not even a top-three issue for most voters.

This is a battle. And it’s worth passing a bill at some point.

But it is not the war.

And with three and a half months to go until midterms, all the energy needs to go to winning the war.

None of this means the concern is imaginary.

But voter ID is a concern, not a code red.

If a cataclysmic breach were exposed Thursday, or any time in the last six years, that would be one thing.

But that’s not what we got Thursday.

Instead we got more evidence that the system should be improved to create trust, not evidence that it’s broken.

This is a key distinction that keeps getting lost in the election fraud discussion.

I’ll address that later in the article.

4. The Public Doesn’t Like These Priorities

One of the easiest ways to win a campaign is to find an enemy, as Trump has done with the Democrats and is now doing with China.

But right now, the war that needs to be waged is not on a people — it’s on problems.

60% of Americans say Trump is not focused on the country’s most important problems.

The top three, in every poll, all term long: inflation, jobs, the economy.

What people see him focused on is an unpopular war in Iran, ICE, and election fraud.

And at the top of every speech, he tells us the economy is doing great.

That’s not what people feel.

“The economy” is not the stock market to most people.

These kids voting for Zohran Mamdani don’t own stocks.

They own debt.

They need cheap groceries and gas.

They want homes.

That’s the economy that decides elections, and it’s getting 20% of the airtime when it needs 80% — at least.

This is not to say winning the Iran war isn’t important. Or that election security isn’t important.

It’s to point out that everything the president does is important, but not everything is of equal priority.

And right now, to 60% of Americans, Trump’s priorities appear backwards.

Nobody voted in 2024 to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. They voted to afford their lives.

The attention is inverted in the eyes of the public.

Eighty percent of it goes to the twenty percent of issues people care about least.

The public’s attention is a scarce resource. Its patience is scarcer.

And he is spending both on an issue the majority of voters don’t prioritize.

5. The Stakes

Prediction markets give Republicans a ~17% chance of holding Congress.

Nate Silver puts Democrats at 85 to 90% to take the House and says the markets are, if anything, low.

That is the crisis Trump is facing, and if he doesn’t solve this, his ability to solve all of the problems he wants to solve — including election security — will be crippled.

Election security matters, but despite all the pomp and circumstance, Trump’s announcement didn’t reveal a cataclysmic vulnerability in those documents.

Trump’s own task force member said so on camera.

The five-alarm emergency is in the polling, not the intelligence files.

And every day spent on a six-year-old grievance that is low on the list of priorities for most Americans is a day not spent on fixing the real cataclysm — the conditions driving the rise of socialism and its corrosive effect on our country.

I say this as someone who voted for him and wants him to win.

I’m not under any illusions that Trump will ever say he lost the 2020 election fair and square.

But he doesn’t have to say he was wrong to preserve political capital.

He just has to stop investing in this battle, for now.

Take the principle — that elections must be both secure and seen as secure.

Pass the bill without making the campaign for it about 2020 — or pass it later, if needed.

And let the rest go.

That’s the strong move and the smart move at once.

Refusing it is a gift to the people he’s trying to beat.

6. Why It Matters

I still believe Trump was the best option available in 2024.

And given what the Democratic Party is becoming — given the rise of socialism inside it — I’m more against the alternative than ever.

That’s precisely why the wasted attention is a strategic error.

Because the thing pushing young people toward socialism isn’t abstract unproven claims.

It’s not “the economy” in the aggregate, stock market and all.

It’s that they can’t afford a home, or groceries, or gas.

That’s the war.

And if Trump loses Congress in three and a half months, he doesn’t just lose power to fix the smaller things.

He loses power to fix anything — the economy included. Stalled bills, subpoenas, two years of trench warfare, and a wide-open lane for exactly the socialism we’re trying to stop.

He may win the battle over voter ID. He’s winning the battle over the media. He deserves credit for both.

And he is losing the war while he does it.

Pass the bill. Then go fight the fight that the majority of Americans want you to win.

Trump did make new claims about the 2020 election that are worth taking seriously.

In the paid section, I go claim by claim through what was released Thursday night — the 220 million files, the “shadow government” text, the “deliberately massaged” briefings, the Venezuela machines.

What holds up, what collapses, and the one thread that deserves a real investigation no matter which side you’re on.

And I answer the question underneath all of it: why this debate won’t die, in one picture — a bank vault — that will help make this whole election fraud conversation make sense.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why invisible safeguards cause election paranoia, and why pointing at an irregularity isn’t proof of a stolen vote.

• What China actually downloaded, what was already public data, and what the intel actually proves.

• The recalled field report from Albany: the one live thread that holds actual weight and deserves answers.

• Why these claims trace back to a compromised source and actually argue against their own headlines.

• How treating suspicion as evidence sabotages credibility with independents when it matters most.

Read more

Two years ago, Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.

I remember vividly where I was when it happened.

I was in my living room, watching the video on my phone.

I saw Trump, blood streaming down his face, raise his fist in defiance.

I felt a sensation in the center of my chest. The feeling was ineffable—like a heatless, pure fire enveloping me. The raw sensation of aliveness.

I was shocked.

Not just at what I was seeing.

But at the fact that I felt so strongly about it.

I had never been a political person.

I had voted for Democrats, more out of routine than conviction. I voted against Trump in 2016.

But it all felt removed. Voting was just a ritual I did every 4 years.

Fast forward to 2024, and I’d started paying attention.

Started mentally detaching from the Democrats as I realized many of their actions and positions didn’t align with my views.

And perhaps most troubling—how they obscured Biden’s declining cognitive health.

So I started inspecting my own beliefs.

And I realized how many of them were not based on what I’d actually researched and deeply considered, but were simply the default beliefs of my tribe.

I started to realize that—although there were plenty of legitimate criticisms one could make of Trump—many of them were just…based on flawed premises. For example, the claim that he called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.”

All of that, coupled with the hyper-tribal, antibody response that the Left had to Trump, made me realize—politics had been captured with narratives over nuance, and whatever his flaws, Trump had been demonized and dehumanized to a dangerous degree.

And rather than have conversations where we could resolve our differences through speech, leaders and institutions on the Left were using force—cancellations, convictions—to enforce their beliefs.

But I was still deeply uncomfortable with Trump.

Eight years of hearing only negative things about him from my information sphere does that.

But to me, that moment that he was shot transcended politics.

It was about the human condition.

We’d watched force be used to resolve disagreements, rather than conversation.

First through cancellations.

Then through convictions.

And finally, killing.

We still don’t know why Thomas Crooks tried to kill Trump—and I’m not going to say he was from the Left.

But it didn’t matter.

This was beyond sides.

We’d reached a point where humans were willing to kill people over politics.

And that is a horrible place to be.

I also saw something in Trump that I didn’t expect to see.

Courage. The kind that cannot be faked.

And I realized he wasn’t just some freewheeling businessman. He wasn’t just “The Apprentice” guy.

He actually had convictions, and was willing to die for them.

So I was willing to listen.

I say all of this now, but these are all realizations I had about my motives in hindsight.

In that moment, all I had was that burning in my chest.

And I knew I had to say something.

I didn’t know what I was going to say.

I just had to get it off my chest.

So I did.

I was scared.

Scared of being viewed as the black MAGA race traitor.

Scared of being viewed as endorsing Trump.

Scared of being labeled as a conspiracy theorist.

My mind scrambled after I recorded the video to figure out whether I should post it.

After all, what if I was wrong?

But I knew that feeling in my chest was telling me something.

The video didn’t have a bunch of citations. It wasn’t as refined as my videos today.

But it was real.

So I posted it.

The next day I woke up to something I’d never experienced.

Hundreds of thousands of people watched it.

Then millions.

It was getting watched everywhere—X, Instagram, TikTok. Even the New York Times.

And that’s the day that this journey and mission I’m now calling Clear Thinker began.

A name that, in case you’re wondering, I did not come up with. It came from Elon.

It’s tricky talking about politics on the Internet.

As much as I try to make my content impersonal, to talk about politics is to expose yourself personally.

People’s natural impulse is to want to categorize other people—right, left, black, white, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, etc.

I don’t like labels and I’m wary of tribes.

But I’ll readily acknowledge that in the current moment, I agree with the Right much more than the Left.

But it’s really beside the point.

What I think really isn’t that important. My name, Kaizen, means evolution. That means my ideas and positions will evolve as I do.

What I want to be constant is the value I provide to you.

I hope that you come away from every word I share feeling that I helped you think more clearly.

I hope you come away from my posts feeling calmer.

I hope you come away feeling like you took a breath of fresh air amidst the polluted atmosphere of politics.

I hope that when I inevitably provoke you, it’s thought-provoking.

(I promise, I don’t like triggering people for its own sake.)

I want people to be reminded that we can talk about hard things, without devolving into personal attacks.

Or worse, physical attacks.

I hope that’s what you’ve been getting out of Clear Thinker, regardless of how often you agree.

Because I’m going to keep bringing it.

Thank you for trusting me with your time and mind.

Happy Anniversary.

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On October 31, 2024, I went to a Trump rally and a Kamala rally. On the same day.

By that point I was at the end of a months-long journey. I had voted for Democrats all my life, but had come to believe Trump was the best choice in 2024.

I wanted to do one last thing before locking in my vote — go to a Trump rally and see the community for myself.

It confirmed my suspicion. This was not the white-supremacist red-hat fan club the media told me to expect.

It was a passionate, positive, surprisingly funny group of people.

By comparison, the crowd at the Kamala rally seemed energized, but fearful and negative.

Not quite a year later, I attended Charlie Kirk’s memorial at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

I wasn’t very familiar with Charlie’s work before he died. A year prior, I’d assumed he was a typical right-wing commentator making “own the libs” content, and that his shtick was embarrassing college students for views.

It was only after he died that I began to appreciate what he was trying to do — steer a frustrated, desperate generation of young people (facing a brutal job market, massive student debt, and astronomical home prices) away from bad ideas that have destroyed civilizations.

How prescient he was, considering the current rise of socialism.

And he was doing it with nothing but the force of good ideas, freely spoken.

He did so imperfectly, but successfully. And he seemed to be one of the few leaders even trying.

It was the malevolent glee of those who celebrated his death — along with the distortions of his more controversial opinions — that made me look at his work in long form, with fresh eyes, to see for myself if he was as bad as people said.

He was not. In fact — I concluded — he was a very good man attempting a very difficult thing.

So going into the memorial, I suspected I was walking not into a neo-Nazi rally, as social media would have me believe, but into something different.

What, I didn’t yet know.

What I experienced was an inspiring surprise.

Charlie’s death was catalyzing healing.

JD Vance proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ.

Trump and Elon making amends after a public falling out.

Erika Kirk forgiving her husband’s killer.

Less prominent speakers echoed her message.

Repeatedly emphasizing that Charlie put Christ at the center of his life.

For the most part, this was not a rally about taking an eye for an eye.

There were speeches I disliked.

Stephen Miller’s I found unhelpfully aggressive — a swordsman looking for someone to swing at.

I was disappointed by Trump’s admission that he hates his enemies, amused by his candor, and slightly heartened when he said maybe Erika could teach him not to.

I left inspired to go back to church, to double down on seeking and speaking truth, and hopeful that the Right would take cues from these leaders by turning the other cheek — and turning toward problems, not against people.

Candace’s Investigation

My hopes for that moment were dashed in the months that followed.

Before I continue, I want to make it clear: this is not meant to be a personal attack on Candace. It is an attack on her methods, which I think are bad, and the results they are producing, which are also bad.

I’m not interested in influencer infighting, character attacks, or speculating about her motives. None of those are things that anyone can verify, and I prefer to stick to what we can verify.

Five days after Charlie died, Candace posted an episode titled “They Are Lying About Charlie Kirk.”

Within days, she started implicating Netanyahu and Israel in Charlie’s death.

Within weeks, Turning Point.

Within months, Erika Kirk.

I suspected early that something was off in her analysis. Too much emotion. Too many appeals to intuition. Too little patience for boring explanations.

But… maybe she was right? I thought. I respect Candace’s skill as a speaker. I respect her courage. She cited names and events I didn’t know. She was tracking Israel more closely than I.

Maybe she knew something I didn’t?

But it’s said you will know a tree by its fruits. And the fruits of her arguments were rotten.

A pattern of claims that didn’t survive scrutiny, and a habit of personal attacks.

So I started looking at the tree.

It turns out the roots of her argument weren’t good either.

I decided that if I was going to examine her claims — and potentially speak on them — I wanted to do it right. So I spent over 20 hours on just a few of them. I shared the results here.

What I found was a mess of unscientific thinking. She gathers receipts, but doesn’t read them rigorously.

And the deepest pattern was this: when she couldn’t explain something readily, she filled the gap with low-quality explanations — and among all the possibilities, she reliably emphasized the most complex, most inflammatory, most nefarious one, while deemphasizing, missing, or ignoring the boring ones that are usually true.

In philosophy terms, she was failing to apply:

1. Occam’s Razor: the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is usually the right one.

2. Hanlon’s Razor: don’t assume malice when incompetence will do — because across enough cases, incompetence explains far more than malice.

It didn’t read like probabilistic thinking — weighing a range of possibilities against each other by likelihood. It read like a narrative: whichever version made the best story was the one that led.

Which is excellent for viewership. And useless for finding the truth.

It’s harder to refute BS than to create it.

To help you see what’s so wrong with what Candace is doing, I want to first introduce you to one of my favorite laws.

It’s called Brandolini’s Law — the bull**** asymmetry principle. Coined by an Italian software engineer named Alberto Brandolini in 2013:

“The amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

It’s ten times harder to clean up than to spill.

This matches my experience. It took me over 20 hours to properly examine one hour of Candace’s claims.

She has posted well over a hundred episodes since Charlie died, most of them about Charlie.

To casual observers this seems like a job well done. But it’s actually indicative of the opposite. Her level of output is the problem.

A real investigation is never drip-fed daily. For the same reason a scientist doesn’t publish her results while she’s still running the experiment.

You gather the data.

You analyze all of it.

You subject it to peer review.

Then you publish — once — and stake your name on it.

Why? Because early findings get overturned by later ones.

Publish as you go, and you will inevitably broadcast things that seem true on Monday and are false by Friday.

Multiply that by a hundred episodes and it becomes impossible — for the audience, for critics, even for the host — to track what was claimed, what quietly died, and what was ever corrected.

One example: for weeks in late 2025, Candace pushed a theory that Egyptian planes had been tracking Erika for years — dozens of location “overlaps,” flight-tracker screenshots, a coincidence probability she put at basically zero. Then people pulled the actual flight logs, and it fell apart — a large share of the “overlaps” simply didn’t hold up.

She later conceded on air that the way the data had been presented led people to overstate things.

But she didn’t retract the underlying theory.

She doubled down hard: she claimed the planes were actually flying in and out of Israel, that the panic over the theory proved it was true, and that the real story was the Israeli connection.

She frequently frames critics as Zionists or paid Israeli shills rather than addressing the data.

When presented with contradictory data, she regularly misinterprets it — intentionally or not, I don’t know.

And you don’t have to go digging to find examples. Here’s part of a tweet from just three days ago — and this one you can check yourself in two minutes.

But here’s the problem — that’s not what Lance Twiggs, Robinson’s roommate, said.

Per the AP, Twiggs said that Robinson “sometimes talked about politics, including Trump,” and that he “did not talk much about gender issues or LGBTQ rights.”

• Lance: “Sometimes talked about politics, including Trump” | Candace: “wasn’t political.”

• Lance: “Did not talk much” | Candace: “didn’t ever.”

These are substantive differences — what Candace said simply is not accurate.

The interview is public. You don’t need her, or me, to interpret it for you. You can just read what he said.

This is why professional investigations run on three principles that sound boring and exist for very good reasons.

• Slow — because complex evidence takes time, and new information invalidates old conclusions.

• Private — because publishing mid-stream contaminates the case. It attracts fame-seeking tipsters. And it tempts the investigator to serve the audience instead of the truth.

• Done in teams — because peers catch the biases no individual can see in themselves.

Slow, private, and peer-checked also means boring, unmarketable, and unprofitable.

In other words: the exact opposite of a Monday-through-Friday livestreamed investigation with audience tips, sponsor reads, and a merch store.

About those incentives

To be clear — this is not an accusation about her motives. I also make money researching and opining. I believe you can maintain integrity while making money as a commentator.

But I can tell you from experience: it is extremely difficult. And staying unbiased is nearly impossible.

Think about the position. Your livelihood depends on people’s opinions of your opinions.

Your sense of career progress is tied to income and follower count.

Contradict your audience too hard, you risk both.

Make a mistake, you lose trust.

Tell the truth too boringly, you lose attention.

It’s a brutal balancing act.

Frankly, it’s why I’ve avoided hosting a daily show. A three-minute video can take me five hours — much of that spent checking my own biases, trying to be opinionated while staying honest and fair.

The more content you must produce, the harder that bar is to hold.

What the courtroom just told us

Last week, Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing ran five days in a Provo courtroom — the first time this evidence left the world of podcasts and entered the world of oaths.

Start with the claim Candace’s camp hung its hat on for ten months: that a .30-06 round could not have hit Charlie’s neck without passing through — so the story must be a lie, wrong gun, second shooter.

On July 9, an ATF forensic examiner named Samantha Karner — a federal specialist with no connection to Turning Point, called to the stand by Robinson’s own defense — testified that the bullet recovered from Charlie’s body during the autopsy broke into multiple fragments consistent with a .30-caliber / .30-06.

So there it is, from a source under oath.

The bullet stayed in the body. It fragmented. And it was the caliber officials named from the start.

The fragmentation also quietly answers the question that launched a hundred episodes. How does a beast of a bullet stop inside a neck? A bullet that breaks into multiple pieces has dumped its energy inside the body — which is exactly what certain bullet types are designed to do. No man of steel required. No second rifle required. I identified this possibility months ago.

I mention this not as a victory lap, but to point out — anyone could have considered this possibility months ago, including Candace.

But she fixated on the explanation that matched her pre-existing suspicion.

When asked whether the fragments came from the specific rifle found in the woods, Karner would not say yes.

The comparison was inconclusive — the fragments were too deformed to carry enough unique markings.

Pressed on it, she stood her ground: “Saying anything but inconclusive was inappropriate.”

That is what a real investigation sounds like. Say what you know. Leave what you don’t know unconfirmed. Don’t speculate to fill the gap.

Candace, ten months in: there must be a second shooter, a planted gun, and Erika Kirk is complicit.

The examiner, under oath: the bullet was consistent with a .30-06, it cannot be tied to this specific rifle, and that is all we know.

One of these methods finds the truth. The other keeps an audience.

Behind the paywall: everything else five days of testimony established — the rooftop video, the rifle’s family history, the DNA, the engraved casings, the note, and what his own parents did.

Plus five questions that tell you — about any investigation, anywhere — whether you’re watching truth-seeking or theater.

What five days in court established

Here are some of the other key findings from the hearing. And note — this is evidence submitted in a courtroom, much of it under oath — meaning the people submitting it have strong incentives to tell the truth. Some of this information we knew before, but what’s new is that it was submitted as courtroom-tested evidence.

Read more

I’m not sharing that for sympathy. Strange as it sounds, I’m sharing it to inspire you.

We’re in an odd moment. The country is about as divided as it’s ever been, and at the same time more connected online than it’s ever been.

It used to be that if someone didn’t like what you said, you could tune it out. The disagreement stayed at a distance.

Now we’re piped straight into each other’s heads, into some of the nastiest thoughts people have.

And when the attacks come, we watch people do one of two things. They double down, or they retreat.

This is a guide to doing neither.

Why does it matter? Because you matter.

Everyone is an influencer. You’re shaping the people around you whether you mean to or not — every conversation you have, and every one you avoid, moves someone. Your friends. Your family. Your coworkers. The charged Facebook post you scroll past from someone you know and disagree with. The dinner table where you bite your tongue instead of saying what you think.

The way through is being neither offensive nor defensive. It’s courage — the courage to say what needs to be said, when it needs to be said.

Consider this a follow-up to my previous letter on how to have hard conversations with the people you love without getting cancelled.

