The selection of JD Vance can be seen as a triumph for the Tech Right. I explain where they came from and what makes them different from others in the GOP. They're socially liberal, anti-egalitarian, and ultimately for dynamism and progress. 🧵 richardhanania.com/p/understandin…
Ironically, there is a group of leftists who saw this coming. They came up with the acronym TESCREAL, which is so ugly that it's actually catchy. The leftists paying the most attention knew that tech elites were different from other elites in academia and journalism.

The time Israel sent a commando team into downtown Beirut that assassinated three high-ranking members of the PLO and got out. The team was led by Ehud Barak.

Westerners hate Israel because it fills them with a sense of inferiority by showing that heroism is still possible.

Stop and read about the Entebbe Raid, after a plane was hijacked and taken to Uganda. The Israelis secretly flew a team from Suez to Uganda, slaughtered the Palestinian terrorists, their German allies, and Idi Amin’s soldiers, bringing almost all of the hostages home alive.

Fascinating analysis of the trendiness of baby names.

Since the 1960s, the endings of names rise and fall together, especially for boys. The fates of Mason, Jackson, Grayson, etc are all linked.

What names sound good to parents depends on subtle signals they’re not aware of.





This is associated with the decline of traditional names. The lesson here is people really feel the need to conform on a very deep subconscious level! If they don’t conform to tradition, they’ll look for arbitrary signs of trendiness.

Time Magazine in 1958: Blacks are 10% of the population in 1,551 cities but commit 60% of violent crime. Northern mayors consider this their biggest problem and are afraid to talk about it. Black leaders blame racist law enforcement.

Black problems didn’t start with LBJ.



Time in 1958: NAACP tries to get people not to talk about black crime. Many whites are uncomfortable about the subject, and newspapers go out of their way not to mention a crime suspect’s race.

Academic who researches the right realizes he can’t get a job because he’s a white male.

He complains, gets laughed at by a woman at Yale. He accuses her of “punching down” at him, thinking lack of employment makes up for his race and sex.

Talk about a teachable moment.





Screenshots from @hradzka, as David Austin Walsh has locked his account.

Since October 7, many of us have been asking how we can be better allies to Israel.

I explain that what Israel needs is not better PR, or "hasbara," but pushback on narratives that are hostile to civilization itself, which Israel represents. richardhanania.com/p/article-in-t… Israel doesn't have an "optics" problem because the rest of the world hated Israel before this war, and one can see this in the obsessive focus on its flaws compared to everything else in global politics. The problem is with Israel's existence.

John Spencer, expert in urban warfare, explains to Sam Harris what was unique about the October 7 footage. First, Hamas members were absolutely euophoric as they were going off to rape and murder. As someone who has led men into battle, he tells us that “this is not normal”.

Most striking was the reaction to the sound of a young boy moaning to death. In a normal battlefield situation, even when there is an enemy combatant, there is usually an instinct to render aid. Here, a boy’s eyes were gone, his father just killed, and the Hamas fighter nonchalantly goes and grabs a beverage from the refrigerator.

This war has clarified so much for me. I keep talking about why Hamas is worse than Nazis, and the moral culpability of Palestinian civilians. People don’t like these opinions. They still remain true. If you have a position on this conflict other than “Israel keeps going until Hamas is destroyed” you have failed one of the great moral tests of our time. Sam Harris on the overwhelming sadistic joy regular Palestinians felt at seeing Jewish mothers clutching their babies, and defiling the bodies of dead girls.

We simply refuse to face the truth about this culture.

You've probably heard about Americans fleeing blue states like CA for FL and TX.

But this isn't new.

I've dived into 40 years of GDP and population data and show it's been happening for generations.

Here's how we know economic freedom is better.🧵
richardhanania.com/p/forty-years-… First, to give one example of how states differ in policy, here's tax burden by state. It varies from less than 5% to 15.9% in New York. They also vary in regulation, minimum wage, strength of civil rights, unions, etc. Here's one map of economic freedom.

