The Case for Fishback

Nearly 40 young men, nearly all white, have killed themselves as a result of Nigerian cyber criminals running a sextortion racket. They have killed more Americans than ISIS. This affects very few people. Normal Americans are suffering from many small issues, little gaps in the social contract that globalization’s vicious children are prying further apart. One reflection of this is the wide popularity of the “Nick 30 ans” meme, originally from France and adopted across the West, capturing young men’s feelings that they are destined to be nothing more than tax farms for boomers, the poor, illegal immigrants, and do-good causes across the sea. That’s if they’re lucky, of course, and don’t kill themselves first.

Construction workers, farmers, accountants, and software developers, if they are citizens and white men, are second-class. They are too wealthy to benefit from the countless programs for the poor, but often not rich enough to save for their children’s education or retirement. If an alien observer were to inspect American society, they might liken middle-class white American men to the Eastern European dhimmi of the Ottoman Empire. They are a tax base with no political representation, squeezed apart by a distant and decadent capital’s demands. Their wealth is reappropriated for more loyal subjects favored by the whims of imperial dictat. The blue-collar and middle-class parents of Nicks’ find their children bereft of opportunities, assaulted by assorted online horrors, from trans groomer cults on Discord to Nigerian sextortionists. Their communities have been swamped by illegals while anti-white racial discrimination continues at most universities. Their children, if they only have a high school education, by ill-fortune of their citizenship, are less attractive to employers than illegals, and if college educated and interested in STEM, will find their wages suppressed by OPT and H-1B. These Americans pay for the healthcare, houses, and babies of illegals and the perennially out-of-work urban poor. They pay for the retirement of boomers. Their tax dollars are sent to other shores. They subsidize power bills for data centers. Blackstone buys some of their homes. Their taxes, sent to public universities, are used to design summer camps for the children of Chinese apparatchiks and pay the salaries of professors of whiteness. Property values are skyrocketing in Miami, in competition with Dubai, making houses unaffordable. The traditional industries of rural Florida, the endless miles of perfect citrus groves, are rotting under the incessant peck of the Chinese Psyllid, decimating the state’s most defining industry. It is 2025, the Golden Age, and USAID is gone. But Nick remains Nick.

And in comes Fishback. He launched his campaign talking about H-1B, Data Centers, and Blackstone. What some might call pure slopulism. It’s true that H-1 B in Florida is a small issue: there are only 8,000 of them. Data centers are a small issue. They only increase energy and water bills in a local area. Blackstone only owns 3,000 homes in Florida: 3,000 homes that are mostly turned into affordable housing, taking single-family homes off the market and giving them to, before Trump, illegal aliens with taxpayer-subsidized rent.

Many online, on the right and left, from Scott Greer to Yimbys, piled on him, calling him a “slopulist,” joking that he was running to be governor of X. It is worth recalling that opposition to gender ideology in schools began on Facebook in parents’ groups. Dissent from the lockdowns spawned there, too. It’s easy to be an elitist, especially when you think you’re a populist, and it’s elitist to think Fishback is a slopulist. Though issues like H-1B or Blackstone seem too online, they are real and making life impossible for good people; they symbolize a broader sense that the world is against them. And it sort of is. Good Americans are in a vice from above and below. They are dhimmi. They are Nick. They are, in the words of Bannon and Trump, forgotten men and women. And Fishback argues that Byron Donalds isn’t the governor they need.

Gubernatorial Politics and MAGA

There are two problems with MAGA. The question of the governor needs to be put in the context of these problems. First, because MAGA is an actual existing political movement, there are real divides that require great political skill to navigate. It is held together solely by networks at the top. If the top begins to break down, the rest goes too.

MAGA’s second problem is white minoritization. This is a tsunami on the horizon for America. White minoritization is about two decades away. It is extremely unlikely the Republican Party can avert this. Once white Americans are a minority, but a majority in Congress and our political institutions, “woke” will become a halcyon memory. This realization is causing a resurgence of hard-right radicalism. What unites JD Vance, Nick Fuentes, Stephen Miller, all the young “Groypers,” Rod Dreher, Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson, and even Charlie Kirk is the slow but sure realization that the defining issue of America’s 21st century is mass migration.