Those people are only one audience. Sooner or later you may be called to speak to a wider one — a comment section, a feed, a room full of strangers. These are the lessons I’ve learned for that.

Lesson 1: It’s not about you

You’re an influence whether you asked to be or not.

Think about what influence even is. To influence someone is to change them. The whole act points outward, at them — never back at you. Two encounters taught me this in the same year:

These are two stories — one from someone with a positive perception, one with a more negative one. Neither was accurate.

The one who loved what I do and the one who almost hated me were reacting to the same thing — a render of me running in their own heads. You feed it a little material: a clip, a post, a story someone forwarded. You never touch the model itself.

So here’s the paradox. You’re the one expressing yourself, but the people reacting didn’t show up for you. They showed up for what they get from you.

The more you make it about you, the harder it gets to serve them — and the harder every insult lands, because now it’s personal.

I get a version of this question all the time. Someone’s post blows up, the negativity rolls in, and they ask me: What do I say back? How do I defend myself in the comments?

But here’s a question: Why do you need to defend anything?

If the thing you said is true, and you stand by it, and it came from a sincere place — there is nothing to defend.

No comment to answer.

No apology to draft.

No proving to strangers that you’re a good person.

You already know why you said it. That’s enough.

Lesson 2: Being hated by some means being loved by others

Knowing it’s not about you helps. But sometimes it doesn’t make the hate stop hurting.

We’re social animals. We all want to be liked. Nobody wants to be cast out and alone, and that fear runs deep for a reason.

For most of human history, losing your tribe meant death. The Greeks understood this — exile was a punishment close to execution, because a person alone did not survive. That wiring is still in you. It’s why a wall of hate feels like the end of the world.

But you’re not in a hunter-gatherer band. There are 8 billion people out there. Get cast out by one tribe and another is already forming somewhere, made of the people who needed to hear exactly what got you thrown out.

So when people ask me what to do about the haters, I say the same thing every time: Keep going.

What you’re attracting is simple: the natural polarization that comes from being yourself. Not all atoms are meant to form molecules. Some attract each other, some repel. It’s the same with tribes.

The tribe you gain will fit you better than the one you lost, because it’s a tribe you don’t have to perform for. You get to be yourself and form even stronger bonds with people who like the real you.

Lesson 3: Self-respect is the highest currency

Approval is fickle. It arrives fast and leaves faster, and you can’t take in only the good. Because if you’re attached to the positive, you’ll also be attached to the negative.

And the human brain has a negativity bias, so the insults often cut deeper than the praise heals.

The key is to detach from both the validation and the vitriol.

Most approval isn’t deep anyway.

People like what you said because they agreed with it, because it validated them.

The day you say something that takes that validation away, the same people turn. Easy come, easy go.

There’s a better currency — and it comes from the people who respect you. They won’t always agree, but they see the deeper value in what you’re doing. That’s worth more.

The highest currency is the one nobody can give you or take from you: self-respect. Integrity with yourself. The quiet you feel when you know you were honest.

Think about why lying hurts the liar. Set aside the harm to the other person.

When you lie, you have to hold two stories at once — who you’re pretending to be and who you know you are. That gap is cognitive dissonance, and it’s exhausting.

Honesty creates harmony in the mind.

That’s the most valuable currency — your reputation with yourself.

And it makes you stronger everywhere, not just online, because a person who trusts themselves moves more powerfully.

I learned this lesson firsthand. Earlier this year I put out a fast take on a story everyone was fighting about, and it went viral. Then I realized I’d gotten ahead of myself, so I posted a correction and an apology.

The result?

The side that had approved of me before said I caved.

The side that hated me still hated me. I lost both rooms in a day.

But I got to keep my peace of mind by owning it. And as a bonus — I earned the respect of people who appreciated someone willing to correct himself.

Here’s where I’ll pause.

The full talk is on YouTube, free:

But if you want more than the talk — the extra breakdown and two of the most important lessons — I’ve made that available for paying supporters.

Read more

Maybe there’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding.

Maybe it’s with your daughter. Maybe your closest friend. Maybe the coworkers at lunch who assume everyone at the table agrees.

The topic comes up — immigration, race, capitalism, take your pick — and everyone nods along. Your chest tightens, your jaw clenches — but you say nothing.

And who can blame you? It doesn’t seem worth it.

We’re now at the point where people are ending relationships with people they know over politicians they don’t know.

People get excommunicated from friend groups over this stuff.

Cut off from their families. Called names.

So most people run one of two programs: Stay silent but frustrated. Or blurt it out, watch it go nuclear, and confirm everybody’s suspicion that “we just can’t talk about politics.”

The first costs you your integrity.

The second costs you the relationship.

But there’s a third option.

It takes more skill than the other two, which is why you almost never see it.

I’m going to share my approach for communicating truth effectively without pissing people off more than is necessary. It’s what I employ in my personal life, live debates, and content.

It’s also what I teach members of my community, the Clear Thinker Academy.

By the end, you’ll know how to open the conversation, hold it, land your point, and walk away with the relationship intact.

The Truth Is Not Enough

One premise sits underneath everything that follows.

When it comes to cultivating healthy relationships, the truth is not enough.

Anyone who has ever been in a healthy relationship already knows this.

Honesty is necessary. But delivery decides whether that honesty strengthens or erodes the relationship.

It’s easy to say “the truth is the truth, deal with it” — but the truth is we all get emotional when the right thing is said the wrong way.

We are all human. Everyone has sensitivities.

This is not a guide to avoiding the truth because of those feelings, but to communicating in a way that is most likely to actually be received by the other person, despite their feelings.

As with everything in life except death and taxes, there are no guarantees of an outcome here.

You can’t control people. You can only control what you say.

But you can say things skillfully — in a way that’s truthful, relationship-preserving, and, paradoxically, most likely to actually change someone’s mind.

Step 1: Don’t Try to “Win”

This is the hardest step, because it’s not about the other person — it’s about you.

Most political conversations are destined to fail before they even start because the conversants aren’t trying to have a conversation — they are trying to “win.”

A great conversation is a mutual exchange of ideas where each person is willing to consider those ideas and change their mind.

Where there’s a chance the rarest sentence in the English language — “You know what, I hadn’t thought of it that way, you changed my mind” — can be uttered.

But that’s not how most of us approach political conversations.

We want to dominate the other person. We want to feel right. We are committed to a crusade, not a conversation.

It’s a natural instinct — I have it too.

But that instinct, when unchecked, can lead to a debate that no one wanted, no one was ready for, and everyone resents being forced into.

To check this instinct, it’s helpful to zoom out and answer this question: What does “winning” actually look like?

Is it changing their mind? Because people rarely want their minds changed, and resent being pressured to.

Here is my definition of winning: Did I express myself clearly, honestly, and compassionately?

Think of yourself as a lighthouse.

A lighthouse shines whether or not any ships are in range. The ships that are ready to navigate by it will find it. The ships too far out will miss it, and the lighthouse keeps shining anyway. Your job is to be the light beam. Not to get the other person to agree. Not for them to tell you you’re right.

This reframe matters because it separates speaking for your ego from speaking for your integrity.

“You’re right” might be the two most delicious words in the English language. Chase them and you will poison the conversation.

Release them and, strangely, you will hear them more often — usually days later, once the person has had time to think.

Step 2: The 60-Second Setup

Nobody likes being ambushed. Think about how most political fights start:

Someone drops a take in conversation (”Can you believe what Trump did? Can you believe what’s happening in Mamdani’s New York?”)

Someone else takes the bait and a fight ensues.

Or: The people who agree with the take speak up, the people who disagree keep quiet, and an echo chamber forms.

The solution to this: Before you talk about the thing, talk about the fact that you are going to talk about the thing.

It sounds like this:

“Hey, I’ve noticed you brought up [insert political topic]. Is that something you actually want to talk about? Because if you are, I’m open to it.”

If they say yes, reinforce that the relationship is the priority:

“Cool. Before we do — I really value our friendship, and I’d hate for politics to ever get in the way of it. So can we agree the friendship outranks the politics? And if either of us hits a point where we’re done talking about it, we just say so, and that’s totally okay?”

Sixty seconds. You have just done something almost nobody does: established why you are talking, what the rules are, and where the exits are, before anyone is upset.

Imagine if that’s how political conversations were introduced, rather than mid-Thanksgiving dinner.

Taking that 60 seconds can make the 60 minutes afterward dramatically more productive and less painful.

It also allows you to do two things:

Pick the terrain. The conversation does not have to happen right now, in public, at the group dinner. “I do want to talk about this — want to grab coffee at my place this weekend?”

You are allowed to choose the time and the setting, rather than getting pushed off a cliff before you’re ready.

Show your cards. If this is hard for you, say so: “I’m honestly trying to get better at conversations like this, and I feel kind of uncomfortable because I don’t want this to turn into a fight.”

Vulnerability disarms people. It is very hard to steamroll someone who just told you they are learning, or scared.

Step 3: Steelman

You might already know what a strawman is: restating someone’s position in its weakest, dumbest form and attacking that.

You know it because it has been done to you — you say something, they repeat it back sounding nothing like what you said, then attack the version they invented. Short of name-calling, there is perhaps no faster way to end a conversation.

A steelman is the opposite: stating their argument as well as they can, or better.

It looks like this:

“So what I’m hearing is [their actual argument]. And it sounds like what you care most about here is [the emotional core]. Do I have that right? Is there anything I’m missing?”

This accomplishes two things: trust and clarity.

Trust: It establishes that you care about their opinion and that you’re making a sincere effort to understand what they say, irrespective of whether you agree with it.

Most bad conversations are just two people waiting to talk rather than being present and listening.

This makes it far less likely that they blow up on you — because at least they feel like you understand them.

It also gives you more license to disagree with them later, because you’ve demonstrated that you value their opinion — you just disagree with it.

Clarity: Asking “Do I have that right” or “Do I understand that correctly” creates space in the conversation to make sure you’re not just talking past each other.

It’s like building a foundation for a skyscraper — you don’t want to get to the 10th floor of a conversation and realize you’re not even in the same building, when you could have addressed that in the lobby.

Here is what happens when you do this well: for a lot of people, it will be the first time in their life anyone has ever done it.

Seriously — try it and watch their whole demeanor change.

And understand what you are buying: reciprocity.

Human beings are wired for fairness. Listen well, and they’ll be more likely to do the same.

Ideally we’d all just do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But in reality, often we do unto others as they do unto us.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The exact phrasing to find immediate common ground with someone you completely disagree with, without compromising your values.

• Three questions that force people to discover their own logical blind spots without feeling attacked.

• The exact script to deploy when you are completely outgunned by someone with a “fact cannon.”

• A full, 70-minute video breakdown of these tactics running in the wild, including a breakdown of my live debate on Piers Morgan and real-world small group coaching roleplays.

Read more

Last week, Gavin Newsom posted a video about billionaires.

In his own words:

“It’s time for a national billionaires tax and a new social contract. 10% of Americans own two-thirds of the wealth. Wages have stagnated. The cost of living has skyrocketed. The system is fundamentally broken. The federal tax code, a corporate code, and an inheritance code were written for a different set of Americans. It’s time for an economic reset.”

The facts he cited are true.

10% of Americans do own two-thirds of the wealth.

Wages have stagnated. The cost of living has skyrocketed.

The American dream feels out of reach for tens of millions of people, especially Gen Z.

But none of those problems exist because the government doesn’t have enough money.

And none of them get fixed by taxing the rich.

The problem isn’t that Gavin said something false.

It’s that the problems he’s naming have almost nothing to do with the solution he’s selling.

Now, Gavin is right that the tax system needs an overhaul.

It’s so complex that “tax specialist” is a career.

With due respect to tax specialists: if a system for paying taxes is so complicated you need expertise to navigate it, something is wrong with the system.

America was founded without an income tax.

The government ran on tariffs and excise taxes.

Simple systems that were easy to follow.

The income tax started as a temporary measure to fund the Civil War, and was repealed a few years after it ended.

It came back for good in 1913, with the 16th Amendment.

And when it did, it was sold as a tax on the rich. Fewer than 1% of Americans earned enough to pay it.

Then it grew.

War expanded it.

The government never gave it back.

And the thing that started as a tax on the wealthy became the code every working American files under today.

Now it’s so complicated that it’s become a game.

A game the rich pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to specialists to win.

In theory, anyone can invest hundreds of hours or pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to win the game. In that sense, it’s “fair.”

But it shouldn’t be a game anyone has to play.

And it’s a valid source of resentment for the average person.

But there’s a second game going on here. And it’s as old as politics.

Using the anger of the public to sell a solution that feels good but doesn’t fix what they’re angry about.

That’s what Gavin Newsom is doing.

The Fairness Problem

Before talking about Gavin, I want to address the reaction from some of the right.

You’ll hear some people on the right say the rich already pay most of the taxes in America.

That’s true.

But it misses the point.

The average person pays close to the full rate — because they don’t have the funds or expertise to win the tax game.

The rich pay less — because they do.

And to be clear, none of this is cheating.

The rich follow the same tax rules as everyone else.

They’ve just engineered their rate down further than you reasonably can — because they can afford the experts who know how.

Here’s a personal example.

A friend of mine recently paid his tax guy around $20,000 to set up a special kind of trust that shrinks his tax bill.

Most people don’t know that option exists — and definitely don’t have $20,000 lying around to use it.

The tax system is a game most people can’t afford to win.

We can recognize this without hating the players — but we should all hate the game.

We should fix that by making the tax system simple, intuitive, and fair — not a game.

But the reason to fix it is social cohesion — not because the government needs more money.

Fix it because nothing poisons a society faster than class hostility and a sense of unfairness.

It creates an environment of suspicion and the perception of bad faith.

The average person stops trusting elites.

Elites wall themselves off.

Everyone loses.

It gets so toxic that even generosity gets rejected.

When Mark Zuckerberg gave $75 million to a public hospital in San Francisco — the largest private gift any public hospital had gotten — activists spent years trying to scrub his name off the building.

That’s where class hostility leads.

But the Government Doesn’t Need More Money

Let’s separate the two things Gavin has bundled together.

1. The tax code is unfair.

2. Fixing it, or taxing billionaires, will bring down your cost of living.

Two doesn’t follow from one.

That becomes obvious when you consider two questions:

Do you think the reason your rent is high is that the government doesn’t have enough money?

Do you think your wage is flat because the government is short on cash?

Because that’s the actual claim hiding under “tax the billionaires.”

That the government needs more money, and that once it gets more money, your life gets cheaper and your paycheck gets bigger.

Say it plainly and it falls apart. If we wired the federal government another trillion dollars tomorrow, walk me through what happens to the price of a house in your city. What happens to your wage. Trace the steps. There aren’t any. The trillion dollars doesn’t pour a foundation, frame a wall, or train a nurse. It never touches the thing making your life expensive.

And we don’t have to guess about this, because we can look at exactly where the cost of living exploded and where it didn’t.

Over the last 25 years, some things got dramatically cheaper. TVs fell roughly 97%. Toys, software, and cell phone service got cut in half or more. Clothing, furniture, and cars stayed roughly flat while everything else inflated.

And some things went vertical. Hospital services more than tripled. College tuition more than doubled. Childcare, healthcare, housing — all climbing far faster than wages.

Now put the two lists side by side. The things that got cheaper are made in competitive markets, open to global competition, with relatively little government in the mix. The things that got more expensive are the most subsidized, most regulated, most supply-constrained sectors we have.

Healthcare. Education. Housing. Childcare.

The pattern is so clean that economists have a nickname for the chart that shows it.

They call it the chart of the century.

The sectors crushing the middle class are not the ones we starved of public money.

They’re the ones we flooded with it.

Pouring more government money in has not made these things cheaper.

Often it’s done the reverse, because when you subsidize demand for something whose supply is capped, you don’t lower the price. You raise it.

So why did they get so expensive?

Take the two that hit people hardest.

Housing and healthcare.

Start with housing.

Housing isn’t expensive because we underfunded it.

It’s expensive because we made it almost impossible to build.

And for evidence of that, just look at the state Gavin governs: California.

Zoning laws say you can’t build. Permitting takes years. Environmental reviews and lawsuits pile on cost before a shovel touches dirt.

California spent decades letting anyone with a lawyer freeze a project under “environmental review” that had nothing to do with the environment.

Make supply that hard, and prices go up.

A billionaire tax builds zero homes.

Letting people build, builds homes.

Healthcare doesn’t suffer for a lack of money either.

Same story, different costume.

It’s not starved of money — we spend more on it than almost anyone on earth.

It’s expensive because it barely works as a market at all.

Look at your medicine. Between you and the pill sits a middleman called a pharmacy benefit manager.

Three of them control about 80% of all prescriptions. And they’re owned by the same giants that own your insurer and your pharmacy.

So the company deciding which drug you get, the company insuring you, and the pharmacy filling it are often the same company.

They mark the price up, pocket the difference, and steer you to themselves.

And for about 20 years, it was effectively illegal for Medicare — the biggest drug buyer in the country — to negotiate prices at all.

These things didn’t get expensive because the government spent too little.

They got expensive because the market got rigged, capped, or blocked — and the government either did the rigging or let it happen.

So the answer isn’t for the government to replace the market.

It’s for the government to protect the market.

Keep it fair. Keep it open. Strip out the rules that exist to block competition instead of protect people.

That’s the fix. Not a bigger check to Washington.

Wages? Nobody Fully Knows. But Not This.

What about wages?

Gavin’s right that they’ve lagged what workers produce. Ask the economists why, and you get a stack of answers — globalization, automation, the decline of unions, health insurance eating raises.

You know what you won’t get from a single serious labor economist, even the most pro-worker ones?

“Wages stalled because we didn’t tax billionaires enough.”

I won’t pretend I’ve cracked why pay split off from productivity. It’s one of the hardest questions in economics.

But I don’t need to crack it to spot the hole in Gavin’s pitch.

If your fix for stagnant wages is a billionaire tax, you have to show how one causes the other.

He didn’t. Because there’s no line connecting them.

This Is the Oldest Trick in Politics

I want to be clear about something: I’m not here to hand you a new enemy.

Not politicians as a group.

Not Gavin Newsom as an individual — despite my frustration with the state of California.

I’m tired of that. I’m tired of every problem in this country getting pinned on some group or person.

Black vs. white.

Rich vs. poor.

Immigrant vs. native.

Pick a villain, aim the anger, feel righteous, fix nothing.

It’s great for winning elections. But it never fixes the thing people are actually angry about.

I don’t believe billionaires are evil, nor do I think politicians are evil.

But frankly, I think the discussion itself is a waste of time, because no one will ever agree on what good or evil even is.

And even if we could — who on earth is so holy that they get to decide how good or evil someone else is?

What we do know is that billionaires are people.

They do what every single person does — act in their self-interest.

From the person scraping by on minimum wage to the richest man alive, everybody looks out for themselves.

That’s simply the human condition.

I’d pay hundreds of thousands to win the tax game if I could.

I’m guessing you would too.

So if we don’t like how people’s incentives interact with the system, change the system.

It’s the same with politicians.

They simply follow incentives — Gavin included.

His incentive is to get elected.

And the fastest way to get elected is to give people someone to be angry at.

He’s following the same incentives anyone in his chair would.

I’m not writing this because I think Gavin Newsom is evil.

I’m writing it because I think he’s wrong.

And although I get the pain of those who want a billionaire tax, I think this manifestation of it is wrong.

We already covered that there’s no revenue problem.

So a national billionaire tax wouldn’t fund anything that makes your life cheaper.

It would just take wealth, because taking it feels like justice.

These people minimize taxes by winning a game that shouldn’t be a game.

Going looking for new ways to seize what the winners legally earned is a different thing entirely, and a worse one.

That instinct — find the wealth, take the wealth — is just another war on the most successful people we have.

And it’s a war nobody wins.

It will just build more resentment, running in both directions.

The Social Contract

Gavin talked about needing a new social contract. I agree.

The one between the rich and the rest has broken down.

But a contract is voluntary, not forced. And it only holds if both sides keep their end.

Right now, both sides are breaking the deal.

Aristos is ancient Greek for “best,” or “noblest.” It’s where we get the word aristocracy.

And the idea baked into it was this: whoever was given the most, owed the most back.

Status came with a debt to society.

