the most important idea in current politics

self-hatred as political moneyball

at core, modern politics has little to do with genuine sentiment or ideology. when one really boils it down, it’s all moneyball: how do i most cheaply acquire “on base” (getting elected) and runs (getting control) to put up wins (weilding influence). and like billy bean before him, soros has been a pioneer in this, playing the political establishment over and over by finding unlikely avenues of highly affordable influence like NGO’s, prosecutors, AG’s and similar means of acquiring massive and effective influence on the cheap.

this same logic gets applied to segmenting the demos, breaking it into parts and tailoring messaging and policy in what look to be surprising and non-intuitive fashions only to have them produce big scores and wins that no one saw coming. a great deal of it seems to be coalescing around one fundamental insight and this counterintuitive fact about the world is the piece that unlocks perception of the whole, the lens that makes clear what otherwise seems impossible or absurd.

the riddles are straightforward:

• why does the “progressive” left keep championing only the worst and most dissolute villains among us?

• why are they voting for the most divisive and intellectually and morally bankrupt frauds and communists, race war hucksters, and the “gimmie dat” grievance-obsessed?

• why are these candidates winning despite the clear fact that they are promising to attack the very people who are voting for them?

• how can a movement like that succeed? (at least electorally, obviously once in power, it’s a different story)

well, i have a theory and my theory is this:

they are mining a seam of counter-intuitive preference structure rooted in the abject self-hatred of those broken by decades of school-sanctioned self-esteem destruction from critical theory, woke, and the rest of the aggrievement narrative panoply.

generation “external validation/i am my ideas rather than having ideas” has been turned inside out into the political equivalent of “cutters” engaging in self-harm just to feel something, to feel relevant, to express their carefully cultivated yet internally unexamined rage at an insufficiency of participation trophies.

they have been taught to hate themselves, their families, and their communities and to favor everything unlike themselves over anything close to them and this substrate gets bathed in an unreality field of sufficient intensity to generate obviously self-annihilating ideas like “queers for palestine” without hint of irony or self-awareness.

the whole thing has become nothing so much as chickens proclaiming “fox for henhouse supervisor!” and then wondering where all the chicks have gone.

this represents an astonishing outcome and stands testament to just how much damage one can do with stunted, externalized identities whipped into uncomprehending social contagions.

it’s an ideology of anger and desire to tear down anything and everything that looks familiar (or familial) or close in favor of the distant and disparate. this breaks all societal substrate and makes invaders look like liberators.

ultimately, it’s self-harm and surrender peddled as self-help and evolved empathy.

“hate your dad? have we got the movement for you! let’s get him! it will make you a good person if you do!”

and this is why this graphic originating from this study in nature is just about the most important idea in politics right now.

what we see here is an astonishing inversion. the rings represent every extending “things to care about” that reach from the center (immediate family) out toward the extreme distance of “all things in the universe.”

self-styled “conservatives” center their value on “friends and close friends” and those closer in like family.

“liberals” center their far from this, somewhere around “all animals in the universe.”

here’s how the survey works:

and while this has, to some extent, always been with us as part of the “progressive” mindset (we must protect the fluffy butted warbler over humanity or some delta smelt or rocky wasteland over our farms and cities) it has seemingly become far more acute in recent decades.

this has been a 100% cultivated and calculated effect from another political puppet serving some true masters of politico-electoral moneyball. it’s been driven into every aspect of movies, media, and schools. globalism, universalist concern, global warming, race fear, gender conflict, all of it stormed onto the global scene in 2008 with the election of a previously near-irrelvant congress-critter who played the herald for a new world order, a man elected entirely on “personal image and story” and “not like us and that is good” with a side order of “you all need to make redress for your intrinsic traits” to such extreme extent that he was awarded the nobel peace prize simply for getting elected.

this was used to push doctrines of incomplete humanity, external identity, the pathologization of normalcy and normal objection, and the endless repetition of demoralizing stories.

this is what the globalists have been pushing for decades via proxy, puppet, and political takeover and infestation of institutions.

in classic totalitarian fashion, no stone was left unturned and what BO began, the brandon administration (infected with many of the same people and fronted by a perfect “old white male” figurehead too senile to object or even understand), the carefully inculcated “people who are their ideas” were weaponized and set loose upon everyone else as DEI and CRT became the polestars of federal agencies in overt and ostentatious fashion.

these matters always start with pretty and lofty words and appeals to “empathy”

“In 2006, then Democratic Senator Barack Obama bemoaned the country’s “empathy deficit,” telling college graduates, “I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern.””

but these ideas are a trap. they lead not to “justice” or understanding but rather to the abnegation of one’s own tribe, culture, and morals. when one inhabits a high trust, high function society, this loss amounts to the disavowal of “everything that works” and the embrace of everything that doesn’t.

societies die in induced auto-immune spasam against healthy organs.

hate replaces actual empathy, division supplants unity, and low-trust low-moral practices proliferate through the first world systems conducive to human flourishing rendering them second world gulags of malfunction and decline and discord.

and it can get pretty stupid pretty fast.

and it’s honestly difficult to even scope this intellectual damage sufficiently to mock it properly. (though i will, of course, give it my best effort)

suddenly, a leader saying things like what follows can win the NYC democratic primary for mayor.

the man is a self-described socialist/communist, and anti-western muslim, and has been spewing actual overt, anti-white hate. amazingly, a guy who thinks “sharia law has some great stuff to teach us” was winning women votes.

many have been asking, “how is this possible? how are people so stupid, so clearly self-harming?”

