Zoltan Istvan: Why I’m Running for President as a Republican
The speed of change we’ve seen in the last few decades is nothing compared to what’s on the horizon with the emergence of radical new technology and science. Already, California has major companies working on brain implants that connect our thoughts in real time to the internet. Artificial Intelligence has become one of the most important military issues of our time. And designer babies born through genetic editing are already alive.
These innovations are part of the burgeoning field of transhumanism, the movement to enhance human bodies and lives with transformative technologies. I have dedicated my life to promoting transhumanism in a rational, objective, and fiscally conservative way. But transhumanism is under siege. Socialists, authoritarians, and the activist far left want it for their own. If allowed, they’ll weaponize, stifle, and propagandize transhumanism until nobody wants this future because it’s downright dystopian. Getting to a bright future of transhumanism requires capitalistic entrepreneurialism and a hands-off approach from the government.
For the sake of humankind’s future — as well as a more nuanced meaning of American greatness — conservatives must steer the direction of transhumanism. Whoever owns transhumanism — whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, whether you’re conservative or liberal, whether you’re a democracy or a totalitarian regime — will own the future. Vladimir Putin has said as much.
There’s not a moment to lose in this race. Silicon Valley — ground zero of transhumanism — is heading down a road of early socialism after formerly being quasi-libertarian. And authoritarian China is already leading American efficiency and innovation in many ways. Adding to all this is the left’s continuous cries for more and more regulation. Only a free, deregulated America can catch up lost ground to China and Russia — and ensure that America retains its leadership as the world moves forward into a brave new future.
That new future could be what lasting American greatness is really all about. Greatness for America is still attainable, but it will require a massive leap forward, both culturally, intellectually, and scientifically to achieve it. It can do this by leading the world forward in using geo-engineering to control the Earth’s atmosphere to mitigate climate change. It can create a universal basic income — without raising taxes — as it accepts that the great majority of human jobs will be lost to automation, robots and AI with 20 years’ time. It can even use genetic editing to end disease and aging in its citizenry. This is what modern greatness might look like to a transhumanist.
Instead, our leaders are seeking to make America great by disrespecting democratic institutions, jarring longstanding international allies, and acting childishly on social media. America cannot be made great by pretending to bring back old jobs when China is on track to become the world’s leading economy in just a few years’ time via the creation of 65 million new jobs in the last five years alone.
Notwithstanding Trump’s personal foibles, I was cautiously excited with the 2016 change of leadership at the top of America. I hoped the system would be jolted in a positive way. I even applied for a job in the current administration. But as time went on, the corruption of the White House, its political posturing, and the gridlock of Washington seem the same as ever. The national debt has hit a new record. Inequality is growing. Smoking a joint can still land you in jail. A new border wall, an economy surviving on irrationally free government money, or a questionable trade war are not recipes for greatness. Neither is bogging down the nation with impeachment proceedings.
Under the current administration, America’s technological edge is slowly being handed on a platter to socialists and authoritarian powers. Even more important than Silicon Valley’s dangerous liberalism is that China is increasingly outdoing us in science and tech — the stuff that historically has bettered everyday American lives more than anything else. The writing is on the wall. While the White House offers faux populism, a phony culture war, and regressive religious morality in the face of innovation, secular China is rushing forward to claim its mantle as the inevitable de facto world leader. Designer babies, artificial intelligence, and revolutionary green innovation — China arguably has a leading grip on all these markets.
I am unable to stand by and watch America fall short of its epic potential. It’s for this reason that I am running for the US presidency — and running directly as a Republican against President Trump. I want to help ensure that America doesn’t become second-best because of old guard politics, vacuous virtue signaling, and a lack of original thinking. I also want to open the Republican Party to 21st century ideas and social mores, which they need to accept to remain competitive against the Democrats and growing socialist base in America.
Raised in a Republican household by immigrant parents who believed in fiscal responsibility, family values, and hard work, I am coming back to the party of my father after being essentially an independent for a long time. While my father died a few years ago, my mom’s 53-year marriage to him was a testament to loyalty and love, and the kind of values the Grand Old Party once possessed but seems recently to have eschewed. While I was the presidential nominee of a politically neutral, science-oriented party (Transhumanist Party), and was also an endorsed libertarian candidate in the 2018 California gubernatorial race, I have come to see the Republican Party as the best chance in 2020 to grab hold of enduring American values and achieve the aims the United States sorely needs.
It won’t be easy for me. I represent a younger and more evolved type of Republican, forged more in the form of our revolutionary founders than the eroded Trumpian GOP. I’m fiscally conservative yet socially liberal. I’m religiously agnostic but am firm on the separation of church and state. I insist on shrinking government but realize its essential necessity for the greater welfare of our country.
At age 46, I’ve become a passionate advocate for sensible application of radical science and technology, consulting for governments and the US military. My public career was launched in 2013 when I published my novel The Transhumanist Wager, which is often compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s Objectivism was an important influence in my life, but it was my nearly five years as a journalist for National Geographic that defined my passion for politics.
As a journalist, I’ve seen horrors while on assignment in the 100+ countries I’ve visited — everything from genocide to the complete destruction of forests to gut-wrenching human rights abuses. I’ve covered many of those stories, from street children taking drugs to music helping overcome racism to fighter pilots losing their jobs to drones.
While my 20s were spent seeing and reporting on the world, my 30’s were spent building various businesses; the most successful of which was in real estate development. People sometimes ask if I’ve worked with my hands. You betcha. I have personally built or renovated many homes in my life, using every power tool imaginable, doing every type of job. My hard work paid off; selling my business portfolio enabled me to stop formally working and dedicate myself full-time to writing and politics.
What most people know me for is helping to spearhead the transhumanist movement, which is surging into a bonafide mainstream phenomenon. Transhumanism may seem esoteric, but make no mistake, it is at the core of the world’s most valuable companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. We are using more and more radical tech in our lives, and someday soon, a lot of that tech will be making its way into our bodies. I already have a tiny chip implant in my hand that I can text with, start a car, and open doors.
The coming tech we’ll see in the next five years will be more radical than what we’ve experienced in the last twenty. The new tech coming out of California’s Bay Area, where I live with my physician wife and kids, will ultimately replace jobs — and maybe even biological human beings. A core part of my presidential campaign is not creating jobs but positioning America for the eventuality that there will be very few jobs left because robots will take nearly all of them.
It’s for this reason that I support a universal basic income. My version doesn’t raise taxes at all. Similar to Alaska, it utilizes and monetizes the 800 million federal acres of unused land America possesses. It’s called a Federal Land Dividend and is more than enough to give every American $1,000 a month.
I also support spending less money on military conflicts, and more money on fighting the wars that really matter to Americans, like the war on cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Finally, a campaign agenda of mine is to legalize drugs, and spend the saved drug war money on rehabilitation and education. Let’s get nonviolent criminals out of prison and back to work. And while we’re at it, let’s turn those now empty prisons into free public colleges.
The fact I’m pro-choice, pro-immigration, secular, and even support LGBTQ rights doesn’t sit well with many Republicans, especially the older ones. They see me as a potential Trojan Horse. But there are plenty of younger Republicans like me that are fiscally conservative but also embrace a wide array of social freedoms. We aim to usher in humanity’s radical new future in fiscally responsible way.
With authoritarian China looming evermore powerful on the horizon, Democrats increasingly embracing socialism, and robots poised to forever change our economies, a new vision of conservativism is needed. I aim to bring that into America’s political sphere so that a new guard of Republicans might emerge and hold its ground against anti-American forces. I look forward to telling you more about it on the campaign trail, and how America might not just become great, but also the most innovative nation in the world again.
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