And both ends of that deal have broken.

From below, resentful voices sell the myth that the successful are villains — that billionaires are evil and shouldn’t even exist.

But the dividing line between good and evil is not at the third comma.

It’s between the angels and demons on each of our shoulders.

From above, too many who did well stopped paying the debt back — leaning on the parts of the system tilted in their favor instead of giving through it.

Both ends have to show up.

It’s in the rich’s own interest to serve. Joy comes from a community that loves you, and no amount of wealth will protect you from a society that hates you.

And it’s in everyone’s interest to honor the people who build and give — because a society that spits on its builders ends up with fewer of them.

So call out problems. But shame actions, not groups.

Because if the successful are damned whether they give or not, then most of them… won’t.

And you can’t fund hospitals with resentment.

Stop Looking for Enemies

There is no uniquely evil group of Americans. There’s no secret villain behind your rent.

There’s just people — all of us, all humans with hopes, dreams, and needs that add up to what we call self-interest — and a set of systems that decide how all that self-interest gets balanced.

Some of those systems are dumb. Some of them let a handful of people’s interests drown out everyone else’s.

That’s the problem. Not a person. A system.

We are on the same team here.

The goal is not to find a better enemy. It’s to build a better system.

So if it’s not the billionaires, and it’s not the government’s empty wallet — what is the actual problem? And what do we do about it?

Below, I’ll show you exactly what’s broken, why “tax the rich” leaves it completely untouched, and the one reform that would actually fix it.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The mechanism showing how enormous campaign spending dilutes your vote, and why a billionaire tax completely leaves this system untouched.

• A breakdown of how a $100M corporate lobbying budget legally killed a free, simple government filing program that would have saved American taxpayers $23 billion.

• The precise, unglamorous campaign finance and market-protection reforms required to force down the costs of housing and healthcare without relying on political scapegoats.

The Actual Problem: Billions Louder Than Millions

Gavin was right that we have a money problem.

But it’s not that the government doesn’t have enough money.

Read more

Warning: contains a graphic description.

I was born in the Bronx, New York, on October 16, 1990.

My parents moved to America in the 80s from Ghana.

In 2021, my family and I visited Ghana. It was my third time, and my first time as an adult.

The first two times were when I was a kid — too young to process what I saw.

This time was different. I wanted to understand where my parents came from, and the life I could have had.

What I Saw in Ghana

While there, I had an idea.

I wanted to see a slave castle — where the transatlantic slave trade started.

Not exactly part of a relaxing getaway, but, I sensed, an important one.

We took a taxi there. I sat shotgun, with my mom and sister in the back.

As our driver took us down a long dirt path, I saw a pile of clothes and a mass of something I couldn’t identify.

Ten seconds and a few dozen feet closer, I saw it clearly.

It was the body of a dead woman, on the right side of the road.

A few feet to the left of that, there was another mass.

By then, I could see it clearly, but didn’t comprehend what it was.

A few minutes later, I comprehended.

It was the body of a dead baby.

No one in the car said anything. I wasn’t even sure if anyone noticed.

The driver must have, but perhaps my sister and mother didn’t.

I think I kept quiet because I didn’t want them to notice.

It was only years later that I brought it up. My mom told me that she did see it, but didn’t say anything to me for the same reason I didn’t say anything to her.

She confirmed what I saw — a dead pregnant woman and the remains of her unborn child.

She elaborated: Some people in the region believe that sacrificing a pregnant woman and her unborn child in a ritual, using their remains as a source of life force, can bring the person who performs it wealth or power.

I didn’t know this when I first witnessed that atrocity. But I did know one thing.

I was so grateful to my parents for the sacrifices they made so I could be born in America.

All cultures and countries have profound beauty and ugliness in them.

I remember that atrocity.

But I also remember a conversation with a cab driver where I asked him what he was proudest of as a Ghanaian, and he said, “hospitality.”

I remember walking by a Ghanaian wedding and seeing a rainbow of bright, beautiful dresses on a gorgeous estate.

I remember going to my grandma’s 90th birthday, and seeing the vast array of people who came to honor her, and a lifetime of her love.

There is beauty to every culture.

Possibility

But there’s a particular beauty to American culture for which I am singularly grateful, and which I cherish above all others.

It’s the beauty of two African immigrants being able to come to America near the bottom of the economic ladder, instill in their son a sense of possibility, responsibility, and agency, and watch him graduate from Harvard decades later.

The beauty of watching my mom and dad work hard every single day to earn money, save it, and move us out of the Bronx and into a nice home in the suburbs ten years later.

Of seeing my parents totally commit to raising us as Americans — learning American customs, embodying American values.

Do your best, you can do it, we believe in you.

They never complained — not about discrimination, lack of opportunity, or difficulty.

They focused on what they could do.

If they struggled, they never let me see it.

My dad would regularly remind me with total certainty: “No one is better than you.”

“Freedom” is the word that people associate with America.

But as I write this, a related word rings richer: Possibility.

I am so grateful that my parents risked it all so that I can enjoy Possibility.

I Can’t Give Up on America

America is going through a difficult moment right now.

We used to fight problems, now we fight each other.

My home of the last 12 years, Los Angeles, is in decline.

Our discourse is in disarray.

But as I sit here at my desk, looking at the breathtaking vistas of Medellín, Colombia, I just can’t give up on America.

I’ve been in Colombia for two months and plan on being here for several more.

I needed the change of scenery to heal my dysregulated nervous system, and a mental reset from the life of compulsive achievement I’ve been living. I’d also like to find love.

But when people ask me if I’ll ever go back to America, I can’t imagine saying anything except “yes.”

Not because America is home. It’s more than just home. Home is intimate, domestic, personal.

America is bigger than that.

It’s the scion of an ingenious insight — that all men are created equal — that has blossomed into an enduring beacon of inspiration for the world.

The strife of this moment in our evolution may cloud that beacon’s light, but it is still there.

The idea of America is for more than Americans.

It is for humanity.

It is a blazing standard of the audacity of the human spirit laid out as an example for all of humanity to see.

We landed on the moon from here.

We will land on Mars from here.

We will populate the solar system from here.

And though that flag may be tattered from being whipped by winds of change, its stripes and stars are still there, clear for all to see.

The angry fire of division that we are embroiled in is born from the bright embers of passion that founded this country and have never dimmed.

We fight each other because we care.

Because we think America is something worth fighting over, though our ideas of what it should be differ.

And that is the horizon, replete with 50 stars, behind the cloud of confusion that besets this great nation.

But clouds are temporary.

These too shall pass.

We will make it through this moment.

We will rise above the clouds.

And we will see that the sky is still there.

Happy birthday, America.

This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted this:

In May, he posted something similar, and said of the achievement, “Call it Democratic Socialism.”

There’s only one problem.

Socialism delivered very little of this win.

Much more of it was capitalism, and taking money from future taxpayers and people outside of New York City.

Now, before we get into that, I want to make it clear why I’m writing this piece.

I’m not interested in demonizing Zohran. I’m not here to expose him as a nefarious liar.

I know that some believe him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing: a secret jihadi communist with a TikTok-ready smile who hates America and is using taqiyya to intentionally lie about his true intentions as he seeks to usher in Sharia law.

I am not one of those people.

If you are, I’m not going to spend this piece convincing you otherwise.

I’m just telling you where I stand for transparency’s sake.

Either way, positive or negative claims about what’s going on inside his brain are subjective, impossible to prove, and a waste of time to debate.

So I’d rather focus on what we can be objective about, which is policy.

In fact, I like the guy.

I think he’s cool.

As someone who resonates with clear communication, I respect his competency in that domain.

Politics aside, I think we could even be friends.

And from the looks of it, I’m not the only one who feels that way.

I’ve also listened to long-form interviews with him. He has a strong understanding of the problems New Yorkers face, and it’s obvious why they elected him.

Similar to Trump, he is in touch with the pain of the people, and knows how to speak to that.

I don’t think he’s bad.

I think socialism is.

So that’s the spirit in which I’m writing this piece. To resist bad ideas.

I’ve written several pieces about the rise of socialism in America.

There are also serious problems that we need to address in our current version of capitalism.

There’s too much money in politics.

Too much corporate influence over policy.

Billions of dollars are speaking louder than millions of people.

But I’m of the belief that socialism is not the solution.

And I don’t want to see socialists ride the coattails of capitalism and call the wins socialism.

That’s what Zohran is doing. And that’s why I’m writing this piece.

Socialism Is the Last Reason the Budget Was Balanced

Zohran Mamdani inherited a budget crisis not of his making.

$12 billion is a lot of money for a city budget deficit.

It’s larger than the gap New York faced during the Great Recession.

He closed it without raising property taxes, without cutting services, without draining the city’s reserves.

That’s a genuinely difficult political and technical achievement.

And it was not an achievement that came primarily from socialism.

In fact, socialism is last on the list of reasons for that achievement.

Here’s how he actually balanced the budget.

Most of the money, 53%, comes from two moves:

• A bailout from New York State to New York City. The majority of that money is from taxpayers who don’t live in New York City, bailing out those who do.

• Future taxpayers paying more for pensions, in exchange for present taxpayers paying less. This is money moved from one group of working-class people to another group of working-class people.

The second biggest pot of money, 35%, comes from projecting that in 2027, Wall Street will continue to have strong economic growth.

Ironically, he is projecting that Trump, the man he has vehemently opposed, is going to continue to oversee a booming stock market that helps balance his budget.

Perhaps even more ironically, Mamdani made a more optimistic projection of Wall Street’s growth in February than his predecessor, Eric Adams, did in November.

Capitalists are creating the growth, while socialists call the benefit of that growth socialism.

The third pot, 25%, comes from government efficiency.

Great job, Mamdani.

We should all celebrate that, regardless of whether it came from left or right, capitalist or socialist.

And finally, weighing in at 5%, is the savings from socialism: taxing the rich.

So 35% of this gap was closed by capitalism, and 5% by socialism.

Much of the 53% came from moving the burden onto taxpayers outside New York City, and taxpayers who haven’t been born yet.

(These pieces add up to a bit more than the $12 billion, because the city reached zero through a mix of overlapping measures rather than one clean stack. The proportions tell the story.)

He said, “We didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people.”

But state taxpayers are working people.

Future taxpayers are working people.

He didn’t take the gap off the backs of working people.

He moved it onto different backs.

Does this sound like a win for socialism to you?

Now, to some, this might seem like nitpicking. So let’s zoom out and discuss why it’s important.

The issue is not that socialists and communists are bad at describing problems. On the contrary, they are some of the best.

They truly attract gifted communicators who move the masses.

The problem is they don’t solve those problems.

There is not a single socialist country on planet Earth that the average American would want to live in.

No, Nordic countries are not socialist. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, and as the former Danish Prime Minister has said, they have capitalist economies with strong social safety nets.

No, not even China is socialist. Its model is characterized as “state capitalism” or “authoritarian capitalism.”

Socialism requires state ownership of the means of production.

The countries where that is actually the case, not in name but in practice, are North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.

The problem with socialism has never been that it can’t identify problems. It’s that it can’t implement solutions.

And here’s the deeper issue. The worldview isn’t responsive to reality. It’s unfalsifiable. Every time it fails, the failure gets explained away.

“It wasn’t real socialism.”

“The timing was wrong.”

“We just haven’t tried the enlightened version yet, the one no civilization before us was virtuous enough to pull off.”

The solution is always kept one more try out of reach, so the ideology never has to account for its own track record.

The concerns it raises are often real.

Wealth is concentrating.

Politics is captured.

Working people are hurting.

Those are true things worth taking seriously.

But the framework built on top of them — the language of power structures and class abstractions, so boundless and poorly defined that it’s easy to sound intelligent without demonstrating results — keeps the actual solution perpetually out of reach.

It’s been said that the mark of intelligence is speaking simply. Socialism doesn’t speak simply. It uses a bunch of terms that mean something different to everyone, and creates the appearance of clarity.

It is not a constructive ideology that values the growth and abundance that capitalism creates.

It doesn’t value capitalism, warts and all.

It says capitalism is all warts.

We’ve scaled humanity to over 8 billion people not through redistribution, but through growth, innovation, technology, and markets.

Every single human being alive today lives in more abundance than their ancestors did 100 years ago.

For the first time in human history, more people are dying from too much food than too little.

To be clear, we have serious problems. Many of them come from the corruption of markets, and the concentration of wealth that follows when business and politics commingle.

That is something we need to solve.

But we should not overcorrect from a flawed but working model to a model that has never worked at all.

We have real problems to address as a civilization.

And the best contribution of the socialists is that they’ve held all our feet to the fire so that we look at them.

But socialism isn’t the solution.

Better capitalism is.

But there’s a reason why socialism is so appealing. And no, it’s not because people are lazy and want free stuff.

In the next section, I’ll show you what the Socialist Messaging Strategy is, and why it’s so effective.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The pyramid model that explains how modern political messaging captures the top floors while destroying the foundation.

• A close look at the test to analyze what happens to safe streets and local jobs when a city honors labels over public service results.

• The playbook behind disordered priorities and how to quickly spot when an ideology is coasting on growth it didn’t create.

The Socialist Messaging Strategy

The socialist messaging strategy is incredibly effective at focusing on things that are genuinely important — racial equality, class exploitation, concentration of power — without putting them in proper relation to other priorities like economic growth and safety.

Here’s the way to understand it.

Read more

I’m relaunching Clear Thinker and doubling down on our mission. Read more below, and join here.

It’s always a little bit awkward when someone asks me what I do for a living.

“I’m an influencer.”

“Oh cool, do you, like, make content?”

“Yeah.”

“About what?”

“…Politics.”

I love this unexpected career that God laid out for me. What I don’t love is being associated with “politics.”

The anger. The name-calling. The tribalism. The confusion. Families being estranged.

Once I met someone who told me she was waiting until after her best friend’s wedding to end their friendship, because they couldn’t talk about politics.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Politics is a loaded word now. But when reduced to its core elements, it’s simply the process of deciding how a civilization runs.

It should be inspiring. It should be civil. It should feel like we’re on the same team, because we are. It should be fun.

After all, what’s cooler than getting to decide what the future of humanity is going to be?

Politics should engender the spirit of the Founding Fathers — a group of genius revolutionaries who loved America, who frequently butted heads on what America should look like.

Who disapproved of what the others said, but would defend to the death a fellow citizen’s right to say it.

How We Got Here

I started Clear Thinker out of frustration. Frustration with a politics that has degenerated into confusion and suspicion.

I say “started Clear Thinker,” but it really wasn’t very strategic.

What actually happened was that almost exactly two years ago, on July 13, 2024, Trump was nearly killed, and I decided to speak up, because if politicians were getting shot, clearly we had lost the plot.

I spontaneously opened my phone, spoke from the heart, and posted it, assuming no one would listen.

It turns out that a lot of people listened. And kept listening. I didn’t know why.

Fortunately, many of you told me why.

There are now over 2.5 million followers across my channels.

That means there are at least 2.5 million of us who value critical thinking, nuance, courage, and fairness.

At least 2.5 million of us are tired of the partisan games, the ragebait, the tribalism.

I hope that inspires you, because that means there are millions of people like you. People who don’t agree with you on everything, but will defend your right to say it.

Going All In

Some of you may have noticed you’ve been hearing from me more often this past month.

That’s no accident.

Out of those 2.5 million followers, you, my Substack readers, are consistently the most thoughtful. The most willing to wrestle with the deeper ideas.

So I’ve been pouring more and more of my energy here.

A few months ago, I asked you to tell me about yourselves in a reader survey. A thousand of you answered.

Here’s who you told me you are:

• You’ve stopped trusting the media — on both sides. The most common thing you told me, by far: everywhere you look, there’s an agenda. Some of you have had your hearts broken by voices you once relied on.

• You don’t want to be told what to think. You want the facts, the full picture, and the strongest version of both arguments — so you can make up your own minds.

• You’re trying to protect relationships, not win arguments. So many of you are navigating real conversations with people you love who see the world differently. You don’t want to beat them. You want to reach them.

• You’re after something deeper than politics. Unprompted, you brought up faith, meaning, and personal growth. You’re not just trying to make sense of the news — you’re trying to make sense of life.

• You’re not here for entertainment. You come here to think. To check your reasoning. To stay informed without being poisoned by the noise.

And the message you repeated more than any other: “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Today I’m making it official.

I’m relaunching the Clear Thinker Newsletter, and this is now the home base for everything I do.

Here’s what that means practically.

This letter is now the one thing I make sure happens every week, no matter what else is going on.

You’ll hear from me twice a week, like you have this past month.

Same mission, with more of what you told me you want: practical tips for the real conversations you’re having with real people.

This won’t be some radical transformation.

It’s still the same core relationship.

I offer you perspective, you grant me some of your time. But for me, this symbolizes a long-term commitment to the mission of changing the culture of conversation in the West. And I hope that’s something you’re willing to commit to with me too.

What you get as a paid member

• 2 full letters per week on the challenging and contentious issues of our time, and the frameworks to think about and discuss them

• Access to the full archive

• Member-only discussions in the comments

The first 500 subscribers also get 30% off annual during relaunch.

Become a Member

To celebrate the relaunch, here’s what I’m doing

5 pieces in 5 days. One per day for the entire first week, starting later today. I’m starting with pieces that are collectively a strong reflection of what you can expect as a Clear Thinker: recent discussions in the media, my philosophy, and strategic thinking about how to approach political discourse with your friends and family — including those who may not agree with you.

After that, we settle into our regular schedule of 2 per week.

For the Long Haul

Now, to be clear — I didn’t start this mission to build a business.

But finances are a part of life.

I want every one of you who becomes a paid subscriber to do it because you believe in what we’re doing here. Not just because you’re expecting extra content, like this is a Netflix subscription.

That said, I do want to give the most support to the people who give the most support to me.

So paid subscribers get the full version of every major piece, including the part where we move from problems to solutions. Plus the complete archive, and my attention in the comments.

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the greatest nation to ever exist, and the near-anniversary of the day I started this journey, I’m offering 30% off annual membership, locked in for as long as you stay subscribed. For those of you who are in this for the long haul with me. (Existing monthly subscribers can also take advantage of this offer.)

It ends on July 13 - the 2-year anniversary of Clear Thinker.

See you later today.

Become a Member

On Tuesday, three Mamdani-backed candidates won their primaries in New York.

All of them beat establishment Democrats. Two of them knocked off sitting congressmen.

The districts are deep blue, so winning the primary all but guarantees winning in November.

Which means three more allies of the socialist movement are heading to Congress.

That same day, the Democratic Socialists of America ran what it called the largest slate of socialists ever to run for a state legislature. At least a dozen DSA-backed candidates won across New York.

And it reaches well past New York.

In Los Angeles, DSA-backed Nithya Raman made the runoff for mayor of the second-largest city in the country, where she’ll face the incumbent, establishment Democrat Karen Bass, in November.

Socialism is rising in America.

Gallup has tracked how Americans see capitalism since 2010.

This year it fell to the lowest level they’ve ever recorded: 54 percent. Among young adults, Gallup finds capitalism and socialism running about even. And a 2025 Cato survey found that 62 percent of Americans under 30 hold a favorable view of socialism.

Among Democrats, the flip is already finished. 66 percent view socialism favorably. Just 42 percent say the same about capitalism.

Not only are young people becoming more socialist, they’re becoming more radical, and they are unapologetic about it.

Drawing on a UCLA survey that has tracked incoming college students since the 1960s, Rob Henderson notes that the share who call themselves far left has tripled since the early 1980s and doubled since 2013.

It now runs higher than it did at the height of the Vietnam-era protests.

And months before a single one of these candidates was on a ballot, someone called all of it.

Charlie Kirk was one of the few on the right who saw it coming, and could say it plainly.

His point was simple. Young people, especially young men, are stuck in a renter economy they can’t climb out of, and if you refuse to fix their economic reality, they will get radical politically.

He called it a distress signal.

He was right.

These people aren’t loyal to a party, or an economic philosophy. That’s why young people voted for Trump in historic numbers, and are now voting for socialists in historic numbers.

It’s the same exact distress signal, just channeled toward different candidates.

Today, you’ll learn:

• Why traditional anti-socialist talking points are completely failing to move the needle with younger voters.

