Vote!
Today, I take a break from your regularly-scheduled AI mathocalypse programming to urge my American readers to vote in the Congressional midterms, early if possible, if you haven’t already. Especially if your state faces one or more major contests, as does my adopted home state of Texas.
Me, I voted straight-ticket Democrat today, as I’ve done in every election since I became eligible over a quarter-century ago (except for when I vote-swapped with someone from another state).
So yes, I voted for the guy who studied theology a short walk from my house, and who seems to have really internalized the whole Jesus thing about kindness to everyone—
—over his sneering, thuggish, cartoonishly mafia-like opponent. Fingers crossed that Talarico pulls off a historic upset for our state (he’s currently a 2-to-1 favorite in the prediction markets).
The Texas Republicans did everything they possibly could to make this choice easy for me, by being corrupt, conspiratorial, racist, and Taliban-like even by the jaw-droppingly debased standards of MAGA in 2026. As I draw breath, I could never vote for a slate one of whose candidates attacked UT students for the crime of being visibly Southeast Asian while cheering their school’s football victory from the stands—and whose other candidates could barely bring themselves to condemn this knuckle-dragging racist, for fear of angering their base. (It’s like, didn’t you want immigrants to assimilate to American culture? What more could these kids possibly do, short of skin bleach?)
All the same, this was also the first US election in my lifetime where I felt like my vote was genuinely in play—especially when I listened to Talarico’s condemnations of Israel, for having the temerity to fight the same kind of war any random other nation would’ve fought had it been attacked as Israel was on October 7. When Hasan Piker came to speak to a cheering crowd here at UT Austin, I actually wrote to someone I know in the Talarico campaign, to ask whether Talarico would show enough balls to condemn Piker’s many antisemitic and anti-American statements, and renounce his support. My contact was nice enough to reply to me, saying: don’t worry, James is taking care to be far away from Austin during Piker’s visit, so he won’t need to engage at all!
So then, this is my candidate: the guy who’s strategically silent on the wildly-popular streamer who’d gladly see my Israeli family members raped and beheaded, rather than campaigning with that streamer like Abdul El-Sayed did in Michigan. I unironically believe that, for Talarico, it took genuine moral courage to resist the whole momentum of his party’s youth even to this extent.
To earn my vote in the near future under these circumstances, all a Texas Republican would need to do is be somewhat sane or reasonable. He or she might affirm, for example, that racism is bad, that abortion is a woman’s choice, that Christianity is not the state religion of the US, that Covid vaccines work, and/or that Joe Biden won in 2020, while still being arbitrarily right-wing on taxes and other stuff. He or she could then simply wait for the Democrats to descend fully into the worldview of the masked hooligans who are currently setting France’s beautiful cities aflame, terrorizing its shopkeepers, and looting as many Louis Vuitton handbags as they can carry … all for Palestine, of course, and for the death of global capitalism, and for the violent overthrow of the scheming, money-grubbing, hook-nosed, international Talmudic … err, I mean “Zionists.”
What I’m trying to say is, it was a genuine achievement on the part of the Texas Republicans to fail to earn a single vote from me this cycle.
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Comment #1 October 21st, 2026 at 12:24 am
Are you unaware of that clip of Talarico that was going around, the Zoom session he had with woke activists in 2020, where he was talking about the “stain of whiteness” and how we need to “deconstruct whiteness” and listen to “black and indigenous voices?” No?
You lecture us about “racism,” but you voted for an anti-White racist. That’s what the Left is today. It’s anti-White racism. And anti-White racism today is worse than any other racism.
Comment #2 October 21st, 2026 at 12:36 am
Mr. Maga #1: If it comes down to
(1) a guy who, like countless others in 2020, went comically overboard in his rhetorical attempts to cleanse himself of racism and now regrets it, or
(2) a guy who gives every indication that he’d murder his own mother if he saw political advantage in it
—well, I told you my choice.
