That was something that came to mind when I saw this video:

In the video, a Hispanic man is in the car with his family, and he gets pulled over by ICE. They have no idea why they were pulled over. When ICE comes up, he asks why he was stopped; ICE tells him that he looks like a target they’re after and asks for his ID. He gives them his ID, they look at it, realize it’s not who they’re after, tell them to have a nice day, and they go back to their cars. It was a very normal encounter. Humdrum and boring even.

Why?

Because the guy in the car didn’t act like a moron.

Compare that to the people in Minnesota chasing ICE agents around with their cars, attacking them, smashing things up, resisting arrest, screaming abuse, etc., etc.

The problem in Minnesota was n…

Read more

In the movie, Seagal is a burned-out ex-DEA agent who is disgusted by the things he’s done to stop the bad guys and decides to retire and come home. Eventually, the bad guys in the movie, a Jamaican drug gang, make the horrible mistake of coming after Seagal’s family. That’s when he gets together with an ex-military friend of his, and he tells him this before they decide to basically wipe the entire gang out like they’re playing a game of Grand Theft Auto:

“The way I look at it, you come home, mind your own business, watch your own yard. And then, if trouble finds you, you go after it, and you bite its head off before it does the same thing to you.”

I may be the first person ever to say this before, but there was great wisdom in those words from Steven Seagal.

When I was younger and people would tell me about their problems, I would want to help them so much that I could be pushy about it. I’d know exactly what to do, I’d tell them to do it, and if they hesitated, I pushed them. In retrospect, was I wrong about the things I strongly suggested that people do? No, not at all. In pretty much every case, these people would have been considerably better off if they did what I suggested.

The thing is, they weren’t MY PROBLEMS, so why was I getting emotionally invested to the point where I probably annoyed them by trying so hard to get them to do things they didn’t want to do?

It was because I was getting caught up in somebody else’s business.

I’ve seen this happen a number of times when a relationship implodes, friends get into fights, or neighbors start feuding, and next thing you know, everyone is supposed to judge who’s right, who’s wrong, and take sides.

But who says you have to take a side?

Why can’t it be, “The two of them have a problem, but I don’t have a problem with either side.”

When you say things like that, people always try to come back with the most extreme examples imaginable. “Oh yeah? So, we should have been neutral between Britain and Germany in WWII?” Sorry, but Susie and Tammy getting in a fight because one of them said something snarky about the other one’s dress isn’t the equivalent of endorsing or opposing the Holocaust.

Granted, there is a time and a place to step in and get involved in someone else’s problem. If your neighbor’s house is on fire, do what you can to help get it put out. Once when I flipped my car over on a North Carolina back road and climbed out of the car covered in blood, I was profoundly grateful that someone stopped to help and was extremely impressed that EVERY SINGLE CAR that passed (there were about half a dozen) stopped and asked if I needed any help. Were those good people who did the right thing? I certainly think so.

But when I got handgun training, I also remember the instructor telling us about this scenario:

Let’s say you come around the corner, see someone on top of another guy, pummeling him, and the guy on the bottom calls for help. So, you pull your gun and tell the guy to stop hitting the other one, or you’ll shoot. He does, and the guy on the bottom runs off. Then, the police show up, and the guy you stopped from beating up the other one says, “Some guy robbed me, and I was fighting back when his accomplice (he points at you) forced me to let him get away with my wallet.” You’re going to have a lot of explaining to do in that situation.

You might think, “Well, that sounds farfetched. When would that ever happen?” Well then, let’s talk about something you might be more likely to see. A man and a woman who are obviously a couple are arguing in a restaurant, and he slaps her. Do you intervene? For a long time, I would have said, “Absolutely,” but Sci-Fi writer Vox Day changed my mind about that many years ago with a blog post that has apparently been lost to history in a server migration.

He said in that situation, he wouldn’t intervene unless he thought her life was in danger because she has probably been through that situation before and hasn’t left, she’s probably not in danger at the moment, and if he kicks the guy’s ass, she’s going to side with him, not you, when the police show up and quite possibly lie to make him sound like the bad guy.

That changed my thinking on the subject, and when I was leaving a restaurant a few months back, I saw an unhappy older couple who were both probably in their seventies. The man gave the woman a little shove – and you know what I did? I chose not to get involved because I don’t know them, it’s not my problem, and I can’t fix the lives they’re both choosing to live.

I’m happy to help people, give advice if I’m asked, and I do care about things that impact me, my friends, my family, and my country, but once you get past that, how much time, effort, and mental energy are we supposed to put into situations that don’t involve us?

You could even talk about this on the national level. “Did you see what that billionaire spent his money on?” Not my business. “Some people are still wearing masks. Don’t they know COVID is over? Hahaha!” As long as they aren’t trying to make me wear a mask, I don’t care. It’s not my business. “Did you see that we’re not giving money to Nepal and transgender people are turning to sex work because of it?” That’s a problem for people in Nepal, not people in America. So, it’s not my business. While we’re on this topic, we could use a lot more rock stars, movie stars, businesses, and sports franchises saying, “We have customers on both sides of the political aisle, so unless it directly impacts us, political issues are not our business.”

So, who cares about the latest celebrity gossip? Why would you harass somebody just because you disagree with them? Why would you insert yourself into someone’s relationship troubles or problems at work? Why go out of your way to disrespect people? Why get involved in things that don’t have anything to do with you? How worked up do you want to get over things you don’t have control over and that aren’t about you in the first place?

You don’t hear it said a lot anymore, but “mind your own business” is some of the best advice most people will ever get.

Subscribe now

Share

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

“You support not just the populist-right, but the far-right. Very fringe parties in some countries,” the reporter stated.

“No, I support the normal people. What you call far-right, falsely…” Musk replied.

“Falsely… you think is the normal person?” she asked.

“Okay, yes. Literally, if you go back 10 or 15 years, those policies are completely normal,” Musk responded.

It’s certainly worth noting that not so long ago, Elon Musk, who voted for both Clinton and Biden, was considered a hero of the center-left. Eventually, his criticism of the way COVID was handled, his opposition to censorship, and his attacks on “wokeness” turned him into a public enemy on the left and pushed him toward supporting Trump. Since then, liberals have QUITE LITERALLY tried to convince people that the same guy who voted for Hillary Clinton is actually a Nazi:

So, when Elon Musk talks about how normal views can suddenly become “far-right,” he is speaking from experience.

That was fresh on my mind when WNBA “star” (I really like her, but I hesitate to use the word “star” for anyone that plays in the WNBA), Sophie Cunningham said men shouldn’t be playing women’s sports or be in women’s locker rooms:

You know what stands out to me about that? The fact that a biological male shouldn’t be playing women’s sports or be in a locker room exposing himself to young girls as he changes is a “conservative” opinion.

If we went back to say, 2010 or arguably even 2015, probably 95+% of America would have STRONGLY AGREED that no biological male should be changing with women.

Moreover, there’s not really anything even inherently liberal about saying that men pretending to be women should be actually treated like women in every way. In fact, you could probably make an even better case from the left that biological men taking female spots on athletic teams and forcing their way into their locker rooms is part of a “war on women.”

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Liberals are the ones waging the “war on women” in this case, and liberalism now mainly revolves more around reflexively opposing what conservatives want and showing disdain for America than it does around any type of real principles.

For example, there’s no principled reason liberals have to be unpatriotic or horrified by the American flag. In fact, left-wing patriotism was the norm for decades until the late sixties.

What about rent control? Well, since the actual impact of that policy has been concretely established to be higher rents, liberals could just as easily oppose it on the basis that it hurts poor Americans. Incidentally, you could say the exact same thing about raising the minimum wage, which hurts the poorest, least experienced workers the most by eliminating jobs that they need.

The same thing goes for “defunding the police” or drug legalization. The wealthy can afford to pay their own security. But crime-ridden neighborhoods inevitably end up being poor neighborhoods because no one with money would live there, so again, having active, well-funded police departments is another “conservative” policy that could just be an across-the-board, common-sense policy. Additionally, rich people can often skate on the consequences of using drugs because they can afford rehab and get better lawyers, while poor people are much more likely to have their lives destroyed by drugs. Again, it’s not obvious that making it as easy as possible for people to get drugs should be a left-wing policy (and it certainly didn’t used to be a left-wing policy), but again, it is.

Believe it or not, we could even say the same thing about illegal immigration. Liberal icon César Chávez’s United Farm Workers used to hunt down, rob, and beat the living hell out of illegal immigrants because they were often used as strike breakers. Of course, it’s also worth noting that illegal aliens drive down wages for the poorest Americans and are here in such numbers that they’re undoubtedly increasing the cost of housing. One of the best things you could do to actually help poor Americans would be to get rid of illegal immigrants.

Things have gone so haywire that the left has even been getting angry about Donald Trump cleaning up and repairing monuments in DC, as if there’s something inherently right wing about making DC look nice:

We can go on and on with this, and certainly, we can give actual reasons why some of these positions have been embraced by the left, but very few of them make the left look better.

For example, liberals pretty clearly want more poor people here who are hooked on welfare because people like that vote Democrat. Liberals are also willing to open up the borders, even if it’s horrible for our country and hurts poor Americans most, because they’re not having as many children as conservatives and need to import a new voter base. Why do liberals try protect criminals so much? Because people in crime-ridden neighborhoods are more likely to vote Democratic. Why do liberals get upset about flag waving? Because they hate America. When you look at the places liberals willfully choose horrible policies that don’t really align with traditional mainstream left-wing ideology, rarely will you find a reason to be charitable about their motivations.

The point of all this is that many of the policies liberals support today are toxic, contrarian, and aren’t even principled liberalism in any sort of meaningful sense – and it shouldn’t be that way. The left and right have a lot of principled disagreements, but the left is so far gone that even the most common-sense policies are increasingly becoming explicitly right-wing.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Do

So, in order to answer the question properly, we should start by noting that working at McDonald’s is an entry-level job. It’s generally thought of as a place for high school students and people with minimal experience to learn the basics of work.

This seems to fit fairly well with their workforce since, per an article about fast food workers in general (not just McDonald’s), about 30% of fast-food employees are teens and another 30.7% are 20-24.

Although by some estimates, as few as 1-5% of McDonald’s workers are making minimum wage, unsurprisingly, it’s not a high-paying job. Although McDonald’s doesn’t officially list national numbers, ChatGPT was able to give a breakdown of what McDonald’s workers are getting paid in general:

If you saved for long enough, invested it and didn’t want something particularly nice, could you get a house on those wages? Absolutely. But, that’s never what people are driving at. What they really mean is that anyone who has a job, even a job at McDonald’s, should be able to afford to get a house in a few years.

Although I’ve never worked at McDonald’s, I did work at Burger King as an employee when I was a sullen teenager and later as an assistant manager when I was an adult. So, I can tell you from experience that it is not fun work. It’s often hot in the kitchen, it feels high pressure during the lunch and dinner rushes, it can be brutal if you’re short on staff, the cleaning after your shift when you’re tired is aggravating, and the assistant managers often make less per hour than the regular employees when you consider how much time they put in to get paid their salary.

On top of that, my two biggest memories from my time as a Burger King assistant manager were how badly my feet hurt after standing for 10-12 hours per day and having them schedule me for the super early breakfast shift one day, lunch another day, and super-late dinner on the third. This happened frequently.

So, doesn’t that mean all those people deserve to be able to afford a house with their wages? Doesn’t that mean I should have been able to afford a house with my wages?

No.

Because that’s not how houses work, wages work, or the economy works.

That’s like saying, “Jenna had a rough year! She was sick for three months, she had to put her dog down, her marriage broke up, and her best friend stopped talking to her. She deserves to be given a house!”

