Month: August 2026

No One is Coming to Save Abdul from Piker’s Sins

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Abdul El-Sayed is actually sort of likable and talented, if we ignore political differences that you can’t just wave off between him and I. Don’t take this as a change in position on the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee, take it as an admission of reality, and one I did not agree with during the primaries. Most of the folks on social media who also don’t like AES will disagree, calling him smug or worse, but frankly, that’s a biased view. It’s enough for me to say I couldn’t support him based on content, we can tell the truth that the guy is mildly entertaining.

I could put up with his unworkable position on health care, because frankly we know the truth about progressives and their stupid “Medicare for All” proposal- they’ll never even bring it to a vote, because they know idea how they’re going to make the program they describe work, no idea how they’ll pay for it, and no clue what the CBO would score it (the ironic part, because honestly, the good and bad math of it is kind of painfully clear). I could absolutely put up with his nonsensical rhetoric about Gaza too, if it were on it’s own, as I know that he could not have been nominated without the votes he received on campuses and in Dearborn, places where it’s possible for actual likely war crimes to become “genocide” by a nuclear power in their minds, even without a significant change in the population of Gaza. Sure, I’m letting AES take fantasy policy positions that are at best annoying, and at worst harmful, basically so we can elect a shitty Senator and get to 51 votes for a Democratic majority. I do recognize Trump is a crisis here.

Of course, then there’s Hasan Piker, and well, no. A month or two ago, Morris Katz’s online army of bots and academics were telling us that we had to embrace Hasan as our conquering king when he was pushing a vile Nazi on us as our Senate nominee in Maine. Now of course we need to forgive AES, because of course, Piker is “just a Twitch streamer.” Funny how that happens. Back when Piker first started becoming an issue this year, I had this to say:

Let me just start by saying I think “Hasan the Little Bitch” is an asshole. Now that we got that out of the way, I think you can guess how I feel about Democrats appearing on his show. I do not believe America deserved 9/11, I do not think the state of Israel should be disbanded, and I have no interest in this loser’s “outreach to masculinity.” There, all done.

Now that I’ve buried the point, let’s get to it- of course the Democrats are screwing up their handling of him. The electorate is locked in right now on things that matter to them- health insurance prices, gas prices, housing prices, personal debt, and things that impact them every day. 95% of the electorate doesn’t know who Piker is or care very much about his Gaza fetish. Even some of the 5% lack very deep thoughts on these matters. Piker has 3 million Twitch followers and 1.7 million YouTube followers, which combined together don’t quite reach 3% of a Presidential electorate, assuming there isn’t any overlap. Until people started arguing about him on Twitter, I had no idea who he was, and I’m in that 5%.

My thought on “Hasan the Hun” from the starts was we should have ignored him, ostracized him, and shunned him. If we weren’t nominating people campaigning with him because they say they “fight” (they’re all Bernie Sanders endorsed candidates, a man who has been a deadbeat member of Congress for over 30 years, doing nothing for his check.), we could ignore Piker like the trash he is. Instead we’re stuck with him as a part of our dialogue, and now the only choice for any sane Democrat is to bury him as the waste pile he is. If it costs us a race somewhere, that’s better than seeing him in attack ads for years to come. He’s a vile human being and we should want to discredit him as a person anyway.

If someone says “America deserved 9/11,” regardless of the context, we should condemn them as a piece of shit. In fact, his exact wording was “America deserved 9/11, dude. Fuck it, i’m saying it.” That’s frankly even worse. Now, if you listen to the whole segment, and I did out of fairness, he was talking about the concept of “blowback” in foreign policy, something any Moravian Political Science grad in the 2000’s read about existensively- that our actions lead to 9/11. I’ll credit him for that being his rationalization, then say that he’s still a piece of shit, because I don’t believe anything but awful people lead to terrorism. I don’t give any room for this sort of equivocation. 9/11 was rotten to it’s core and has no redeeming or understandable qualities. Putting Bin Laden in an unmarked grave was too kind.