• The primary root cause of modern political radicalism that has nothing to do with classroom indoctrination.

• How a warning from Charlie Kirk accurately predicted the exact economic distress signals we are seeing today.

• The bipartisan legislative actions quietly passing through Washington to tackle corporate housing monopolies.

• Four structural shifts required to restore genuine market competition and hand an entire generation a reason to stay.

Socialism Is a Bad Idea. But Saying That Isn’t Enough.

I think socialism is a bad idea.

There’s not a single socialist or communist country on earth that Americans would actually choose to live in.

And the places people hold up as proof it works, the Scandinavian ones, aren’t socialist at all.

They’re market economies with high taxes and strong safety nets. They are capitalist.

Even the leaders of these countries say so:

“I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

— Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Danish Prime Minister, at Harvard

I also don’t buy that socialism just hasn’t been tried the right way. I think it’s flawed at the root. A market is millions of people solving problems at once, and that will always be smarter than a few hundred officials trying to plan an economy from a room. Innovation and growth are what dragged humanity out of poverty and let billions of people survive on this planet. Redistribution has never been the engine. It only divides what the engine builds.

But I’m not going to pretend the problems socialism is reacting to are imaginary. Healthcare in this country is indefensible. A home is out of reach for an entire generation.

The fix for that is a better capitalism, and it’s not the form of capitalism we have now.

The capitalism we have is not what the founders envisioned.

There is too much money in politics.

Both parties are captured by corporate interests. Both sides are bankrolled by billionaires.

Too often the laws get made based on who has the most power, not what’s good for the people.

So we need better capitalism, not socialism.

But frankly, most people don’t care what you call it. They just want solutions.

Imagine you go to the doctor with back pain. You’ve tried everything. The heating pad, the stretches, the supplements you read about online, the brace your cousin swore by. You’ve even tried weird esoteric stuff, energy healing, hypnosis, even crystals. You’re willing to try anything, because you’re desperate to heal.

But you’re still in pain.

And the doctor, instead of treating you, spends the whole visit telling you how stupid you were to try those things. How dumb your research was. How wrong you got it.

Maybe the doctor is right. Probably the doctor is right. He’s the expert. But you’re still in pain, and he hasn’t done one thing about it.

So what happens? Do you change your mind? Or do you change your doctor?

That is exactly what the constant fixation on the tertiary causes of socialism — indoctrination, foreign influence, poor education — instead of the primary cause, economic pain, is doing.

It’s pushing people to a new doctor.

Socialism doesn’t work, critics say, and they’re mostly right.

But the patient is still hurting, and being told you’re wrong while you’re in pain doesn’t make for a happy patient.

The right-wing internet has its explanations ready. Islamist infiltration. Voter fraud in California. Dumb white wealthy college kids. Foreign influence out of China and Russia.

Each one has a kernel of truth, but the size of the kernel varies wildly, and people fixate on the ones that feel best, because those are the ones that hand you a villain.

A boogeyman means the problem is them, not us.

But the seeds of socialism have been in American soil for a hundred years. So why is 2026 such fertile ground for them to finally sprout?

Kirk already gave us the answer.

Young People Are Giving Up on the American Dream

I know people in LA who have given up on ever owning a home.

People in their 30s buried under student debt they’ll spend decades climbing out of, handed to them by a system happy to loan a kid $100,000 for a degree that was never going to pay it back, then collect interest on him for life.

People locked in a permanent renter’s cycle, paying off someone else’s mortgage forever.

Lately it’s been said that young people just aren’t patriotic anymore, like it’s a flaw in their character.

I’d love to see more patriotism from young people.

But how do you love a country you own no piece of, and don’t think you ever will?

How do you pledge yourself to ground you’ll never hold a square foot of?

They’re not detached because they hate America. They’re detached because they have nothing to be attached to. That’s the fertile soil of despair where the seed of socialism takes root.

No amount of videos showing a college student give an idiotic answer in an interview is going to change that.

No number of street interviews exposing a confused No Kings protester is going to change that.

No video explaining why billionaires exist is going to convince a 25-year-old in New York who can’t cover their $3,500 rent.

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” means nothing to someone carrying $100,000 in debt from a degree the system was thrilled to finance.

You can run that playbook every day for the next four years. The kids will only drift further left. Because it’s the doctor again, mocking the patient while the pain gets worse.

Every clip of a smug 20-year-old getting “destroyed” is satisfying, and it moves the needle exactly nowhere, because it never touches the thing driving people to socialism in the first place.

We Need a New Approach

The socialists are not winning because the right hasn’t mocked them hard enough.

They’re winning because people are in pain and someone is finally offering to do something about it.

Until the conversation on the right becomes about addressing that pain, about building a capitalism that works for regular people, instead of an endless parade of “look how dumb these kids are,” the socialists will gain ground and young people will keep drifting left.

Last fall I wrote a piece called “Why Zohran Won.”

The short version was that an entire generation had stopped being able to afford their own lives, and Mamdani was the only one treating that like the emergency it is.

I warned that if the right kept laughing at his voters instead of listening to them, they’d hand socialism the keys.

On Tuesday, the socialists reached out and took them.

So what does addressing the pain actually look like?

Two months before he was killed, Charlie Kirk didn’t just name the problem.

He wrote down the cure, down to the number.

And there’s some good news — because quietly, in Congress and inside the Trump administration, the first pieces of it are already being built.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The exact legislative levers being pulled to ban giant investment firms from buying up single-family starter homes.

• How an unglamorous, bipartisan rule change is quietly slashing thousands of dollars off the cost of new home construction.

• A definitive roadmap to dismantle the student loan machine, eliminate corporate capture in politics, and lower healthcare costs without nationalizing a single industry.

Read more

There’s been a lot of negativity about this war since the beginning.

And that’s understandable, because war is hell, the reasons for this war are abstract, and most people don’t see the benefits, they just see the cost.

But there’s been such committed negativity about war, Trump, and Israel that at this point, people are looking to confirm the worst rather than see the reality.

So let’s address each of these claims so you can decide for yourself where things are at.

Is $300B of American taxpayer money going to Iran?

The moment the memorandum was signed between Trump and Iran, commentators leapt on one particular passage, promising a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran.

It’s easy to misread this as the U.S. committing to giving $300 billion of taxpayer money to Iran, especially with confirmation and negativity bias.

But that’s not what it says.

The truth is the text itself leaves flexibility and room for interpretation.

The key clauses here are:

• “with regional partners”

• “the mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized”

“With regional partners” means that there is a spectrum of scenarios, ranging from the U.S. paying all $300 billion to regional partners paying all $300 billion.

The second clause means that which scenario is going to happen has not been locked in.

There’s a third line in that passage worth addressing, because critics jump straight on it: the part where the U.S. grants “all required licenses, waivers and permissions” for the transactions. That is not the U.S. writing a check. That is the U.S. clearing the legal path, lifting the sanctions walls it built so the money can legally move.

Clearing the road is not the same as paying the toll.

So the honest truth is: we do not know which scenario will happen.

But we do have a clue, and it comes from the Commander in Chief himself:

As well as Vice President JD Vance:

Reasonable minds can disagree over whether any money should go to Iran, how much money should go to them, and under what conditions.

But it’s not true that American taxpayer money is going to Iran. At least not yet.

The truth is that the stated intention is not to use American money, and the reality is that we won’t know whether that intention will be honored until the final deal is signed.

America lost the war

From the start, commentators forecast this war’s outcome with total certainty.

Given the inherent uncertainty of war, I don’t know how they were so certain — maybe they’re just smarter than me.

But there’s a sleight of hand associated with practically all of these predictions — they declared that America would lose without defining what losing actually means.

This is a microcosm of a broader problem with political discourse — people use terms without being precise about what they even mean.

Does “losing” mean:

• The Islamic Republic stays in power?

• Iran keeps any nuclear program at all?

• Iran eventually builds a bomb?

• Iran can still threaten America?

It’s easy to make predictions when you don’t identify what would make your prediction wrong.

Winning and losing are subjective, but the closest we can get to objectivity is understanding what the explicitly stated goals of the war were, and how America fared relative to those goals.

Fortunately, we have those readily at hand.

Despite the social media outrage-industrial complex’s insistence that the war is just about Israel, solely about Israel, and every other possible reason is a lie (more about that later), we do have clearly stated, albeit less salacious, goals from the Trump administration:

On March 2, Trump stated four goals:

1. Destroy Iran’s missiles

2. Annihilate their navy

3. Remove their support for terrorists like Hamas

4. Make sure they can never get a nuke

After the deal was signed, Trump positioned it as a triumph, partially because oil prices are going down, the Strait of Hormuz is open, and the fighting has ended.

These are all good things, but of course, none of those were a problem before the war began, because the war is what caused oil prices to go up, the Strait to be closed, and the fighting to start.

So between Trump’s triumphalism and the mainstream media/social media’s rampant negativity lies the truth.

What the truth is, is difficult to ascertain through the fog of war for everyone, me included.

But let’s give it a shot.

Now, a quick caveat before I try to score any of this. The moment I hit publish, this article starts going out of date. The war is uncertain. It is also volatile. The facts move by the hour, and the spin moves faster than the facts.

I have spent this entire war hunting for a clean through-line, and social media often actually gets in the way.

It is so loud, so confident, and so contradictory that you can scroll for an hour and come away knowing less than when you started, a little dumber and a lot angrier.

So here is what I do.

I track these stories on Ground News.

It has been my favorite news app for two years, since well before they ever sponsored me, because it hands me the high-level picture without the hours of scrolling and without the mental pollution that comes with them.

The feature I lean on most is Bias Comparison. It lays the coverage side by side and shows you how the left is spinning a story right next to how the right is spinning it, so the bias turns into data you can see instead of distortion you absorb without noticing.

Here is a live one, on the Strait of Hormuz.

Look at the split. Read the left coverage and the story is that the West broke this. Israel’s strikes provoked Iran, Washington bargained in bad faith, and Iran is only reacting to being wronged. Read the right coverage and the story is that Iran is the danger. It is choking off the world’s oil, or maybe bluffing that the strait is even shut. Same closure. To one side, Iran is reacting to a wrong. To the other, Iran is the wrong. The facts barely move. The villain flips.

Same event.

Two different stories.

And as Ground News flags, the real fight underneath is whether this was reactive retaliation or a menacing threat to global shipping.

That split is the whole game I have been trying to show you in this piece. Triumphalism on one side, catastrophizing on the other, and a truth in the middle that you have to dig for.

Ground News is the shovel.

You can get Bias Comparison and everything else for 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx.

Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage plan

Signing up keeps you informed, and it directly supports the work I do here.

How the U.S. fared against its four goals

Before scoring it, one honest caveat. Almost every damage figure below comes from the people who did the bombing. The U.S. and Israel claim more destruction. Iran claims less. Independent verification is thin, because Iran shut down the internet and cut off weapons inspectors. So treat these as ranges, not gospel.

Goal one: destroy the missiles and the production base.

This one splits in two, and the split is the story. The factories took a beating. CENTCOM said allied operations damaged or destroyed more than 85 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile, drone, and naval industrial base. [1] The existing arsenal is a different question, and the agencies fight about it. Israeli estimates put the losses at a third to half of the missiles and about half the launchers, while U.S. intelligence, cited by the New York Times in May, said Iran retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar stockpile. [1] Five weeks in, U.S. intelligence assessed the strikes had degraded only about half of Iran’s missiles and drones, with thousands of Shahed attack drones still in hand. [2] What is not in dispute is that the launch capability cratered. Iran’s fire rate collapsed by about 92 percent, and more than 60 percent of its launchers were knocked out. [3]

So Iran can barely build new missiles, but it likely still sits on a four-figure pile of old ones. One number is the workshop. The other is the warehouse.

Status: partially achieved. Production gutted, arsenal dented, launch capability wrecked, a residual force still standing.

Goal two: annihilate the navy.

This is the cleanest win of the four. Forty-three Iranian naval vessels were destroyed or damaged, [3] and the navy was folded into that same 85 percent industrial-base figure. Trump put it plainly in his April address: their navy is gone. [4] The honest asterisk: Iran’s threat in the Gulf was never a real fleet. It was mines, shore-based anti-ship missiles, fast boats, and drones. And Iran still managed to close the Strait of Hormuz on March 4, after the strikes had already started. The fleet was crushed. The sea-denial capability outlived it.

Status: largely achieved. The fleet is finished. The asymmetric Hormuz threat was degraded, not erased.

Goal three: end support for the proxies.

The axis was already gutted before this war began, which complicates the credit. Israel decapitated Hezbollah in late 2024, killing Hassan Nasrallah and most of its leadership, which in turn helped topple the pro-Iran Assad regime. [5] Hezbollah entered 2026 in terminal decline, and its failed intervention against Israel in March finished off any chance of recovery once Lebanon’s own government banned its military activities. [6] The broad verdict from analysts is that leaders across Iran’s network have been eliminated and the groups weakened. [7]

But the goal was removing Iran’s support, not just bloodying the proxies. Those are different things. The militias are wrecked, yet the deal does not bind Iran’s funding of them, and Iran fought to keep that lever. Battered network, intact patron.

Status: largely achieved on the battlefield, much of it before this specific war, and not locked in by the deal.

Goal four: make sure Iran can never get a nuke.

This is the most important goal for the U.S.

The machines got hit hard. The June 2025 strikes likely destroyed or disabled nearly 22,000 centrifuges across Natanz and Fordow, [8] and the head of the IAEA testified it is extremely unlikely any centrifuges survived at the three main sites. [9]

The fuel is the part that matters, and the fuel probably lived.

The IAEA estimates Iran holds about 184 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium and about 441 kilograms of 60 percent, and says that stockpile remains inside the country. [10]

That 441 kilograms, enriched further, is enough fissile material for something on the order of ten weapons. [11]

U.S. intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that Iran has not resumed enriching. [10]

And nobody can independently check. Inspectors have not been able to examine the bombed facilities. [10] Even the early U.S. read was more modest than the rhetoric. A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report said the strikes did significant damage but did not totally destroy the sites, [12] while Trump called them obliterated.

So the pathway was set back.

The bomb fuel was not eliminated, and its current state cannot be verified.

“Never get a nuke” is a promise that needs to be delivered during the 60-day negotiation period that started after the current deal was signed.

Status: leverage established, terms not finalized.

The bottom line. It looks like the war made meaningful progress on all four goals, but more work remains.

The navy is the clean win.

The proxies are mostly beaten, though they were already falling before this round.

The missile arsenal is half-done, with the agencies arguing over the other half.

And the nuclear guarantee, the thing this war was supposedly about, is the one still hanging on the deal.

Trump’s “we’ve done all of it” is triumphalism.

“We lost” is fantasy.

The reality is major damage, oversold by one side, denied by the other, and unfinished on the front that matters most.

Is America controlled by Israel?

In my earlier pieces on the Iran War, I examined the claim that the war in Iran is really about Israel.

I encourage you to read those if you want the full picture of where American and Israeli incentives align, where they split, and the arguments from people like Tucker Carlson that the war is literally just about Israel.

Rather than rehash all of it, consider these comments from our President and Vice President.

These are not the statements of men controlled by a foreign government. They are the statements of leaders managing a strategic partnership: aligned with an ally on the broad strokes, at odds on the particulars.

Adults who are largely on the same page, having a professional disagreement.

And Vance’s comment points to the opposite of what the “Israel controls us” crowd believes.

If anyone holds the leverage, it is America. We are the greatest superpower on earth.

Israel is a small country surrounded by enemies, and it needs our backing to do what it does.

The people shouting that we are controlled by Israel almost never say what “control” would even mean:

• Do we do whatever Israel wants?

• Do we act for their interests against our own?

• Do we compromise, which is what every ally does in a healthy alliance?

They rarely define the term they are leaning the entire argument on.

And Trump’s friction with Israel is not new. He was openly frustrated when Israel and Iran kept fighting after Operation Midnight Hammer.

Here is the harder truth underneath all of it. For Israel, this is existential. For us, it is not. Iran sits on Israel’s doorstep, not across an ocean.

A nuclear Iran is a gun to Israel’s head. For America, Iran is a regional problem and a long-horizon threat. Serious, but not the same knife at the throat. And our interest in that region was never only Israel. It is the Abraham Accords. It is the Saudis. It is the Emiratis. It is oil. It is a neighborhood stable enough to actually do business in.

So why didn’t Trump just finish the job for Israel? Because this war is deeply unpopular at home, midterms are coming, and a hated war tanks the rest of a president’s agenda.

In short — because Israel does not control America — and America’s leader has different priorities.

And here is the proof Israel does not run us: we cut them out of the deal.

This was a direct agreement between the United States and Iran.

Israel was not a party to it.

If Israel ran Washington, the war would not have ended with their single biggest priority unmet, and they would not have been left standing outside the room.

Israel’s appetite is bigger than America’s stomach.

Do they have influence? Yes. Control? No.

There is a reasonable debate to have here: whether Israel’s influence over American foreign policy is worth what Israel gives America in return, and whether America should be operating in the Middle East at all.

What is not reasonable is starting from the premise that there are no America-first stakes in this war, or that Iran is not a threat to America and its interests.

Conclusion

So there you have it, measured against the four goals America set.

No, America has not lost this war.

But it has not won it either.

It has made substantial progress, and it is now in the middle of a process meant to lock that progress in.

In pure geopolitical terms, the ledger right now reads positive.

Which is exactly why nobody is happy.

Israel and the neocons are angry that America stopped short.

Iran is angry that Israel is still operating in Lebanon and that America backed the war at all.

As the old saying goes, when everybody leaves the table unhappy, the deal was probably fair.

But fair is not the same as finished. It is premature to call this a win, because the biggest piece, Iran’s nuclear status, has not actually been locked in. That happens in the 60-day negotiation period, or it doesn’t.

But there’s another question to assess: are we even better off than we were before Trump tore up Obama’s deal in the first place?

Because the situation we are landing in looks an awful lot like the one we left.

That is what I want to get into below.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The Sunset Clause Danger: The hidden flaw in the new framework’s timeline that could accidentally hand Iran a permanent path to a bomb.

• The Stockpile Audit: What is happening right now to Iran’s 441-kilogram cache of highly enriched uranium behind the current inspection blackout.

• The Leverage Equation: The single structural difference between Trump’s force and Obama’s hope that completely alters how this deal functions.

Read more

Part 1 — The Case

On the night of December 3, 2025, an 18-year-old finance student named Henry Nowak was walking home in Southampton after celebrating the end of his first term.

A 23-year-old brown man named Vickrum Digwa stabbed him five times with an eight-inch blade. One wound opened his chest.

When police arrived, Nowak lay bleeding, telling them he had been stabbed and could not breathe.

An officer told him he did not think he had been stabbed at all.

Then they handcuffed him. They put the cuffs on the boy who was dying.

Why? Likely because his killer reached the officers first with a more potent story.

Digwa said Nowak had grabbed his turban and racially abused him, and that Digwa was the victim of a racist attack.

The police likely reacted to that story because Digwa said the magic word: racist.

The cuffs went on Nowak instead of the man who stabbed him.

By the time anyone grasped the truth — Nowak was dead.

A court later found Digwa had lied. The judge told him the claim of racist abuse was completely at odds with everything known about Nowak, and that Digwa was the only person who ever made it. Digwa got life, 21 years minimum. His mother was convicted of helping hide the weapon. Justice was eventually served.

Part 2 — The Reaction

We all remember the outpouring of emotion over George Floyd, who uttered the same words as Nowak — “I can’t breathe.”

His and Nowak’s situations are not the same.

But the difference between the reactions to them is far greater than the difference between the events themselves.

That gap is not just about newsrooms. Blame the press if you want, but every outlet leans somewhere, and chasing their bias is its own dead end.

The gap is in Western culture, and its source is guilt.

We have sorted which deaths we’re outraged over and which ones we ignore by color.

Henry Nowak did not vanish because an editor spiked the story. He vanished because subjective racial preference now governs society’s response to objective evil.

And humans abhor a double standard, even one they enforce on themselves.

To make that double standard clear, ask yourself: if Henry Nowak were black, and his killer white, what would the reaction be?