No, she does not because again, that’s not how houses work, wages work, or the economy works.

Like a car, a Gucci purse, a computer, or a Japanese A5 Wagyu steak, you “deserve” it when you have earned enough money to pay for it. Anything else is charity that comes at someone else’s expense.

There are really two ways you can look at wanting something and being unable to get it as a human being.

The first is the traditional American, very capitalist response, which is, “I need to build my skills so I can make more money and buy a house.” This is a way of looking at things that makes you into a more useful person and a better citizen.

The other way of looking at it is the more un-American, socialistic approach, which says, “I think people should have this thing, so we should mandate by law that it be given to them or that they be given enough money to buy it.”

This is, for example, the approach that the Soviet Union took to housing. They built hideously ugly apartment buildings full of tiny apartments with minimal features, and then they had long waiting lists to get into them. It was not uncommon to have 4 or 5 people in a 400 square foot apartment or sometimes, even in a single room:

This is where this kind of thinking eventually leads you if you take it to its ultimate conclusion. The same goes for socialism and a “living wage,” which is really nothing more than an arbitrary number picked out of a hat that will quickly become outdated.

For example, if the law said the “living wage” had to be $100, that’s the new “minimum wage,” no one with any skills is going to work for that amount. If your plumber is getting $80 an hour today, he’s probably going to ask for $800 after the living wage becomes $100 – and he won’t be alone. Next thing you know, there will be calls to raise the “living wage” again.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways that we can help people get a leg up. Trump’s “no tax on tips” and “Trump accounts” do exactly that. Deporting millions of illegal immigrants will also quite literally lower the demand, and therefore, the cost of housing. Getting rid of rent control, rent stabilization, and lightening up zoning laws will lead to more housing being built, and therefore, reducing the cost of housing. More drilling for oil and increasing the amount of coal, natural gas, solar, and nuclear power will reduce energy bills. Pro-business environments in red states are pulling in corporations from blue states, which increases salaries and the number of people working in red states.

You don’t make life better for most people by giving their power to the government or trying to legally mandate that the market give people things they don’t deserve. You make life better for people by helping them build skills and by putting an environment in place that allows them to better their own lives more easily.

The fix is not and never has been “more government” and “more mandates.” It’s less government and more people reaching their full, God-given potential as human beings.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Of course, the book is also considered DANGEROUS and scary by some people because Machiavelli was a relentlessly practical realist who understood that wielding power is not for the faint of heart.

Personally, I think Machiavelli had a keen understanding of human nature and is one of the most brilliant thinkers to ever live. After you read these quotes, you will understand why.

20) “He who becomes a prince through the favor of the people should always keep on good terms with them; which it is easy for him to do, since all they ask is not to be oppressed.”

19) “The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.”

18) “There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.”

17) “A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.”

16) “People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”

15) “A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.”

14) “Well used are those cruelties (if it is permitted to speak well of evil) that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which. although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men…; the others cannot possibly survive.”

13) “Besides what has been said, people are fickle by nature; and it is simple to convince them of something but difficult to hold them in that conviction; and, therefore, affairs should be managed in such a way that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.”

12) “For a prince should have two fears: one, internal concerning his subjects; the other, external, concerning foreign powers. From the latter he can always defend himself by his good troops and friends; and he will always have good friends if he has good troops.”

11) “And here one must note that hatred is acquired just as much by means of good actions as by bad ones; and so, as I said above, if a prince wishes to maintain the state, he is often obliged not to be good; because whenever that group which you believe you need to support you is corrupted, whether it be the common people, the soldiers, or the nobles, it is to your advantage to follow their inclinations in order to satisfy them; and then good actions are your enemy.”

10) “And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will request your neutrality and he who is your friend will ask you to declare yourself by taking up arms. And irresolute princes, in order to avoid present dangers, follow the neutral road most of the time, and most of the time they are ruined.”

9) “You must, therefore know that there are two means of fighting: one according to the laws, the other with force; the first way is proper to man, the second to beasts; but because the first, in many cases, is not sufficient, it becomes necessary to have recourse to the second.”

8) “And that prince who bases his power entirely on… words, finding himself completely without other preparations, comes to ruin.”

7) “One should never allow chaos to develop in order to avoid going to war, because one does not avoid a war but instead puts it off to his disadvantage.”

6) “One can make this generalization about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers; they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well, they are yours. They would shed their blood for you, risk their property, their lives, their children, so long as I said above, as danger is remote; but when you are in danger they turn against you.”

5) “Therefore, in order not to have to rob his subjects, to be able to defend himself, not to become poor and contemptible, and not to be forced to become rapacious, a prince must consider it of little importance if he incurs the reputation of being a miser, for this is one of the vices that permits him to rule.”

4) “And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state (which is a gift given only to a prudent ruler), they can be cured quickly; but when they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure.”

3) “And one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new order to things; for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old order as his enemies; and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new. This lukewarmness partly stems from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, and partly from the skepticism of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they have personal experience in them.”

2) “And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation: for a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good.”

1) “From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking. Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are wretched creatures, is broken on every occasion in which their own interests are concerned; but fear is sustained by dread of punishment which will never abandon you.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Basically, Haidt would say that you can break morality down into six areas:

1) Care/Harm

2) Fairness/Cheating

3) Liberty/Oppression

4) Loyalty/Betrayal

5) Authority/Subversion

6) Sanctity/Degradation

According to Haidt, the liberal sense of morality (ahem, such as it is) revolves around the first three areas in that list – care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression, while conservatives tend to weigh all six factors.

Because conservatives get all six factors, while liberals only really care about three of them, this leads to conservatives understanding liberals much better than liberals understand conservatives, who struggle to understand the importance of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.

Haidt would not refer to liberals as morally stunted because of their shortcomings, but I think many of the rest of us, me included, certainly would.

That came to mind because of a brilliant post I ran across on X:

What he refers to as liberals playing the “How much pain can I tolerate” game, Haidt might describe as liberals not caring much about authority/subversion, while I would simply say that liberals place very little importance on order.

This is very easy to see if you look at a lot of the policies liberals support and the way they live in many places.

They care so little about punishing criminals that they could fairly be described as “pro-crime.” As we speak, Tim Walz is in the news for bemoaning the fact that an illegal alien who molested a child was deported by the Trump administration despite his attempts to prevent it:

This fits right in with district attorneys in liberal cities refusing to prosecute criminals, their no-bail laws, lenient punishment for crimes and sanctuary cities. Their attitude is, “If people want to tear down a statue of some Founding Father and we don’t care about that statue, who cares?” Similarly, “If the people who vote for us want to riot for a few days, smash up a few store fronts and loot a few stores, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do it? That’s what insurance is for, right?”

They also like the idea of open borders: What does it matter if people came here the right way or not? Why shouldn’t they be able to come here illegally if they want to do it? Why should they be deported FOR ANY REASON? Who needs to be sure that the vote is secure or that illegals can’t vote if we think we’re going to win? Heck, why shouldn’t they be able to vote, collect welfare, or work at whatever job they want just because they aren’t here legally? For that matter, why do we have to bring in immigrants who “fit in?” Why shouldn’t we have radical Islamists, Somalian immigrants on welfare, or people who hate the United States coming to live here?

Why shouldn’t homeless people be able to set up their tents anywhere they want, crap in the streets, and leave used hypodermic needles lying around? Who are we to say that they shouldn’t do that if they want to do it?

Why should we be constrained by gender? If someone says they’re male in the morning, female in the afternoon, and have no gender at night, what’s the problem with that? Why can’t every human just choose their own pronouns, even moment-by-moment if they want?

Granted, liberals will pretend to be interested in order to the extent that it furthers their agenda, you know, sort of like they pretend to be Christian when they’re telling Christians they have a religious duty to do whatever furthers the liberal agenda, but it’s not real. Having one set of standards that apply across the board is critical to having order, and liberals don’t believe in that.

We can go on and on and on with this, but what it comes down to is that liberals simply don’t think order is very important, and because of that, they have a lot of trouble understanding the ramifications of what they do.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad things that naturally spring up from a lack of order. Conservatives get this, which is why we spend a lot of time worrying about slippery slopes and how policies will play out over a long period of time.

Meanwhile, liberals don’t think about or understand the long-term consequences of their actions. Everything that happens is a single, unconnected event probably caused by racism, and solved by a government program.

On the other hand, order requires you to think in chains of events to understand what will happen. If we allow A, then we will get B, then that will lead to C.

When you abandon that, then you get mob rule, people who think they should be able to run over ICE agents because they’re deporting illegals, and people in NYC just walking around homeless guys screaming and punching in the air all day long without anyone in charge ever DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT.

When you abandon order, you get men calling themselves females raping real women in prisons, stealing women’s scholarships, and endless lawsuits, chaos, and angry debates about bathrooms, locker rooms, and how old children need to be before it’s okay to surgically mutilate them.

When you abandon order, you get tens of millions of people who no longer trust election results, 78% of New Yorkers being afraid to ride the subways despite voting for the politicians who allow their subways to be unsafe, and liberals who refuse to do anything about shoplifting bitterly complaining as their stores close down because of shoplifting.

Granted, you absolutely can go too far with order and create a stifling surveillance state where draconian punishments are handed out for trivial crimes, and that’s a bad thing. But without order, you can’t have a functional society at all, which is also bad.

Order means your government makes an effort to tell the truth and do a good job instead of taking bribes and saying whatever sounds good at the moment. It means you trust your neighbors and don’t need bars on your windows or all the products in the local stores behind plastic cases. Order is what it takes to live in a high-trust society, to have predictable laws, and for people to feel safe in their society.

Order means you don’t have to worry if your kids are playing in the yard. It means you spend less mental energy dealing with dysfunctional people. Order reduces societal stress, conflict, and uncertainty. It keeps everything from degenerating into a free-for-all or disintegrating entirely. It just plain old means that things work better across the board.

That’s good for people; it’s good for countries, and a lot more order would be good for America, too.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Meanwhile, have you ever noticed the sort of art that conservatives tend to find beautiful vs. what liberals like? Conservatives tend to really like the classics. You know, old churches, detailed statues, and gorgeous women.

But liberals?

Liberals like to push ugly. Ugly art. Ugly characters. Ugly people.

It was a couple of posts about comics that I randomly ran across that got me thinking about this:

This is not confined to comics either. So much of modern art that liberals champion is hideously ugly garbage. There are many examples we could point to, but these get the idea across:

Admittedly, the Obama Center looks much better at night, but the building looks like it should be the entrance to some super villain’s underground lair.

This has happened so much in video games that it has turned into a regular, bitter complaint from many gamers:

We’ve also gotten a collection of unattractive “super models” in recent years:

This has even bled into TV and movies, although less so, perhaps because casting really good-looking people has been such an ingrained habit for so long:

Now, you might say, “What makes liberals do this?”

Well, there are a lot of theories around that.

Liberals themselves might tell you that they’re trying to be “representative.” “Why shouldn’t ugly people be represented?” Alternatively, they might ask, “Who gets to decide what’s beautiful? Me? You? Besides, what about the people that aren’t normally represented in these roles? Why shouldn’t they be depicted in those roles? Like, why can’t 5 ft. tall FTM trans actor Eliot Page be a warrior? We’re broadening the scope of what people can be accepted as and do!”

Another explanation I’ve heard is that studies show conservatives are more easily disgusted, so liberals aren’t as bothered by ugly characters or characters that aren’t ugly per se but are less attractive than they should be.

Some people might even see it as a way to reject conventional norms, like it’s the equivalent of a nose ring and an ugly multicolored haircut.

Of course, there’s not going to be a definitive answer to this, but I have three theories that I think better explain it.