Hasan Piker is a political loser that can never find his way to 50% in a civilized nation or world- but I guess in a streamer world where 1% of America makes you a shit ton of money, you matter. Abdul El-Sayed brought him to Michigan to help him win a primary. The media has decided to ask him directly about all of the vile, disgusting shit Piker said. This, unfortunately, is politics. Remember when all of us Biden lovers implored people and the media to discuss his economic stats instead of just inflation and him being old? Remember when everyone thought Trump saying “grab ’em by the pussy” would matter more than Hillary’s email server? Remember two years ago when a lot of you screamed to stop discussing “they/them,” and to instead discuss everything Trump did? Remember the whole election about Al Gore being a dork that “claimed” to invent the internet, and not the fact that George W. Bush had an 85 IQ? The whole 2004 election was a giant gaslighting. And before you say it’s unfair, they actually do ask the GOP stuff too. They asked Trump directly in debates about the Proud Boys, his past comments, and him claiming Haitians were “eating the dogs, eating the cats,” and well, he shrugged them off. And none of his voters cared. That’s why the standards are different. For some of you, the answer is to just be like the GOP. So we should should dismiss bad actors on our side who want to throw Black folks, LGBTQ folks, Jews, or whoever under the bus so we can… try the failed economic system of the Soviet Union? I’m confused, to be honest. I mean, I guess, we could go the FDR route and build a “safety net” for whites only, but I don’t think that’s what a lot of us signed up for.

Even assuming that all Democrats could stomach this nonsense, AES’s strategy of waving aside questions about Piker is a dead end. The media isn’t just going to decide to drop the questions. That’s not how elections work. He’s going to be dogged with questions about Piker the rest of the way, because he decided to bring him to Michigan to campaign for him. If you like the milk, you get the cow. There is a fix though- just denounce him. Just come out and say he’s an awful person for what he said, in explicit terms. Be done with it. A clean ambush. The rest of us Democrats who won’t forgive your association with him have nothing to bitch and complain about. The media has no real story to run with, other than your flip flop, which frankly is better than associating yourself with terrorism. The questions lose their potency. You solve the worst of the problem.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Governor GPT’s Congressional Candidate Probably has Multiple Answers on Data Centers

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll vote for Josh Shapiro in the end, I guess. Stacey Garrity (Did I spell that right) is the worst Gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania that I’ve seen from either party in my lifetime. She holds lunatic views, if you even give her credit for coherent views, can’t really articulate them, and lacks any sort of political identity for any of us to even pretend we’re attacking. You can sort of just rule her out through the ear test- listen to her give a speech or two, and you just know this person isn’t capable of running a civilized place, let alone a state the size of Pennsylvania. This is the closest thing to a default election we’ve had. Scott Wagner and Dougie Mastriano were at least easily classified as angry conservatives.

Let’s be honest though, I wish I wasn’t forced to vote for Governor Josh “GPT” Shapiro. As I said last week:

As for Josh Shapiro? Whatever. What has he done? Shorty worked hard on building data centers and passing school vouchers, while SEPTA funding, property tax reform, and adult recreational weed legalization went nowhere. What’s the point of high approval if all you want to do is take it with you to South Carolina in January? To be fair, he made the smart decision to Xerox the Wolf budgets and maybe add the inflation rate to the numbers. I guess he also fixed twenty yards of road in Philly too one time. Get shit done, right? Still, the guy is basically competent and kept the state from going off course in his first term. Stacy Garrity is incompetent and has bad ideas. Nobody needs her as Governor.

I mean, it’s a step down from Tom Wolf, who was honestly a step down from Ed Rendell, but hey, it’s like complaining about spam when the alternative is starvation. You’ll take it, you guess. Of course, Josh would have a problem with a credible alternative though. As data center politics energize rural Pennsylvania, and even the suburbs, Shapiro is pretending now that he’s standing in the way of irresponsible development. He’s running ads saying his opponent is awful on data center development and putting out executive orders in the 11th hour of his term to set rules on the structures. I mean, it’s a super complicated issue and I appreciate his wanting to get it right now, but wow the revisionist history. Just Google Josh Shapiro record on data centers. I mean, the guy secured $20 billion from Amazon Web Centers to build data centers all over Pennsylvania when he thought it was popular. Oh, and there was this:

Other groups are more skeptical of Shapiro’s proposal. The Better Path Coalition, a grassroots consortium of environmental groups, pointed to the administration’s behind-the-scenes communications with Amazon, which is developing multiple data centers in the commonwealth, as a cause for concern.