This is a problem for MAGA because MAGA is a populist, middle-American takeover of a hostile Republican Party animated by ’90s deindustrialization. MAGA voters remember 85% white America and are uncomfortable discussing the 45% white future. Politically, this problem manifests in two factions: the coalescence of the vitalist, post-liberal, and nativist right into a remigration right, centered on the Vance-Rubio nexus; while the old Republican establishment, multiculturalists, and large donors (with many notable exceptions) fall into an anti-remigration right, centered on Cruz and a few others, who are true believers in colorblind liberalism. Thus, this movement of many factions gradually narrows to two, while the voters themselves remain uncomfortable with either. The party is led by a ’90s Democrat and businessman, with a fundamentally transactional worldview, governing a coalition whose most financially and politically powerful faction is still dedicated to a lost ’90s consensus, yet whose brightest lights are reading Renaud Camus. Often failing to deliver for young people, but seemingly always succeeding in delivering to donors and the elderly, he’s grasping for a sense of how to save himself, because ultimately, he knows what happens if he loses. Torn between the competing interests of donors and the base and the lib-right and hard-right, MAGA risks breaking down: Lutnick is selling American citizenship for $1 million, just as Trump is most beloved for saying “reverse migration.”

And so, one more force arises to take advantage of this chaos: the interloper, the political entrepreneur, the slopulist and shill, the marginal or major figure who makes plays to advance their own agenda and goals. And this year, three Gubernatorial seats have presented themselves as opportunities for plays. In Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene seriously considered running against Trump-endorsed Brian Kemp before withdrawing and resigning from Congress, to Democrat applause. In Ohio, Trump-endorsed Ramaswamy is running against Dr. Amy Acton. Ramaswamy is symbolic of the Trump administration’s failure to engage in critiques of multiculturalism, legal migration, and H-1B, as well as the problem of ethnic mafias and lobbies. State-level politics in Ohio and Georgia were temporary battlegrounds for the long-term national political landscape. And the same is happening now, in Florida.

Donalds is not Strong

Byron Donalds is Trump’s chosen candidate. He has been in politics since 2012. He has no major legislative achievements to speak of. His political interests, such as they are, are in banking, cryptocurrency, and federal prison reform to reduce recidivism. These are assorted and unimportant. He has never expressed a passion for or interest in immigration. He is Trump’s chosen candidate, it appears, because he said that Biden was not a legitimate President. He demonstrated loyalty. The boss has rewarded him.

On his “issues” page, there are no policies listed. The banner at the top reads “Trump endorsed Byron Donalds,” and a photo of him with Trump appears multiple times on his site, literally twice on the same page. For a man with over a decade in politics, it is remarkably hard to find out what he cares about.

Fishback Isn’t a Joke

Florida is the next state-level battleground for national politics. If Vivek in Ohio is emblematic of a failure to pivot from multiculturalism, and if Greene represents simplistic populism, then Fishback might represent the perils and possibilities of hard-right populism.

He’s chased by controversy, rumors, lawsuits, and accusations of resume inflation. He’s an expert at curating media cycles. He wants to do a Zohran-style campaign, only from the right, which leads him to take some unserious positions. Consider his advocacy for an “American,” Mohammad Ibrahim, a Palestinian with citizenship, arrested for throwing rocks at settlers in the West Bank. Fishback has advocated for his release, likely less because he really cares than to stir up a media story that pits him against Miriam Adelson, possibly hoping for the same boost in the polls that Zohran received from his anti-Zionism. And, to me, this is slop. Not just slop, CAIR slop. A consistent, hard-right stance would be the total rejection of the notion that there are American citizens who are named Mohammad Ibrahim and live in Palestine. It’s hard to make the case for disengagement from foreign influence without a consistent stance on denaturalization. Similarly, his insistence that his first trip abroad would be to Brazil rather than Israel is another attempt to create a media cycle, casting Donalds as Cuomo, and Miriam as Bill Ackman.

Despite this, he does have good ideas, sometimes mistaken for slop. For example, he spoke of “food deserts” in our interview. While the USDA definition of a food desert is fundamentally unsound, many elderly, rural, poor Florida residents lack access to food besides Popeyes. The problem is not starvation but a lack of fresh, good food. Pop and slop are similar but not the same: pop is good for the people, slop is good for the media. And this isn’t actually a purely slop issue. Good Americans deserve better in their old age than Popeyes.