1) The first is that liberals have become so hostile to success that they see beauty as a form of oppression. You know, “Rich people must have cheated to get all that money and beautiful women don’t deserve all that attention! It’s not fair all these men are drooling over Sydney Sweeney, when they should be raving over how brilliant I am because of the feminist screed I wrote on Reddit!”

2) The second goes back to a quote by Thomas Sowell:

Liberals don’t want to have “common sense,” but how can they think they’re so much better than you and everyone else that you need them to guide you if they believe the same things you do? So, you can think Sydney Sweeney is hot, but they can explain to you why some Democratic president’s wife or weird lesbian is actually much hotter:

The fact that they can see that and you can’t is why they should be in charge, instead of lesser people like you, who can’t even see what REAL beauty is.

3) Last but not least, study after study after study has concluded that liberals are more mentally ill, unhappy, and have more sociopaths in their ranks than conservatives. You know what a lot of people like that love to do? They love to TROLL.

To them, the world is ugly, unfair, and spoiled and they don’t like it when other people are happy and having a good time. So, many of them, often as an almost subconscious impulse, take great joy in trying to irritate other people. Sure, there are influencers who do that for money and traffic, but these people take pleasure in creating bad feelings in other human beings.

So, what better way to do that than to take something pretty and make it ugly? “Oh men, like pretty women? Well, I’m angry at men for not liking me, so make this woman ugly and see how they like that! Ha, I can’t wait to hear them get unhappy about how I put a man in the dress on the cover of this magazine or made their favorite video game character look like she was hit in the face with a baseball bat!”

However you slice it, and whatever the reason for it may be, there’s something psychologically unhealthy about recoiling from beauty. It’s just not something happy, mentally well people do. Its also why one of the running themes of horror movies is the killer dressing themselves up to look hideous and frightening:

When you start to prefer and embrace that ugliness over beauty, it’s a sign there’s something broken in you that needs to be fixed.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Many of them spent their whole life in front of computers with their parents hovering in the background, being told that they needed to be shielded from opinions they don’t like and that they’re victims because they have to deal with normal human struggles.

Then, when they got to adulthood, many of them were terrified because they’d never really been prepared to be an adult because mom and dad (or in many cases, just mom) were around to do everything for them.

So, to a lot of these kids, the idea of getting out on their own and being responsible for their own life is frightening.

That, not economics, is really the biggest reason that this is happening:

How are you ready to get married, be an asset to society, or even call yourself a real adult if you can’t cut it without living with mom and dad?

If you point this out, you get fed a flood of self-pitying nonsense about how it’s tougher than ever for Gen Z. If you note that every generation has struggles and it’s really not tougher than ever, the response is usually something akin to, “Okay Boomer,” as if that’s supposed to be some sort of devastating comeback.

Setting aside the fact that there are lots of people that aren’t Boomers pointing out Gen Z doesn’t have it uniquely badly and that just noting someone is a Boomer doesn’t automatically mean they’re wrong, what challenge has Gen Z faced that’s as tough as the one the Boomers dealt with during the Vietnam War?

Oh, that’s right. Nothing. Nothing even close.

Still, I want to be fair about this. So, let me address the biggest complaints I hear from Generation Z that supposedly explain why they have it so tough.

The first is housing.

There is no question that the cost of housing has gone up significantly since COVID and the market isn’t turning over very fast right now because of high interest rates. So, if the standard is, “Are houses cheap right now?” then the answer is, “No.”

However, houses are also not extraordinarily expensive either compared to historical rates. In fact, the cost per square foot of a home hasn’t gone up much since the 1970s. On the other hand, what has gone up dramatically since then is how much space each person thinks they need in a home:

If you say, “I still can’t afford a house! I’d have to get roommates!” Well, join the club. There’s nothing new about that. I had roommates. Most of my friends had roommates. That has been a standard thing for decades for many people in their twenties.

The other claim is that everything is so expensive now that they can’t possibly afford it. Again, it’s true that since COVID we certainly had a big burst of inflation caused by the FED dramatically increasing the money supply. But if you compare apples to apples, Gen Z is doing better than any generation that came before them in disposable income:

However, you know where Gen Z is not doing fine? In their expectations. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that people who grew up looking at influencers flexing their wealth on social media have skewed expectations about what a “necessity” is and what you need to make it, but this seems a little bit on a loopy side:

By the way, if you’re wondering what percentage of Americans earn $587.8k or more in a given year (it’s worth noting that doesn’t mean EVERY year, it means in any given year), it’s about .5% of the population. So, roughly 99.5% of Generation Z is destined to be a financial failure by their own standards.

Does the fact that Generation Z is the most sheltered generation in history play into these extreme ideas about what it takes to be financially successful?

I’m sure it does – and that ties into the whole reason you should kick your kids out of the house when they turn 18.

The job of a parent is to turn their kids into functional, capable adults. If they’re living at home, mom’s doing their laundry, dad’s buying them dinner and they’re lying on the couch, playing a video game for hours a day, they’re not adults in any meaningful sense. They’re still children. How long are you going to extend your child’s adolescence? To 22? 25? 30? At what point should you tell your child, “It’s time to leave the nest and go out on your own?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t help your kids. I was still driving a beater my parents bought me when I was in high school, long after I left the house and they paid for my college. So, they did a LOT for me.

But there was also never a question whether I was going to be leaving at 18 on their part or mine. I would have been DEEPLY ASHAMED if I had to go back home and mooch off my parents. So, I took crap jobs. I had roommates. Let me also note that none of that makes me exceptional in any way. It was just normal and expected that things would be that way both for my friends and me.

It’s also true that I, and a lot of my friends, struggled a good bit. Some people don’t like the idea of their kids struggling, but struggle gets a bad rap. It’s making it through the struggle that helps you make better decisions in the future, gives you resilience, and teaches you that you can handle tough situations. It’s something that all adults need to learn to do if they’re going to be successful in life. Allowing them to boot that down the road to their mid-twenties or later probably isn’t going to help their development as a human being.

That being said, don’t get me wrong. If you want to set up some kind of deal with your kids where they pay rent for a little while or work their behinds off and build a nest egg by living with you for a few months, that makes perfect sense. You’re doing your part to help your kid get ahead, not keeping baby bird under your wing.

However, many Americans are clearly going far beyond that and allowing their kids to extend their childhood into their mid-twenties (or even later) on mom and dad’s dime. That’s not good for mom and dad, or even their kids, who need to grow up and start acting like adults. There were ancient Roman boys marrying at 14 and American soldiers fighting in the Civil War at 15. Surely, if your kid is really an adult, they should be able to start making their way in the world at 18, as so many hundreds of millions of adults before them have done through the years.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Isiah Chance is a great example of this.

You may be thinking, “Who the hell is Isaiah Chance?” Well, Isaiah Chance killed a rapper that I had never even heard of before named Julio Foolio. Apparently, Julio Foolio was a member of a rival gang, and Chance, along with some other members of his gang, murdered him in a hotel parking lot.

This kind of thing probably happens every weekend in Chicago, but what really caught my attention about this case was when Chance said this in court:

“It ain’t worth it… the dissing, the beefing, the shooting. For what?”

It’s like, how is he just figuring this out? How does everyone not know this already?

Believe it or not, despite the fact this guy was wearing an ankle monitor at the time, he was still good with murdering someone in a hotel parking lot and apparently never really considered how badly this could go for him until it was too late.

Sometimes, even if you can’t excuse stupid things that people do, you can at least SORT OF understand it. Maybe they’re an addict, doing something in the heat of the moment, or they’re really young and have trouble understanding the long-term ramifications of their actions.

On the other hand, Isaiah Chance was 21 years old when he participated in the murder of Julio Foolio. Every 21-year-old, even if they’re not all that smart, should have a pretty good idea of where the gang life ends up. Either you end up dead, in a wheelchair, or in jail. Even if you make it to old age, you’re still a gangbanger who probably doesn’t have sh*t except a lot of people trying to kill you.

It’s a loser’s game.

The thing that’s so mind-blowing is how many mistakes we’re making in our society that are just as obviously dumb as what Isaiah Chance did.

For example, how is it that in 2026, in the country with the highest level of disposable income on earth, we’re having to refight a battle over whether socialism/communism is better than capitalism? This is as close to a settled debate as you’re going to find in history and economics. There is no real argument to be made that socialism/communism is going to produce more prosperity or lift more people out of poverty than capitalism. There are no smart, well-meaning people who will tell you that communism or socialism would improve most people’s lives in America (and if they do say that, either they’re not smart, well meaning, or maybe either). Yet…

We could ask the same kind of questions about our national debt. Everybody knows it’s insanely high. Everybody knows the deficit is out of control. I think most people accept it as a genuine threat to the future of our country. In fact, both parties also use it as a campaign issue when it’s convenient and, of course, ignore it when it isn’t:

Yet, whenever someone (and for the last few decades, that person is always a Republican) tries to do something about the debt, the pushback is enormous and the reaction from the American people is so toxic that nobody is even willing to try anymore other than, God bless him, Elon Musk who faced a literal terrorist campaign from the Left against Tesla as a “thank you”:

We could say the same kind of thing about the border and immigration. If we don’t control our borders, anyone from foreign agents to terrorists, to drug runners, to criminal gangs can walk into our country and do whatever they want.

Yet, the Biden administration alone just allowed millions of illegal aliens to cross into our country, get welfare at the local level, and now are giving welfare to the little anchor babies they had here. We’re also bringing large numbers of Third-Worlders with no skills here legally and immediately putting many of them on welfare long-term.

How could any intelligent person (or even an unintelligent person) think this is a good idea? It’s obviously, incredibly, stupid, and the only reason it’s not destroying the whole country… yet…is because we’re so wealthy.

In Europe, where this policy has led to mass rapes, riots, no-go zones for police, huge increases in the welfare rolls, and talk of violence and civil war, they mostly seem to be giving up and preparing to die:

Palantir CEO Alex Karp notes that when he talks to a lot of European elites, many of them don’t think much of Europe will exist in 50 years. Does he mean this literally? Figuratively? Because it is genuinely possible that many European nations won’t exist in 50 years or will exist in name only, while they’ll be nothing but deeply declining babysitting services for immigrants who consider them to be suckers to be fleeced and care nothing about their nation.

Of course, it’s not like it’s fate or something they can’t do anything about. All they need to do is fix their immigration policies, lessen the power of the state, and loosen up on the regulations so their entrepreneurs can innovate, and they’d probably be fine. That’s essentially what JD Vance and Donald Trump have been telling them, but what has the reaction been? Moaning, crying, and whining while they wait for their nations to fade away and die.

The same can happen here. In fact, the same thing WILL HAPPEN here if we don’t bring some sanity back to our immigration policies.

In the end, all it will take to ruin America for future generations is to stay on autopilot and continue to studiously ignore all these issues that aren’t hard to see at all. It’s like being on the Titanic and debating whether the biggest danger is from giant squids or sea mines when everyone can see you’re steaming toward an iceberg at full speed. For God’s sake, stop the ship and at least change direction away from the icebergs we can all see before worrying about everything else.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Of course, as I got older, wiser, and learned more about history, I realized that time didn’t freeze and stop after the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. We fought together with the British in WWI and WWII, and they were our strongest ally during the Cold War. So, my opinion of the British changed.

This came back to me recently because so many Japanese people really went out of their way to wish the United States a happy 250^th anniversary:

The reaction to this seemed to be heartfelt gratitude and thank yous from American conservatives, while Third Worlders, liberals, and Chinese accounts basically yowled the equivalent of, “How can you say nice things about America when they nuked you in WWII?”

Of course, we did nuke Japan in WWII, and they could choose to hate us because of that just as we could choose to detest the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor, the way our prisoners of war were treated, and the fact that they dragged us into a war that cost a lot of American lives.