A group of Montour County residents who organized against data center development obtained a trove of emails from the administration through a Right-to-Know request, which showed that a top staffer sent an Amazon lobbyist a “feedback draft of the principles” that the administration planned to lay out in GRID before the standards were public.

The records, which were previously reported by Heatmap, also included an email that state Secretary of Community and Economic Development Rick Siger sent to Amazon. He told the company the GRID standards are “intended to be voluntary,” and said Shapiro is “not proposing to ban or even discourage data centers or other large loads that don’t agree to implement them from siting here.”

That, the Better Path Coalition wrote in a recent statement, shows Shapiro’s GRID standards are “strictly performative.”

Now, he’s doing this:

  • The executive order asks developers to sign an agreement that they will follow the governor’s GRID standards, which include clean energy and job creation requirements. In exchange for signing, they get permit review and approval on a rolling basis.
  • It requires that developers show proof of local approvals before they can receive any state permits or authorizations.
  • It puts conditions on Pennsylvania’s data center sales tax exemption — if developers don’t follow the GRID standards, the state Department of Revenue won’t acknowledge applications for the tax credit.
  • It bans agencies under the governor’s control from signing NDAs in connection with data center projects. (The order doesn’t prevent local government officials from signing such agreements.)
  • It kicks data centers out of Fast Track, a Shapiro administration initiative to speed up permitting of major projects. (Previously, Shapiro had said he was giving this extra permitting attention to data center projects that followed his GRID standards.)

So basically, all the easy permitting he promised, and the tax breaks he promised, now he’ll make you pay off the locals first (I wonder how he raised so much, don’t you?), then you can have them. Look, I get it, I do think the eventual answer on data centers and AI from Democrats has to be yes, but Governor GPT started out with the red carpet out for them, and now he wants to pretend he’s making it hard for them. The answer should be “pay for the infrastructure and utility costs, actually help the towns you invade in ways they need, and then meet our state standards,” and this is closer to that, so good. It still feels hypocritical as hell though. The truth is that Shapiro saw something that made potential 2028 donors and major unions who support him both feel happy, and he tried to be the champion for that, until he realized that public sentiment was way behind on it. So now we get the Shapiro shuffle.

Of course, Josh Shapiro is also asking us to vote for his hand picked Congressional candidate, Bob “Crooksy” Brooks in the Lehigh Valley, a man who can’t string together thinking nearly as advanced as Shapiro on data centers. Crooksy is a stone cold moron who stiffed his ex-mother-in-law out of money, and well, he’s probably confused on this issue. On one hand, Crooksy knows a couple of unions made him a serious candidate for Congress, and he’s probably just waiting to be told what he thinks on this issue, which will probably be to build them. On the other hand, Uncle Josh is moving his position in response to activists like the ones in Carbon County, in South Whitehall, and in Lower Mount Bethel who are opposing data centers, and Crooksy doesn’t know how to make those folks happy without just saying what they want.

Knowing Crooksy, we know his answer- both. A friend of mine said back in the Spring that they attended a Crooksy talk to local Muslim leaders where he said Israel “had committed a genocide in Gaza,” but they were less than convinced that he really understood his answer. I was too, based on the since removed video of him at Lehigh Valley for All completely avoiding the question and pulling his shirt over his face. Look, these are tough questions. If you can keep your answers private, you can get away with giving a different answer to everyone who cares about them. If you’re kind of dumb, why not try that on data centers too? I get it, do what you can get away with, bro.

The Left’s House of Cards

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

A friend of mine who is a lot more “lefty” than me said something to me in 2020 that is starting to resonate now- “part of why we always lose is because of the narrative that we can’t win.” Even when Bernie took a polling lead in 2020 with a plurality, everyone saw through it- there wasn’t 50% plus one vote out there to nominate him, because everyone believed he’d lose to Trump, which he almost certainly would have. The narrative was almost self-defeating. Nobody wants to pick you if they believe you’ll lose.

Welcome to 2026, where all of a sudden, polls come out that show Nazi criminal Graham Platner leading in Maine. Anti-Israel crusader Abdul El-Sayed leading in Michigan. Lost weirdo Francesca Hong leading in Wisconsin. Congressional polls repeatedly showing “Fight Agency’s” clients leading. Weirdly though, in many cases they end up wildly underperforming, or winning with a minority of the vote. General election polls suddenly come out showing the once mighty leads they claimed were false. Even their initial internals, such as Bob “Crooksy” Brooks’ own, show close races where they are shy of 50%- and that’s what they were *willing* to release. It’s as though… no way, right? No way they literally just cooked the books, right?

