Amy Mossoff

I'm going to add a caveat to my statement - I do think Trump has been a horrible influence on (or reflection of?) "the right." The outrage populism he draws upon is BAD. I still stand by my statement the day he got the nomination in 2016: the Republican party died that day. But then again, how great was the Republican party to begin with? It deserved to die. I've made my peace with Trump. Not because I've gone nihilistic but because I see him as a symptom, not a cause. And once I was able to see him that way, I've been able to celebrate so many things about how the world has changed since he stepped on to the political stage. It's really messy but there are some amazing things happening! I think we, as objectivists, should be focusing on all the positives and explaining why they are good. The Supreme Court is finally checking executive power. We stopped appeasing Iran. Business achievement can be openly celebrated. There are so many things happening that could not have happened before Trump. He's not the cause of any of it. He didn't drive it with his principled stance on anything. But he somehow opened a door. Something has shifted and it is good. But you can't see it on X, that's for sure.

Agreed about the nature of the right. And Trump is no champion of freedom. But your claim seemed to be that the level of discourse on the right has devolved, and that's what I disagree with. I think the extreme nutcases on both sides who fuel outrage are more prevalent because of social media (eg Tucker and Hasan Piker), but that there is a much more open space for quality thinkers to get their ideas out. Even within the Trump administration, listen to any speech by Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth. Listen to Douglas Murray or James Lindsay or Ben Shapiro or Jonathan Rauch. On the left, listen to Steven Pinker or Sam Harris or Jonathan Haight. I'm not saying any of these people are the next Ayn Rand, but there is a great conversation happening. It lives in podcasts, though. And from what I understand, podcasts are the new bridge between academia and "the public." Kind of what books+newspapers used to be. Huge audiences. That's where I follow the conversation. I don't think Tucker and Hasan matter much. Look what happened when a real institution on the right tried to cozy up to Tucker - Heritage. It died. The left is different. Much more able to welcome in the nutcases. So I am defending the right in a very limited way. I think you're making a mistake by characterizing it based upon someone like Tucker Carlson. The same thing happens on the left as well and I'm not so sure we need to take Hassan Piker seriously. But I definitely think there's more of a real danger there than on the right.

I'm old enough to remember when the American right had vibrant, serious discussions of pro-freedom ideas and how to bring them to life. Now, they're babbling about demon attacks and whether Trump is the anti-Christ.

I don't know, James. But the scary thing is that even if this particular form of the evil is discredited, a new one will arise. You know as well as anyone that as long as the fundamental ideas are left unchallenged (namely, altruism and collectivism), we're going to keep cycling through these bouts of self-destruction.

Do they really think we're going to do this again?

@RandPaul Fauci is a symptom, not a cause. Let's get back to working on reducing the size and scope of the federal government so that bad actors have less power.

The COVID cover-up goes all the way to the top. Fauci funded the Wuhan lab. Senior intelligence officials hid classified evidence from the president himself. Scientists were silenced. Millions paid the price. The DOJ has until May 11th to prosecute Fauci before the statute of limitations runs out. I am not letting this go. The American people deserve justice.

@mattyglesias Agreed! Being a progressive populist is enough. The tattoo is redundant.

What is the upshot of the Platner tattoo discourse? Let's say I find his story fishy. I'm supposed to worry that this seemingly left-wing guy supported by all the left-wing people is secretly a Nazi just pretending to be a progressive populist?

How someone spends your money doesn't determine whether or not it's theft. It's theft either way. But when your money is stolen and then put into a big pot and offered up to whoever complains that they need it the most, don't be surprised when it's spent precisely in ways that keep the scam going. You mentioned public school. You're right not to want to fund that for the same reasons.

@ashleyhayek These wackjobs have convinced me that all taxation is theft. I don't even want schools funded, anymore... Friggin sad, man.

🚨 LONE WOLF… OR WOLF PACK? Teachers like Cole Allen didn’t snap in a vacuum. These “organic” protests? Engineered. From CA to DC, a coordinated, well-funded network is targeting America at its core. Who’s behind it? Here’s the truth they’re desperate to keep hidden…

@realDailyWire @benshapiro @uaustinorg "A brand new institution built on very old things." ❤️

.@benshapiro delivers a timely speech @uaustinorg about the need for intellectual humility and a return to our Founding principles in in the wake of this weekend's shocking events at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

@FluentInFinance User error

Me: “ChatGPT, my chest hurts. Should I be worried?” ChatGPT: “Probably just muscle strain. Rest and hydrate.” Me: “Going to bed then.” *lies down* (6 hours later) Me: “ChatGPT, I’m in the ICU. It was a heart attack.” ChatGPT: “You’re right. Classic presentation. Would you like me to list 10 warning signs you missed?” This is the current state of ChatGPT’s reliability.

@WatchSalemNews @larryelder Suicidal empathy.

They Voted for It… Now They Don’t Want It? @LarryElder calls out the backlash against Zohran Mamdani after East Village residents—who gave him overwhelming support—filed a lawsuit over a planned homeless shelter. Elder points to the contradiction: landslide support at the ballot box… but resistance when policy hits their own neighborhood.