On the other hand, America and Japan have been friends for something like 75 years at this point. Both countries seem to like and respect each other’s culture. We have helped them out with things like Operation Tomodachi after an earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear crisis there, and they’re responsible for the famous cherry trees we have in DC:

What’s more important? What happened in WWII or 75 years of friendship and respect?

That depends on the lens you view the world through, doesn’t it? If you want to focus on what matters today, you focus on friendship, shared values, and reasons for both nations to get along.

On the other hand, if you’re all about victimhood and nursing grievances, no matter which side you’re on, you focus on all the ugliness of WWII.

Liberals are very much trapped in the second way of thinking.

In fact, if you listened to the things many of them were saying on X about America’s 250th birthday, you’d almost certainly get the opinion that they like America less than the Japanese do:

Alicia Keys is the perfect one to end on because she’s so typical of the kind of complaints that liberals have:

Here’s a woman who became a famous singer in America and is worth 150 million dollars. If we were coming up with a list of the richest people in all of human history, she’d be in the top 1%. She’s one of the most fortunate, privileged people to have ever walked planet Earth, yet what is she doing on the 250^th anniversary of America? Talking about how great the country must be to have given her these opportunities? Noting that she wouldn’t have been as successful anywhere else? Talking about her gratitude for being in such a great nation?

No, instead she’s whining about how bad it is here for women and trying to convince people women don’t have equal rights. What rights are those that women don’t have? Nobody seems to be able to give a good answer to that question.

This is just how liberals are now. It’s their nature.

“I’m a victim. Feel sorry for me! Everything is terrible here because I don’t like something! Nothing is anyone’s fault except the people I don’t like, who have it too easy! I’ve got it so hard! I like that group of people, so they have it hard, too! Everyone is oppressing us! There’s nothing good here because I want something and I don’t have it and not enough people are falling all over themselves to acknowledge how tough people like me have it! Wah! Wah! Wah!”

It’s so tiresome and tedious to listen to the Left’s obsessive and incredibly hypocritical focus on victimhood. Because it’s all self-serving. You get victimized by a liberal or some group liberals treat like brain-damaged puppies who can’t be held responsible for peeing the rug, and they care nothing about your problems. In fact, you deserved it because they don’t care about people like you, and people they don’t care about are always the oppressor somehow, never the victim, even when they’re getting stabbed, having their business burned down, or having some left-wing pervert sexually harassing them in a women’s locker room.

There’s no gratitude from liberals, no helping people learn to better themselves, no appreciation of America, all because those things run counter to their entire being. They’re focused on explaining why the patriarchy is responsible for them wasting 180k on an art degree from an Ivy League school or why white people made them end up in jail for robbing houses or how it’s not fair that they have to pay rent because all housing should be free.

If the only tool you have in life is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. If everything in your life revolves around victimhood, you have to explain why you’re losing, even if you’re winning. In fact, it goes double if you’re winning, because you don’t want the other people who think like you and aren’t as successful to decide to blame you for all their failures in life.

That’s why black liberals are still talking about slavery and white Democrats never shut up about the historical sins of America, even though if you look closely, you’ll find they’re responsible for most of them.

Liberals always have to live the famous meme…

…because if they tell the truth, which is that America is a great country, you have more opportunity here than anywhere else on the planet, and that many of the things liberals complain about are imaginary, not serious problems or not things the government should be involved in, it creates all kinds of issues if you’re a liberal.

Other liberals are going to be angry at you for “invalidating their struggle” by noting most problems in life are self-created. It also raises questions like, “If we just need to keep doing the things that made America great to keep it great, then what do we need liberals for?” Next thing you know, you’re actually saying we should hold everyone to the same standard and that if illegals didn’t want to get deported, they shouldn’t have come here illegally in the first place. You can’t be a good liberal if you abandon victimhood and start telling people to take personal responsibility.

Take away the victimhood complex, and you take away liberalism.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Obviously, a list like that is going to be somewhat arbitrary, in that different people value different things. A great example of this would be Elvis Presley. One of the greatest singers of all time? Absolutely. But how does he compare to great scientists? Presidents? Business leaders? Generals? How do you compare Elvis to General Patton or Nikola Tesla?

Furthermore, it’s hard to rank people that are still living because their legacy is not yet complete. Do people like Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates get considered now, or do we need to wait until they’ve passed to fully determine their standing?

Difficulties aside, here are people I think deserve to be considered the 100 greatest Americans in history on the 250^th Anniversary of America.

Business Leaders and Industrialists

1) John D. Rockefeller — Built Standard Oil and became America’s defining industrial magnate. First American billionaire.

2) Andrew Carnegie — Steel titan and major philanthropist.

3) Steve Jobs — Probably the single most influential consumer technology entrepreneur ever.

4) J.P. Morgan — Banker who reorganized American industry and stabilized markets.

5) Elon Musk — Built or led PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X. First trillionaire.

6) Cornelius Vanderbilt — Railroad and shipping magnate.

7) Walt Disney — Built one of the world’s most influential entertainment empires.

8) Sam Walton — Founded Walmart and transformed retail.

Civil Rights, Religion, and Reformers

9) Susan B. Anthony — Perhaps the single most recognizable leader of the women’s suffrage movement.

10) Martin Luther King Jr. — Led the civil-rights movement through non-violent moral protest.

11) Frederick Douglass — Abolitionist, writer, and orator who exposed slavery’s evil.

12) Jonathan Edwards — The leading theologian of the First Great Awakening, whose preaching helped spark America’s first nationwide religious revival.

13) Billy Graham — America’s most influential modern evangelist.

Explorers

14) Neil Armstrong — The first human to walk on the Moon.

15) Daniel Boone — Frontiersman and explorer who helped open Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian West to American settlement.

16) Meriwether Lewis and William Clark — Explorers, soldiers, mapmakers, and co-leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, whose journals and maps helped define America’s western expansion.

17) Amelia Earhart — Pioneering aviator who became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and a symbol of American daring.

18) Charles Lindbergh — Aviator whose first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic transformed aviation and made him one of the most celebrated Americans of the twentieth century.

19) John Muir — Explorer-naturalist who mapped and championed Yosemite and other wilderness areas, helping create the national park system.

20) John Wesley Powell — First to navigate the Grand Canyon through the Colorado River and became one of America’s greatest scientific explorers.

Founders, Presidents, and Statesmen

21) John Adams — Key architect of independence, first vice president, second president, and staunch defender of the Constitution and independent judiciary.

22) Benjamin Franklin — Founding Father, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and one of the most versatile Americans ever.

23) Thomas Jefferson — Wrote the Declaration of Independence and helped define America’s ideals of liberty and self-government.

24) Alexander Hamilton — Built the foundations of America’s financial system.

25) Abraham Lincoln — Preserved the Union, ended slavery, and became America’s greatest wartime president.

26) John Paul Jones — Revolutionary naval hero known as the father of the U.S. Navy.

27) James Madison — “Father of the Constitution” and key architect of the Bill of Rights.

28) Thomas Paine — Wrote Common Sense, arguably the most influential political pamphlet in American history.

29) Ronald Reagan — Revitalized conservatism as president and helped pressure the Soviet Union near the Cold War’s end.

30) Theodore Roosevelt — Progressive reformer, conservationist, trustbuster, and energetic national leader.

31) George Washington — Led the Continental Army, became the first president, and set the model for peaceful republican leadership.

Inventors, Engineers, and Technology

32) Willis Carrier — Invented the first modern air conditioning system.

33) Thomas Edison — Prolific inventor who commercialized electric light, sound recording, and motion pictures.

34) Nikola Tesla — Serbian-born American inventor central to AC electrical systems.

35) Alexander Graham Bell — Inventor credited with the telephone.

36) Henry Ford — Revolutionized manufacturing and mass-market automobiles.

37) Samuel F.B. Morse — Invented the telegraph and Morse code, creating the first long-distance electronic communication system.

38) Eli Whitney — Invented the cotton gin (revolutionized southern agriculture) and pioneered the concept of interchangeable parts (foundation of modern manufacturing).

39) Orville and Wilbur Wright — Co-inventors of the first successful airplane.

Military Leaders and Heroes

40) Douglas MacArthur — Major World War II and Korean War commander.

41) Dwight D. Eisenhower — Supreme Allied commander of D-Day and later president.

42) Ulysses S. Grant — Union general whose victories defeated the Confederacy.

43) Andrew Jackson — Hero of the Battle of New Orleans and later president.

44) George C. Marshall — Army Chief of Staff who organized America’s victory in World War II and later created the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Western Europe after the war.

45) George S. Patton — Aggressive armored commander in World War II.

46) Winfield Scott — Dominant general of the Mexican-American War and early Civil War strategist; one of the most influential 19th-century military figures.

47) William Tecumseh Sherman — Union general whose campaigns helped break the Confederacy.

Musicians, Actors, Directors, and Artists

48) Louis Armstrong — Revolutionary jazz trumpeter and singer who helped create and popularize jazz worldwide; one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.

49) Marilyn Monroe — Actress and sex symbol whose image became globally iconic.

50) Elvis Presley — Rock-and-roll icon who transformed popular music.

51) Steven Spielberg — Most commercially and culturally successful film director in history; shaped modern blockbuster cinema and historical storytelling.

52) John Wayne — Western icon and symbol of rugged American masculinity.

53) Frank Lloyd Wright — America’s greatest architect and one of the most influential architects in world history.

Scientists, Medicine, and Space

54) Norman Borlaug — Agricultural scientist who developed high-yield crops that helped save hundreds of millions of people from famine.

55) Vinton Cerf — Often called one of the “Fathers of the Internet.” He co-designed the TCP/IP protocol that allows independent computer networks to communicate. Without TCP/IP, there is no modern Internet

56) Albert Einstein — German-born physicist who became an American citizen and transformed modern physics.

57) Enrico Fermi — Italian-American physicist who revolutionized quantum and nuclear physics and led the creation of the world’s first controlled nuclear reactor.

58) J. Robert Oppenheimer — Scientific leader of the Manhattan Project.

59) Jonas Salk — Developed the first effective polio vaccine.

60) Claude Shannon — Mathematician and engineer who founded information theory, laying the mathematical foundation for the digital age.

Sports Figures and Athletes

61) Muhammad Ali — Boxing champion and global symbol of charisma, protest, and conviction.

62) Tom Brady — Most accomplished quarterback in NFL history.

63) Michael Jordan — Basketball’s greatest global icon.

64) Jesse Owens — Won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

65) Michael Phelps — Most decorated Olympian in history.

66) Babe Ruth — Baseball’s first great home-run superstar.

67) Jackie Robinson — Broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier.

Writers, Journalists, Judges, and Philosophers

68) Ernest Hemingway — One of America’s most internationally influential literary figures.

69) William James — Philosopher and psychologist, founder of pragmatism.

70) John Marshall — Probably the greatest judge in American history; established judicial review and greatly strengthened the Supreme Court.

71) Edgar Allan Poe — Pioneer of horror, detective fiction, and psychological literature.

72) Ayn Rand — Russian-born novelist and philosopher of Objectivism.

73) Henry David Thoreau — His ideas on civil disobedience influenced figures including Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

74) Antonin Scalia — Perhaps the most influential conservative justice of the late twentieth century and a leading advocate of originalism.

75) Mark Twain — America’s greatest humorist and author of Huckleberry Finn.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

When people hear numbers like that, they often think how great it would be to have that kind of virtually limitless supply of money... except, as it turns out, it’s not as limitless as it seems since Floyd Mayweather apparently has serious money troubles.

Boxer Floyd Mayweather is facing two felony charges alleging theft and “intent to defraud” by passing a bad check to purchase a $200,000 watch in Las Vegas, according to Nevada court records.