the graphic above is how. they were taught that they needed to value that far from them vs that close in, the disparate over the proximal, and then on top of that was layered copious self-hate and guilt driving certain subsets of population to hate “anything that looks like them.” school and society became one long struggle session anchored in a new form of original sin blood libel by birth.

you and your structures are structurally bad. pay homage and atone.

and it has worked. mamdani is running this table because he understands the moneyball (he’s an obama clan proxy and gets guidance and tactics from team BO, so this is no surprise).

the electoral fact is that telling white liberals you are out to get them makes white liberals vote for you.

and this is going to make a wild mess of US politics.

examine that bottom chart. it comes from the ANES pilot survey of 2500 voters.

most of the results are as one would expect: races and groups tend to preference themselves and have “warmer” feelings toward others like them than toward those in outgroups. but look at “white liberals.” they have no such sentiment. in fact, they exhibit outright antipathy toward what one would expect to be their ingroup of an intensity basically equivalent to which other groups prefer themselves. this is a 26-27 point inversion in typical sentiment.

the rich are voting “eat the rich” and the poor opposing it.

but A LOT of this swing was “youth/early adult vote.” they turned out in droves and with only 1.1 million people voting in this primary, they had a huge effect.

older voters stayed home and 18-29 poured in.

these are the young, white, college educated liberals who moved to one of the most expensive cities in the world only to discover that their degrees are not worth what they were told they were, that payscales are flattening as distance work lets people in boise compete for jobs in NYC, and the ruinous policies of government have made the housing market supply constrained and spiralling in terms of cost.

they all think they should have “above average” jobs and live in the apartment from “friends” while working at coffee shops and the shock of leaving the nests of their rich parents and having to live in the same dumps we used to has set them off.

they have been told that this is lies

and this is truth

and they are lapping it up because it suits their desires and self-image of “generation wronged” who ought to have far more than they do (some of which is true) and has so addled their minds as to ensnare them in political and cultural stockholm syndrome, embracing the captors who put them here and attacking anyone who offers to free them. they hate themselves, their families, and their culture, all the paths to plenty and flourishing are repudiated in favor of dictatorial subjugation and control.

their “parents” and people like them own these “investment properties” and these kids have no affinity for that which is close to them (a classic marxist teaching to eradicate competition from friends, family, religion, and community in order to focus loyalty upon the regime) so they line up to grab the torches and pitchforks of empathy and go spread the love.

they are dying to attack “like us” because they do not like “like us”

these summer children of presumptive plenty seem unaware they are attacking themselves and the systems that could create the lives they covet.

their incoherent self-anger manifests as self-harm expressed as political preference.

over and over.

ask pretty much anyone “would you like the streets to be safer?” and they will tell you yes.

then they vote mamdani.

imagine your goal is to double the crime rate of new york and ensure that none of the streets are safe. how would you improve upon this agenda?

the decoder ring to understand this intense opposition to self-interest is self-loathing and other preference. if you are sufficiently convinced of your own intrinsic badness and immorality, you experience every call to attack your own way of life as a positive.

this is not an accident, it’s a well researched calculation.

zorhan is just like obama: a young, good looking, “different than you” candidate making pretense to empathy to sow division and moneyball the votes of the self-despising/other identifying voter cohort.

this sort of tactic will continue to advance because, on a certain group, it works

and once you understand the frame, you’ll see it everywhere.

see how much sense this makes now?

and how these obviously, utterly stupid affinities emerge as “trendy”?

they signal this kabuki virtue by lining up in favor of the worst ideas most “not like us” and choosing the mascots most absurd, pernicious, and divorced from society and even reality.

look at the beatific, idiot smile of other adjacency. if it were fiction, no one would beleive it.

“i stand with pathology!”

it’s always “not for you and for ‘other than you’” cast as ethics and overwrought emotive appeal to alleged “empathy” as though such a thing may only be manifest by the championing of civilizational solvents and wreckers.

the same people who dissolved all proximal empathy in these kids then oppress them with failing economic and social doctrine and set them upon themselves because these inverted identity people seek to expiate their own birth guilt by turning upon their birth tribes as “proof of loyalty” to buttress their externally validated senses of self. they are the venn interset of useful idiot and shock troops happy to punch themselves because they so desperately need to feel good about punching someone.

this will, of course, feed them like cannon fodder into the maw of this machine and when the “find out” part comes, it’s always the same.

“i never thought leopards would eat MY face!” exclaims the vitriolic voter for the leopards eating people’s faces party. it would be pitiable were it not so dangerous.

these blue bastion children and young adults are callow and naive reality denialists who want the trophy without winning the game. they are mired in wobegon fallacy. half the population believes it ought to be the top 3% and this has made them angry.

they all think they should have the house on the right and have no idea that under socialism only the dictators get one.

they are wreckers who think they are builders, a sophomoric stratum of self-congratulatory self-delusion.

and i fear (at least in NYC) they are about to get what they voted for, good and hard.

“my god, señor cat. this seems awful. is there no silver lining to all this?”

well, i’m glad you asked. yes, i think there is.

for all that this is clever moneyball in swamp donkey primaries and the dark blue bastions of certain cities, i suspect it’s electoral arsenic in a more general sense and the fact that such people as mamdani can win in NYC will only further accentuate the decline of such places offering ever more marked contrast to saner domains.

the left seem locked in a spiral to become increasingly unpalatable because “being against your civilization” has become their winning primary strategy, but this moneyball will not hold in most general elections outside of places that are so foregone as blue as to be irrelevant to swing voting.

they will keep getting weaker and more out of step.

those who vote based on self-annihilation beget parties that annihilate themselves.

this is going to get spectacularly ugly.