Well, we have our first fake polling firm story. Median Strategies, which showed Francesca Hong way up, is no more. It was in fact, never real. Nor was their poll showing Karen Bass leading big in Los Angeles’ Mayor race. The whole firm was a fake. They literally just made shit up.

I cannot, for the life of me, underscore just how unserious these people are. They are selling a false narrative, and even powerful people like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer will not push back on the nonsense. The country rejected Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they felt they were too liberal, yet these folks want you to believe that now the solution is to move left. Are they winning some deep blue primaries against unorganized incumbents? Yes. That’s because the party shrunk as it was perceived to move left. That is not indicative of how the public feels. Yes, the public hates Trump, and the left is rightly realizing that means they could have a chance in a binary choice against MAGA, but no, people have not decided that Hasan Piker and his audience of less than 1% of America are now representative of “who we are.” This is all nonsense. It’s made up. And Democratic leaders are falling for it, hook, line, and sinker.

All the dumbest people. What can I say? Just the dumbest people.

How I’ll Probably Vote

/ Rich Wilkins / 1 Comment

Poor Danny got stuck with me on his list. I feel for him, I’ve been there. Asking someone to volunteer who is repulsed by your ticket’s existence is hard. I don’t make it better.

So I am decided. I won’t be voting for Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. No way, no how. The best part is this is just the stuff that can be sourced. This guy said way worse that just can’t be verified. A man who steals from his family is not fit for any office. A man who failed to purchase workman’s comp insurance for his employees calling himself a “working class hero” is a joke. I won’t vote for Mackenzie, despite personally liking him more, because he voted for Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” That is disqualifying.

I’ll be voting for Senator Lisa Boscola and Jeff Warren for the State House. Both are solid, normal people who will fight to make life more affordable for us. I’m decided there.

As for Josh Shapiro? Whatever. What has he done? Shorty worked hard on building data centers and passing school vouchers, while SEPTA funding, property tax reform, and adult recreational weed legalization went nowhere. What’s the point of high approval if all you want to do is take it with you to South Carolina in January? To be fair, he made the smart decision to Xerox the Wolf budgets and maybe add the inflation rate to the numbers. I guess he also fixed twenty yards of road in Philly too one time. Get shit done, right? Still, the guy is basically competent and kept the state from going off course in his first term. Stacy Garrity is incompetent and has bad ideas. Nobody needs her as Governor.

If the Democratic Party wants to embrace Bernie Sanders style politics, they’ll lose votes. Not as many as they should, because the GOP is a cult, devoted to the dumbest, most fat, grotesque beta in America, and that has to hurt more. But it’s uncomfortably close.

There are Better Ideas than a Wealth Tax

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Well, the bad and losing ideas of the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries are making a comeback and we can’t get rid of them. The newest returnee? The wealth tax. The long and short here? The idea is you’d tax the actual wealth and estate values of rich people instead of just their income.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that the current Supreme Court would invalidate a wealth tax under the Fifth Amendment. If somehow they didn’t, the issue with the tax is fairly simple. How does you deal with illiquid billionaires vs. liquid billionaires? What happens if you have billionaires selling off stocks and assets in a rush to have the cash for the tax? There’s a ton that can go wrong- assuming it ever even clears the courts.

There’s a better way that makes sense and would probably build more public support. Create more brackets, make them lower, and eliminate or dramatically cut write-offs. If someone proposed making people who earn over a million dollars *actually* pay 25%, rather than claim every write-off known to man and pay nothing, the public would probably support it. Maybe you don’t like the 25% number, fine, pick your number. If your complaint is that rich people don’t pay, take away the write-offs and shield regular people from the hits under lower rates like 5 or 10%.

It’s true that increasing wealth concentration under the ultra wealthy is a real problem. Sure, you can do a windfall tax, and that probably is good at some high number, but that number is not a million dollars in 2026. Everyone would be better off with a legitimately simple, straight forward graduated income tax with simple brackets that are lower. Collect more revenue and make things simple. Only conservative ideologically crazy people would complain. That would be actually a good thing.