Mayweather was not present for a Clark County court hearing Monday and was instead represented by his counsel. Mayweather’s official charges are “theft, value $100,000 or greater” and “draw or pass check with intent to defraud, value $1,200 or greater.”

...It is the latest in a litany of legal woes for Mayweather.

Plaintiffs in separate civil cases in at least four states allege Mayweather owes them money. The Internal Revenue Service has a tax lien of more than $7.2 million levied against Mayweather for unpaid taxes in 2018 and 2023. A Las Vegas-area gated community filed a separate lien of over $22,500.

The IRS declined comment about Mayweather’s lien, saying the agency cannot discuss or release tax information.

Has Floyd Mayweather filed for bankruptcy? Nope. Is he broke? Probably not in the sense that most of us think of. He owns a lot of expensive assets, still has big earning potential, and probably isn’t cancelling his Netflix subscription and eating Ramen noodles to save money.

Still, I think most of us just assume that if we made a billion dollars, money woes would be off the table for good. So, why hasn’t that happened for Floyd Mayweather?

Well, the problem is his spending.

Per BroBible, which turned Floyd Mayweather’s insane spending habits into a whole article, here are some of the things he spent money on.

• He owns 50+ cars worth more than $40 million and has someone whose full-time job is to sanitize his cars.

• He supposedly has a fully stocked candy shop inside his home.

• He has multiple watches worth more than $1 million, including one watch that’s worth $18 million.

• He owned a $50,000 diamond-encrusted iPod.

• Supposedly, his jewelry collection is worth $50 million. He has multiple pieces worth more than $1 million, and there are claims he never travels with less than $5 million worth of jewelry at a time.

• There are claims he was paying his barber $1,000 per haircut and his chef $1,000 per meal.

• He has not one, but two private jets.

• He spends millions per year gambling, reportedly bet more than $5 million on a single game, and there are claims he lost $100 million in a single year.

As you read about all this, you’re probably thinking, “This sounds INSANE! Why would anyone spend that much money on such trivial things?”

Well, what if I told you that most people with long-term financial troubles have the exact same financial problem that Floyd Mayweather does, albeit on a much lower level?

What do I mean by that?

I mean that most people who struggle with money long-term have that problem because they consistently allow their expenses to rise to meet their level of income.

This is why, no matter who the President is, roughly 60% of Americans end up living paycheck to paycheck. It’s why roughly one-third of Americans making over a quarter of a million dollars per year are living paycheck to paycheck. It’s also why this happens:

A 2009 Sports Illustrated report estimated that 78% of National Football League (NFL) players file for bankruptcy or are experiencing financial stress only two years after retiring, and 60% of National Basketball Association (NBA) players suffer the same fate after five years of retirement.

All of this is a result of natural human tendencies that may not be logical, but that are quite common.

1. When you get to a certain level of income, it’s very easy to assume that the money will keep coming in at least at that level from then on.

2. When your expenses seem to level off, it’s easy to forget that surprise bills, sometimes very large ones, are eventually going to happen.

3. It’s very easy to start buying things not because you need them, but because you’re trying to live up to other people’s expectations. The moment you start thinking that you have to live in a big house, wear Gucci, drive a luxury car, or wear a Rolex because of what other people may think, that’s the moment your finances become about impressing other people and keeping up with appearances instead of doing what’s best for your future.

Unless you’re specifically thinking about these issues, this type of thinking often happens almost automatically.

Let’s say you’re making $30,000 per year with nothing left over, living with roommates, and driving a clunker. What are you going to think when you make $40,000? “AWESOME! Now, I can get my own place, get a better car, and pay all my bills on time!” Except, next thing you know, you’re living by yourself, you have payments on the new car, and you’re struggling even more than before to pay your bills.

Then, you get a raise to $50,000! Now, all your problems are over for sure! Well, except you do need a new living room suite so you can get rid of that crummy couch your cousin gave you. Also, you start eating out at lunch every day because you can “afford it,” you overspend a bit to go on a vacation, you start paying a trainer $50 per hour, three days a week, to get in shape, etc., etc., etc. Now, you’re struggling to pay your bills at $50,000 per year.

As you can see by looking at Floyd Mayweather, there’s always something else you can spend your money on, even when you make a billion dollars.

So, how do you beat this?

All you need to do is budget and set aside money to save and invest first, then spend what’s left over. If those numbers won’t work, then you either need to work more or spend less until they do.

It really is that simple.

The unfortunate part is that it’s also boring, it takes a lot of discipline, and it requires putting your long-term interests ahead of what you want right now. It may not seem like it if you’ve never done it, but not having to struggle to pay your bills is worth more than anything you can do for “fun” or to impress other people with your money. If you don’t believe that, try it for a year, and you will change your mind.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

When the Empire was strong, and Roman culture was thriving, the border was defended, and tribes allowed in were often split up and sent to different parts of the empire to learn to assimilate.

Over time, as the Roman Empire grew more decadent, corrupt, and unpatriotic, it became harder for them to maintain the military. When the Huns started pushing other tribes into the Empire, the Romans weren’t sure they’d be strong enough to keep them out. So, they let them enter in great numbers, and they also no longer had the will, common sense, or believed in their own culture enough to split the tribes up. Instead, they let them stay together and become the backbone of their military. Eventually, the tribesmen, who were militarized and loyal to each other, not the Romans, sacked Rome and took control of the western half of the Empire.

Is that what’s happening today in America? Not exactly, but as Mark Twain was reputed to have said:

Yes, immigration can make a country stronger. It certainly made the Romans stronger until it helped cause their destruction, and the same thing can happen here. In fact, it probably will happen here if we continue down the same insane road we’re currently on with immigration. For people with eyes to see, there are red danger signs the size of Times Square billboards flashing all around us. You see it in story after story about the shocking number of foreigners being brought into our country and the poor overall quality of immigrants we’re getting.

We are getting to the point where we’re bringing in so many welfare recipients from Somalia, one of the most dysfunctional nations on earth, that American politicians are trying to show their loyalty to Somalia to get their votes:

In a sane world, the number of immigrants America would bring into our country from a backward country like Somalia would be close to zero, yet they’re being brought here in large enough numbers to swing elections, given welfare, and allowed to commit fraud at will in places like Minnesota because they’re reliable votes for the Democratic Party.

This is madness.

So is the idea that the mayor of America’s largest city, Zohran Mamdani, is a “Democratic Socialist” from Uganda who has his job because of strong support by foreign-born Americans:

As we speak, a foreign-born judge is blocking some of Trump’s legislation:

After reading all of this, you might be thinking, “Gee, it sounds like this guy is saying that immigrants to America shouldn’t be eligible for welfare, to be judges, or be allowed to hold leadership positions in Congress or as governors or mayors.”

That is exactly correct.

The Founders explicitly disallowed foreign-born citizens from being President in the Constitution, but given how small America was at the time, they probably thought it was too restrictive to apply that across the board for a fast-growing nation of 4 million citizens and assumed we’d just amend the Constitution as we got bigger or if it ever turned into a problem.

If only.

It’s also worth noting that bizarrely, after 9/11, America significantly INCREASED the amount of Muslim immigration to our country:

There are wonderful human beings that are Muslims, but everywhere you see Muslims reach significant numbers in the West, you see massive increases in sexual assaults, terrorist attacks, refusals to assimilate, and attempts to radically change the culture for the worse. This doesn’t mean every Muslim is a bad person. That’s certainly not true. But it’s an open question whether Islam is compatible with Western civilization once their numbers increase in a society, and if you had to answer based on all the available evidence, it would be, “No.”

Is immigration currently THE BIGGEST threat to America’s future? Realistically, you’d probably have to say the debt and the Left trying to create a one-party state are bigger threats, but immigration, both legal and illegal, may be next in line.

That’s unfortunate because merit based immigration could be a positive for America, and it really shouldn’t even be a political issue. If our immigration policies revolved around what was good for America, instead of trying to bring a new electorate into the country to boost the chances of Democrats taking and holding power, every single problem we’re talking about here and dozens that haven’t been discussed could easily be fixed within a few years.

Of course, that’s a little like saying that if the crazy person in the boat with you would stop trying to punch holes in the bottom of the ship, it wouldn’t sink. What if Democrats don’t care about what’s good for the country? What if they keep allowing in illegals by the millions, flooding the country with Third World welfare cases, and encouraging radical Islamists to come here? Well, if they do that and they’re not stopped, it’s not going to end well for our country. The Romans could have told you all about how it turns out.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Still, a lot of people claim not to understand why communism doesn’t work, so let’s start at the very beginning.

What is communism? Here’s a very good definition from Britannica:

Communism: Political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society. Communism is thus a form of socialism—a higher and more advanced form, according to its advocates. Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists’ adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx.

Like most writers of the 19th century, Marx tended to use the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), however, Marx identified two phases of communism that would follow the predicted overthrow of capitalism: the first would be a transitional system in which the working class would control the government and economy yet still find it necessary to pay people according to how long, hard, or well they worked, and the second would be fully realized communism—a society without class divisions or government, in which the production and distribution of goods would be based upon the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Marx’s followers, especially the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin, took up this distinction.

Now, you might be thinking, “So communism and socialism are pretty close to the same thing?” Yes, they are. I’d also add that modern American liberalism/progressivism, fascism, and Nazism are all branches of that same tree, although you’ll never get liberals to admit it. However, we’re going to save the litigation of that issue for another column and get on with the topic at hand.

Let’s start by talking about the two most important features of communism: The idea that we’re all going to share the fruits of our labor and the overwhelming power of government that has to go along with it to make that happen:

First of all, there is at least one place in our society where this type of thinking ACTUALLY WORKS most of the time. It’s the family unit. Maybe dad’s working sixty hours per week, mom’s taking care of the house and the kids, big sis watches her little brother sometimes, and he… well, he’s three, so he’s mostly dead weight.

Still, everybody gets fed, and it all works out. But why? Because these are people who are committed to each other. They’re bound by blood, and parents and children naturally care deeply about one another.

When you try to take that philosophy outside of the family unit, it immediately falls apart because the rest of the world isn’t your family. You don’t have the same level of concern and willingness to sacrifice for everyone else as you do for your spouse or your kids. Sure, charity exists, but very few human beings take charity as far as the dad in our example, who’s working far harder for his family than he would probably work for himself.

In fact, not only do people not want to provide for each other’s needs, THEY OFTEN DEEPLY RESENT being asked to do so. If I were allowed to opt out of having my taxes go to welfare, food stamps, and public housing, I would do it in a heartbeat. A large percentage of the population feels the same way about these heavily abused programs.

Since that’s the case, communism destroys the incentive for people to work hard. If a highly skilled, genius engineer who is putting eighty-hour weeks in at SpaceX for a quarter of a million per year can’t make more than a fast-food worker, why would he put himself through that? What’s the point of putting your money on the line, taking a huge risk, and working yourself to death for years starting a business if you’re not allowed to benefit from it? Communists love the idea that people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Jensen Huang wouldn’t exist under communism, but they don’t understand that their companies wouldn’t exist either. Those companies never would have been started under communism, and the companies that already existed after a communist takeover would fall to pieces because there’s no incentive for highly skilled workers to push themselves to make it work.

In other words, under communism, there’s no real incentive to work hard, produce, or create anything new. Sure, a bunch of lazy bums and resentful people being forced to work at jobs they neither want nor care about will still produce SOMETHING, but it’s going to be a fraction of what they would have produced under a capitalist system. This is why the more communism, socialism, or progressivism you have, the more poverty you’ll have that inevitably goes along with it.

This brings us to the second problem with communism, which is that it makes the government into the nexus of all activity. All the money, power, and important decisions in society end up involving the government.