We have built a society that runs two different standards for the same act.

One standard for when the majority group is at fault.

Another for when the minority group is at fault.

And an unspoken rule that the second standard can never be named, because naming it “feels” like racism.

The impulse to protect minorities is understandable. After all, history and modernity are littered with examples of minorities across the globe being abused by the majority.

But the solution to that is not to reverse double standards, it’s to remove them.

But often that’s not what happens.

Instead, lower standards are created for minorities, and higher standards are enforced for majorities.

Part 3 — How We Got Here: The Cycle

A wrong does not stop being a wrong when the victim belongs to the majority.

And a buried double standard does not heal. It ferments. Here’s what happens:

1. In reaction to abuses against minorities, corrective measures are put in place.

   1. Example: minorities get abused in the UK, so police sensitivity training is put in place.

2. Alongside those corrective measures, overcorrective measures are put in place.

   1. Example: members of the public walk on eggshells, quick to accuse anyone criticizing national immigration policy of racism.

3. Members of the majority group feel frustrated by the overcorrection, but feel unable to express it for fear of being labeled bigots.

4. As a result, the only members of the group willing to speak out are the very courageous, the aggressive, or the unapologetic bigots.

   1. Example: the far-right, extremists, and provocateurs become the only spokespeople for the concerns of the majority.

5. Legitimate concerns get labeled as bigoted because of their association with bigots or aggressive spokespeople, and don’t get addressed.

6. Concerns don’t get addressed, and more members of the majority group get angry.

7. Anger boils over into violence.

   1. Example: violent protests in the UK over Henry Nowak.

8. Mainstream media — unable to understand how we got to step 7 — reports on step 7, identifying the problem as right-wing extremists without understanding how right-wing extremists became so influential.

This cycle will continue until we fix it by ceasing to make race the primary mode of analysis.

Part 4 — The Root

Strip the case down and look at one moment. An officer stood over a bleeding white boy and a composed brown man, heard two stories, and chose which to believe.

We cannot know what moved that officer. But a ready inference is that the cry of racism rattled him into doubting a boy who said he could not breathe — and the fact that this is the readiest explanation is the problem.

That he believed the one that was socially safer to believe.

That he sorted his trust by skin.

That the dying boy said “I’ve been stabbed,” and the system answered that the other man had cried racism, and that is the claim no one is trained to doubt.

That is the state acting on race. That is the precise reflex everyone swore off after 2020. It came back pointed the other way, and a boy died of it.

And notice how much that one word could carry.

A man had stabbed someone five times, and merely the claim “racism” was a trick powerful enough to flip the roles — to make the killer the victim and the dying boy the suspect, to the cops on the scene.

And the killer knew that invoking the word “racist” was so powerful that it could actually give him a chance of being absolved of his crime.

That is the deeper tell.

The judge refused to let the trick work, and that is good. A healthier culture wouldn’t have officers fooled by the trick in the first place.

Some of the reaction to Henry’s death is, of course, horrible. Some of it was a handful of men outside a police station throwing bricks and Nazi salutes, harassing Sikhs who had harmed no one. That’s irrational, destructive, and unacceptable — no matter what their grievances are.

But they shouldn’t be dismissed as simply a group of crazed madmen.

Because they are a cohort that will grow louder and more violent if we don’t correct the cultural conditions that are making their reaction appear appealing to the millions of reasonable people who are tired of watching the racial double standard be ignored.

Because when people are ignored, they become resentful. And eventually, the resentful cease to be reasonable.

Real racists exist, and some of them cheer for sensible policy for ugly reasons.

But a bigot wanting secure borders does not make secure borders a bigoted idea.

A bigot wanting to ensure that immigrants are culturally compatible with the native culture does not make the desire a bigoted one.

The presence of bad actors in a coalition indicts the bad actors, and no one else.

Smearing an entire concern with the sins of its fringe is judging the many by the worst of the few.

Underneath this confusion in the West sits one engine, and it is time to name it.

White guilt.

There is a narrative pervading Western culture that the West is fundamentally morally bankrupt.

That America was built on slavery and conquest.

That Britain is similarly contemptible as the source of colonialism and slavery.

That the West — and in particular white people, as the phenotype most represented in the West historically — is morally defective.

Slavery is evil. Conquest involves evil. Colonialism does too.

The problem is not the acknowledgement of these evils, it’s the selective focus on these evils, to the exclusion of the good.

The balance of the public’s focus has tipped more toward Western sins than Western wins.

I’ve written at length about this with regard to slavery in particular — we are telling a selective version of history that positions the West as the antagonist, rather than the protagonist, of history.

The net effect of this is intangible but potent.

It shows up in the decline in patriotism in America, and its total collapse in Britain.

But it shows up on a personal level, and I’ve noticed it among many white people.

I felt it up close once. Years ago, in a therapy circle, a well-intentioned white stranger turned to me with wet eyes and apologized for “what my people did to you.”

I am the son of African immigrants.

My parents arrived on planes, not in chains.

That apology was never about me.

It also wasn’t about him. After all, he didn’t do anything.

It was a man trying to wash himself clean on the nearest dark-skinned body.

It was sad and unnecessary.

But that’s what guilt does.

Guilt creates performative theater that looks like repair and builds nothing.

And a guilty society performs the same scene on a national scale.

It is why the borders stay open while the voters who object get filed under bigot.

It is why a sprawling welfare fraud in Minnesota, run by a subset of the Somali community, was allowed to grow for years — because Somalis are black, and the people who should have stopped it did not want to be called racist for looking too closely.

It is why British authorities spent years refusing to look squarely at gangs of child rapists in which Pakistani men were overrepresented.

Because in order to even begin to have a rational conversation about any of these topics, one must first prove that one is not a racist.

Because that’s what a guilty culture needs to do — constantly defend itself.

Just like a person who feels guilty.

We have made the accusation of racism so powerful that it sends people scrambling to defend themselves.

Part 5 — Stakes and the Way Out

Here is why this matters more than one street in Southampton, and why it’s relevant to you regardless of the color of your skin.

Nature abhors an imbalance. Every double standard you refuse to fix transfers.

The resentment moves from the group that felt wronged yesterday to the group that feels wronged today, and it grows in transit.

Suppress it with guilt and it turns to pressure, and pressure finds the nearest crack, and turns to anger.

Henry Nowak is a canary in a coal mine.

What comes next, if we keep pretending, is a backlash against migrants and minorities that will not stay performative and will not stay online.

Build a society on guilt and you raise a generation on resentment.

The way out is one standard for everyone, applied before anyone checks a skin tone. It doesn’t matter if someone is black, white, or anything in between — murder is equally wrong.

When a human bleeds on the pavement, you help, before you weigh the optics, before you decide whose story is politically safer.

And we have to be able to say all of this out loud, in good faith, without the conversation detonating the second someone reaches for the word “racist.”

Race is an idea. We have fed it until it walks around looking like a fact. Henry Nowak is what the idea costs when it reaches all the way into an officer’s split-second choice about whose life to believe.

So that is the diagnosis. Now the harder question — the one that lands in my inbox regularly — is: how do you actually talk about any of this without getting branded a racist and losing the room? How do you raise a real double standard, at work, at dinner, online, without the fear silencing you before you start?

That is what I want to hand you below.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The exact mechanism of how suppressed double standards inevitably ferment into societal violence, and what comes next.

• A counterintuitive opening script that allows you to bring up highly sensitive racial topics without triggering the other person’s defenses.

• Exactly how to react and disarm the situation the moment someone tries to slap you with the “racist” label.

• My 6-step framework for speaking the truth about cultural double standards at work, at dinner, or online, without becoming the villain, losing your job, or getting canceled.

Read more

I recommend you read the monologue and scan through the questions and dig deeper into the questions over time. You may want to come back to this letter a couple times.

Let me know in the comments how you liked the live conversation, and if you want me to do more of these in the future.

Part I — Opening Monologue: The LA Race & How to Reason About Fraud

(0:00) So, I originally decided I wanted to do this because of the Spencer Pratt LA mayoral race. This is one of those topics that, first of all, is really near and dear to my heart — because right now I’m in Medellín, Colombia. It’s kind of a mouthful to say, Medellín, Colombia, but I’ve lived in LA for 12 years. Right now I’ve left, just for my own personal life fulfillment and to explore and to travel, and I plan on going back to LA. But frankly, if LA’s management doesn’t change, I don’t know that I will.

The reason I share that is because, emotionally, I am with a lot of you in my audience. Many people in my audience are right-leaning — I’m aware of that. Many are people who may have shifted from the left to feeling politically homeless. And many are fellow Angelenos who are also frustrated with the state of the state and the city.

(1:00) With all that said — as someone who put out multiple videos advocating for Spencer Pratt, believing that he’s the direction we need in order to bring more balance and rational, common-sense policy to California and to LA — what I’m noticing in the discussion around the LA electoral race is that people are not holding a very high standard for accusations.

To give you the analogy: if you go to a court of law, you can’t just accuse people of things and get it heard in court. You need a strong body of evidence to even get heard by the judge in the first place. Why is that? Because it takes a lot more energy to defend against a claim than it takes to make a claim. Unfortunately, in the court of public opinion, we don’t have such a high standard. It’s very easy to accuse people of things based on pretty much nothing. And I know this as someone who gets talked about online and has seen people make stuff up about me.

(2:03) What happens is people will often make a claim about something based on an emotion, or on the fact that they can’t explain it.

This is called making an argument from incredulity — it’s a philosophical term. An argument from incredulity basically looks like: “Hey, I don’t understand how something works, therefore something nefarious is going on.” Or: “I can’t explain this anomaly, therefore it must be evidence of malevolence.” Said in simpler terms: people get suspicious, and they use that suspicion as itself an argument.

I’m not doing this stream to tell you not to be suspicious. To be absolutely clear: there are anomalies in the LA electoral race. And just so it’s also said — there absolutely is fraud in the LA mayoral race. We pretty much know there’s fraud, because in almost any complex system (and election systems are some of the most complex out there, at a scale of millions of people), things are going to go wrong. People are going to cheat. There’s going to be fraud. So if you see a video of homeless people on Skid Row saying they were paid to vote for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman — yeah, I could believe that.

(3:17) The question here is not whether there’s fraud in the electoral system. The question is: what is the degree of fraud, and is it enough to swing an election? That’s the actual thing we’re having a discussion about. What’s happening in the public discourse is that people are taking a bunch of social media clips and screenshots of things that don’t make sense, out of context, and saying, “See, I knew it — the election is being stolen.”

(3:47) But I actually want to back up a little bit. How did we even get to the point where people are making this accusation in the first place? Well, June 2nd is LA’s election day — that’s when people go to the booths and vote in person. But that’s not the only time voting happens in LA, because people can sometimes submit mail-in ballots. In 2020, during COVID, the mail-in ballot system was expanded nationwide, including in LA. The rationalization, the justification, was that people don’t want to vote in person because of COVID, so we need to make it easier to vote by mail. I understand that rationale, but unfortunately it results in a system that isn’t as intuitively trustworthy.

If you layer on top of that the fact that we don’t have voter ID in California, most people look at the system and say, “Well, how can this possibly be secure if you’re not even required to show ID when you go to the voting booth?” I think that’s a very rational concern, and it’s part of the reason I think we really need voter ID in California. Not because the system is fundamentally easy to defraud — I’ll talk about the safeguards they have in a second — but because it’s difficult for the system to be easy for the layman to trust. You bring ID to buy alcohol, you bring ID to go to a bar; how is it that you don’t need ID to vote in an election? It doesn’t intuitively instill a lot of trust in people.

(5:12) Now, in California — and I’m not saying this is a sufficient solution — it’s important to know they have other safeguards in the system. One of them (and this gets into some of the things people don’t understand but are calling evidence of fraud) is called vote curing. Vote curing is a process by which a bunch of people — I believe by hand, but maybe by machine too; I think a lot of it is actually done by hand — look at someone’s record of signatures on official government documents. They look at the signature you used when you signed up to vote. So let’s say I moved to California in 2014 and registered to vote in 2014. They’d look at the signature on my voter registration from 2014 and compare it against the signature on my ballot in 2026. If there’s a big discrepancy between the original and the new signature, they go through a curing process: they notify you as the voter — “Hey, there’s a discrepancy large enough that we’re not willing to accept your vote.” But you have, I think, three weeks to cure. “Cure” just means you have to reconcile the difference between the signature we have on file and the one you just gave us.

What does that mean? It means it’s actually pretty hard to introduce fraud into that part of the system. If I have a signature from ten years ago, even if someone’s trying to impersonate me, unless they know what my signature looks like — which is possible; someone could go through my mail and try to find evidence of my signature — they need to actually match my signature to the one I submitted to the county registrar years ago. So that’s one of the safeguards in place. Again, I’m not saying it’s necessary nor sufficient for safety or public trust. But I’m telling you this because people are taking the fact that certain voters in LA got notified that their ballot was not accepted as evidence of fraud. No — it’s not necessarily evidence of fraud. It’s actually a very normal part of the process that happens all the time. Does that make sense so far? Cool.

(7:34) The reason I’m saying this is because yesterday I saw a post go viral on X — millions of views, tens of thousands of likes — claiming that 18,000 votes, mostly or maybe even all for Spencer Pratt, were not accepted, as more evidence of fraud. No, that’s not what that means. What it means is that those votes didn’t have matching signatures and therefore need to be cured through the normal process. On top of that, the post said 18,000 votes were not accepted — I don’t know how they got that number. And in fact, the LA County Registrar on X (which is actually kind of cool) replied directly to that post saying, “No, these numbers are made up. We don’t even know where you got them.” Maybe those numbers are true, but the person didn’t even cite their source.

I’m mentioning this because on social media there is zero standard for making an accusation. You can find someone making claims about absolutely everything. And I, as someone who’s in the business of being a thought leader and an influencer, know how easy it is to selectively frame something to fit your narrative. It’s incredibly easy — because most people (and this is not a slight on any of us as individuals; it’s collective human behavior) are busy. These things are complicated. It’s overwhelming. We don’t like uncertainty; we want certainty. So rather than saying, “Hey, I genuinely don’t know — let me wait for an investigation,” we’d rather get information across our feed that makes us feel validated, that makes us feel like I’m right and they’re wrong and they’re evil and the Democrats (or “Demonrats,” as I call them) are stealing the election and I knew it. We’d rather get information that quickly fills the gap and confirms our bias than actually look for the proper information.

That was one of those posts — where literally the only information was a screenshot of someone whose ballot needed to be cured. There was no evidence that 18,000 such ballots existed, and no evidence those ballots were primarily for Spencer Pratt. I’m painting this as an example — not because the point is to address every single accusation; I can’t do that and I’m not here to do that — but to help you see how gaps in our understanding of complex systems can make things appear a lot more suspicious than they need to be, once we actually understand how the system works. So again: it is actually normal in California for votes to get rejected because the signatures don’t match, and that’s actually a feature of the system to prevent fraud. And if the signatures don’t match, the person who submitted the vote has an opportunity to fix it.

(10:22) Which leads me to my second point: why does it take so long in California to count votes? Again, I’m not saying it’s a proper system — I think we need voter ID, and especially given this election, I think the whole process needs to be a lot faster than a month. But part of the reason it takes so long is mail-in ballots. In California, even though election day is June 2nd, people have until June 2nd to actually send their mail. When someone sends their mail, the post office does something called postmarking. I don’t know if it’s the date they receive the mail or the date it’s sent, but basically it has to be postmarked by June 2nd. Which means — if we’re doing the math — if someone is a liberal, progressive, far-left college student from California currently studying at Harvard (and I knew plenty of those students), and they waited until the last minute to vote, because that’s what students do — they procrastinate — those votes are not coming in on June 2nd. They’re coming in days or even weeks after, but as long as they’re postmarked by June 2nd, they’re still valid.

So if you have a vote-curing process and a process by which people can submit a ballot that doesn’t arrive until after election day, you actually don’t get the full picture on June 2nd. That’s why things are a bit misleading.

I’m actually guilty of jumping to conclusions on election day. I got swept up in the hype. I was excited. I thought Spencer Pratt had secured top two. I even made a casual video on the street saying I was wrong — he did not secure top two. I was ignorant as to how this system worked. So I had the same question many people had: how can someone be in the lead at first and then fall behind later?

[Aside: the lighting’s not very good here, so as pretty as the background is, we’re going to switch it up so you can see me. There — see my face? Good. So I’m not shrouded in shadows. Election fraud and integrity, without me being in shadow too.]

So I didn’t even understand how the system worked — and I’m someone who lived in California for 12 to 13 years. But when I researched it, I concluded: okay, I think the system is needlessly complex. I understand why people don’t trust it. But no, it’s not dead simple to defraud — it actually requires a significant amount of work. And if you factor in that mail-in ballots disproportionately favor progressives — and not just progressives, but the far left — think about who a democratic-socialist message resonates with (Nithya Raman is a democratic socialist). It resonates with young college students, especially the kind going out of state for an Ivy League education at a liberal arts school; or renters who aren’t voting on election day because they find it difficult to take time off work; or in-state students who think going to a polling booth on election day is lame, so they’ll just vote by mail if they vote at all. Those are the kinds of people who vote by mail.

The kind of people who vote on election day are, in California at least, generally a bit better off — often homeowners, retirees, or self-employed people who find it easier to go to the booth and who feel it’s their civic duty. Layer on that the fact that a lot of Spencer Pratt’s voters are anti-establishment people who feel really frustrated. Think about Spencer Pratt’s whole story: the guy lost his home and his parents’ home. He’s angry. He’s part of a resistance movement. The people who resonate with that are the kind who go vote on election day. So that’s when you’d expect the highest concentration of Pratt voters — election day, June 2nd, in person. Obviously not all of them, but the point is: the composition of voters on election day is different from the composition of voters after election day. As a general rule, the further away you get from election day, the further to the left you get.

Honestly, in hindsight, maybe it’d be better if they didn’t even release results until after they’ve counted all the ballots — so there’s not this whiplash. Because I get it. People got whiplash. I got whiplash too. People get excited, then really disappointed, then they look for answers, then they say “fraud.”

(15:30) A second thing: I think people — maybe especially outside California — have an image of California being very liberal, and LA certainly is, but I don’t think people quite understand just how liberal it is. I really started to understand that when I went through my own political identity shift in 2024. I was a default Democrat. It was kind of like demographics was destiny: I’m Black, I was born in New York, I worked in tech, I lived in California — odds are I was going to vote Democrat. Then I went through my own awakening, or maturation, whatever you want to call it, and 2024 was the first year I voted Republican. That is very socially risky in LA. Even to this day, you don’t advertise that you voted for Trump. In fact, there was a story going around — and maybe this isn’t true, so feel free to fact-check me — where I think an old guy wearing a MAGA hat got assaulted, possibly in California, and tragically he died. That’s not normal, it’s obviously an extreme, but it shows you: California isn’t only very blue, it’s very anti-Trump — LA specifically, very anti-Trump. Only about 15% of registered voters in LA are registered Republicans. So it’s actually really surprising that Spencer Pratt was ahead at any point in the race.

Again, I’m not saying that fact defeats any claim of fraud, and I’ll continue to address specific claims. I’m pointing it out because your perception determines your reality. If Spencer hadn’t been leading, people would’ve said, “Well, California is just a liberal cesspool and far-left socialists are taking over the state” — which, by the way, is true. The democratic socialists actually are gaining ground in California. They’ve been quietly eating up legislative seats and local governments in cities and neighborhoods within LA. They’re very organized. I’m saying that descriptively. Normatively, I actually think that’s a big problem. But California hasn’t just been liberal — it’s getting more liberal, and is very anti-Trump.

(18:04) And depending on how you feel, you may or may not like this, but Spencer Pratt reminds a lot of people of Trump. Even if you look at the résumé, there are things in common: he was in television, had a reality TV show, and a lot of people associate Trump with reality TV and The Apprentice. They’re both boisterous. They both make big claims. They’re both very good marketers, very charismatic. They’re both white. They’re both aligned with the right. A lot of people associate Pratt with Trump. Trump even endorsed Pratt. So if you’re in an area that’s only 15% Republican — where we just went through this whole ICE thing a year ago, all this inflammation over the ICE raids, people really upset about it in California, with Gavin Newsom running the state and his full-time job basically being to resist Trump — the demographics just don’t favor Pratt here. It’s remarkable, and it actually gave me hope, that he received as much support as he did. From the perspective of demographics, it’s not surprising that he’s not advancing.