Jewish woman moves to the Bay Area for the "progressive values," shocked that the half-literate DEI types who control the school system take the side of the Palestinians.

"At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed—and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys."

So weird! Wonder how that happened.

Conservatism has a low human capital problem. Most smart people are leftists, particularly in the influential professions that are High Status, Low Pay (HSLP).

Does that mean conservatism is doomed? Not at all. I explain how it can still win.🧵 richardhanania.com/p/coping-with-… It's not simply that engaged liberals are smarter, though they are. It's that they have a near monopoly on HSLPs, people who go into fields like academia, the arts, journalism, etc.

Maybe in the long run you inspire a change here, but this going to be a problem for a while.

Leftists are trying to pretend like they never had a problem with women's bodies.

We were all there during Gamergate, the opening shot of the culture war.

We're actually doing this. Yes, Sydney Sweeney's boobs are anti-woke. richardhanania.com/p/yes-sydney-s… My tweets on this topic have gotten 80 million+ views and two Know Your Meme pages, while inspiring too many think pieces to count. You may call it a troll, but the best trolls are based in truths that everyone understands but no one has explained.

You can't make this up.

The Biden administration tried to make financial aid easier to get for those in the country illegally.

But the system broke down because it froze you out if you didn't have a social security number.

The whole system is backlogged and now in chaos.





The Department of Education was too busy finding ways to forgive loans to be able to distribute this year's financial aid and loans. Also, to deal with school reopenings after teachers unions forced them to close. Every leftist cause just feeds the cycle of incompetence.

New racial insanity in California.

Nonwhite felons can now ask for a new trial based on the argument that whites were arrested less or got shorter sentences for the same crime.

Courts are not to consider criminal history in the analysis because that's also due to racism!

San Francisco man caught with a loaded gun, finds a "race expert" to argue he shouldn't have been arrested and prosecuted because a police officer used the phrase "high crime area."

New form of welfare for CRT scholars who get to advocate for emptying the jails.

There was cultural tension when Napoleon conquered Egypt.

The Egyptians were angry that French women behaved so freely and were a bad influence on local women.

Also, the Egyptians were confused as to why the French liked women in the first place instead of young boys.





French and Egyptians had different standards of female beauty.

The Egyptians liked their women big. They had an expression: “She was so beautiful she could not fit through the door.”

Texas banned DEI in universities.

What happened?

University of Texas changed the name of its DEI bureaucracy and just went on as before, keeping most of their diversity goals and programs on the website.

One bureaucrat didn't even bother changing her job title at LinkedIn.

Full report here. dc.claremont.org/where-are-they…

This is beyond parody. Hard hitting American journalist finds that in a poor country food is cheaper, says it has radicalized him against his own society. I can understand the subway one. American urban dysfunction is something to be ashamed of, and there’s a point to make

But supermarkets are clearly one thing we’re very good at! If you’re critiquing America on the issue of supermarkets, you’re showing your anti-American bias.

California to require all students take "ethnic studies."

A debate has broken out over whether kids should be taught that Jews are white, and therefore oppressors, or not.

Districts are split on the question.

This is what an education debate looks like in our largest state. Ethnic studies "scholars" say to be true to their science they must considers Jews oppressors.

They're standing by their principles! California politicians will probably in many cases compromise and end up simply teaching that all energy should be focused on White gentiles.

You know social science is fake. But it's actually much worse than you think. Many of the problems aren't even solvable in theory.

I wrote about why that is, and how one can develop healthy epistemological habits and a reasonable worldview anyway. richardhanania.com/p/epistemology… The typical qualitative paper find a statistical relationship and sees if it holds after "controlling" for potential confounders.

This pretends to do away with selection effects. In fact it does no such thing. See the cases of out of wedlock births and breastfeeding.

Which side believes in more misinformation?

I used to think that the question was unanswerable because it depends on the questions you ask. People can come up with questions that conservatives get wrong ("Was the 2020 election stolen?") or that liberals get wrong ("Were 2016 vote totals changed by Russia?") Many studies do this, and they should be rejected as biased.

