Maarten de Lange

🕹️ Hoe kunnen drones slim ingezet worden op het slagveld? De Koning bezoekt de drone-eenheden van de Koninklijke Landmacht en het Korps Mariniers op het militair oefenterrein van de Bernhardkazerne in Amersfoort en gaat in op nieuwe ontwikkelingen. koninklijkhuis.nl/actueel/ni…

Show off your wild side with personalized chicken feet socks that turn every step into a joke.

BREAKING: Nvidia CFO Colette Kress takes over as interim CEO after Jensen Huang resigns, effective immediately.

What an interview question. This is remarkable TV. ‘What do you think happens when you die?’

Breaking News: Nvidia opened an investigation into Jensen Huang, its CEO, after he acknowledged to the company’s board that he had been intimate with a business executive who U.S. intelligence determined to be a Chinese spy. nyti.ms/3ViPMAt

Ik heb nog 1% wegen wacht dus #accu

After DOGE, Elon came to a conclusion most people missed. He tried to reform the state from the inside. He failed. And he said it plainly: the government can't fix its own deficit. Nobody in power actually wants to cut. The machine protects itself. So he drew the only logical conclusion. If the state can't be reformed, there are only two ways this ends. Either global bankruptcy. Debt keeps compounding, interest payments eat the budget, and the system collapses under its own weight. Or robots. AI and robotics grow the economy so fast that the debt becomes manageable, and abundance makes the old fights over scarcity irrelevant. Here's the part almost nobody sees. For two centuries, capitalism has had a marketing problem. Its gains are real but slow and invisible. 2% growth a year doesn't feel like anything. Your life gets better over 30 years and you never connect it to the system that did it. Meanwhile, the left's promises feel immediate and concrete: a check, a subsidy, a benefit. That's why the left wins on promises even when it can't deliver them. Capitalism produces the wealth, socialism takes the credit. Robots break that asymmetry. When productivity doubles in a few years instead of a few decades, people will see it. Things get cheaper, services get better, opportunities appear, in real time. For the first time in history, people will connect capitalism and their rising standard of living directly, almost instantly. The causal chain becomes visible. And that changes everything politically. So there are two scenarios. Scenario one: we stay in the current inertia. No breakthrough, or a breakthrough we regulate to death. The debt wins. Living standards stagnate, then fall. A frustrated electorate turns to whoever promises the most, and that pushes toward a hard collectivist left. But collectivism fails, as it always does. And when it fails, the most organized, most disciplined collectivist force left standing isn't the old left. It's radical Islamism. Bankruptcy, then communism, then something worse. Scenario two: robots win. Abundance arrives, and it arrives visibly. The link between free enterprise and prosperity becomes obvious to everyone. And this is the key point: it becomes obvious to everyone, including the minorities the left was counting on. Because their long-term incentive is the same as everyone else's. A kid in the suburbs gains infinitely more from a booming, abundant West than from a bankrupt state handing out promises it can't keep. Abundance is the most powerful integration machine ever built. That's the Western renaissance. The West doesn't need to win the culture war by arguing. It needs to win it by delivering. And for the first time, it has the technology to deliver fast enough for people to notice. The race isn't left vs right anymore. It's robots vs bankruptcy.

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up. So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us." Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.) In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.