🇭🇷, political theory, history, demography. Created @WhiteAtlasProj and collaborating with @Western_Tally.
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Joined August 2018
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I think I'm starting to wrap my head around the midterms. If I go back to my memory of what 2025 felt like, it was like Trump was blowing it. The energy was dying out. He failed to keep the momentum. Yarvin warned of the outcome of that already in Feb/Mar 2025.
A "lame duck presidency" -- that's it, isn't it? The momentum is gone, there is nothing to vote for. The public deeply cares about these things.
I think I see it. Failing at marketing and then losing the momentum caused a swing, coupled with short-term, legible financial troubles (gas and tariffs).
I’m totally whitepilled.
The democrats will now completely own two years of what was almost certainly going to be a lame duck presidency anyway, leading right into a presidential election. It’s beautiful timing.
I fully expect democrats to immediately troon out in maximum fashion, stepping over and over in huge piles of shit, while doing NOTHING that anyone wants. They won’t end the conflict in Iran.
They won’t lower gas prices.
They won’t materially make anything better for anyone.
They inherited a shitty situation they can’t do much about, and after two years they will own it, whether it’s true or not.
All leading to, as I said, a presidential election.
Be of good cheer things look rosy.
Marino Linich retweeted
I believe one of the key reasons Republicans lost is that they were completely defeated in the information war.
There are literally millions of normies - possibly tens of millions - who genuinely believe that Donald Trump personally ate babies with Epstein.
They believe AI data centers consume all water on the planet and that there is a wave of hidden lynchings of black people in the South and that Lindsay Clancy is innocent while the Cornell 7 represent a campaign of white men terrorising and raping everybody.
So the question becomes - how do you stop leftists flooding the short form video space with insanely toxic lies.
People really believe that Lindsay Clancy is innocent, they really believe that there are secret lynchings going on throughout the South, they really believe that data centers are destroying the planet
Marino Linich retweeted
Presidential approval rating tracked against the Iran war
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
Marino Linich retweeted
Fuentes basically had the second largest right wing viewership yesterday for the midterms
Marino Linich retweeted
Incredibly prescient understanding of the young male vote from @ScottMGreer’s Whitepill.
This nails what we are seeing exactly. Read these two full paragraphs.
Young White men ages 18 to 29 swung 35 points toward Democrats in the 2026 midterms compared with the 2024 presidential election.
Follow: @AFpost
Marino Linich retweeted
Laestadians are 2% of the population in Finland 🇫🇮, and 4.5% of live births.
By 2050 they could be as many as ~12.5% of Births in Finland.
This is part of why having a high TFR Subgroup is so important and why I am slowly trying to work out how large that base might be in Australia and working on policy to support them.
I found this old Yugoslav children's picturebook ("Bajke u slici," book 12) published in Belgrade in the 80s. The illustrations and stories were Spanish (Eugenio Sotillos and María Pascual).
Looking through it, I think about how striking the scale of what we've lost since is.
Marino Linich retweeted
Sanity thank you
We're in a new era of communication, and only one side seems to be living in it. The old guard consultant class is about to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If you think that high prices lost the election for the right, you don't understand marketing. Humans have no problem paying a premium for a good quality brand. Notice the word "brand", not "product". Are Nikes better than New Balance? Nope. But the brand is better. And notice what happened when they tinkered with the brand and screwed their core narrative? Nike stock fell through the basement. Did the product change? Nope. The brand did.
It's not the product, it's the brand. Results don't sell the product, the storytelling does. Will these newly-elected commies lower prices? Of course not. Are they gonna get you free healthcare? No, your insurance is gonna get even worse, just like it did the last time they tried socialized medicine. They're not going to do anything they've sold you, but...like Saul Goodman said: if you're committed enough, you can make any story work.
The committed storytelling of a couple insane podcasters was enough to fracture an entire political coalition from their own side in less than 2 years...they have zero power, zero credibility, they've never actually governed anything nor produced any results, but...they're good storytellers, and that's all that matters. Are they telling a good story? No, it's atrocious, but they're telling their atrocious story effectively and compellingly.
It is 100% true that everything's too damn expensive, and we all know that inflated prices are always sticky. Does anyone know that it's entirely the result of shutting down the global economy over the flu and (both naive republicans and democrats) printing infinity dollars for several years? Nope...because nobody has effectively told that story, and it's an unsexy story to tell. "Free stuff!" is a VERY easy story to tell, and when everyone's gotta take out a second mortgage just to pay their insurance premiums, "free healthcare" is an unbeatable story. It doesn't matter that "free healthcare" doesn't exist and socialized medicine is a terrible product...it's not the product, it's the brand. And "FREE!" is a great brand.
You can't get mad at people for having the financial literacy of a 9 year old. I mean, you can, but they outnumber you a million to one, so it's not going to be productive. You need to figure out how to make an unsexy story sexy, or else the "free stuff!" crowd is going to eat your lunch every time. If you give people a choice between earning a six pack on a treadmill or taking Ozempic, they're gonna choose Ozempic...they don't care about the side effects. If you give people a choice between fiscal discipline or free stuff...guess what they'll pick? They don't care about the side effects.
With projected growth of 5%, the economy right now is stronger than it's been in generations. Is that the story you hear? Nope. Is that the vibe you feel? Absolutely not, especially when every time you fill up your gas tank, it feels like a diesel enema.