When you start asking people like Zohan Mamdani, who was a subway rapper in NYC, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was a bartender, to decide where the capital for the whole country should go, it’s going to be an economic disaster equivalent to setting off nuclear bombs in a dozen American cities. Under communism, you end up with people who aren’t smart or experienced enough to know what they’re doing in ANY FIELD, making decisions about EVERY FIELD instead of letting the market decide where to allocate capital. If you want to know why 30-40 million people starved to death under Mao in China, it was because he was making critical decisions about farming that impacted the whole nation when he had no idea what he was doing.

On top of this, communists also have to keep a lid on the people who are angry about the corruption that inevitably goes along with it. If the government gets to choose where to distribute everything, the one thing you can be sure of is that the government and its loyalists will get a much better deal than everyone else:

Furthermore, a large portion of the population simply won’t voluntarily live under a communist system, so those people have to be forced to comply with things like gulags, secret police, social credit systems, and the Tiananmen Square massacre. Given time, ALL COMMUNIST GOVERNMENTS turn into authoritarian governments that heavily oppress their citizens because free people won’t willingly choose to live under communism long-term.

If you’re a normal person, you’ll probably read this and think, “Why would anyone want to do this?” Well, there are two groups of people who at least believe they will benefit tremendously under communism.

The laziest, most unskilled, most envious people like the idea of coasting through life, being guaranteed a bare minimum, and having the people who are better than them knocked down a few pegs.

The other group of people who love the idea of communism are the ones who imagine themselves being in charge. Then, forget about the athletes, movie stars and billionaires, they’d be the ones getting the special privileges, telling everyone else what to do, and being the most important people in society.

What it all comes down to is that communism destroys freedom, impoverishes nations, and turns the people into slaves of the state. No one who loves this country would want that kind of future for it.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Then, a year later, someone tells you that same homeless guy got so into methamphetamines that he lost his appetite, spent his time yelling at imaginary people, and literally starved to death in a back alley.

Then, they say, “And you know who’s responsible for that? YOU ARE. He starved to death because YOU didn’t keep giving him food every day! How could you let him die? YOU are responsible for his death!”

You would probably think someone who said that was insane, but that’s essentially what Democrats like Ro Khana are doing to Elon Musk right now. According to Ro Khana, Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of 4.5 million CHILDREN:

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will need to be investigated for the “4.5 million children” whom he “possibly sentenced to death” through his spending cuts, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., argued Saturday.

Khanna suggested that the Democratic Party take the initiative to hold Musk accountable if they were to regain control over the House of Representatives or the Senate.

“I do believe once we take power, there needs to be accountability,” Khanna said on the “I’ve Had It” podcast. “There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk. You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires, but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.”

Khanna continued, “He needs to answer for that. He needs to be subpoenaed. He needs to face an investigation. He needs to answer for what he did with DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency]. It’s not just ‘let’s move on.’”

So, the first thing you may be wondering is where he got that number. Are there dead children piling up somewhere?

No, there aren’t.

Khanna got that number from a report in The Lancet, which is an old, prestigious, peer reviewed medical journal that has seen its reputation decline as it has turned into a vehicle for left-wing activism that posts political messages about everything from global warming, to racism, to the Palestinians. Although there are certainly plenty of doctors who still read The Lancet, no serious person would treat it as credible on any claims it makes related to political issues.

Speaking of which, when DOGE was making cuts to the USAID budget in 2025, The Lancet did a completely nonsensical, utterly unscientific “report” claiming that it would result in 14 million deaths.

The entire thing was little more than an opinion piece featuring “researchers” eyeballing USAID numbers, making wild guesses about how many people they helped, and then declaring that all those people would die by 2030 without that aid.

The report was completely non-logical and non-replicable in that if you had twenty groups of people independently working on the same project, all of them would have come up with different methodologies and different numbers that may have had very little relation to each other. In other words, it was the equivalent of a “report” determining how many space aliens exist.

There’s also an enormous, glaring flaw in the whole study. It starts with the assumption that the United States is the only entity with free will on the entire planet.

What do I mean by that?

Well, as a starting point, what about the people getting aid? If food isn’t being shipped to your village by the Americans anymore, you can always move, grow your own food, start hunting, work extra to buy more food, work for the local rich guy if he has all the food, etc., etc., etc. If the supermarket you like best closed, you wouldn’t just keep going there endlessly until you starved to death, you’d go somewhere different to get food. People have been adjusting their behavior to get more food since there were people.

Still, people do starve or get sick on a wide scale. What happens then? Well, typically, their government steps in. If, let’s say, Rapid City, South Dakota, has no food or, God forbid, an outbreak of Ebola happens, it’s not going to be Haiti or Kenya coming to help them; it will be their own government at the state and national level.

Sometimes, if the government is incompetent, malicious, or too poor to help, others will step in… note that I said “others,” which could theoretically include lots of nations, individuals, and organizations outside of the United States. It could be the United Nations, China, Russia, Europe, Japan, NGOs, billionaires – it could even be Ro Khana, who is worth 200 million dollars. That money could feed millions in Haiti, Ro Khana, so why are you killing them by hoarding it?

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that giving someone charity today doesn’t mean you have made a lifetime commitment to be responsible for them. You’re not “letting them die” if you don’t choose to take care of them for the rest of their lives, which is seemingly what The Lancet report implies.

The Lancet was projecting out deaths until 2030 because of the United States stopping aid in 2025. Why not 2035? Why not 2050? Hell, why not just hold the United States responsible for every person on the planet that dies that we COULD HAVE potentially helped? “Oh, a man in China died of a heart condition his village doctor couldn’t fix, but a surgeon in the United States could have corrected it. Guess that’s one more person the United States killed!”

This is all ludicrous.

No country that is running deficits year after year should be pouring billions of dollars in aid into other countries unless they’re getting an enormous amount of value in return. Our country is 39 trillion dollars in debt, and even if USAID really was all charity, as opposed to a little charity mixed in with a large left-wing slush fund, there’s no way we should be putting our country deeper into debt to pay for it. So, cutting off that money was the right thing to do, and the proper response isn’t to try to accuse Elon Musk and, by extension, America, of murdering people by the millions for not taking care of them forever; it’s to say “thank you” for all the charity we already gave them.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Here’s how Gad Saad described “Suicidal empathy” in an opinion piece for the New York Post:

Empathy is an admirable virtue; as a social species, we have evolved the capacity for empathy. We seek prospective spouses and close friends who exhibit this trait.

We look for empathetic healthcare providers, be they physicians, therapists, or veterinarians.

But as Aristotle explained millennia ago via his golden mean, all good things in moderation. Too little or too much of anything is often worse than some optimal sweet spot.

This insight applies to empathy as well. Little or no empathy is a hallmark of psychopaths. Too much of it is a telltale sign of the suicidally empathetic, which also includes invoking empathy in the wrong situations for the wrong targets.

Suicidal empathy results in the misfiring of an adaptive virtue in ways that result in the willful suicide of one’s civilization. In Japan, seppuku was the act of self-disembowelment that a samurai would commit to redress the shame of his actions.

I argue that the West is committing civilizational seppuku via suicide by empathy.

First of all, just to be clear, if you know relatively normal liberals that aren’t particularly political, you’ve probably seen them display something akin to normal human empathy. Plenty of liberals like that exist, although they are much rarer in the political world.

What Gad Saad is describing also exists, and we can see it all around us. Insane behaviors that liberals engage in and endorse that undermine our whole civilization, which are justified via “empathy” and “kindness.”

However, I don’t quite agree with Gad Saad’s thesis, because I don’t think what he’s describing is empathy in any real sense. On the contrary, I would call it “performative empathy.”

What does that mean?

It means that most liberals who are deeply involved in the political arena have about as much empathy as a serial killer, and everything you see from them that is described as “empathy” is either designed to benefit people on “their side” or make them look good to other liberals.

It’s not real empathy. It’s performative empathy.

You can see the evidence that supports that theory all over the place. Just pick any group of people that liberals claim to compassionately care about.

How about black Americans? According to them, conservatives are racist, and they’re the only people who really care about the welfare of black Americans. But, is that true? Doesn’t their fake empathy only apply to people who help their side? They’re all about black Democrats, black criminals, and black welfare cases, but they don’t give a damn about successful black businessmen or black Americans who don’t serve the Left. That goes double for black conservatives like Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas. They hate them with the heat of a thousand suns. So, much for all that empathy.

What about the homeless? They’re the ones who truly care about the homeless! That’s why they want them to be able to get drugs, live in tent cities on the sidewalks, and let them scream at people on the streets and the subway. So, if they care so much about the homeless, *** cough, cough *** not just funneling money to each other *** cough, cough *** why did they do this?

Liberrals in California spent 160k on 150k homeless people, and the end result was 30k more bums. That’s not kindness. That’s not empathy. That’s just liberals funneling taxpayer money to other liberals in the Homeless Industrial Complex.

What about the trans issue? They’d say they’ve got us there, right? Because they go on and on and on about that one, don’t they? Oh, they really care about those poor people so much… well, unless they detransition, right? Then liberals turn cruel and abusive to the exact same kids they said they care so much about, who were often pushed toward a bad idea, manipulated into embracing it, and often surgically mutilated:

Even setting that aside, there is nothing less empathetic than pushing mentally ill people to do something that causes them to kill themselves at a staggering clip. No one who genuinely cares about another human being would encourage them to go trans:

Well, what about illegal immigrants? Liberals feel all kinds of empathy for them, right? No, of course not. If illegal immigrants benefited conservatives politically, they’d be getting the Luigi Mangione treatment by now. The Left’s love of illegal immigrants 100% revolves around the political advantages they get from them:

What about USAID? Why, liberals care SOOOOOOOO MUCH about doling out money to people in need all over the world, don’t they? Certainly, that must be about empathy, right? No, of course it isn’t. It’s all about making the money you contributed to taxes into THEIR MONEY. They use it as a jobs program and to fund their agenda in America and all across the world:

Yes, liberals care a great deal about things and groups that benefit them, but who doesn’t? What’s supposed to be so empathetic about that? Tell me how empathetic they are for victims of crimes, white people who are discriminated against because of the color of their skin, or people who lose their businesses because of looting or shoplifting? They don’t care if those people live or die, but because they care a lot about getting paid, getting power, and appearing like they care to other liberals, so they want credit for being empathetic. It’s all a performance. Liberals are empathetic people the same way Tobey Maguire is really Spider-Man, or Bill Clinton is a devoted husband. It’s just a role that they play, and the longer it goes on, the easier it is for everyone to see that.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

There are two reasons for that.

The more conventional one that most people would expect is that standards have risen to such an extent that we almost expect many of the most successful people to push themselves to the absolute limits of what human beings can do. When you hear that Kobe Bryant’s trainer had to stay at the gym for thirty minutes after they practiced to keep him from coming back in the middle of the night and working on his game, or that Elon Musk will sometimes get a few hours of sleep per night on a factory floor rather than go home, or that to win the title of strongest man in the world, Eddie Hall literally mapped out every hour of every day for an entire year in advance, it’s hard to conclude that anything short of your absolute best effort will get you to those heights.

However, there is another type of perfectionism that is running rampant in American society and that, perhaps surprisingly, is embraced by an enormous number of unhappy and unsuccessful people. Because social media encourages people to post the highlight reels of their lives and to judge themselves by how much attention they get from others, it causes an awful lot of people to put on a front, play a character, and try to be what they think people want them to be, not who they really are. It also causes a lot of these people to shy away from challenges or just give up entirely because they look at what it would take to achieve their perfect dreams and just say, “This is going to be way too hard. What’s the point of even trying?”