But a 2021 paper has convinced me that liberals are the side that is overwhelmingly closer to the truth on most factual matters.

This article found an objective way to get at the misinformation question. Researchers decided to track 20 viral stories each two week period over 6 months in 2019. Every two weeks, they grabbed the 10 most viral true stories and 10 most viral fake stories over that period.

They then recruited conservatives and liberals to see who believed in more false information, in 12 different waves. This is an unbiased method because the researchers aren't themselves deciding which questions to ask. They're looking at what articles go viral, and then asking people about them. If one side tends to see more fake stories go viral, that will show up in the data.

First finding: more conservative false stories go viral.

"Fully two-thirds (65.0%) of the high engagement true statements were characterized as benefiting the political left, compared to only 10.0% that were described as benefiting the right. The pattern among falsehoods was reversed, although the relationship was attenuated: 45.8% benefited the political right versus about a quarter (23.3%) the left."

Both sides share unflattering things about their enemies. But when liberals do it, the information they share on social media is more likely to be true.

Moreover, it could be that people at the extremes are more likely to believe false information. In fact, the more conservative you are, the more false statements you're likely to believe. "Very liberal" people do the best at this measure, and "very conservative" the worst.

Even more shockingly, the researchers controlled for the fact that more conservative misinformation goes viral. Yes, both sides were biased and more likely to believe what they wanted. But liberals were more likely to admit things against their ideological interests. They were just better informed or less biased across the board.

In sum, this is absolutely damning for conservatives

1) Conservatives share a terrible epistemological ecosystem, where false claims go viral much more often. This is not a small difference. Liberals dominate the real news industry, while conservatives are the leaders in fake news
2) Conservatives as a result believe more false information
3) One could try to argue that a few conservative "bad apples" spread misinformation, and that biases the results, because among the general public each side just endorses what makes them feel good. But conservatives believe more false information even when that is accounted for.

One might have suspected these results just from observing different kinds of news media. But this is the strongest piece of confirmatory evidence I've seen for the idea that one side is in an epistemologically superior position. The right-wing echo chamber is a major problem, and in many ways worse than the liberal establishment it criticizes.

Part of this is probably just IQ. Liberals are smarter, and smart people are more likely to believe in true things on average. Also, when tribes with slightly different means form, they can have radically different cultures. To compare conservatives to liberals, it's not enough to just ask what the average IQ or level of tribal instinct is for each group. One must understand that a group that is low intelligence and high on tribalism will form a fundamentally different culture than one with the opposite traits. This is why cultural differences are often more radical than individual differences between communities. A community is not simply the sum of its parts, but includes feedback loops.

Social science can often be very biased, but we shouldn't reject findings when the methodology being used is sound.

The simple truth is liberals are more connected to reality than conservatives.


Some examples of the false statements. You can quibble here or there with what's actually false or what the slant of a story is in a few cases, but I don't think reasonable people will find much to disagree with here.

We know that Republicans have recently been nominating bad candidates and losing elections. I don't think most understand how bad things have gotten at the state party level, especially in swing states.

Consider the kind of people the GOP now attracts.

A 🧵 of the dysfunction. In Michigan, an important swing state, Republicans chose single mother Kristina Karamo to head the party last year.

She was just voted out, but claims that it was done improperly, so has refused to resign. Last week, the Michigan GOP had an event where both Karamo and the other supposed leader showed up, like the two popes, but neither was recognized as the head of the party.

Kamaro previously ran for Secretary of State in Michigan in 2022. She lost by 14 points and refused to concede. Now she refuses to leave the RNC!

DC had a program that randomly gave poor parents $10,800, taken as a lump sum or 12 monthly payments. What did they do with the money?

Washington Post profiles some winners. First, Canethia Miller, who took a $6K trip to Miami and bought her kids new outfits every day. By taking her kids on an expensive vacation they couldn't afford to look at rich people's houses and yachts, she says she motivated them to succeed.