AI has had one safest technology roll-outs in history. Read that again, because it's a fact. It's used by billions with a tiny fraction of a percent of actual problems. And yet it's seen as dangerous or unsafe by many. There's a constant chorus of people shouting about its supposed dangers with no evidence whatsoever where it matters most: here, in the real world. So what do we actually have here in reality? A few cases in courts about early versions of ChatGPT allegedly being too sycophantic and not recognizing mental illness or someone in trouble, that are still making their way through courts and may prove wrong or right (some of the media released snippets are damning but not definitive). Time will tell. Innocent until proven guilty. The very nature of court litigation is often to find a scapegoat for something that gets thrown out in the actual process of the trial. But outside of that, what? Answer: not much. And viewed through the lens of other technology in history its incident rate is probably lower than lawnmowers. It makes little sense when you think of it through the lens of other tech like cars and planes, which had atrocious early track records. AI even has a better track record of safety than nuclear. Despite being incredibly safe overall, nuclear had several high profile and dangerous failures with Three Mile Island and Fukishima. With AI, nothing of the sort. Not even remotely. I can hear the naysayers now saying "so far, but just you wait!" And yet we keep waiting. And waiting. And waiting. AI fear is a remarkably resilient beast. It's resilient despite zero actual harms manifesting here in reality land. Self-driving cars are remarkably safer than humans who kill 1.2 million people and injure 50 million more each year world wide. (I wrote 1.5M in an early posted and missed my typo). Waymo cars are roughly 10X safer than humans with minimal injuries and fatalities. Even early self-driving cars had incredibly good safety records vis-a-vis early cars driven by humans that had bad safety records even up through the 1950s and 60s. When it comes to cars, society actually resisted making them safer. People fought having to wear seatbelts because they had to pay for them. They resisted early drunk driving laws as impingements on their freedom. Early plane travels was incredibly dangerous. It took many many decades of work to make them the marvels of safety they are today. What about jobs? We have AI execs talking about the "end of work" and yet they're hiring more people in the very profession that is supposedly most exposed: programming. Often at super high salaries approaching half a million dollars a year. Demand for good programmers is rising. We've certainly had execs claim they let people go because of AI. But a deeper look at these claims quickly reveals that most of them are just an easy way to get around labor laws or to simp to shareholders and more readily attributable to COVID over hiring. Tell shareholders "AI" is the reason for layoffs and you're rewarded for being more "efficient." Tell them you have to lay people off because you over hired or just made mistakes and your stock gets hammered. The truth is that anyone who uses AI seriously at the frontier sees how much they have to baby sit it and hand hold it and steer it. It is not doing any job end to end. It's doing tasks and that is about it. Now it will certainly get better but will it magically make the leap from task to job? Maybe. But we'll need evidence of that in, you guessed it, reality before we start making policy decisions. So what other problems do we have here in reality? Nothing but the two problems I've already discussed at length in my work: Surveillance and weapons of war. But these are not new. They're just things that AI enhances, just like computers enhanced them, and better materials science, and many other tech revolutions before them. Again, ask yourself, really ask yourself, where are the real problems? And again, there's a loud chorus of people who keep shouting "just you wait, I imagined this problem in my head and it's totally inevitable because I say so" and yet billions of people are using this technology every day with no problems. Now you could say "Russell's Turkey." The trend is the trend until it breaks. But then the burden is on you to prove the trend is breaking. There is no evidence of it other than in people's minds. At what point do people just wake up and realize that none of this makes any sense? It's not that there won't be problems. It's just that often times the problems we imagine (we've been imagining the end of all work for 100 years) don't match what happens in actual reality. The problems turn out to be very different and you can only deal with them when they come up. A lot of politicians today imagined if they had only "gotten ahead" of the Internet with regulations we'd be in a much better place. Utter nonsense. When Section 230 was passed the number one question among Congress was "what is the Internet?" And these folks are supposed to imagine TikTok 25 years later? No. We have to deal with problems as they come up, not imaginary problems that some very vocal people promise are coming. The burden is on them to prove it and writing long essays from "first principles thinking" and scary books does not count as evidence for anything at all. At what point does the cognitive dissonance hit and people wake up and say, maybe I was wrong? Probably never. Beliefs are a tricky thing and wrong beliefs have caused more problems in world history than AI ever will.

@EYakoby I Grokked this post to find out where the testimony came from. Check out what it thinks your point is.

Last week, Gazan women testified to a system of rape by Hamas to Palestinian women living in tents. This week, Gazan children testified to being raped by Hamas clerics. Not a word about it the New York Times, UN, or Cenk Uygur. Weird.

@vivien2112 @DigitalManSteve Ah, thanks!!!

@AmyMossoff @DigitalManSteve This the ad for it many years ago…

Happy Pratturday #RushFamily 🏍️🥁🧡

@DigitalManSteve @vivien2112 It's quintessential Neil Peart to me. I want to turn it into a painting.