Well, yesterday, I was listening to a podcast that discussed perfectionism, and it reminded me of my days as a perfectionist.

I am someone who used to work 80 hours per week, who did not take days off, and who even worked during vacations. There was a time when I worked out with weights 7 days per week, too, and was obsessive about getting more traffic for my website. When I was younger, I also had a tendency to try to appear to be what I thought people wanted to see while pushing who I really was into the background because I didn’t think the real me would go over as well as the front I showed to the world.

Today, I am not a perfectionist anymore, and I’m considerably happier, much less stressed, and much more authentic than I was back then. Whether you read Culturcidal, see comments I make on social media, hear me as a guest on a radio show, read my book, or talk to me face-to-face, I sound like the same person. That’s because people may like it or not, but everyone gets the real me now.

So, I understand being perfectionistic, and I can tell you about the changes in the way I viewed the world that helped me get out of that unhealthy way of thinking. Hopefully, if you are a perfectionist, this can help you do the same thing.

1) It’s the journey, not the destination

The lie perfectionists tell themselves is that if they win the event, reach the peak, get the highest grade, do the thing just right, be exactly what people want them to be, etc., etc., THEN they’re going to be happy and reap the rewards.

Except this is not even remotely true. For most people, especially people with perfectionistic tendencies, do you know what happens after your perfectionism pays off? After you win the race? Kiss the girl? Make the million dollars?

Five minutes later, you’re going, “Wow, I really did it. That’s amazing! I’m going to have a big steak tonight to celebrate or buy myself something nice. Of course, I guess then I should get back to work on doing it again, even better this time!”

Suffering short term? Sure, go do it. Sometimes we all have to suck it up and do things we don’t want to do for a while, but you should generally ENJOY THE GRIND. I’m not saying life has to always be a Carnival cruise. Ideally, you should be able to push through a good bit of work and unpleasant things and still have a good day, but life is also not supposed to be endless drudgery. Even one of the most famous perfectionists of the last century would have told you that:

2) How can you feel good about people liking you if they’ve never met the real you?

Back in the day, when pick-up artistry was a big thing, there were different approaches to getting women. Some of them emphasized a lot of canned routines, and some people took that to an extreme.

The absolute, no-holds-barred worst one I ever heard that didn’t involve just outright lying from start to finish was a guy who took every woman on the exact same first date. And by EXACT SAME, I mean EXACT SAME. They went to the same restaurant down the street. He’d take her back to his place and play the SAME MOVIE. He’d have the same cute lines he’d drop at the same time in the night.

Honestly, that’s the equivalent of going to a prostitute as far as your self-image is concerned. After all, that woman doesn’t know him any more than a prostitute would have. She was unwittingly playing a role in a play he put on to try to get her into bed, while basically he was one of those wind-up monkeys playing the cymbals in exactly the same way, over and over. There was no real “him” in the interaction.

Sure, it’s great to have people giving you likes online, paying attention to you, and singing your praises, but if they’re just praising a fake persona you put on to get a reaction, how can that feel anything but empty? It would be better to have 5 good friends who really know you and like you as a human being than a million people cheering a made-up identity you’re pretending to be in order to appeal to them.

3) Perfect is boring

All credit for this one should be given to the “Godfather of the Red Pill,” Rollo Tomassi.

Tomassi was writing about that in regard to women becoming bored with “perfect” men, but there’s a lot of truth to it in general.

Perfectionists tend to think of perfect as “the best,” “elite,” or “it couldn’t be any better,” but do you know what people who try to come across as perfect actually sound like to other people?

They sound like guarded, inauthentic try-hards—because they are. They’re not vulnerable, quirky, or real. How many times have you opened up to someone, and they’ve responded by doing the same thing? How many times have you told some story about a friend or family member that’s hilarious because of some quirky thing they’ve done? What about authenticity? It makes you feel like you know a person, while someone who sounds perfect makes you wonder what they’re hiding.

This is the ironic thing. The real you, flaws and all, is going to be more interesting to people long-term than the fake you that you’re showing them because you think it’s what they want to see. If you’re thinking, “But, the real me isn’t that fascinating,” then the solution isn’t to create a facade, it’s to work on becoming the sort of person you want to be.

4) You have to be able to forgive yourself and love yourself

The mind of a perfectionist is an endless treadmill, with a never-satisfied coach in the background making snide comments. There is no speed except “faster,” no type of work other than “harder,” and no satisfaction to be had because there’s always SOMETHING you can get better at. It’s like a lifetime of hearing, “You’re not good enough,” repeated over and over. That sounds grim, right? It’s why a lot of perfectionists tend to be unhappy people.

However, a good coach doesn’t actually behave that way. A coach who wants you to succeed builds you up instead of tearing you down. He wants you to set high goals and achieve them, not impossible goals that you can never hit. He very much wants you to win “the thing,” whatever “the thing” may be, but his first concern is ultimately what’s good for you as a human being.

I hate to get Biblical on you, but just as God forgives us when we fall short, we have to be able to forgive ourselves. Just as God loves us, we have to love ourselves enough to want something better than a never-ending treadmill. There is an enormous amount to be said for trying to be the best version of ourselves, but there’s nothing to be said for trying to be perfect.

No matter who you are, you’re going to fall short. Love and forgive yourself anyway.

5) Reject the whole idea of an “all-or-nothing” mindset

Do you know what an all-or-nothing mindset does to you?

• It makes you not even want to try a lot of things because it’ll turn into too much work.

• It can make a big win feel like a huge loss because of an insignificant mistake.

• It leads to you feeling endlessly dissatisfied because you never get it “just right.”

• It closes off an enormous number of options in your mind because they won’t lead to the maximally good outcome.

• It can make insignificant setbacks feel like calamities.

• It can cause you to ignore serious problems or massively exaggerate their significance.

• It can completely derail an enormous amount of progress because one setback makes you feel like a failure.

• It can make you feel like a loser when you’re actually winning bigly at life.

Dieting is an area where you can easily see how this type of thinking creates messes for people. Let’s say you’ve been perfect on your diet for a month. In fact, you’ve lost 10 whole pounds! Great job, but, uh-oh, someone brought a bunch of cookies to work today, and you ate one! Cookies aren’t allowed on your diet, so you CHEATED. As a practical matter, the 300 calories you just ate essentially mean nothing long-term, but what do you tell yourself? “Well, since the diet is blown today, maybe I should get a burger and fries for lunch.” Then, you eat some nachos for dinner and want to take advantage of your “cheat day” by eating some ice cream. Now, you’ve gone 3,000 calories over your diet total. That does matter. Worse yet, the next day, you go, “Well, it’s Friday, might as well take the whole weekend off and start again on Monday.” Except you don’t. You keep on eating trash. A couple of months later, you’re five pounds heavier than when you started. This happens to people ALL THE TIME.

Don’t think in terms of all or nothing. Expect setbacks and don’t let them knock you off course. Like the meme says, success almost never turns out to be a straight line.

6) There are too many different important parts of life to be a perfectionist

If you read up on the elite of the elite, the most gifted human beings who became absolutely obsessed with something and made it to the top of some field, do you know what you’ll find? Even if it’s hidden from publc view, they’re almost always a train wreck in a lot of other areas. They tend to have a lot of bad habits, a tumultuous family life, and they’re often not particularly pleasant people to be around.

So, if you’re a perfectionist who has to get an A+ on every paper, outwork anyone in the building to make it to CEO, or eat, sleep, and breathe chess so that you can become the best player in the world, ironically, not only are you going to fail to be perfect in a lot of other areas, you’re going to be a below-average human in a lot of ways.

The point of this is not, “Don’t try to be the best at something.” I don’t see anything wrong with being imbalanced and pouring your heart and soul into something for a while to try to get ahead, particularly when you’re young (of course, maybe that’s the perfectionist in me talking), but recognize that succeeding at life is ultimately a lot more than just that thing.

I mean, what matters on some level? Money? Your career? Your family? Your relationships? Being liked? Leaving a legacy of some sort? Contributing to other people? Your spiritual growth? Growing as a person? Controlling your time? Your health? We could go on from there, but the truth is that ALL OF THEM are important to some degree, and the price of being a perfectionist in one is going to be neglecting a lot of the others.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

1) “Pictures don’t lie:” Actually, pictures lie all the time. When I see her again, she may kill me for this, but this is a public picture of an ex-girlfriend of mine I took at the Boston Observatory a few years back:

Your first thought after seeing that is probably, “OMG! She looks so sad! What did you do to her? YOU MONSTER!”

In actuality, I made a terrible joke, she made a weird face in response to it, and I somehow happened to snap a picture in the middle of her facial expression changing. That’s how we ended up with her looking like I told her all the puppies in the world just died futilely trying to save all the kittens.

And by the way, this is a REAL PICTURE. No filters, no editing, no attempt to deliberately mislead people. Once you bring those into the equation, it’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t:

2) “Good things come to those who wait:” Depending on what you’re doing, patience really can be a virtue, but waiting? In and of itself, it’s often a bad idea. Although there’s no proof he actually said it, Abe Lincoln supposedly had a great response to this quote:

You know what waiting usually means? Inertia, missed opportunities, and the window closing on your dreams. If you want it, get about it.

3) “Love conquers all:” If this were true, the phrase, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” would have never been said before. We also wouldn’t have 40-50% of marriages ending in divorce, depending on whose statistics you believe. Pretty much all of those people started out in love, and the world broke them down. Maybe it happened slowly, year after year, as they drifted apart, or maybe it happened fast.

A woman once told me about why she got divorced. She dated a man for a year, and he never stayed overnight. She thought it was because he was being respectful. It was actually because he was a hopeless drunk who got hammered every night. He probably thought he could free himself from his addiction before they got married. Unfortunately, he couldn’t, and after they got married, he wasn’t able to hide it anymore. As strong as love is, it wasn’t able to conquer alcoholism. They were divorced within a couple of months.

When love is working its magic, there is nothing sweeter, but when it fails – and it does frequently, it’s the sort of miserable process Neil Gaiman described so brilliantly:

4) “No pain, no gain:” Sure, it’s true that you’re almost always going to have to go through suffering of some sort to get much better at things. Your humble author was repping out 315 pounds on a hex bar deadlift earlier this week. It required pain, effort, and today my legs are still very sore. That pain was required to get the muscular gain that comes with it.

However, people often use this as an excuse to push through injuries. I don’t even know how many freaky strong people and stud athletes have told me about lifelong damage of some sort that they’re still living with decades later because they got hurt, ignored the pain, and kept on pushing until something gave. Don’t be that guy.

If you’re not a high-level athlete who has to push through the injury pain for your job, don’t do it. You don’t need to be limping around 30 years from now because you pushed through an injury to try for a new squat max:

5) “The early bird gets the worm:” If people were to interpret this to mean, “The first person to an opportunity usually gets it,” it would basically be correct. Being the first person to ask a business owner for a job, create a new product, or ask a particular girl to the dance is a big advantage.

However, most people look at this as another way of saying, “The earlier you get up, the more productive you are,” and that doesn’t really seem to be true. Sure, there are productive people who get up early like famous Navy SEAL Jocko Willink:

On the other hand, there are productive people with all sorts of sleeping schedules. Personally? I have gotten up extremely early for jobs before, but the most productive times of my life were when I was working until the wee hours. That’s not unusual. There’s no magic to getting up super early. In fact, it doesn’t work particularly well for most people, which they will happily tell you if they have to get up much earlier than normal for some reason.

6) “Just follow your dreams:” This reminds me of something billionaire Palmer Luckey said a few years ago:

Are you dreaming of being the next Keith Olbermann? The Leader of the Crips Street Gang in your neighborhood? Of hosting the world’s most famous radio show about conspiracies? Well, maybe you should dream about something else.