But again — when you see “it looks like he’s going to advance” and then all of a sudden he’s not, and you don’t understand the mechanics of how voting works in California, it can be really frustrating. And, understandably, given the bad marriage that America is in — where Democrats and Republicans can’t talk to each other, the left and right are calling each other evil, and it feels impossible to agree on anything these days — it’s understandable how people fill the gap.

(19:52) Now, the next thing I want to talk about — because this is one of the things people are using to fill the gap — is the situation with homelessness. Recently there have been videos going viral of homeless people on Skid Row saying they were paid, in some cases to vote for Karen Bass; one guy I watched said he was given a choice between Nithya Raman and Karen Bass. To be super clear: that needs to be investigated and prosecuted if true. Period. If there’s any fraud, it doesn’t matter if it’s one vote or a million votes — it needs to be investigated and prosecuted. I’m glad there are investigations being done. That’s a good thing. But it is not the same thing as tens or hundreds of thousands of votes being manipulated to swing an election.

(20:47) There’s a logical fallacy I want you all to be aware of that we’re all guilty of sometimes — called the base rate fallacy. A non-political example to make it clear: autonomous vehicles are available now. If you own a Tesla, maybe you’ve tried Full Self-Driving. I own a Cybertruck — I absolutely love the feature; I drive with Full Self-Driving 95% of the time. (This ad is not sponsored by Elon Musk.) When autonomous vehicles first started getting onto the market, people freaked out, saying things like, “What if it kills someone?” And here’s the truth: autonomous vehicles will kill people. That’s going to happen. The question is not will things go wrong — it’s how frequently will they go wrong, and is that more or less often than with a human driver? When there’s a story about someone getting killed by a human driver, it happens often enough that, tragic as it is, it probably won’t even make the news. But if it’s a Tesla on Full Self-Driving that kills someone, what do you think happens? It’s broadcast everywhere — because it has the most emotional content. People feel a lot more upset over a robot killing a person than a human killing a person, even though robots are much safer drivers than humans, and having everyone drive autonomously would save many, many lives.

What people do is commit the base rate fallacy: they look at the most inflammatory thing and use it as evidence of a broader trend, overestimating how often something is happening. That’s what I suspect — I don’t know, but I suspect — is happening with this homeless case. Look, it’s possible there are tens of thousands of homeless people who were all approached by Democrats or socialists and paid off for votes. It’s possible. But you need evidence — not just instance, but frequency. One instance of something happening when there are millions of people in a complex system is very far from evidence that the system itself is fundamentally bankrupt.

(23:29) I mention this because someone yesterday pinged me, in response to one of the things I was saying, and said, “Well, the Heritage Foundation found evidence of fraud.” For those who don’t know, the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank — and California is liberal — so Heritage has a strong motivation to own the libs and find something wrong in the system. They did, I think, a decade-long study (and admittedly I have to double-check this, but I believe it’s roughly true) of voting fraud in California, and they found a few dozen to maybe low hundreds of cases. What I’m saying is: of course there are instances of fraud, and every single time they happen they need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law — not because “there’s only a little fraud so it doesn’t matter.” No — even the perception of fraud is a huge issue, which is again a reason you need voter ID. It’s not just the system being good; it’s people believing the system is good that matters.

That said — if you were in a court of law, you wouldn’t prosecute someone based on a video of a few homeless people saying they were paid off. You’d say, “Okay, this is evidence, but you need more corroborating evidence to demonstrate scale.” But on social media, we’re not doing that.

(24:50) This is the piece where I want to invite some self-reflection, because it’s easy to say we’re all committed to truth. And at some level, we all want the truth. But we also like to feel like we’re right. When you have a bad marriage where you’ve been fighting for years, and legitimately the other side has done things that are really hurtful, and you can’t explain something — “Oh, you were gone for a few hours, where were you? Were you cheating?” — that’s basically the situation America is in right now. The default is massive amounts of suspicion with low amounts of evidence. That is not a healthy way to conduct a democracy, my friends. It’s a really destructive way. And we’re watching it play out over and over. We could say it’s the media’s fault, or the politicians’ fault — but it’s our fault. It’s our fault when a post goes viral on X that says 18,000 votes were rejected, doesn’t mention how vote curing works, doesn’t cite any sources, and gets millions of views — while the LA County Registrar (which, by the way, has bipartisan watchdog commissions; they literally have Republicans watching people count votes and Democrats watching people count votes — that’s one of the safeguards) replies saying “these numbers are made up, we don’t even know where you got them,” and that reply only gets a few thousand views and a few hundred likes. That’s the situation we’re in.

I think people are now aware of all the issues with politicians, and aware of all the issues with the media. I think people are only becoming aware of all the issues with social media. Social media is so confusing. It is dumbing us down. It’s dividing us, creating so much confusion, giving us information in fragments with no gatekeeping. The benefit of no gatekeeping is that if the gatekeepers are hiding the truth, you can get the truth through social media. But along with the truth, you also get a lot of garbage. And that’s what I’m seeing around this — a lot of garbage and a lot of snippets people hold onto, saying, “Well, this confirms my existing belief, and it’s true, and if you think it’s not, well, you have to prove it to me.” No. The first thing we should do when we get any piece of information is prove it’s true to ourselves. That’s very time-consuming. It’s hard. I don’t expect all of you to do what I do — all day I’m talking to AI, double-checking things, checking primary sources to see if information I’m accepting into my mind is true. But this is my job. I like to think of it as a mission, not a job. Most people don’t have time to do that, and that’s okay. But the degree of confidence you have in something should be proportional to the amount of time you’ve actually spent investigating it. If you haven’t spent much time, that’s okay — but we all need to adopt some intellectual humility.

Because we’re scrolling a feed where it’s videos of naked girls dancing, then cats fighting, then more bikinis, then a crypto ad, then an ad about how evil the Democrats are, then an ad about how evil Trump is, then maybe a useful piece of information — all jumbled up. We’re mixing information with entertainment and calling ourselves informed. This is what I’ve been trying to say, and it’s why I wanted to do this livestream. Honestly, I got overwhelmed — like, I don’t even know how to address all these pieces of partial information people have.

(28:51) Which brings me to another thing. People are going around saying there’s a statistical impossibility around Spencer Pratt not advancing. Specifically, they’re talking about a screenshot from an Associated Press news feed that showed Nithya Raman and Karen Bass getting all of the vote and Spencer Pratt getting none. That screenshot has gone viral. You know what screenshot is not going viral? The screenshot of the same feed 60 seconds later, with an updated count for that same batch of votes, that actually showed Spencer Pratt getting over 21,000 of the votes in that batch — actually the plurality of that batch. So in that batch he got more votes, and what happened was a mistake in the reporting, updated 60 seconds later.

(29:48) I’m not here to call people out or name names, because this is a collective problem. But do you think the influencers who took that first screenshot and said “this is evidence of the election being stolen” showed you the second clip? No. Let me clue you in on something about making a living off social media: you don’t have an incentive to tell the truth. It sucks to say, but it’s true. You don’t have an incentive to lay out complex, nuanced thoughts. You don’t have an incentive to make something that takes 30 minutes to read. You have an incentive to make something that takes three seconds to read, that confirms what people already think — even if it’s not true — and evokes an emotional reaction, because emotional reactions are what get shared. Emotional reactions get views. Views get money and sponsors and clout and status and invites to parties with other influencers and cool stuff. That’s how this industry works. I’m sorry to say it. And you should take no one’s word at face value — including my own.

Me, I take a long time to make my videos. It took me like five hours to make a three-minute video. Frankly, it’s exhausting. That’s part of why I’m starting to write more — I can’t keep up with the pace of this stuff. But the alternative is for me to do less work and have quicker takes that aren’t as well researched and just feed into a tribe, because that would make me more money. It would. I’m no special person — I like money, I like the things money buys me in life. The reason I don’t do it isn’t because I’m some special good person. It’s because I would hate myself if I knew I was putting out work beneath my standard. That’s why I don’t do it. Everyone has a different standard, and no one’s standard is truly transparent to us. People are complex. I’m not saying there are evil influencers lying to you intentionally. Life is hard. Life is confusing. Everyone’s trying to do what they think is right and make it by.

(31:55) But one of the things we really lost when we lost trust in mainstream media — and again, it’s partially the mainstream media’s fault, but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — is credentialing and peer review and group fact-checking, the kinds of things that happen in organizations because people have accountability. It’s not just some guy with an anime avatar posting stuff. People have jobs and careers and have to stake their reputation on it. Does mainstream media get things wrong sometimes? Yeah. Does it straight up lie sometimes? Yeah. Does it selectively frame stuff all the time? Yes. But at least mainstream media can be sued for libel and slander. How do you do that with some anonymous person posting from Bangladesh behind an anime avatar? How do you even know the account you’re hearing from is in America, or even who they say they are?

I’m not saying this to make you feel like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe anything ever.” I think the solution is for us all to have more intellectual humility and open-mindedness — and to start from the assumption (back to the argument from incredulity) that if you don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean something bad is happening. It means you need to first try to understand why it’s happening. And then, if even the best explanation doesn’t explain it, you do investigations, you get more evidence, and eventually you get to the point of, “Okay, now we know something is being done, and we know it’s at a scale that flips an election.” But personally, I haven’t seen that. I get a lot of links and videos from people. One three-minute video of people talking to homeless people on Skid Row is not proof that tens of thousands of votes were flipped. It’s the beginning of an investigation, an inquiry that we should do. That’s how we need to think about this. We need to all be judicious. It’s a shared responsibility.

(34:01) One of the things about modernity is we have more freedom than ever. You have the entire corpus of human knowledge at your fingertips immediately. People can order food from everywhere on the planet on Postmates and have it at their door in 20 minutes. People can hop on a dating app, swipe, and be connected in minutes with someone who might become their future spouse or just a companion. We have so much freedom — and that means we also need responsibility, because freedom without responsibility is chaos. That’s what we’re experiencing right now: chaos in our information landscape. We’re all confused, and we need to admit that. Because if we start by admitting it, we can actually start to have conversations and tap into the real network that matters — the human network. That’s how people used to make sense of things: by talking to human beings, eye to eye, hand to hand, and creating a shared sense of reality. But we don’t have that. We have a loneliness epidemic in America. People aren’t talking to each other in person; instead they’re talking online, more allied with their tribe online than with their neighbor — they don’t even know who their neighbor is.

(35:15) So I just want us to be more self-reflective about where we’re getting emotionally overcharged when we actually don’t have a strong argument yet — we just have a feeling. It’s okay; everyone has feelings. I told you how I was excited about Spencer Pratt and now I’m disappointed. But the more upset we are, the more skeptical we should be of our own position, because our minds are constantly being assaulted by people vying for influence and attention over us. So stay on guard. Richard Feynman, a physicist, once said: “The first thing you need to understand is that you must not allow yourself to be fooled — and you are the easiest person to fool.” I like to say: you’re the easiest person for you to fool. If we proceeded from that, we’d start with a lot more humility and a lot less anger, and we could actually solve problems a lot more quickly — because problems are just not getting solved in this country right now, and it’s really frustrating.

(36:19) So — did I answer everything? Give me a second; I feel like there might be more claims I want to address before I move off this point. What did we cover? We covered the blue shift — that’s what they call it in politics: the trend of LA mail-in ballots favoring progressives. We talked about why Spencer Pratt had more votes on election day and then lost share afterward. We talked about the vote-curing process and the signatures — that no, they’re not just throwing out votes; if the registration signature doesn’t match the signature at time of voting, those votes get sent back to the voter, who has a chance to cure and submit a proper signature. We talked about people selectively taking screenshots and not giving you context.

Oh — and voter ID. I want to reiterate this, because I think it’s kind of the crux of a lot of people’s argument, and I get it, but it’s not a complete argument: the absence of voter ID does not mean there are no safeguards. It means there are other safeguards, which you still might not think are sufficient, but which are more opaque, more complicated, and harder to trust. I understand that — but it does not release us of our responsibility to understand what those safeguards are if we’re going to make accusations.

(37:46) And here, I want to steelman the argument for fraud. If people are going to say there’s fraud, the claim would be that between election day, June 2nd, and roughly a week after (because within that one-week period is when Spencer Pratt started losing his lead), somehow the Democratic establishment and/or the Democratic Socialists of America garnered tens of thousands of fraudulent votes, got them through the system, got them past bipartisan watchdogs, and somehow got them postmarked by June 2nd — which would mean they needed one or more corrupt post offices to postmark those votes by June 2nd. Or, if you think homeless people were involved, they would’ve needed to get tens of thousands of votes from homeless people, postmark them by June 2nd, and submit them so they’d be counted after June 2nd — after they knew Spencer Pratt already had a lead.

That would be the argument — but hopefully you can see there are a bunch of vulnerabilities in it. One: if you were going to corrupt the election and you know everything needs to be postmarked by June 2nd, how exactly do you get the votes after June 2nd rather than before? If you have an operation sophisticated enough to get tens of thousands of votes between June 2nd and June 9th, wouldn’t you need to get them all before? In which case, why would Spencer Pratt ever even appear to be leading? Low-probability events happen all the time, because there are billions of people on the planet, trillions of interactions every day, and lots of entropy in the universe. But part of thinking clearly is being able to consider a multitude of options and assign probabilities. And the probability that there was massive fraud, executed in a way that had Spencer Pratt appear to be leading and then got overtaken within days after he established his lead — that probability is really, really low. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary proof. None of what I’ve seen so far is extraordinary proof. It’s proof that there should be some inquiry — and I’m always down for inquiry — but no, it’s not proof that we should hold onto a narrative that this is definitely fraud.

I don’t want you to leave this video thinking, “Kaizen has the answer, and he gave it to us.” No. I want to invite you to reflect and be precise with the arguments. If you’re saying it’s fraud, describe exactly how it happened, describe the degree of difficulty of pulling that off, and then assign a probability. Let’s just think more rigorously. Would this standard of reasoning hold up in a court? Would it even hold up in a Supreme Court with a conservative-leaning panel? No, it wouldn’t. But maybe more evidence comes out, and if it does, I’m happy to update my view. That’s what intellectual humility and honesty require. I don’t have all the answers; we don’t have all the information; let’s wait until we have more. In the meantime, let’s not become so attached to one point of view, suspicious in a way that just validates the suspicion we had in the beginning.

(41:13) I also want to talk bigger-picture about why people are at this point. The public’s trust has been betrayed time and time again. We were told people weren’t getting censored on social media for conservative viewpoints — they were. We were told the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn’t being suppressed — it was. We were told the COVID Wuhan lab-leak theory was just a bunch of conspiracy theories by crazies — it wasn’t. Time and again, public trust has been breached. And just like in a relationship, if someone keeps lying to you, you adopt a posture of suspicion — not because it means they’re always lying, but because you want to protect yourself; you don’t want to get hurt again. It’s a very normal human reaction. But we have to think in terms of probabilities, and recognize that just because a low-probability event happened in the past doesn’t mean a specific low-probability event is going to happen in the future.

(42:29) Okay, guys. I think that’s it. We’ve ripped for like 45 minutes on this topic. Maybe you’re exhausted hearing about it. Frankly, I don’t want to talk about this topic again. I’m disappointed Spencer Pratt lost. I’m frustrated that LA — the city can burn and still people would vote for not just Karen Bass, but someone even more far to the left of her. I’m not surprised. I don’t even know if I’m going to go back to California, honestly. Certainly don’t want to buy property there. Maybe I’ll go back as a renter. But despite all that, I think we still have to be principled in our analysis, and I just want to invite you into a different way of thinking about this.

Part II — Audience Q&A

(43:09) Okay, let’s get to some of the questions. Some of you are paid subscribers, and I appreciate you for your support — I want to get to as many questions as I can before I have to log off. We’re going to give it about another 30 to 45 minutes. It’s really hot outside; I’m sweating. But let’s do this. I wanted a pretty backdrop, not my bedroom in this rental, so let’s do this outside and do it live.

We’ll start with the earliest questions first, to reward those who submitted early. And I’m sorry I don’t have the names of the people who submitted questions — I actually don’t know if people want their names associated with a question. Maybe it’s for the best, because in politics people can get attacked for any random thing. I certainly know that, and I don’t want to expose viewers to that. So I don’t have your names, but I appreciate you asking, and if you asked a question, that means you’re a paid subscriber, and I appreciate the support.

From here, I answer 25 questions from paid subscribers, including:

• What are the bedrock set of behaviors to which an individual in, say, the United States must conform — or else be seen as an enemy of civilization?

• How do parents respond effectively when their kids come home from high school and college and accuse them of ruining the world — racism and capitalism?

• What’s your take on gun control? I know this is a radioactive topic and I’m looking for validation from a clear thinker.

• Will reparations help make things more equitable?

• Where are you currently on your faith journey? Do you wholeheartedly believe in the story of the resurrection of Jesus? Have you read the book “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist”?

• For many reasons, I believe that in the end we cannot share this country with people who hate its very existence and refuse to see anything good in it. Consequently, I believe some sort of secession movement will take hold in the end, as most of us do not want to go down with the ship the left will inevitably create. Do you think this is inevitable?

• Why is there no appreciable progress on an immigration policy that will make sense? Or are we just ignorant about the policy in place, and that’s okay?

Read more

Paid subscribers can drop a question for me using the link at the bottom of this letter. The focus will be Spencer Pratt and whether he lost because of fraud in the LA election but you can ask about any topic, no limits.

Then everyone, free and paid, can join the live Q&A on Friday, June 12 at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET). RSVP here.

I’ll also upload a recording in case you can’t catch it live.

Two weeks ago, I published my 80th letter and asked you to help shape the next 80.

One of the biggest takeaways I got was that you don’t just want to read what I think. You want this to be a discussion.

Good. That’s the entire point of this project.

So today I’m making it official.

Ask me anything

Starting now, paid subscribers can ask me anything using the form at the end of this letter.

Politics. Faith. Spencer Pratt and the LA election. Where I think I’ve been wrong. The business of doing this work. A topic you suspect I’ve been avoiding.

Nothing is off the table.

Then, on Friday, June 12 at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET), I’m going live to answer the best of them, and the livestream is open to everyone, free and paid alike.

RSVP for the Livestream

Why a conversation, not a broadcast

The mission of Clear Thinker has always been clarity in an age of confusion.

For 80 letters, that’s mostly meant me writing and you reading.

But clarity is a practice.

And nobody develops a practice by watching someone else do it.

You can read about critical thinking forever, but at some point, you have to do it - ask the question, push on the argument, and sit with an answer you didn’t expect.

That’s what this is for.

There’s another layer. I’ve always said this project is about transparent reasoning in real time.

There is no more transparent reasoning than answering a question you didn’t choose, live, with no edit button.

The second reason is about me

I’ve told you before to watch for bias in every commentator you follow.

Including me.

I meant that. The financial incentives in this industry reward telling audiences what they already believe. I feel that pull every week. I’ve written about it openly.

My discipline is one defense against those incentives.

You are a better one.

An audience that asks hard questions keeps a writer honest in a way willpower never will.

So ask hard questions.

One request

I’ve written before that many people asking questions in politics aren’t actually curious. They’re disguising accusations as questions.

This space works differently.

Ask because you want to understand - including when you’re sure I’m wrong. Especially then.

I’ll extend you good faith. I’ll steel-man your view before I respond. I’m asking for the same in return.

That’s not a request for soft questions. Disagreement delivered in good faith is the most valuable thing you can give me.

It’s also the thing American politics has almost none of.

What I’m hoping this becomes

I’ve described American politics as a bad marriage - two sides who’ve stopped extending good faith, interpreting every move in the worst possible light.

The way out of a bad marriage isn’t silence. And it isn’t shouting.

It’s hard conversations, held with discipline.

Most of the internet isn’t built for those. Comment sections became battlegrounds. Questions became ambushes. Listening became losing.

I think a small corner of the internet can work differently.