Fishback’s economic vision is serious: developing agriculture, aerospace, and manufacturing is more feasible than shifting the state into financialization. It would be better for regular people. Life would be better with less Blackstone, data centers, and H-1B, and there are good reasons to oppose overdevelopment, which is great for investors but can be bad for locals. While it’s easy to laugh at a campaign launched on X focused on H-1B, does anyone really admire a campaign launched on Fox with Sean Hannity?

Critically, one of the strongest arguments for Fishback is that there are legitimate opportunities for state governors, as he mentioned, to use the 10th (and 11th) amendments to police immigration themselves, including conducting deportations if they were brave enough to challenge Arizona v. United States. A creative, visionary Republican governor could fundamentally reshape every state’s immigration enforcement abilities if they had the courage. Governors DeSantis and Abbot have both experimented with state authority, and continuing those experiments is central to the success of Republican gubernatorial politics. Abbot set the national agenda going into 2024, and his bussing of illegals was critical to Trump’s success in cities. Vision, boldness, and a willingness to reshape the national conversation, rather than move with the times, are required for good leadership. Fishback has a greater capacity to do so than Donalds, who lacks that critical spark on immigration. There are real advantages in having a media-hungry governor willing to occasionally play the role of outlaw. This would be especially valuable, as Mike Howell has explained, because of ICE’s lack of farm and workplace raids. A brave governor could, in theory, enforce the law himself, bolstering ICE’s enforcement capabilities by raiding workplaces, creating the tight labor market workers need. It’s critical to prove to voters that mass deportations will really improve their quality of life.

Florida, Financialization, and the Future

If Donalds wins, it’s a sign that Republicans in red states don’t have to offer young people anything; they don’t have to think about the housing problem beyond aping Ezra Klein on zoning. They don’t need a vision of a future that offers dignity to blue-collar and working-class people. The vision that a not-insignificant number of people seem to be arriving at is that the job of state governments is to maximize the financial capital in their state to use as a tax farm. They believe, though they’d never say this, that real manufacturing won’t come back, and they are preparing for automation of blue-collar and white-collar work and the actual disappearance of the middle class. The best they think they can do is attract technology and financial giants to their state, via lucrative deals that make data center construction easy, and offer corporations generous benefits. This is Donalds’s signature promise: making Florida a financial capital. For these people, the collapse in productivity amongst the white dhimmi will be compensated for by the new revenue from technology giants, who will subsidize the vast social programs that already provide effective UBI and abundance to illegal aliens, the urban poor, and the out-of-work. In short, the American Dream will actually, really die, and something new and ugly will take its place. You may not agree that’s what Donalds or Abbot want, but this is the fear that lurks in the minds of many Americans: the fear of enormous forces reshaping their world, stripping them of the last dignity they are allowed to have, that of work. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” At the top, a small elite would reap rewards, and the proletarianized dhimmi would be powerless to stop them. For some, the only problem with the Nick meme is Nick. If he were to be replaced, say, by a robot or worker who won’t complain, a certain type of elite could finally achieve the goal of turning Jefferson’s republic of yeoman farmers, bound by culture and blessed by providence, into a post-national Emirate with Caudillismo characteristics. This would be a paradise for boomers, and an even harsher world for Nick.

There can only be one financial capital. And right now, red states are in a race to the bottom to become financial capitals.

Miami has the potential to deliver even higher returns to investors than Dubai thanks to a land shortage, with the Everglades acting as a natural barrier that creates property scarcity. As a development plan, this will do nothing for the state’s actual economy, which is agriculture, manufacturing, and aerospace. Data Centers and property investment are similar in that they generate value without generating many blue-collar jobs, especially if there aren’t state-level efforts to deport illegal laborers and create a tight labor market.

Real estate inflation and financialization embody the failed consensus of ’90s liberalism: there really is no daylight between Donalds’ vision of Miami as a financial capital and Bill Clinton’s NAFTA. Clinton believed NAFTA would lead to more white-collar jobs, just as Donalds thinks that finanicalization will lead to, also, more white-collar jobs. And Clinton was not wrong, really, and neither is Donalds: it’s just that the people who lose their jobs due to manufacturing disappearing don’t get those jobs. Fishback is not wrong to mock this as “line-go-up.” The meme exists for a reason. Miami might compete with Dubai, and mom and dad might get a Robinhood account, but is that the best that MAGA can do? What about the forgotten men and women? What about Nick?