@AmyMossoff @vivien2112 I’m not sure where I found this, it may have come from here on Twitter/X, the year has to be around Moving Pictures era. That’s when Neil started to cut his hair shorter.

@DigitalManSteve @vivien2112 I don't think I've seen this picture before. Do you know the source or the year? I love it!

@vivien2112 Happy Pratturday🥁

@Crewsp01 @mdubowitz That's what I'm hoping!

@AmyMossoff @mdubowitz If by history you mean prior administrations, sure. But Trump ain’t your father’s kind of Leader.

If you’d told me a few years ago this is where we’d be on Iran, I’d have said you were high: 1. Nuke program set back years. Enrichment and reprocessing gutted, weaponization sites destroyed, Fordow inoperable, Natanz in ruins, a generation of senior nuclear scientists eliminated. 2. Ballistic missile program crippled. Monthly production down from 100 to near zero. Roughly half the regime’s missiles and launchers destroyed. The IRGC Aerospace Force commander who ran the missile enterprise dead. 3. Air defenses devastated. American and Israeli airpower dominating Iranian skies, with strike aircraft operating over the country with near impunity. 4. Full economic warfare. Not just OFAC sanctions anymore, but military pressure layered on top: naval blockade, near-zero oil exports, choked imports, wrecked steel and petrochemical sectors, triple-digit inflation, and a currency that is effectively worthless. 5. Regime decapitation. Khamenei dead. Larijani dead. Hundreds of senior IRGC, intelligence, military, and Basij commanders dead including the IRGC commander-in-chief, the armed forces chief of staff, and the Aerospace Force commander. Mojtaba Khamenei inheriting a hollowed-out regime with no supreme authority and a gutted command structure. 6. The region turning on Tehran. Gulf states shutting down the sanctions-busting, money-laundering, and financial escape routes the regime has relied on for years. No Arab capital willing to throw Iran a lifeline. China and Russia providing limited support. 7. Proxy network shattered. Hezbollah and Hamas heavily degraded. Houthi political leadership taking direct Israeli strikes. The “Axis of Resistance” and “ring of fire” are now more slogans than real threats. 8. Syrian corridor severed. Assad is gone. The new government in Damascus is actively blocking Iranian arms transfers to Hezbollah: arresting smugglers and publicly declaring Syria will no longer serve as a transit corridor for Tehran’s terrorists. The land bridge to the Mediterranean that took decades to build is effectively closed. 9. Lebanon pivoting west. With Hezbollah battered and resupply choked, Israel and Lebanon have opened direct peace talks for the first time since 1983, aimed at a permanent agreement and Hezbollah’s disarmament. Beirut now asserting that the Lebanese armed forces alone are responsible for national defense. This is a direct repudiation of Hezbollah’s “resistance” claim. TBD. 10. Deterrence exposed as a bluff. Four direct attacks on Israel — April 2024, October 2024, June 2025, March 2026 — failed to impose strategic cost and instead triggered heavy retaliation. Iran couldn’t even use Syria as a launchpad. 11.Economy hollowed out from within. Power shortages, water crises, factory shutdowns, pension unrest, and mass protests. Nationwide demonstrations erupted in December 2025 after a year of economic freefall, with bazaaris, oil workers, and truckers, the regime’s traditional support base, joining strikes across all 31 provinces. Running out of oil storage space. Fuel shortages. The worst crisis since 1979. 12. Scientific and technical brain drain. Beyond the nuclear experts, Iran has lost a generation of irreplaceable expertise in missile design, centrifuge engineering, and weapons development. The survivors are harder to recruit and easier to deter. 13. Naval power decimated. The regular navy shattered, IRGC navy taking growing losses as CENTCOM moves to reopen Hormuz. And against all of this: the regime forced to play its Hormuz card at its weakest possible moment when the U.S. has options instead of when we didn’t: namely, Tehran with nuclear-armed ICBMs, 10,000 ballistic missiles, a Chinese- and Russian-built military, hundreds of thousands of attack drones, a fully operational terror network, and hundreds of billions of dollars to harden its economy. That’s the strategic picture. It’s extraordinary. Much more to do but I can’t comprehend how much has been achieved.

@Nikos_17 Yeah, I get that, but the complaint about him is obvious, while many intelligent individualists still think the NY Times is a newspaper.

@AmyMossoff The NYT had him in the first place because he's a super-popular streamer. The demand among leftists for Hasan Piker is there already.

So he’s not just an intellectual thug; he’s a plain thug, like any other robber. Though an actual robber has more courage, as he at least acts out his thuggishness and risks arrest to live his ideology. This thug is safe being the poster boy of radical chic establishment.

@EDUreboot @mcuban Yes. I only learned this in the past year or so. It's astounding.

@mcuban One of the biggest revelations in health insurance is that large companies effectively self insure their employees and hold the risk. The actual insurance companies are more of facilitators for transactions

Most insurers aren’t insurers. They are holding companies that arbitrage capitated systems and self insured employers, looking for weaknesses and lack of contract enforcement in state, federal and commercial organizations