I think a small corner of the internet can work differently. The notes you've sent over the past year have already changed how I think and write.

So that’s why I want to have more conversations.

A monologue can inform you. Only a conversation can change you.

So: ask me anything.

I’ll see you live on June 12 at 2 PM PT (5 PM ET).

RSVP for the Livestream

-Kaizen

Click the link below the paid break to ask me your question.

Read more

Let me get the disclosure out of the way.

I wanted Spencer Pratt to advance.

I’ve written multiple pieces making the case for him.

As someone who lived in LA for over a decade, the prospect of Karen Bass winning again is bad, and the prospect of Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman winning might be worse.

I’m currently taking a sabbatical away from LA, but the outcome of this election might make that permanent.

When election night results showed Pratt comfortably in second place with a 40,000-vote lead over Raman, I was happy.

When subsequent batches of mail-in ballots narrowed that lead to 33,000, then 20,000, then within a single percentage point, I was disappointed.

When the Right started calling it fraud, I understood the emotional impulse.

I felt it too.

I’m writing this piece because the impulse, however understandable, is doing more damage than people realize.

Not just to election outcomes, but to our ability to think at all.

Why This Piece Is Hard to Write

Writing this is harder than writing a partisan piece, and I want to be transparent about why.

These articles take many hours to write. The videos take longer.

When they don’t perform well, it impacts my livelihood directly.

The honest reality is that it would be much easier and much more profitable for me to deliver partisan takes that validate what my audience already believes, and my audience is right-leaning.

That work gets rewarded with engagement, growth, and income. Telling people that their initial reaction might be wrong gets rewarded with unsubscribes.

Multiple times over the past week, I’ve had the instinct to post a tweet about how dumb California’s election system is, or how the left games everything.

Those tweets would have done well. They would have gotten attention, validation, agreement, and money.

They also would not have been principled. They would have been emotional reactions.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

First, I want you to stay open to what’s coming, even if you don’t like it.

This piece isn’t fun to write, but it’s necessary, and I’m hoping you’ll read it the way I’m trying to write it: as one American trying to think clearly with another.

We have to be able to do this if the country is going to work.

I’m trying to lead by example.

Second, because I want you to watch this dynamic everywhere you encounter political commentary.

Including with me.

The financial incentives in this industry overwhelmingly favor giving people attention-grabbing takes fueled by negativity, tribalism, and suspicion.

The incentives are not aligned with telling you the truth, especially when the truth is boring or uncomfortable.

Most political content creators, including ones you trust, are responding to those incentives whether they realize it or not.

The biggest influencers on the right have made millions feeding the audience what the audience wants to hear. So have the biggest ones on the left.

The model works financially. But it also produces a media environment where every outcome you don’t like becomes evidence of fraud, malice, or conspiracy, because that’s what generates clicks.

Watch for it. Watch for it in me. Notice when someone confirms exactly what you already believed with exactly the level of outrage you were already feeling.

That’s often a sign you’re being sold a story, not given an analysis.

The story might still be true.

But you should be more skeptical of stories that flatter you than stories that don’t.

People are confused and angry. The outrage machine is exhausting to live inside. I’m tired of every political moment being a death match without introspection.

Frankly, it’s burning me out and making me want to stop analyzing politics altogether.

I keep doing it because I’m drawn to topics where there’s confusion. I enjoy helping people think more clearly. And politics is the epicenter of confusion right now.

So with all that said, let me show you what I actually see.

How We Got Here

It’s worth taking a moment to ask why so many people instantly assumed fraud the moment Pratt’s lead started slipping.

The honest answer is that we no longer have the trust we used to have.

There was a time, even within recent memory, when American politics had a level of shared baseline. People were disappointed when elections didn’t go their way, but they didn’t routinely challenge the legitimacy of the outcome. There was a level of trust in the basic functioning of the system that covered the gaps in any one person’s knowledge of how it worked.

That trust is gone. COVID broke part of it. The 2020 election broke another part. Biden’s cognitive decline being denied for years and then suddenly admitted broke another. A long string of institutional failures and social media hallucinations has made consensus reality, a baseline that everyone agrees on, a thing of the past.

This makes skepticism a reasonable default. The people who tell you to just trust the system haven’t done the work to earn that trust back. Real reasons to doubt mainstream narratives exist, and dismissing those reasons would itself be dishonest.

But there’s a specific dynamic at play that’s worth naming. American politics right now is a bad marriage.

In a bad marriage, the couple fights about everything. The dishes. The schedule. The in-laws. The actual content of the fights almost doesn’t matter. The problem isn’t any specific disagreement. The problem is that the underlying relationship is broken. Trust is gone. Communication has collapsed. Every gesture from the other person gets interpreted in the worst possible light, not because the gesture is actually bad, but because the relationship has trained both people to expect the worst.

An absence becomes evidence of cheating. A mistake becomes evidence of malice. A moment of incompetence becomes evidence of intentional evil. Both people in a bad marriage do this. Both feel justified. Both can point to real instances where the other person actually was wrong, and they use those real instances to confirm that every subsequent ambiguity is also bad faith.

This is what American politics looks like right now.

Two sides who genuinely don’t trust each other, who interpret everything the other side does through the worst possible lens, who have stopped extending good faith because they’ve been burned doing it before.

Some of the suspicion is earned on both sides.

But when you’re in a bad marriage, adopting a default of suspicion is the road to divorce.

The discipline of a good marriage, or a functioning democracy, is exactly the discipline of not doing that.

Here’s what this means in practical terms.

The worse the relationship gets, the stronger your reasoning needs to be.

Because you can’t trust the relationship to provide the baseline.

You have to provide it yourself, through discipline.

I can’t tell you whether there’s fraud in this race. I can’t tell you if it’s the reason Pratt might lose.

No one can. The answer isn’t fully knowable yet.

What I’m going to do is offer a way to think about this clearly.

That will help you stay calm when everyone around you is panicking.

That will make you harder to manipulate by anyone who profits from your attention.

Including me.

One quick caveat before going further.

Nothing I’m about to write means zero fraud has ever happened in California. In any system involving millions of ballots, some people will try to cheat, and some will succeed. That’s true everywhere.

But individual fraud and election-flipping fraud are different claims at different scales. To flip a major race like this one, you’d need tens of thousands of coordinated fraudulent ballots, evading signature verification, escaping detection by Republican observers at every step, and staying unreported by everyone involved in counting. The first happens. The second requires evidence we haven’t seen.

How California Counts Votes

California’s vote counting works differently from most of the country, and most people upset right now don’t understand the mechanics, so understandably, they are suspicious.

Understanding the system is the prerequisite for evaluating whether it’s working as designed or being manipulated.

Let me be clear before walking through it: I’m not endorsing California’s system. I think there are legitimate critiques of how it operates, especially the lack of voter ID.

But to critique a system, we have to first understand what it actually does.

California allows three primary ways to vote.

1. In-person on Election Day at vote centers.

2. Early in-person voting in the weeks before the election.

3. Vote-by-mail, with ballots accepted as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days after.

Every registered California voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. They can use it or vote in person. This system was expanded significantly during COVID and has remained in place.

Counties have up to 30 days after Election Day to complete their canvass, verify signatures on mail-in ballots, and process provisional ballots. This is required by state law.

Mail-in ballots are processed in batches as they come in. The signature verification is labor-intensive. Each envelope’s signature must be compared against the voter’s signature on file. Mismatches can be cured, meaning voters are notified and given a chance to confirm their identity. This adds days or weeks to the process.

What this means in practice: election night results are nowhere close to final.

The ballots counted on Election Day are largely group 1: in-person votes and the mail-in ballots that arrived early.

The ballots counted in the days and weeks after are predominantly group 2: late-arriving mail-in ballots.

These two groups vote differently.

Understanding this will help you understand why it looked like Spencer Pratt was going to win, but now looks like he’s going to lose.

OK, but why is Nitya Raman gaining votes even relative to Karen Bass? (Updated June 11)

One question that’s come up: if late mail-in ballots skew progressive, why is Raman gaining ground and not Bass? Wouldn’t you expect the moderate Democrat establishment favorite to also benefit?

The answer is that “progressive” isn’t a single category. There’s a spectrum, and the further away from Election Day a vote is cast, the further left along that spectrum the voter tends to be.

Conservatives in California cluster on Election Day relative to liberals. They’re more likely to be self-employed or retired, more likely to view voting as a civic ritual, and more activated for an anti-establishment candidate like Pratt.

Moderate Democrats (Bass’s base) are more spread across the whole timeline. Early voting, Election Day, mail-in. Their votes don’t cluster at any single point, which is why Bass’s share stays relatively stable across batches.

Far-Left progressives vote latest. Students who mailed ballots from out of state. Young renters who got around to voting in the final week. Low-propensity voters reached by Democratic Socialist-aligned ballot collection programs operating in the closing days.

So as the late batches get counted, you’re not seeing Bass voters switch to Raman. You’re seeing a new demographic enter the count, one that prefers Raman over Bass over Pratt. Bass and Pratt’s shares drop proportionally because they already captured most of their voters earlier in the timeline. Raman’s share grows because the late voters are her people.

The deeper story here isn’t fraud. It’s that California, especially young people, are increasingly drawn to socialist politics. We saw the same dynamic in New York, where Zohran Mamdani built a coalition of young, progressive, late-mobilizing voters that overwhelmed establishment Democrats. The pattern is generational and ideological, not procedural.

Why Mail-In Ballots Skew Progressive

Here’s the part that frustrates conservatives the most, and it’s the part that looks most like fraud if you aren’t given an alternative explanation.

Mail-in ballots in California, and increasingly across the country, lean Democratic. They have for years. The reason is structural and demographic.

Consider who is most likely to vote by mail and who is most likely to vote in person.

Voters who choose mail-in ballots tend to be younger.

They’re more likely to be renters who move frequently.

They’re more likely to be students who may be away from their registered address.

They’re more likely to work jobs without the flexibility to take time off on a Tuesday.

They’re more likely to have small children and limited childcare options.

Voters who choose in-person voting tend to be older.

They’re more likely to be homeowners with stable addresses.

They’re more likely to have flexible schedules or to be retired.

They’re more likely to view voting as a ritual to be performed in person.

Look at the demographics of each group and the partisan tilt is obvious. The younger, renter, lower-propensity voter skews Democratic. The older, homeowner, ritual voter skews Republican. This is true at the national level and especially true in cities like Los Angeles.

There’s a second factor, and it’s one Republicans have done to themselves. Starting in 2020, Donald Trump and a significant portion of the conservative media ecosystem spent years telling Republican voters that mail-in voting was suspect and fraud-prone.

Republicans listened. Republican mail-in voting collapsed. Republican in-person voting held steady.

Democrats, meanwhile, invested heavily in mail-in voting infrastructure. They built operations to make sure their voters knew how to use the system. They invested in ballot collection programs.

The result: when mail-in ballots are counted in California, they break Democratic. Sometimes by 20 points. Sometimes by 30.

It’s the structural reality of every election since 2020.

So when election night shows a Republican leading and the lead evaporates as mail-in batches are counted, the most likely explanation isn’t fraud. The most likely explanation is that the Republican led among in-person voters and lost among mail-in voters, and the in-person votes got counted first.

This is exactly what happened to Spencer Pratt. He won election-night in-person voting comfortably. He’s losing the mail-in count. Both are by structural design.

This pattern has a name in election analysis: the blue shift. It’s been documented in California for over a decade.

Sometimes Mail-In Voting Favors Republicans

Conservatives reading this might assume mail-in voting just inherently favors Democrats. It doesn’t.

Florida is the one major state where Republicans dominate mail-in voting. Florida Republicans are more likely to vote by mail than Florida Democrats, according to data from the University of Florida Election Lab.

The result has been a steady Republican trend in Florida elections for over a decade, partly driven by Republican mail-in turnout operations that started before Trump’s anti-mail-in rhetoric and continued through it.

More recently, some Republican operatives have realized that ceding mail-in voting to Democrats was a strategic disaster. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA built mail-in operations in Arizona. Scott Pressler did the same in Pennsylvania. The RNC under new leadership pushed mail-in turnout in 2024.

The results were immediate.

The New York Times analyzed mail-in data across states and found Republicans made almost universal gains in mail-in voting in 2024.

Pennsylvania’s share of mail-in voters who are registered Republicans jumped from 24% in 2020 to 33% in 2024. Trump won Pennsylvania partly because of this shift. The same pattern showed up in Connecticut, Florida, and other states across the political spectrum.

Pre-2020, Republicans actually pioneered mail-in voting.

Older white voters, military families, rural voters, and business travelers were Republican-leaning groups that used mail-in heavily.

The Republican mail-in advantage was the norm for years before Trump’s 2020 rhetoric flipped it.

California is the holdout.

The state-level Republican Party in California has not built the kind of mail-in operation that Florida, Arizona, and Pennsylvania Republicans now have.

That’s a strategic choice, not a structural inevitability.

When California Republicans build the operation, they’ll capture more of the mail-in vote. Until they do, Democrats will keep winning the late-counted batches.

If conservatives in California want different results, the answer is the same answer it’s been in Florida, Arizona, and Pennsylvania: build mail-in infrastructure.

This Has Happened Before. In This Exact Race.

For anyone tempted to believe Pratt’s vanishing lead is unprecedented or suspicious, the precedent is right there in the same city, four years ago.

In June 2022, Los Angeles ran the same mayoral primary, with one candidate (Rick Caruso) running on tougher policing and clearing encampments, and the other (Karen Bass) representing the progressive establishment.

Caruso led on election night by 5 percentage points. He celebrated with confetti at his election night party. Pundits declared him the surprise star of the night.

Two weeks later, Caruso was trailing Bass by 7 points. The swing was 12 percentage points, entirely from mail-in ballots counted after Election Day. Bass went on to win the runoff in November and become mayor.

The Los Angeles Times wrote a piece at the time titled “California primary’s lesson for pundits: Don’t speak too soon in the age of mail-in voting.”

Political consultant Michael Trujillo gave the quote that ages perfectly for this moment: “If your race is within 10 points at the end of election night, it’s probably premature to call it a win. If you’re up 20 points, you’re probably safe.”

Pratt’s election-night lead over Raman was about 6 percentage points.

By the rule established in the last LA mayoral race, that lead was always going to be vulnerable to exactly the kind of mail-in shift that’s now happening.

What’s happening in the Pratt-Raman race is not anomalous. It’s the third documented instance in less than a decade of the same exact pattern playing out in California, with the same exact partisan implications.

If this pattern is fraud, it’s been fraud for a decade.

Across multiple election cycles. Affecting multiple races.

Documented in mainstream media at the time. Studied by academic institutions.

Predicted by political consultants who work in the state.

None of those entities have produced evidence the pattern is anything other than what it appears to be: the structural consequence of mail-in voting demographics combined with California’s counting timeline.

The boring explanation isn’t only more likely on first principles. It’s likely been the actual explanation every other time this has happened.

A Note for My Conservative Readers

I want to be clear about something before going further, because I know what I’m asking you to accept is uncomfortable.

I’m telling you that California’s election system is not rigged. I’m not telling you that California’s election system is fair, or that Democrats are operating in good faith, or that the structural advantages they’ve built are accidental.

I’m highlighting that there’s a difference between fraud and systemic design.

Democrats designed California’s election system to favor outcomes they wanted.

The auto-mailed ballots. The 30-day canvass. The legal ballot harvesting. The same-day registration. The voter roll maintenance practices.

Each of these individually has a defensible rationale.

The cumulative effect is a system that advantages Democratic-aligned political infrastructure (mail-in turnout, ballot curing, organized canvassing) over Republican-aligned infrastructure (Election Day voting, in-person turnout).

The same pattern shows up in other areas conservatives have legitimately complained about for years.

Take the southern border. The Democratic position has not been “we want millions of people voting illegally.”

The Democratic position has been functionally equivalent to: we benefit electorally from population growth in blue states, from eventual citizenship pathways for immigrants, and from generational demographic shifts that have historically favored Democrats.

Census counts shape House apportionment and Electoral College votes. Amnesty creates new voters. None of this requires anyone to vote illegally. All of it produces electoral advantages over time.

It’s not fraud. It’s politics.

Is this a power grab? Yes. Both parties do power grabs through systemic design.

Republicans are currently doing it through congressional district maps. Democrats designed immigration policy and California’s election system.

The structural complaint is legitimate and worth fighting through actual political channels.

But “Democrats designed systems that favor them” is a completely different claim than “Democrats are committing mass fraud.” That is an accusation that requires evidence.

The reason this distinction matters: if you conflate the two claims, you weaken both arguments.

The legitimate critique of structural advantages gets tarred by association with the fraud claims that don’t have evidence. People who would otherwise engage with the structural critique dismiss everything because they associate it with conspiracy theorizing.

You can be angry about systemic design without claiming fraud.

In fact, that’s the only honest position when there’s no evidence of fraud. The system can be unfair and not rigged at the same time.

The “Smoking Gun” That Wasn’t

There’s such a thing as healthy skepticism, and what we’re seeing online from the right-wing ecosystem isn’t it.

The most viral fraud claim from this race is a perfect illustration of how unhealthy skepticism operates, and worth walking through carefully because it shows the pattern we need to learn to recognize.

On election night, the Associated Press’s automated data feed pulled vote updates from LA County in two separate updates one minute apart.

The first update showed thousands of new votes for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, and zero new votes for Spencer Pratt.

Screenshots flew across social media. Statistical analyses were run showing it was impossibly unlikely for a candidate running second to receive zero votes in a batch.

One minute later, the second update came in. It showed thousands of new votes for Spencer Pratt and zero for Bass or Raman.

When the AP issued its official statement, the actual combined batch showed 21,870 votes for Pratt, 12,850 votes for Bass, and 9,521 votes for Raman.

Pratt received more votes than either Democrat in the batch that “proved” he was being cheated.

The central “evidence” was a one-minute gap between two automated updates from a third-party data provider. The full combined batch actually showed Pratt receiving more votes than either Democrat. The screenshots that went viral captured the gap between the two updates. By the time the AP released the full picture, the screenshots had already gone everywhere and the narrative had hardened.

Sit with that for a moment.

The central piece of evidence cited by people calling fraud was a one-minute display lag in third-party software pulling government data.

And it spread because people wanted it to be true.

This is what cherry-picking looks like in practice, and cherry-picking is one of the cognitive biases I’ll go deeper on in the paid section.

The mechanism is simple: you find one piece of data that supports your preferred conclusion, you isolate it from its context, and you treat it as decisive. Everything around it that would have complicated the picture gets ignored.

It’s also a textbook example of what philosophers call the argument from incredulity. The structure is: “I can’t imagine how this could happen without fraud, therefore fraud.”

It treats personal inability to imagine an alternative as evidence about the world. It isn’t. It’s evidence about the limits of our imagination, often combined with unwillingness to explore reasons why we might be wrong.

Anyone with a phone in their pocket can construct a non-fraud explanation in less time than it takes to post an outraged tweet.

You can open any AI model and ask: “What’s the best non-fraud explanation for a Republican candidate leading on election night in California and losing as mail-in ballots are counted?”

The model will walk you through the blue shift, the demographic patterns, the organizational asymmetries. The information is free and instantly available.

The failure isn’t access. The failure is willingness.

Constructing the strongest counter-explanation requires entertaining the possibility that your gut reaction was wrong. That’s uncomfortable. The bandwagon of agreement on social media is comfortable.

Outrage gets attention. Steel-manning doesn’t.

The Occam’s Razor Test

Occam’s Razor is the principle that when multiple explanations are possible for the same set of facts, the one requiring the fewest additional assumptions is most likely correct. It’s a principle of formal reasoning that dates back to the 14th century and has held up across nearly every domain of human inquiry.

Apply it here.

To believe systemic fraud has produced the Pratt-Raman result, you have to:

1. Assume coordinated action across thousands of election workers, signature verifiers, county officials, third-party data providers like the AP, and observers from multiple campaigns.