There are two real futures for MAGA’s economic policy: national capitalism or foreign direct investment and increased financialization. Trump’s “billions” of investment in the United States, like Canada’s FDI, is a fundamentally regressive economic policy that relies on taxpayer subsidies to make domestic investment attractive to corporations. The issue with FDI is that other states want it, which inevitably leads to global labor arbitrage: the same race to the bottom that defined NAFTA, and is now defining red state economic policy. The real priority of a competent MAGA would be home-grown manufacturing, scaling up viable businesses, and using federal power to create industries that aren’t financially viable in a global market. This would mean tripling the size of Anduril and Tesla, federally subsidizing the production of raw materials, such as steel, and comprehensively reforming the education system to meet social needs (how many American men can build a large transformer?). In short, jobs for people without college degrees would require some central planning. Much of MAGA opposes this because they remain committed to the ’90s consensus and want to be free from government oversight. Again, MAGA is a real movement, of real factions. Most state governments are not pursuing serious economic development programs. They’re racing to the bottom. This is because donors prefer this.

Consider that one of Donalds’ first donors was Jeff Yass, who intervened to save TikTok to protect his investments. On TikTok, the United States’ national security came into direct conflict with the free market, and the market won. And hey, did you know that one of Ramaswamy’s biggest donors is Jeff Yass, too? That’s something he and Donalds have in common, in addition to the fact that both their issues pages are light on detail but use the same language of turning their states into the nation’s leading financial powerhouses via lower taxes and less regulation. How many financial powerhouses can there be in one country? Is it really diversification if Montana, Texas, Ohio, and Florida all try to move into finance at the same time? Or might there be some other, metapolitical effort here, some sort of effort from a libertarian financier, a fan of Rand Paul, to shift Republican politics away from nationalism with investments in state-level gubernatorial campaigns to win MAGA votes, even if at the expense of national security and blue-collar work? Like TikTok, the question of whether to continue allowing 600,000 Chinese students to remain in the country, which Fishback opposes, is an example of financial interests conflicting with national security. MAGA has real, internal divides over how real the China threat is and how doable shifting to a new economic model is, and these are really the same question. And powerful donors have a stake in how that question is answered. This is particularly felt in Florida because the state’s declining orange industry competes with China’s, and because the tree-killing Psyllid originated in China. Given that we’ve caught Chinese nationals smuggling bioweapons into the United States on multiple occasions, you can figure out the rest from there... there’s a strong case for a China hawk governor in Florida.

The Case Against Fishback

Fishback received $215,000 in cash from Greenlight, signed promissory notes promising to repay it, and the loans were supposed to be forgiven ratably if he remained loyal. When he left in 2023 and (allegedly) violated the terms of their relationship, Greenlight accelerated the notes, obtained a New York judgment for the full amount plus interest, and is now collecting in Florida. Firms lent him this money because there is a tax advantage for them (the advance is treated as a loan rather than taxable compensation until forgiven). This money acts as golden handcuffs, preventing the analyst from moving to Citadel or other firms. If an employee breaches confidentiality or competes, it can serve as powerful leverage to punish them, which is exactly what’s happening to Fishback, who allegedly stole information. The case against Fishback is that he’s a con man whose crimes will catch up to him before he can really mount his campaign. By implication, if he’s not able to fulfill his debts to a firm, why would he be able to fulfill his promises to voters? This is the strongest case against him: that he’s a conman liar, whose good populism is an accident of overall slopulism.

There’s a chance the Fishback campaign dies, but even if it does, I truly hope the Republican establishment listens. MAGA is not in crisis, but it is beginning to split internally over fundamental questions about who Americans are and who America is for. This was inevitable, as mass deportations would always raise the salience of ethnos. For almost six years, since the end of Trump’s first term, MAGA has avoided direct confrontation on these questions by focusing on the struggle to regain power. But now that MAGA has that power, what is it for?

Fin

The case for Fishback is that, as governor, he would continue the bold experimentation in state-level governance that DeSantis began, while pushing the state- and national-level conversation on immigration, working towards the goal of an America that is good for Americans without college degrees. He would offer an alternative to growth through financialization that would benefit normal people and traditional state industries. He would not be beholden to the Chamber of Commerce and would prioritize immigration over financialization.