It's not the product, it's the brand. A great product can fall into oblivion with bad messaging...a single bad review from one effective storyteller can tank a restaurant. The "influencer economy" is lucrative for a reason; everybody inherently understands the importance of effective storytelling...except the right. Zohran Mamdani gets it...he has an army of influencers on staff. In a perfect metaphor of this transitional phase of old guard vs new wave political messaging, Zohran nuked the Vice President into oblivion with maybe the biggest ratio in the history of the internet. By simply posting the subway assistant meme, Mamdani got 2 MILLION likes, quoting a post from the VP that had only 10K likes. If you're reading that sentence thinking "this is fucking ridiculous, you're talking about social media likes as political analysis now?"...you are the problem.
Yes, this stuff matters. Rizz matters. The President did a masterful job of this kind of retail politics in his historic 2024 campaign...you can be angry that this is what politics has been reduced to, but you can either adapt or die.
"No the problem is, you didn't deliver enough for the American people!" Are you a moron? Since when does anybody care about that? What have democrats delivered for Californians in the last 20 years? Unmitigated wildfires, homeless drug zombies everywhere, roads that look like Fallujah in 2004...people don't care about results. They think they care about results. That want you to believe they care about results, just as Nike wants you to believe their shoes are better than New Balance...but at the end of the day, all people really care about is the swoosh.
Adapt or die.
Marino Linich retweeted
At any point in time, if your circle of concern is proximal enough in time and space, the "best" course of action is some pleasure now, more pain later: do drugs, import cheap labor, etc. And since proximal maximizers always outnumber distal maximizers, maximal democracy=entropy
Marino Linich retweeted
Texas results by group (NBC exit poll):
🔴 White men: +23 Republican
🔴 White women: +13 Republican
🔵 Latino men: +19 Democrat
🔵 Latino women: +42 Democrat
🔵 Black men: +77 Democrat
🔵 Black women: +84 Democrat
🔵 All others: +10 Democrat
Like it or not, demographics are destiny
We should stick to principles like voting. None of us use our time optimally anyway, and we all get a moral boost from voting. A principle/ritual yields long-term rewards and can't always be reasoned about, especially in risky bets. You should always vote, without exception.
Marino Linich retweeted
This might sound hyperbolic, but I think it's true:
Musk's future, along with America's, depends on him changing the rules on X to allow advocating for violence (to defend from Democrats).
American patriots need a place we can actually organize, and X is still far too strict.
The greatest test for any meme is vertical spread. Without this, it is illegitimate and likely akin to a harmful pathogen. Memes that spread purely horizontally are destructive to their hosts.
Imagine if self-driving was the default, and we were suddenly arguing about letting these new manual-driving cars for humans on the road. Mortality in places where they are tested shoots up 9x, and hundreds of people die as a result of the experiment.
What would the natural reaction of any sane government to that be? It would be to BAN THEM IMMEDIATELY.
Millions of people die needlessly every year because humans still drive cars. The data is already out. This technology is being delayed because of self-interest.
Just the other day, I heard someone with a few of my mutuals died in a car crash. That is the kind of evil these interests (from companies, bureaucracies, and drivers themselves) are creating, and it happens constantly.
Marino Linich retweeted
A Muslim man called his son home from school, still in his school uniform, so he could help gang rape a little white girl
You have no idea how evil these people are
And yet they live amongst us
I talked to some member of the broader Libyan elite yesterday. Father is Saudi, and fascinatingly, he speaks English like a black American (which is common among Arabs, who somehow feel like they should emulate them).
His cousin participated in that famous barbaric video where they sodomized Gaddafi with a bayonet, and he kept railing on about how he hates Gaddafi and would like to torture him if only he were still alive. You'd think that he had some kind of good reason, but it boiled down to some tribal mumbo-jumbo. The only comprehensible argument I remember is that he said a couple married Libyan women got raped by Qataris (and wanted to emphasize it wasn't "the whores," those he didn't care about), and that this was allowed by Gaddafi. When I then asked if that was the whole reason why "Libyans" hated Gaddafi, he conceded that it was entirely secondary, and just the "tip" of what was going on.
So, what was going on? I don't know. It seems it's just a list of retarded collective personal grievances, and probably relates to his wider family competing for power. They have no theory of governance or the kinds of problems that a leader must deal with, it's more or less just clan antagonism.
In many ways, it reminds me of an ex-classmate who was Pakistani Pashtun. She tried to blame rapes in Europe on Punjabis (who she has a problem with), and when I pointed out it was actually Kashmiris (who she likes) that were comprising most of the Pakistani rape gangs, her brain froze. That's without mentioning Afghans rape more women per capita in Europe than probably any other nationality.
There was another instance where she tried to project her own motivations onto me, asking if I had a problem with immigrants "because I had a negative experience with them." Once again, she was surprised when the answer was "no," and that my personal experiences have nothing to do with the broader phenomenon and the destruction of my continent. To her, this was weird, because she hated Punjabis more-or-less only because she had a couple negative experiences with them.
We don't fully comprehend the degree to which our understanding of things is different from this tribal babble. Third worlders don't have a concept of truth or universality, their entire cognitive structure boils down to this small, parochial, bullshit clan struggle.