2. Assume this coordination has been operating across multiple election cycles spanning over a decade.

3. Assume it has affected multiple different races with different stakes.

4. Assume not a single major whistleblower has emerged in any of those cycles.

5. Assume the results just happen to perfectly match documented demographic patterns.

6. Assume the conspiracy is invisible to every Republican observer at every level.

To believe the boring explanation, you have to assume:

1. California is the most Democratic state in the country (well-documented).

2. Mail-in voters skew younger and more progressive (well-documented).

3. Republicans abandoned mail-in voting after Trump’s 2020 rhetoric (well-documented).

4. Democrats invested heavily in mail-in turnout operations (well-documented).

5. Late-counted ballots are disproportionately mail-in (mathematically required).

6. Spencer Pratt is widely perceived in California as a Trump-aligned figure who motivates anti-Trump turnout (well-documented).

Every component of the boring explanation is individually documented. The fraud explanation requires accepting a multi-year, multi-race conspiracy with zero leaks, producing results that happen to look exactly like what the boring explanation predicts.

The fraud claim isn’t impossible. Things that look like one thing sometimes turn out to be something else.

But the fraud claim requires vastly more assumptions to be true. That makes it vastly less likely to be the correct explanation. Not impossible. Less likely.

This is the discipline Occam’s Razor demands. Not certainty in either direction. Weighting probabilities by how many assumptions each explanation requires.

The simpler explanation wins until positive evidence forces a reconsideration. That positive evidence has not emerged.

This doesn’t prove fraud is impossible. It shows why the burden of proof is on the fraud explanation over the boring explanation.

What’s in the Paid Section

Here’s why I point out the specific errors in reasoning people are committing so you don’t make the same mistake as them.

Next, I go deep on the seven cognitive biases and logical fallacies driving the fraud narrative, with the specific mechanism of each one and how to recognize it operating in your own thinking.

• Anchoring bias.

• Cherry-picking.

• Confirmation bias.

• Motivated reasoning.

• The argument from incredulity.

• Tribal asymmetry.

• The bandwagon effect.

By the end of the letter, you’ll understand how to use these to sharpen your critical thinking and your ability to discuss these issues with your loved ones - including those you disagree with.

Read more

Words shape how we see problems.

And when it comes to LA’s homeless crisis, we’ve been mincing words.

To be clear - I’m not saying these people aren’t homeless. They are. They don’t have private homes of their own to go to. The word is technically true.

But it’s imprecise. And imprecise diagnoses lead to wrong treatments.

Consider someone with kidney failure. Saying they have “a health problem” is technically true. But it’s so vague that it doesn’t tell you what to do. Tell a doctor “kidney failure” - and the response becomes obvious. Treat the kidneys.

That’s where LA is. We’ve been treating “a homeless problem” when the patient has a specific condition - drug addiction - that requires a specific strategy.

This is also why the obsession with policing words - “don’t say homeless, say unhoused” - is a waste of energy. The substitution doesn’t change anything that matters.

Most of LA’s visible street crisis is a mental health and drug problem that’s been mislabeled as a housing problem.

If you treat addiction as a housing shortage, you build more housing. The addiction continues.

If you treat it as a mental health and drug crisis, you focus on rehabilitation, treatment, and the boundaries that make recovery possible.

That’s why we’ve spent $218 million in 5 years on interim shelter beds that sit empty every night.

We’re solving the wrong problem.

What I Saw on Skid Row

I’ve been to Skid Row. I’ve done charity work there. I’ve handed out food to people on those streets.

It’s hell on earth.

Hell that they’re choosing.

According to RAND Corporation’s 2025 LA LEADS study, less than 50% accept group shelter when it’s offered - the most common type of shelter offer. The LA City Controller’s audit found over 3,000 shelter beds sit empty every night.

Meanwhile, 27,000 people remain unsheltered on the streets of Los Angeles.

They have options. They’re refusing them.

They Have Free Will. We’ve Stopped Believing It.

Homeless people have free will, just like everyone else. They’re exercising it. The choices we’re watching them make are choices.

This is the fact we have to start with, because it reorients everything else.

I want to be careful here, because this is where the conversation usually breaks down into two bad camps.

The right says: they have free will, so they should be acting responsibly. Their failure to do so is a moral failing on their part.

The left says: their circumstances are so overwhelming that talking about responsibility at all is cruel. They can’t be expected to choose better.

Both are missing the union of opposites.

Free will is inherent. Responsibility is developed.

Everyone has free will from birth. That’s not the variable. What varies - what develops or deteriorates over a lifetime - is the ability to exercise free will in ways that serve you and the people around you. That ability is what we call responsibility.

A two-year-old has free will. They want what they want. But they don’t yet have much responsibility - they can’t reliably channel their will toward outcomes that are good for them or anyone else. So we don’t give them unlimited freedom. We set limits. We provide structure. We let them experience consequences at a scale they can handle. And as they demonstrate more capacity, we expand their freedom.

But responsibility isn’t automatic. It doesn’t show up just because a person turned 18. It has to be built - through being treated as an agent, through encountering consequences, through having structure and support and standards.

What’s happened in LA, and in much of California, is that we’ve stopped doing the building.

We’ve decided that the visible street homeless population - many of whom are addicted, mentally ill, or both - can’t be held to standards. So we’ve removed the consequences. Removed the structure. Removed the expectations. Removed the very feedback loops that develop responsibility.

We didn’t decide they had no free will. They obviously do - they’re making choices every day, including the choice to refuse shelter that’s been offered to them. What we decided is that their underdeveloped responsibility means we shouldn’t engage them at all. We shouldn’t ask anything of them. We shouldn’t expect them to grow.

That’s cruel.

Because the only way responsibility develops is through engagement. Through being held to standards. Through experiencing both positive consequences when you make good choices and negative ones when you don’t. Remove those, and responsibility never develops - no matter how many programs you fund or how much housing you build.

The “treat them as victims” model has failed so completely because it doesn’t engage the human capacity to grow.

Treating someone as a moral agent capable of growth is what real respect looks like.

Treating them as someone who can’t be expected to grow - who must be permanently managed because they can’t develop - is what dehumanization actually looks like, no matter what compassionate language it’s dressed in.

The False Dichotomies

A trap gets erected whenever we try to discuss this honestly.

Individual or collective failure.

Personal responsibility or systemic factors.

Law and order or compassion.

But these are illusory choices. Both halves are required.

We can recognize the errors in someone’s choices while recognizing the collective responsibility to create better conditions.

We can acknowledge broken systems without evading bad personal decisions.

We can enforce law and order while constructing laws that are supportive, not punitive.

The solution is balance.

The problem is LA - which has been under one-party rule for decades - is the opposite of balance. Empathy has overridden logic.

And nature abhors imbalance.

What Support Without Limits Actually Produces

We’ve decided that the worst-off in society deserve total freedom without any responsibility.

The result is they get neither.

They’re free in the sense that living in chaos is “free.” They’re trapped in addiction, stress, and squalor. They have free will, but massive obstacles.

And they’re never asked to take responsibility for the choices that contributed to their situation - which means they never develop the skills to escape it.

Truly being supportive would mean providing both halves:

Positive incentives: safe, clean, healing shelters; a path to employable skills; dignity throughout.

Negative incentives: not allowing people to live on the streets or do drugs in public.

We’ve confused permissiveness with compassion. So we give the positive, but not the negative.

If you’re afraid to set limits for a child who’s misbehaving, that’s neglect, even with nice words.

If you’re afraid to enforce boundaries for a mentally ill family member who’s destroying themselves, you’re abandoning them.

That’s what we’re doing. Abandoning our fellow humans for fear of enforcing the negative.

What People Train You To Do

There’s a basic truth about human behavior that we’ve stopped applying to homeless people: people respond to incentives.

Everyone does. You do. I do. Every person on the street does.

When you allow someone to violate your boundaries without consequence, you’ve trained them how to treat you.

That’s exactly what’s happened at the scale of a civilization.

We’ve trained homeless people that they can defecate in public, do drugs in public, set up permanent tent cities in our nicest parks, threaten people walking by, and face zero consequences for any of it.

Then we act shocked when a portion of the population looks at that arrangement and decides, “You know what, I’ll take that deal.”

Humans respond to incentives, and the incentives we’ve created reward exactly the behavior we say we’re trying to reduce.

It seems complicated due to a lack of courage, not a lack of intellect.

What Real Compassion Looks Like

Real solutions require both compassion AND consequences.

Build genuinely good shelter - clean, safe, supportive, with the dignity people deserve. Make it the kind of place a person would actually want to be.

Then enforce a simple choice: shelter, rehab, or jail. Not three options that include “remain on the street.” Three options that all involve getting off the street.

This is what we’d do for a family member we love. If your brother was destroying himself with addiction, you wouldn’t tell him “you have the freedom to keep doing this in my home.” You’d insist on treatment. You’d set limits. You’d do it because you love him.

Democrat Matt Mahan has been doing this in San Jose. I wrote about it here. It works.

The principle is simple. The execution requires discipline.

Rejecting the principle is what confuses us into making this unnecessarily complicated.

What’s In The Paid Section

I’ve laid out the surface argument: LA’s homeless crisis is a drug crisis, the people on the streets have free will, and real compassion requires building the responsibility that lets them use it.

In the paid section, I go deeper on the philosophical problem underneath all of this:

• Why our entire framework for “compassion” toward the worst-off is built on a myth - and how that myth is making everything worse

• The principle that scales beyond homelessness to nearly every politicized issue in America right now

• Why a society that doesn’t hold everyone responsible can’t hold anyone free

Read more

I’ve published 80 letters on this Substack.

Most of you know me from videos. That’s how I built whatever audience I have, and I’m not stopping. But the longer I do this work, the more I keep running into the same problem.

A single 3 minute…

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I’ve lived in LA for close to 12 years.

Seeing homeless drug addicts acting erratically in public is normal.

Smelling the stench of homeless encampments is common.

Having to cross the street because I see a homeless person behaving strangely is routine.

Getting threatened by homeless people has happened to me.

And I suspect I’m not the exception.

And yet, when the universal unpleasantness of these experiences is mentioned to other Angelenos, people get uncomfortable.

It’s more comfortable to have conversations about the words we’re told to call homeless people - “unhoused,” “homefree” - than it is to talk about the actions.

Because the moment a conversation starts about action, there’s a background risk that the conversation stops being viewed as a good-faith discussion on how to solve homelessness - which is obviously both awful for the homeless and unpleasant for everyone else.

Instead, the smallest misstep - the wrong word, the wrong tone, the wrong “energy” - and now the conversation becomes about whether you’re a good person. Whether you lack empathy. Whether you lack compassion.

It’s a rhetorical game of don’t step on the lava.

That’s why if you say something obviously true: like if you are endlessly permissive of someone’s behavior, they will not change it - it attracts retaliation.

To recognize that if you ceaselessly talk about compassion but avoid consequences, you will recreate the circumstances - you get called cruel.

It is true that we should have a heart for the worst off. But we should also have a brain.

The basic common-sense truths everyone intuitively knows have been suppressed by a decade of this rhetorical game:

• People respond to incentives, both positive and negative

• Being around homelessness is unpleasant for everyone involved, including the homeless - many homeless people have a drug problem and are uncomfortable at best, dangerous at worst to be around

• Public spaces are cultivated for public use, not for individual claim

• A civilization that doesn’t respect itself can’t expect its members to respect it

These are obvious. They were obvious to every previous generation of Angelenos. They’re obvious to anyone who walks down Hollywood Boulevard.

Logic without empathy is cruelty. But empathy without logic is lunacy.

Right now LA is suffering far more from the latter than the former.

I said something similar on a show last year:

Pratt’s Plan

Pratt recently announced a 5-step plan:

1. Stop giving drug users needles and tools to use drugs

2. Use California’s new SB 43 law (which Pratt credited Democrats for passing) to compel treatment for severely addicted people

3. End the body-brokering racket where NGOs profit off out-of-state addicts trafficked into LA

4. Bring in federal law enforcement against the cartels operating openly on our streets

5. Build a dedicated treatment campus instead of expecting residential neighborhoods to absorb the crisis

The predictable reaction has already arrived. Pratt is being attacked as heartless. His plan is being called “criminalizing homelessness.” Activists are framing him as a MAGA Republican with no compassion for the unhoused.

It would be too easy to say it’s because of Spencer’s provocative speaking style. Or because he’s white, wealthy, and privileged. Or because he’s “MAGA-coded.”

All of that falls apart when you realize one thing.

Moderate Democrats with the exact same policies get the exact same criticism.

The Mahan Test Case

Matt Mahan is the mayor of San Jose. He’s running for Governor of California as a Democrat. He’s the only mayor in California who has actually reduced street homelessness - by roughly one-third.

His approach is functionally similar to what Pratt is proposing. Shelter is offered. After three refusals in 18 months, there are consequences - typically referral to a behavioral health court. He pairs accountability with massive expansion of interim shelter capacity. He uses SB 43 - California’s own law signed by Newsom in 2023 - to compel treatment for people too lost in addiction to make the decision themselves.

Mahan’s philosophy in his own words: “compassion paired with accountability.”

For this, Mahan has been called heartless. His policies have been called “criminalizing homelessness.” Activists protested him at San Jose City Hall holding signs that read “Jail the billionaires, not the unhoused.” He’s been accused of being “punitive, immoral and ineffective.”

Those first two labels are opinions. The last one is untrue.

One of Mahan’s loudest critics is Alex Lee, a sitting California State Assemblymember and the chair of the California Legislative Progressive Caucus. Lee ran for office as a proud, self-identified member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He is, on paper, Mahan’s political ally.

Lee’s response to Mahan’s results-based approach wasn’t a counter-proposal. It wasn’t data. It was an insult:

“It’s clear that he’s having a public mask-off for the true conservative that he is.”

Lee called Mahan a “MAGA fellow traveler.”

When the same attack lands on a Democrat with proven results that lands on a Republican with a campaign promise, the attack is ideological.

Not logical.

What Compassion Actually Looks Like

Look at what a decade of “compassion” has built. Six to seven homeless Angelenos dying every day. $24 billion spent at the state level on homelessness in five years, and the State Auditor told us we don’t know if any of it worked.

This is what we call compassion. It is institutionalized neglect dressed up in compassionate language.

If someone you loved was on the street, addicted to fentanyl, defecating in public, harassing strangers for money - you’d grab him. You’d get him to rehab. You’d demand he get sober before he came home. You’d do it because you love him.

Shallow empathy is about words. True compassion requires action.

That’s what Mahan is doing. That’s what Pratt is proposing. And that’s what the DSA-aligned activist class calls cruelty.

What’s In The Paid Section

I’ve laid out the surface story: the attacks on Pratt come from the same coalition attacking Democrats like Mahan. The attacks aren’t substantive - they’re ideological.

But naming the problem is only half the battle. The harder half is knowing what to actually say the next time someone tries to shut down an honest conversation about homelessness - or anything else.

In the paid section, I lay out a field guide:

• The six most common rhetorical moves used to shut down honest conversation in America right now

• What each one is actually trying to do

• And what to say when it happens, in your own voice, without yielding or escalating

These are general-purpose tools. The examples I use are about homelessness because it’s fresh on the page, but you’ll recognize every move from a dozen other conversations. Once you can name the tactic, you can walk through it.

How to Walk Through the Lava: 6 Tactics That Shut Down Honest Conversation, And How to Handle Each One

The “don’t step on the lava” game I described above isn’t unique to homelessness. It shows up in every politically charged conversation in America right now - immigration, education, drug policy, crime, gender, race, foreign policy. The specific topics change. The rhetorical moves don’t.

What follows is a field guide. Six of the most common moves used to shut down honest conversation, what each one is actually doing, and what to say when you encounter it. I’ll use homelessness as the running example because it’s fresh on the page, but every one of these applies anywhere.

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I’ve lived in LA for close to 12 years. I’m frustrated with the direction it’s going. I want to be upfront about that bias, so you can read this through that lens.

My frustration with LA’s leadership is also why I’m excited about what’s going on with the LA mayoral election.

Honestly, not because of Spencer Pratt as a candidate - I haven’t researched his policy positions deeply enough yet to endorse him.

And I’m not excited because he’s a Republican either.

I’d happily vote for a competent, authentic, sensible Democrat.

I’m just tired of the same empty suits.

Karen Bass is a carbon copy of every other machine politician we keep electing in California - polished, scripted, unimpressive.

I am excited that Pratt is a real threat to the political establishment that’s overseen this city’s decline.

I am excited that in a one-party city, in a one-party county, in a one-party state, we’re getting a healthy check that can bring some balance.

I love Los Angeles. I’ve spent my adult life there. As I write this, I’m in Medellín, Colombia. And I’m seriously considering leaving LA because it’s decaying under poor management.

The crazy property prices caused by regulations. The filth. The homelessness that just keeps growing despite billions of dollars being thrown at it every year.

And people’s complacency with it all.

LA’s star is falling.

So in Spencer Pratt’s candidacy, I see the possibility of radical change. He’s real. He’s honest. He understands the frustration of Angelenos who love this city and are exhausted from watching it be neglected.

That alone is exciting. Whether he’s the right answer is a separate question.

What I want to do in this piece is explain how we got here. How a former reality TV villain with no political experience is polling only 8 points behind an incumbent mayor in a Democratic city, what that says about California, and what the data shows so you can decide for yourself.

The Spencer Pratt Story

In 2007, Spencer Pratt was the villain on MTV’s The Hills. He played the heel on a scripted reality show. He earned roughly $10 million over the show’s run. He spent most of it - $4,000 bottles of wine, $30,000 shopping sprees, a $1 million crystal collection.

Not the best résumé for a mayor.

Then, on January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire destroyed his home. His parents’ home burned the same day. He watched on his security cameras while live-streaming the destruction. He lost everything he owned. The Palisades Fire became the third-most destructive wildfire in California history. Twelve people died, and more than 6,800 structures were destroyed.

Two weeks later, Pratt joined a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and the Department of Water and Power, along with 20 other property owners, alleging the city’s failures turned a fire into a catastrophe.

Then he spent all of 2025 building a social media audience around one question: how did this happen, and who’s accountable?

On January 7, 2026 - exactly one year after the fire - he announced his mayoral campaign at a “They Let Us Burn” rally in the Palisades.

Standing near the ruins of his home, he said: “Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles.”

Five months later, he’s polling at 22% in a May 14 Emerson College poll. He’s 8 points behind Karen Bass and just ahead of City Councilmember and Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman.

He has more than doubled his support since March.

He’s drawing seven-figure checks from people like hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, NYSE chairman Jeffrey Sprecher, Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, Tinder founder Sean Rad, and the Winklevoss twins. Lakers governor Jeanie Buss is a personal donor.

Pratt is a registered Republican, and LA hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1993.

Why He’s Winning

Pratt is resonating because he’s real.

He doesn’t speak like a politician. He speaks like someone who lives in LA and has suffered - because he is.

That story alone would be a competitive advantage.

But Pratt has another one: he understands social media the way other populist candidates - Mamdani, Trump before him - also have.

His recent viral ad shows it perfectly. He’s not in a studio. He’s not behind a podium. He’s walking the streets of LA, showing what most politicians refuse to acknowledge - the homeless encampments, the trash, the decay. The stuff every Angeleno sees every day on their commute, while the political class tells us things are improving.

The Bigger Picture

That’s what’s visible. Now let me show you what’s not.

And it’s bigger than LA.

Spencer Pratt isn’t running against just Karen Bass. He’s running against Nithya Raman too - a documented Democratic Socialists of America member.

And Raman isn’t a lone candidate. She’s part of a coordinated political movement that has been building in Los Angeles for six years, has its own slate of six candidates for 2026, and whose leadership is openly stating - on the record - that LA is a building block toward a democratic socialist presidential candidate in 2028.

Quite literally, a socialist takeover of America.

What’s in the Paid Section

In the paid section below, I go deeper on:

• The personal story of how I first learned about the LA socialist takeover - and why I dismissed it at first

• What “socialism” actually means, why Denmark isn’t it, and what the Danish Prime Minister wishes Americans understood

• The DSA-LA “Shake Up City Hall” slate - the documented plan to take over LA legislatively, with the on-the-record quote from their own co-chair about building toward 2028

• How the LA story connects to the national pattern - and why most LA voters going to the polls on June 2nd don’t realize what’s actually on the ballot

The Socialist Takeover of Los Angeles

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