As someone who pursued (and succeeded at) political blogging as a career when there was one person on earth making a living at it (Andrew Sullivan), I am not going to tell you that you should give up on your dreams because they’re longshots, but there needs to be some sort of acknowledgement of the odds and reality.

Oh, you’re 5’3, and you want to be in the NBA like Muggsy Bogues? Okay, how do your physical skills compare to his? Are you at least an elite player at the level you’re playing at? You want to be a rock star? How good are your vocals or ability on the guitar? What kind of reactions are you getting at your performances? Are there people ready to pay money to hear you play?

Your dreams are important, but there’s also a lot to be said for being smart about your dreams, so you don’t spend decades chasing a fantasy.

7) “If you love something, let it go, if it’s meant to be it will come back to you:” This is undoubtedly the dumbest one on the entire list because this is pretty much the exact opposite of how life works most of the time.

Maybe you could come up with some context where this makes sense, like let’s say you’re one of those guys who is crushing on a woman who only sees you as a friend. Sure, it could make sense to tell her how you feel, ask her out, and walk away if she’s not interested. Also, if let’s say you’re a Beast man who has been keeping a beautiful woman captive in your castle and you think she’s in love with you, but you’re not sure, it also might work:

However, back in the real world, it’s usually a disaster. Do you know what happens when you stop talking to your friend, become estranged from your family, or go on a “break” from your relationship? Typically, the relationship ends because most people believe that if you really cared, you would have fought for them, not let them go.

Sure, there are exceptions, but the rule is going to be that they’re going to find someone else, make a new friend, or write you off, maybe permanently. What else would you expect if you let them go?

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

The crowd was all soldiers and UFC-friendly celebrities, the fighters walked out with Medal of Honor winners, the military did an amazing job of handling the music, the fireworks were awesome, and the flyover by the jets was incredible:

Then, to top it all off, in the final fight of the night, when Justin Gaethje began his walk-out, he was standing in the White House looking at the original Declaration of Independence.

Gaethje, who was a huge underdog, followed that up by winning the title in a fight so good it’s practically guaranteed to be added to the UFC Hall of Fame:

Know what else stood out about that event? The openly patriotic, pro-American, pro-military ads we saw throughout the event:

Watching that event made me even prouder to be an American, which is why it really stuck with me when I saw how rare that sentiment apparently is in the blue half of the country:

Let me just be blunt: If you’re not proud to be an American, there’s something wrong with you. Either there’s something wrong with your mentality, your knowledge of history, your view of human nature, or your understanding of the world, because it doesn’t get much better than this, and to the extent it does, it’s because we keep topping ourselves.

The United States is the oldest surviving democracy on the planet, and our Constitution has been THE STANDARD against which all others have been judged. We have also freed more human beings than all other nations combined.

We fought a war to end slavery in our country, saved the free world in WW1, were the key nation in the fight for freedom in WW2, and then helped free over a hundred million people by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Europe is free because of us. South Korea is free because of us. We even had the foresight to help rebuild former enemies like Italy, Germany, and Japan, and turned them into friends.

We’re the country that produced George Washington, Steve Jobs, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Daniel Boone, Elvis Presley, John Rockefeller, Charles Lindbergh, Robert Oppenheimer, the Wright brothers, Ray Kroc, Ben Franklin, Douglas MacArthur, Henry Ford, Edgar Allan Poe, Sam Walton, Mark Twain and a thousand other legends that will be remembered as long as there are history books.

We have also been the greatest center of commerce, invention, and human advancement to ever exist. Putting a man on the Moon? The Internet? Airplanes? The helicopter? The Interstate highway system? The light bulb? Air conditioning? Microwaves? Refrigerators? Personal computers? The telephone? Self-driving cars?

WE DID THAT.

After WW2, when our industrial base was intact, we had the most powerful military on the planet, and we were the only nation with nuclear weapons; we could have swallowed the planet. Instead, we helped our friends and, even more notably, our enemies, rebuild. Then, we helped enforce a global order that has endured for most of a century and made the world a better place.

Even today, we could conquer Canada and Mexico anytime we wanted. Why haven’t we done it? Because it’s not who we are. As you look back through history at other nations with the sort of power we have, you’ll see conquest and subjugation, but you won’t see other nations that are as strong as we are behaving the way we do. Even today, just look at how willing China and Russia are to militarily dominate their neighbors when they think they can get away with it. We’re not like that, even though we could be ten times worse if we wanted. WE’RE BETTER THAN THEM. No nation in history has ever been more of a worldwide force for good than the United States.

Oh, you say, but that’s the past. What about today? Are we still great today?

YES, WE ARE.

America has the strongest military in the world, the strongest economy in the world, and America’s people have the highest amount of disposable income in the world. There is a reason why half the planet would come to America if they could get in, and why so many millions of people are even willing to break the law to get here.

“Oh, but they have free this in one European country, and the welfare state in another European country is better than ours!” True, but European nations are also stagnant, weak, increasingly tyrannical, and their taxes are much higher. Most European nations are poorer than the worst-performing states in America on disposable income. For example:

Do you want to create a new company, get rich, or build a comfortable life for yourself? This is the place to be. You want to live in one of the biggest cities in the world? A beautiful spot in the country? In the desert? Near the sea? Next to some of the most beautiful landscapes on planet Earth? America can accommodate you like nowhere else.

Do you like freedom of speech? Do you like having an extraordinary amount of freedom across the board as long as you leave everyone else alone? Heck, do you even like the idea of having an extremely low tax rate on the people who aren’t making as much money as the guys at the top?

The truth is that most of the people who don’t like it in America have one of two problems.

Some of them have that disease that Machiavelli described so long ago:

They compare what’s good in the real world versus their imaginary, utopian vision of how the world should be, and they become deeply dissatisfied because reality doesn’t match their nonexistent fantasy. You know, “I should be able to draw and play video games all day long, everything should be free, people like me should be celebrated in society, and people I don’t like should be torn down because it would make me feel better to see them fail!” Sorry, but the world doesn’t work like that unless you’re oppressing everyone else and making them suffer to create your “utopia” at their expense.

On the other hand, some people are just deeply unhappy. They don’t like themselves. They’ve embraced ideas, ideologies, and ways of looking at the world that make them miserable, and they just happen to be in America.

If they moved from here to France, Japan, Dubai, or Australia, they’d be just as depressed because the real problem is them, not where they live. Even if the place they live in changes, they’re stuck with the real source of their own misery everywhere they go. See feminists, race-obsessed people, communists, advocates of intersectionality, people with victim-oriented mentalities, lazy people who want handouts, the they-them crowd, etc., etc., etc., for great examples of this. America looks sour to them because they’re sour people, but dealing with that would require a lot of effort, work, and worst of all, they’d have to CHANGE. So, they blame America instead of shining the light of truth on themselves and realizing that much of the ugliness they see in the world is a reflection of the lens through which they view it.

Our country has never been perfect, and we have always had and will continue to have our challenges, but this really is the place to be on Planet Earth. If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. All of us should be proud to be part of a country like this. Just being an American makes you one of the luckiest people on Earth.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Elon Musk’s SpaceX began trading at $150 a share on Friday, above its listing price of $135 a share, making him the world’s first-ever trillionaire following the IPO.

The rocket and satellite company raised a record $75 billion, valuing the company at about $1.8 trillion, pushing the value of Musk’s stake in SpaceX to an estimated $690 billion. The company is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker “SPCX” after pricing its IPO on Thursday.

Combined with his holdings in electric vehicle maker Tesla, as well as other investments and assets, Musk’s net worth is now estimated at about $1.1 trillion.

Do you know what I think about when I hear that Elon Musk became a trillionaire? One of my favorite quotes from the late, great Walter Williams:

Elon Musk is so rich because he’s done such a good job of serving his fellow man.

Tesla revolutionized the electric car business, and SpaceX has revolutionized rocketry and satellite Internet. He’s also working on The Boring Company, which has the potential to make it much easier to move around big cities, xAI, which was created to reduce the dangers of AI to the human race, and Neuralink, which may allow crippled people to walk again.

Like everyone else, Elon Musk has flaws, but if there was one person on Earth you’d want to have this many resources, it’s him because he’s successfully doing a lot of extremely difficult things that have the potential to benefit the whole human race. There is no such thing as an “indispensable man,” but the closest thing to it on the planet right now is Elon Musk.

On the other hand, when liberals hear that Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire, they immediately think, “There’s a big pot of money we can confiscate to distribute to each other and use to get more votes.” It’s like a horde of fleas getting excited and hopping up and down as they see a big, fluffy dog walking their way:

We could go on and on with these quotes, but they’re all variations on the same thing. It’s socialists encouraging people to break the 10th Commandment instead of telling people to copy success and then pitching pie-in-the-sky promises about what they could do with that money.

“Oh, if we had that money, we could pay for free college and trade school for everyone, get rid of the homeless, make sure everyone has enough to eat (I’m not sure I believe that’s much of a problem in a country where statistically, the poor are fatter than everyone else), solve world hunger, get everyone in the world clean drinking water, and reforest the Amazon,” and whatever 84 magical, beautiful things Bernie Sanders says he wants to do with the money.

But, if that’s true and in 2025 we took in 5 trillion dollars, spent 7 trillion dollars, and are 39 trillion dollars in debt, why haven’t all of those things already been done? If you are dumb enough to believe what these people are saying, then theoretically, we should have been able to do all the things they want to do many, many times over.

So, why haven’t we? Because this is all socialist bullsh*t from start to finish.

Just as a starting point, Elon Musk’s money is almost entirely tied up in companies he created that are bringing amazing new things into the world, not sitting in some Scrooge McDuck-style vault, waiting to be looted and handed out to the crew doing the heist.

If Elon Musk were to sell all of his stock so we could put unicorns in the Amazon or give every homeless person a beachfront cottage in Kennebunkport, the value of Musk’s holdings would plunge because the very fact that he’s personally involved in these companies is a significant part of their value. So, if you liquidated Elon Musk, you wouldn’t get a trillion dollars, you’d get a fraction of that:

On top of that, we’d also lose the extraordinarily large amount of taxes and economic activity his corporations produce:

And what would actually be done with that money? We hear all these beautiful promises (“Oh, if they get that money everybody will get their own private jet and the grocery store will pay you money to take their food,” but back in the real world, socialists are continuously spending money on the most ridiculous things imaginable. We get trans puppet shows in Croatia, massive grants to homelessness fighting NGOs that only create more homelessness, payouts to illegal aliens that aren’t supposed to be here, tens of billions spent on infrastructure projects that never actually get built, like the high-speed choo-choo to nowhere in Gavin Newsom’s California and even richer hauls for welfare queens, in return for voting for Democrats, of course.

All of this is in service of the only things they really care about, which are getting reelected, having control over their fellow citizens, and forcing all of us to spend money on things we wouldn’t want at any price.

On top of that, not only do I not want Elon to pay higher taxes, I believe no one should be paying higher taxes right now. Not only do I not want these new programs they’re promising, I want the government to dramatically cut back on the programs we already have to reduce spending. In fact, until we AT LEAST get rid of the deficit and start paying down the debt, we shouldn’t be talking about any new programs that don’t revolve around the most basic functions of government, like national security or securing the border.

Last but not least, instead of trying to convince everyone that it’s terrible that Elon Musk got so rich by succeeding in building so many amazing things, why aren’t we encouraging more Americans to follow his example? The man is an African immigrant who was living with his brother, his mother, and working an $18 an hour job when he was eighteen years old. Now, 36 years later, because of his own incredible ability, a little luck, and the amazing opportunities that are available in America, he’s worth a trillion dollars. Our country’s message today should be, “If Elon Musk did that, what can you do?”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know