Comment #3 October 21st, 2026 at 12:47 am
Dear Scott,
Honestly, how can we have a serious discussion when you use hyperboles like this? Paxton wants to kill his own mother, because of a couple of scandals? I feel like you are so locked in to the TDS media zone that you can only throw around hyperbole like “racist,” “mafioso,” blah blah blah…
But anyway…
I can’t believe the flippant and dismissive attitude you have towards anti-White racism. If he said Jewishness is a scourge in America, the Jews need to stop controlling everything, the evil Zionists are oppressing us and are money-hungry etc., and I said “well, you know, he just went comically overboard in his rhetorical attempts to condemn Palestinian genocide or whatever,” how would you feel about that? Would you be willing to forgive such rhetoric? I can’t believe how Democrats such as yourself are ready to forget about all the insane wokeisms of 2020, the anti-White racism, the psycho Marxist decolonial politics, all the people fired and lost their jobs, as just “rhetorical excesses” or whatever. It’s terrible.
Comment #4 October 21st, 2026 at 12:57 am
They aren’t declaring the Covid vaccines “don’t work” necessarily, they just want MORE TESTING and of course for them NOT TO BE MANDATORY…How could you be against that????? Should these experimental things really be forced on people??? Seems like a no-brainer to me. Test the experimental stuff really hard, and don’t force it into anybody. People are tired of being treated like lab-rats with no rights…
Comment #5 October 21st, 2026 at 1:23 am
Scott: Indians are 2.1% of Texas, and 1.5% nationally. When we see them dominate UT Austin, of course that doesn’t seem fair. Why are they so overrepresented in everything science, technology, engineering, and math? When men or white people are overrepresented, that’s a “huge problem,” that’s a sign of “sexism” and “institutionalized misogyny” and “white supremacy” and “discrimination,” but when Indians are overrepresented, literally by an order of magnitude or more, that’s just “progress” we have to accept. Of course people will get frustrated by this double standard, and frustrated more generally that recent immigrants to America are dominating all the best jobs and university positions. Calling them “racist” is just going to make them more angry. And you can count me one of them 😃
Comment #6 October 21st, 2026 at 1:26 am
Mr. Maga #3: Look, I part ways from most of the left in agreeing with you that anti-white racism is even theoretically possible at all. And I go further, in agreeing that in certain times and places, anti-white racism has been a genuine moral problem worth standing courageously against. (And of course, when it comes to “risking one’s career and reputation by standing up to the woke Puritans,” there are few to whom I defer, as you might remember from 2014.)
All the same, in the United States in 2026—which is still a majority-white country, run by majority-white politicians like James Talarico—I view us as still a billion miles away from the point of (say) shackling whites into ships to be enslaved forever, or herding white children into gas chambers, or any of the other world-historic injustices whose repudiation is a large part of what modern morality consists of. If I ever see that change, I’ll say so.
In other words: get a grip.
Comment #7 October 21st, 2026 at 1:33 am
I don’t understand the why abortion is a strong moral issue for people like you. What is the obvious difference between a newborn and a fetus that makes once a life and the other worthless? If you defined life by only by present capabilities you wouldn’t care more about a 2 year old than a dog.
It’s obviously just an arbitrary line drawn mostly on moral intuition. I’m personally pro choice but I can respect other people having different intuitive feelings.
With covid you should at least respect how justifiably upset people were with how it was handled. It’s frustrating to see covid vaccines as a purity test when you have no issue with democrats insisting Anthony Fauci did no wrong.
Patrick Collison describes the issues well.
The religion thing I agree with you on principle, but I think most Christian Republicans are entirely performative. The only real policy implications are anti abortion stances and support for school vouchers. Most of those kids weren’t going to amount to anything anyway so it’s not a huge loss.
Hopefully we’ll be able to bring you into the fold for the next election.
Comment #8 October 21st, 2026 at 1:42 am
Max #4: See, but I don’t believe the anti-vaxxers that that’s their real position. If “more research is needed” into whether mRNA covid vaccines are basically safe and effective even in 2026, when exactly will it not be needed?
Instead I think that, as with nuclear power and genetically-engineered rice and countless other technologies, “more research is needed” functions in most cases as barely concealed code for “I will invent reasons to reject something I irrationally hate until the end of time, because I have a primitive, conspiratorial, prescientific worldview that deserves every thinking person’s contempt, and I’d rather see your family members die than admit I was wrong about it.”
(Exercise for the reader: Why is AI importantly different here from covid vaccines or nuclear power or genetically engineered rice? Hint: The answer involves what each technology could do in actual reality; it can’t be answered purely from emotional word-associations!)
Comment #9 October 21st, 2026 at 1:50 am
Current student #5: To a first approximation, no one in the US has ever discriminated in favor of Indians, or given them any special privileges whatsoever. Thus, to whatever extent they’re overrepresented at the top universities, or win positions you think you deserved, the simplest explanation is just that they’re smarter and more industrious and better people than you are. Granted, that probably isn’t a high bar.
Comment #10 October 21st, 2026 at 1:59 am
Aperson #7: I’m far from an abortion maximalist, and am amenable to a compromise like many European countries have, where abortion is heavily restricted after 15 weeks or whatever. Here in Texas, though, abortion is now outlawed from basically the moment most women would realize they were pregnant, even in cases of rape or incest (!), and doctors are afraid to perform abortions even to save a woman’s life lest they be prosecuted. So, it’s way past the point of sane compromise and into the realm of performative, Taliban-like cruelty.
Comment #11 October 21st, 2026 at 2:05 am
Okay, I feel like there’s a lot wrong with your comment, and I’m going to try to break it down.
What you’re saying basically, is, “get a grip, White people haven’t ever experienced real oppression and brutality in history,” and also, “modern morality is about repudiating all the horrible things white people have done.” I’m going to respond to these both in turn.
White people haven’t ever experienced real oppression and brutality in history
How about the Barbary slave trade? Millions of Europeans were kidnapped from coastal towns or fishing boats or ships, by pirates, and sold into brutal slavery in the Islamic world. Many of them even became sex slaves.
You mention Hitler, but the vast majority of people Hitler killed were Europeans, themselves White. Ashkenazi Jews are “White,” and Slavs are “White.” Hitler wanted to depopulate and enslave Slavic Europe. He didn’t really care about colonizing Africa or Asia or whatever.
White people have experienced enormous suffering in history, like two World Wars that devastated Europe, that traumatized entire generations and killed millions of young men, and the Stalinist purges in Russia, and communism in Eastern Europe. And you know, life for most people, including even the “privileged whites,” was brutish and short only a few hundred years ago. Was being a serf much better than being a plantation slave? My ancestors worked twelve hour days in brutal coal mines where many died, was that “privileged?”
Modern morality is about repudiating all the horrible things white people have done
Slavery, and genocide, and war crimes—these are ubiquitous in history. Basically all the premodern Empires were brutal. The Mughals had slavery, the Timurids had slavery, the Ottomans had slavery, the Ming and Qing Chinese had mass forced labor. They all slaughtered civilians in war, they all put cities to the sword. They tortured and killed people in horrible ways. None of them had “human rights.” Empires were all brutal back then. Why are European societies singled out as uniquely worthy of being reprimanded for past atrocities? In fact it was European societies that were first to articulate what we’d call “human rights” today, that fought wars to end slavery, that ushered in the (relatively) most peaceful period the world has ever known.
Which brings me to my last and most important point, which is that if Whites or westerners should “repudiate” the atrocities of slavery, colonialism, etc., then by the same logic, why shouldn’t they be PROUD of the enormous and singular contributions of Western civilization and European societies to building the world today? There wouldn’t be modern science or technology or capitalism without Western civilization. There wouldn’t be an industrial revolution without Europe. And how many billions of lives has western civilization saved? For example with the Haber-Bosch process, or penicillin? If we have to constantly “repudiate” all the historical atrocities of European societies, then why shouldn’t we also remember their singular contributions to building the world of peace and plenty that we inhabit today?
Comment #12 October 21st, 2026 at 2:29 am
Mr. Maga #11: It would be the understatement of a lifetime to say that I’m strongly for celebrating and preserving the achievements of Western civilization, and ferociously against all the horrors you list that were inflicted on various white populations (often, though not always, by other white populations).
Here in the modern US, though, those who obsess about anti-white racism are frankly not the standard-bearers of Western civilization who impress me or who I want. (Richard Hanania, himself a recovering former obsessive on the topic, has written about this much more eloquently than I could.)
And crucially, I don’t predict that a mainstream Democrat like Talarico would try to make life worse for his fellow white Texans were it in his power to do so, however much he felt in 2020 like he should repent for the historic sins of “whiteness.” On the contrary, I think he’d try to make life better for his fellow white Texans, being at worst mistaken about how.
Crucially, if you go far enough to Talarico’s left, I think that this stops being true, and you really can find political figures who want to inflict what they see as richly-deserved suffering on all whites, or straight men, or rich people, or Zionists, etc. (Just like, if you go far enough right, you can now find countless political figures who actively want to inflict suffering on women, gays, non-whites, etc.) My promise to you, the reader, is that wherever I think this is the case, I’ll say so!
Comment #13 October 21st, 2026 at 2:36 am
Oh, so I just have a primitive worldview worthy of contempt, and I’d rather your family members die than admit I was wrong. Charming.
By the same token, I could say you have an authoritarian, tyrannical, closed-minded worldview, and you’d rather people get sick and die after having gene therapy forced on them, than admit you were wrong.
But I digress….
There weren’t enough tests, dude! They only tested it for a couple months, and then rolled it out to the whole world! They never had the usual clinical trial, the phase 3 thing, that’s supposed to last for years! So if the “vaccine” never went through the normal tests, how would we even know it’s safe? It doesn’t matter how long it’s been on the market for, if it never actually WENT THROUGH THE TESTS. The real tests, not the five month bullshit they did. That wasn’t enough to rule out LONG TERM SIDE EFFECTS that take years to develop. Because we didn’t do the usual clinical trials, we have no idea what they might be doing to people…
First of all, it’s not a vaccine. It’s DNA. So it’s more like gene therapy than a vaccine.
And also, people are getting sick and dying from it all the time, and nobody cares, because none of these medical people want to admit they were wrong. This isn’t just a “conspiracy theory” dude. This isn’t just some internet randos saying this. There’s tons of actual doctors and scientists and stuff saying this on Substack…But I doubt you’d read it.
Anyway, can you at least admit that it’s not a vaccine, it’s a DNA thing?
Comment #14 October 21st, 2026 at 2:42 am
@Scott
You do understand Israel is very very very extremely further to the right than anything in the west anywhere. Israel definitely is the racist ethnic supremacist society that you think the right in the west is. If you can’t see this when it’s explicitely expressed by both the left and the right in Israel. You are honestly just delusional. You supposedly are a zionist.
Could you at least be honest about your self-interest here? That you are jewish, and hence vote for jewish interests.
Stop the moral grandstanding, nobody smart is impressed by it. You just vote for your own particular niche jewish interests abroad and at home.
I just read a weak-willed man in your words.
I don’t actually particularly care if you vote left or right, that’s not the point. I hate your incoherence and self-interest presented as moral grandstanding.
Comment #15 October 21st, 2026 at 3:17 am
I don’t see anything wrong with that tweet about Indians, or the right-wing discourse about it.
I know you’re a big cosmopolitan globalist and all, but let me break this down for you. We aren’t just atoms floating in the void, interchangeable citizens in a global community. We all come from somewhere. We all come from a surrounding context, from a culture. We all have an ancestral origin.
I’m a real, actual, heritage American. My ancestors were here for hundreds of years. They built this country. They were Christians, and they came from England, so they’ve probably been Christians for over a thousand years. They were the founding stock of America.
And now you have these fucking Indian immigrants, who are fresh off the boat, who are from an alien culture totally different from us, who worship bizarre gods—literally demonic heathen gods, if you want to know the truth—and they get off the boat, and get all the best fucking jobs? And get into the best universities? Do you know how fucking hard it is to get into these top universities now? Do you have any idea? Why would you, you haven’t applied to a college in twenty-five years. Well UT was actually one of the schools I applied to, for CS, and I was rejected. But that anecdote’s besides the point. Heritage Americans are getting screwed everywhere. There’s no jobs, and we can’t get into college. There’s no opportunity.
Meanwhile, the tech companies are all hiring fucking H1B Indians instead of giving the jobs to real, heritage Americans. It’s so sick. These are globalist traitors who care more about cheap wages than actually helping their country. And the schools? They’d rather admit literal devil-worshippers from the other side of the fucking Earth, than actual Christian heritage Americans whose ancestors built this country.
And you know what? I don’t actually care if they were “born here.” Okay? I’m more American than they are. My family’s been here for generations. My family’s Christians, and we were speaking English before fucking Shakespeare. We deserve more than they do. I’m more American than they are. And I’m no longer afraid to say it. None of us are afraid to say it anymore. We’re done walking on eggshells. Trump’s in the White House and I’ll say what I want.
Comment #16 October 21st, 2026 at 3:24 am
Inconsistent #14: Yes, a cause that I very openly support, and vote for, is for the world’s remaining Jews not to be shot or burned alive or exterminated with poison gas—i.e., to avoid a repeat of what happened to most of my extended family within living memory, largely because there was no State of Israel at the time. To avoid the repeat that hundreds of millions of the world’s people feverishly want, and march for, and would actively participate in if they could. I’ll grant you the presumption, whether deserved or not, that you aren’t among them.
I support the cause of continued Jewish existence for multiple, overdetermined reasons:
(1) because, as an Enlightenment liberal, I don’t want annihilation to befall any people, and
(2) because the math and science and literature that Jews have contributed to civilization, wildly out of proportion to their tiny numbers, are a large part of what makes life worth living for me, and
(3) because I’m Jewish and my wife and kids and brother and parents are Jewish, and I don’t want us to die.
In the early 20th century, there were already many smart people worried about the problem of Jewish survival, and there were many competing ideas—including Zionism, but also Communism, Bundism, assimilationism, and other ideas that would not require a specifically Jewish state, but would “merely” require the world to accept Jews as humans, rather than as vermin to be exterminated where they lived and kept out from where they didn’t live.
And then … something happened that discredited all the other ideas about as clearly as anything in human history has ever been discredited, and that vindicated Zionism about as clearly as anything in human history has ever been vindicated.
The six million are not another data point that informs my morality. They are my morality. They’re with me day and night, from my early childhood memories until today. It’s this morality of ashes that gives me total self-confidence to say: if the weight of history wasn’t enough to show you why the Zionist position is reasonable, then I wish you could’ve been obliterated, and that one of the six million could’ve taken your place among the living.
Comment #17 October 21st, 2026 at 3:36 am
Everyone: I’m closing down this thread, because contrary to my hopes, it was taken over by piece-of-shit lowlifes not gradually, but nearly immediately.
[ADDED 1 DAY LATER: I still stand by the above language for the anti-Indian racists here, as well as for the idea, familiar from Allied discussions of the Holocaust while it was underway, that preventing the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews is a parochial “Jewish interest.” For the other right-wing commenters I would’ve chosen more temperate language, however strongly I disagreed with them.]
Let me add: if I believed that the people who comment on threads like this one were in any way representative of my readership, then I wouldn’t blog at all. This is not an audience for whom I have even minimal respect.
I continue blogging only because, every time I travel and give a talk at a university, I’m swarmed by students who tell me how much this blog has meant to them, how they’ve been reading it for years, how it got them into quantum or CS, how I’ve been a light in the darkness and a voice of sanity for them, etc. etc. But alas, those are not the people who comment here.