Culturcidal by John Hawkins

Looksmaxxing Shows You How Much America Has Rotted Culturally

John Hawkins — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:00:55 GMT

One of the unfortunate things about being on X way too often is that you’re constantly exposed to news about people you neither like nor care about. If you’re wondering who those people are in my case, this small, but noteworthy list of words I have muted gives you some hints:

At the risk of sounding like Grandpa Simpson talking about new cultural fads…

…I’d like to note that I have seriously considered adding a lot of streamers on there as well. You might say, “Streamers? What are those? Like who?”

Streaming is live broadcasting to an audience, and among some of the more famous people doing it are Asmongold, Pokimane, Destiny, XQC, Adin Ross, iShowSpeed, Kai Cenat, HasanAbi, MoistCr1TiKaL, Sneako, N3on, QTcinderella, ExtraEmily, Jack Doherty, and Jynxzi.

You might be thinking, “Wow, do I need to listen to all these fresh new voices to find out what’s going on in the world?”

No, you absolutely do not.

Other than Asmongold, who seems to spend most of his time gossiping and posting things like, “This is brutal,” and “She’s done for good after this” mixed in with sometimes surprisingly insightful commentary, pretty much every other clip you see from all these people is them saying outrageous things, doing crazy stuff, getting involved in some controversy, getting arrested, talking trash about each other, etc., etc. In other words, completely valueless garbage. I will give a partial pass to iShowSpeed and Kai Cenat, who are both loud and wildly emotional, but at least somewhat likable; otherwise, it’s hard to even know what the appeal of most of these people is. I’ve never heard a clip of any of them saying anything smart or worthwhile, and half of them come across like the extremely annoying character you root for the killer to decapitate first in a horror movie.

All that being said, there is one particular streamer I was forcibly exposed to who has caught my attention because that person could be said, in a roundabout way, to be the personification of much of what’s wrong with our culture.

His name is Clavicular and the first time I heard of him was when he deliberately ran over a “stalker” who was throwing himself on the hood of his car:

After running over him, someone in his stream said, “Is he dead?” He coolly replied, “Hopefully.”

In any case, the police declined to prosecute, and he seemed pretty unapologetic about deliberately running over someone:

Clavicular is a “Looksmaxxer.” Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with improving your appearance. In fact, everyone could probably benefit from that, at least to a certain extent.

However, Looksmaxxing takes this concept to the extreme. In Looksmaxxing, looks are EVERYTHING. In that way of looking at the world, your looks determine where you stand among other men, among people in general, and even determine your worth as a human being.

It’s like the Greek myth of Narcissus, who was so in love with his own beautiful reflection that he stared at it until he wasted away, but portrayed it as a VIRTUE:

So, what is Clavicular’s life like?

Well, he apparently has a very contentious relationship with his parents, which he seems to bring up a lot:

He says they don’t support anything he does:

Perhaps that’s related to the fact that he recently overdosed on air while he was livestreaming:

To give you a little more background on Clavicular, here’s an excerpt from a GQ article about his adventures in Manhattan:

Clavicular took it further than anyone else: he claims to have smashed his face with a hammer to make bones regrow sharper, smoked meth to curb his appetite, and performed “dick-ups” by placing weights on his penis to maximize girth and erection strength. At age 14, he’s said, he began injecting testosterone he’d ordered from the Internet, with no parental or medical oversight. Now his body can’t naturally produce it; he believes he’s currently infertile.
He has also mastered clipfarming, the strategy of doing such unhinged things on livestream that they get clipped and go viral on social media. In his Truman Show-esque daily streams, he gleefully says slurs and brutally eviscerates women’s looks. Just before Christmas, he appeared to hit a guy with a Cybertruck while streaming and driving, and said on camera that he hoped the guy had been killed. (No charges were filed.) In January, he popped out to a Miami club with the Avengers of far-right dorks and danced to Ye’s “Heil Hitler.”
...He’s used the risky anabolic steroid trenbolone, which is not approved for humans—just animals—and claims to have smoked meth to burn off flab (Did it feel good? “Of course, it’s fucking meth.”) His purported pill intake includes everything from beta blockers (for anxiety reduction) to minoxidil (hair growth) to melanotan II (sunless tanning) to retatrutide (appetite suppression). After just three weeks at Sacred Heart University, the school kicked him out when Looksmax users tipped them off about his habits, and steroids were found in his room.
...At one point, he recommended his audience try to reduce anxiety with baclofen, a muscle relaxer. In December 2024, while driving home from his job at a restaurant in Massachusetts, he crashed his car. On the Looksmax forum, Clavicular wrote that it was because he’d fallen asleep off the baclofen. “No comment,” his publicist says when I bring this up. “Oh yeah. It’s silly,” Clavicular adds. “How about we comment on the car crash where the driver fucked up my Sprinter? Bro, this fucking retard drives it under a bridge that says seven-foot clearance, and it’s a fucking Sprinter.”
...His first spotlight moment came in December, when he told the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles that even though his personal politics hewed closer to JD Vance’s, he would vote for Gavin Newsom in 2028, because Newsom is hotter and Vance is “obese.”

So, let’s start pulling all of this together.

To begin with, Clavicular is making a lot of money, getting a lot of attention, being treated like a “star,” and he really does seem to be doing well with women:

In other words, Clavicular is perfectly checking all the boxes our culture is telling people it’s most important to hit. Fame, money, looks, women – that’s what winning is, right? If you have all that – and Clavicular does – you’re at the apex. It doesn’t get any better than that unless it’s having even more fame, money, looks, and women.

Right?

Yet, this guy is a DISASTER of a human being.

He’s obviously got some serious problems with drugs. He’s practically the walking, talking definition of narcissism and shallowness. Is he immoral? If anything, it appears more like he’s amoral. He doesn’t seem to have any values that go beyond, “I want to do what I want, when I want to do it, regardless of how it impacts other people.” All those women who are attracted to him? Well, it’s questionable if he’s getting anywhere with any of them because he has publicly admitted that his drug habits have left him with serious erectile dysfunction at 20 years of age:

Moreover, although any honest person would say he’s a good-looking guy, all of us get old. If the only thing that makes you valuable is looks, well, by his own standards, he’s going to spend the majority of his life as a not particularly valuable person after he ages a bit, assuming he isn’t already dead by then.

Is this an admirable person? No. