Which is worse? MAGA or Mamdani?
MAGA manufacturers, Mamdani midwits, globalism and gardening.
None of us — not me, not you, not New York voters — none of us really know how New York works.1 Can the mayor raise taxes? Can he subsidize buses? Can he impede ICE? Can he abolish the police? Even if he can, will he do any of these things? As those disappointed in Trump’s first term will remember, even a brash executive can’t just “do things.” The legislature holds the power — that’s true at the federal level and at the local level.
None of this matters, and nothing ever happens. Still, we can screech loudly and proudly into the wind about our aesthetic preferences and moral rage.
I have a working theory that all political desires are victimological third worldism.
White nationalism is the idea that white people are a native aboriginal tribe, with centuries of deep, blood-soaked, intimate connection to the land, who are being ruthlessly exploited by imperialist rootless cosmopolitans. The goal of white nationalism is to expel violent brown invaders so that white people can return to their natural, organic folkways.
Palestinian activism is the idea that Palestinians are a native aboriginal tribe, with centuries of deep, blood-soaked, intimate connection to the land, who are being ruthlessly exploited by imperialist rootless cosmopolitans. The goal of Palestinian activism is to expel violent Zionist invaders so that the Palestinian people can return to their natural, organic folkways.
Zionism is the idea that Jews are a native aboriginal tribe, with centuries of deep, blood-soaked, intimate connection to the land, who are being ruthlessly exploited by liberal activists and internationalist bureaucrats in the United Nations. The goal of Zionism is to expel violent Muslim invaders so that Jews can return to their natural, organic folkways.
On the economic side of things:
MAGA is the idea that the American-born working class, whose ancestors built this country, have been ripped off by a rootless international elite. MAGA believes that by raising taxes on free trade, the American-born working class will once again be prosperous and rich enough to have babies.
Mamdanism is the idea that art hoes with law degrees and six-digit college loans have been ripped off by a rootless capitalist elite. Mamdanism believes that by raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires, the art hoes with law degrees will once again be prosperous and rich enough to not have to live in a Hispanic neighborhood.
These five ideologies really reduce to one ideological framework, which in the ethnic realm is a vague sort of anger at a transnational elite, and in the economic realm is a general desire for more taxation and protectionism.
Let’s contrast this with Deep Leftism:
Deep Leftism is the idea that a transnational liberal elite who sustain the global economy are being held back by retarded poor people. Deep Leftism believes that by chemically castrating the proletariat with soybean oil, the transnational liberal elite will finally be prosperous and rich enough to genetically modify bears into exploding super soldiers.
Now, admittedly, Deep Leftism might be slightly less popular than those other ideologies. It might be difficult to get 51% of the population to vote for the Deep Left Party. In 2024, 152 million Americans voted for Trump or Kamala. By contrast, Deep Leftism currently has 2,634 subscribers. But don’t worry: if I just do a few more interviews and podcasts, I’m sure the Deep Left Party will be very competitive in the 2028 election.
If I were a very rich person intent on changing the American political landscape, to be honest, I would be a little bit cynical about this Deep Left Party. I might decide to simply work within one of the two major parties to try to get what I want. Choosing the lesser of two evils is more productive than screeching into the wind.
That brings us back to our initial question: which is worse, MAGA or Mamdani? One faction promises to force big corporations to give jobs back to real Americans; the other faction promises to force billionaires to give bureaucratic sinecures to metrosexuals.
The best case for MAGA is that Trump Always Chickens Out; that the tariffs are a bluff and a negotiating tactic; that the small tariffs which remain will be fully absorbed by China.2 The worst case for MAGA is that you can’t separate economics from foreign policy; that American tariffs will cause third countries to do more trade with China, not less; that America uses trade as leverage over those third countries, and without that leverage, America will be forced to use hard power to enforce global security.
Since American hard power is limited, this will hasten the collapse of the Pax Americana. Without peace, there is no trade. Without trade, there is no economy. Without economy, there is no innovation. No innovation, no genetically modified bears!
The best case for Mamdani is that inflating the federal bureaucracy to absorb entitled woke midwits with law degrees is probably less structurally damaging than limiting trade. The gains from trade are enormous, both from a security point of view (more trade means less war) and from an ecological point of view (less trade means more aggressive marginal extraction, such as fracking).
It’s more important that America trade with the world than that we shrink the federal budget. The federal budget can be paid off with more growth — but if the economy contracts due to isolationism, then the existing federal budget becomes unsustainable and will lead to austerity.
Libertarians Dave Smith and Thomas Massie have historically aligned more with Trump than Kamala, because they tend to think that Republicans are worse than Democrats. This is petty and small minded. Massie’s “debt clock” is very symbolic of this pedantic engineering mindset, counting the dollars and cents going to shrimp sex and elephant treadmills. This was the spirit that animated DOGE, which was a huge failure and an embarrassment to the world’s richest man.
If you’ve ever worked at a large food company, like Walmart or Costco, you know that if merchandise goes past its expiration date, the standard practice is to throw it away. Millions of pounds of food are thrown away. When I was hanging out with anarcho-communists, they would invite me to go dumpster diving for this food.
Libertarians remind me of dumpster divers. They want to get down and dirty in the nitty gritty details of the budget, saving every scrap that “the man” wanted to throw out. This is not economically sensible, but it feels good. This hyper-obsession with efficiency is sort of like gardening, or sculpting a Bonsai tree.
When I listened to Massie talk to Theo Von, Theo asked if Massie’s lifelong goal to go “off the grid” was saving him money. Massie replied, no, all the time he was spending making his property “more efficient” was a huge waste with very small returns. Massie can freely admit this when it comes to his gardening, but he can’t see the parallels between this “gardener mindset” and his approach to the budget.
The illusion that Democrats are the party of deficit spending while the Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility can only be upheld if we ignore the last 30 years of history. Bill Clinton balanced the budget; George Bush drove us into debt, and Trump made it worse. If Republicans were willing to enforce austerity and attack Social Security, then the Massie argument would have some empirical weight to it. As it is, Republican governed states take in more tax money, while Democratic states are net contributors to the federal budget.
With the exception of Wyoming and Utah, all of the states which are net contributors to the federal budget are swing states and blue states. The deep South and West Virginia are a drain on the federal budget. It’s true that the South has a larger black population, which surely increases the burden of public spending, but it’s also true in Republican states with low black populations, like Kentucky and Maine and Oklahoma.
This doesn’t mean that Republican policies increase the debt, just that the Republican Party is more popular with poor, rural whites than it is with rich, urban whites. In the long term, however, this is a problem, because demographics are destiny.
Going back 200 years, the party which is filled with poor rural whites tends to be the more populist-socialist party. It’s only since 1993 that poor rural whites started voting solidly Republican, and the result of that shift has been the rise of Trump. Continue the trend, and it’s easy to see how, structurally, the Republican Party platform is destined to become a “High-Low vs the Middle” alliance of populist-socialists and oligarchs — just like the Southern Democrats of ye olden days.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is an alliance between midwits and minorities. Increasingly, however, minorities are fed up with the midwits, and are defecting to the Republicans. Eric Adams, Andrew Tate, Kanye, Royce White, and the Hodge Twins are leading the way to a minority exodus.
Of course, a majority of minorities don’t have any ideology at all and are thus much less responsive to social media campaigns than white people, so the process of exodus will be slow and drag on for decades.3 But for the Republicans, we’re already seeing racial issues taking precedence over fiscal conservatism.
By the way, here’s a really funny poll showing Buttigieg being both the most popular Democrat in America, and also winning 0% of the black vote.
Ironically, the guy who does the best with blacks is the one with the Gordon Gecko stock broker haircut.
If the Democratic Party follows the Republicans down the path of tariffs, we would get the worst of both worlds: federally subsidized sinecures for midwits and the collapse of global trade.
I tried to find a figure in the Democratic Party that was willing to praise Trump’s tariffs, and the first person I thought of was Lina Khan, since she is always hanging out with JD Vance and Steve Bannon. She doesn’t sound like she’s in love with Trump’s tariffs, and says that tariffs must be a “scalpel” paired with industrial investment. But maybe that’s just because she’s been negatively polarized by Trump, and if Kamala was in office, she would be pushing harder in a pro-tariff direction. Hard to say.
So who’s worse: MAGA or Mamdani?
Historically, the Democratic Party is the party of federal bloat and welfare. Historically, the Republican Party is the party of fiscal responsibility and austerity. That has been true for roughly 200 years, and before the Republican Party existed, there was a Federalist vs Anti-Federalist dispute over the size and scope of the federal government.
Before 1993, uneducated whites in the north consistently voted for Democrats. After Bill Clinton solidified the perception of “Democratic liberalism” on the national stage, Republicans became the party of poor whites for the first time in 139 years. Trump accelerated and amplified this trend in 2016, but he didn’t start it, and will outlast him.

This trend shows no signs of slowing or reversing. Republicans continue to make gains with poor whites, and with blacks and Hispanics. Democrats are becoming the party of white midwits, and are trying to increase youth turnout by promising college grads a guaranteed job in an expanded federal bureaucracy.
My emotional sympathies are with my people, the over-educated sissy boys, not the rednecks singing “rich men north of Richmond.” But putting aside my own selfish interests, I think that I would rather waste money on the over-educated than on the under-educated.
If it’s true that more money equals more babies,4 I would rather give free money to the midwit tribe than the MAGA tribe. This is because I would rather sissy midwits have more kids, and I would rather that MAGA truckers, who are one paycheck away from overdosing on opioids, have less children.
When we vote, we are not just voting for policies, we are voting for structural inertia. Rewarding Republicans for going down their current path seems like a bad incentive, while rewarding Democrats for electing Mamdani also seems like a bad incentive.
I would have preferred that Democrats nominated Whitney Tilson, but that’s not going to happen in New York.
Politics is not about having an ideologically pure, coherent, logical coalition of good people. Politics is about cynically supporting one group of victim-mongers over another group of victim-mongers.
If Cuomo or Adams were to become mayor of New York, I think that would demoralize Democrats and energize Republicans. If Mamdani is mayor, I think that will energize Democrats, and might negatively polarize Republicans. Seeing Republicans come out to suggest that Mamdani should be deported will probably shift some moderates to the left, rather than widening the Trump coalition for the midterms.
Urban Planning
I do not want Mamdani’s politics to go national, and I do not want Mamdani to become president. But if you believe in climate change, it isn’t such a bad idea to try to expel all New Yorkers and rebuild on higher ground.
In 1624, when New York was founded, it was at a chokepoint between Boston and Richmond. All ships had to pass through its harbors — a perfect place for a city. In 2025, we have roads, and the fact that New York is built at a choke point is terrible for traffic.
In the age of concrete and automobiles, it’s much smarter to build a city on a flat plain, like Atlanta or Dallas, where you can expand infinitely in all directions. From the perspective of urban planning and development, I would support abolishing New York City and moving all the smart people elsewhere.
Mamdani’s rent freeze should accomplish just that: it will disincentivize people from building, renting, and moving to New York. Through attrition, New York will shrink, and smart people will go elsewhere. People vote with their feet, and Texas and Florida will be happy to welcome the refugees from socialism.
I don’t have any special aesthetic attachment to New York — I’ve always found it to be dirty, noisy, rude, pushy, obnoxious, and entitled. It ceased long ago to be a city of start-ups and innovation, and has settled into the exhaustion of status signaling. Trying to save the city by voting for the lesser of two evils is understandable, but now that the primary is over, the goal should be limiting the damage that Mamdani could do in the eyes of moderates, while cynically using him as bait for young college grads to get out the vote in 2026.
Mamdani also voted against revenge porn laws on a platform of free speech absolutism and supports ghost guns, which is pretty cool.
On a pure aesthetic level, we need the Democratic Party to move away from the imagery of Dean Withers. I don’t really care what that new imagery is — an Indian refugee from black nationalism married to a hot woman is cool with me. As far as policy goes, I’d rather add $1 trillion to the deficit making up jobs for smol beans than add $1 trillion to the deficit by closing the borders and shutting down trade.
Let me know when there’s a version of Buttigieg that isn’t gay though so we can all focus on actually trying to win elections on the basis of charisma rather than through sheer force of bribery.

So far, I’ve really only been focusing on transfers of wealth to MAGA manufacturers vs Mamdani midwits, but there’s another dimension to consider: which is age. Trump promised no taxes on social security, which would reduce federal revenue by $116 billion in 2026. I would much rather give that money to young gays trying to find love in Brooklyn than to old hermit crabs living in McMansions.
Probably the worst thing I’ve heard about Mamdani is his desire to tax white neighborhoods at a higher rate. On the plus side though, New York City living is notoriously bad for fertility rates, so if you’re worried about white fertility, banning white people from cities is actually how you engineer a higher white birth rate!
The weird thing is that white New Yorkers really love this guy, so I guess they are real masochists over there. Although it’s also probably true that rent freezes disproportionately benefit whites, since whites pay higher rents than non-whites (white neighborhoods have higher rent).
In Conclusion:
Trump wants to steal money from the young and give it to the old.
MAGA wants to close the borders and shut down trade.
Mamdani is all-in for gay midwits and hot art hoes.
It’s probably better to give welfare to smart people than chicken-nugget assembly-line workers.
Neither party is fiscally responsible.
The direction of the two parties has structural inertia, and we should punish the party that is headed in the worse direction.
Demographics are destiny, so the party with more poor whites will end up being the more populist-socialist in the long term, while the party with more midwits will end up supporting globalization.
New York was a great spot in 1624; now that we have roads, this chokepoint is a nightmare for traffic.
Due to climate change, New York should be bulldozed for an expanded Central Park; send all the smart people to Dallas, Tampa, and Atlanta.
Mamdani’s wife is hot.
Theory #1: if the Democratic Party became hegemonic, there might be less pressure on it to bribe its constituents with free stuff to win elections.5 If the Republican Party became hegemonic, it would start doing crazy ideologically motivated things like leaving NATO and invading Greenland (not good).
Theory #2: Mamdani will expel all billionaires and kill the Boer, while Republicans will return to the days of Mitt Romney.
Theory #1 seems more plausible than Theory #2.
Mamdani probably can’t/won’t do most of the extreme things he’s promising, but he will probably help Democrats win elections in 2026.
If Mamdani drives smart white people out of New York City by racially taxing them, this would probably boost the white birth rate.
Did I mention his wife is hot?
If you know how New York tax laws work, you are probably the type of engineer-gardener I am critiquing in this article.
The steelman for MAGA on tariffs is that China has a bunch of robots making toasters, and if we tax those toasters, China can’t afford to raise prices because it means Americans would buy less Chinese toasters. If Americans buy less Chinese toasters, that means China has a bunch of useless robots lying around. There’s a case to be made that China would rather produce 6 million toasters and sell them at a lower profit margin than sell only 5 million toasters at a higher profit margin. This is because China is trying to maximize economic growth, not profits.
Whites are uniquely ideological.
This is obviously not true, but natalists claim this, so let’s pretend it is true.
(see the fiscal responsibility of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton)
You'll never understand anything if you keep creating these strawmen and pretending you do not understand anything.
She's like... a seven at best, dude. *does enormous bong rip*, Anyway... I like Trump because around the time of the 2016 election I had what can best be described as a "prophetic dream", a vision if you will, wherein I entered this enormous stadium and saw Trump sat next to this Metro-Goldwyn Lion. I said to him, sneakily I should add, "oh man, so many people don't like you..." as though I was trying to bring him down a peg, unsettle him. But he just smiled. No he didn't smile, his face just took on this very calm, and wise, serenity: like he was totally beyond all that, as though to say to me, "you have so much to learn." Then I saw this aura surround him: Gold, Red and Brilliant White... He was, in that dream, like (and I know I sound ridiculous saying this) the Tarot Card "The Emperor" -- an absolute quasi-deity, a Welt-Geist that was to bring about the harmony of the Divine Male emerging again under the yoke of, what I felt at that time, the Divine Female in the form of its high-point of Woke. I should add that I wasn't completely convinced by Trump at that point, prior to his election, but when I Woke Up, I couldn't shake this sense of having my belief system overturned, of seeing the measly wretched deception in which I lived, from where I judged others to be lower than I, when it was in fact me who had the poison inside. He is funny, he is a charismatic leader, and I think he genuinely supports peace and the interests of the USA: whether the coastal elites might consider his specific form of taxation myopic or anti-bourgeois is by the bye -- if we take the reasoning at face value, the intent is good, and, although the results might hamstring the America economy, its a "new thing", a strange "new thing" that's actually an old thing -- and that hegemony would collapse in either case. The other guy? What is he, brown? The fuck?! I think people like him because he eats kebabs and knows about the internet and has a full head of hair, and because people hate Israel or something? And the other guy was purportedly a-bit-rapey in a kind of 70s way? I didn't pay that much attention but am thankful for your input and for educating me.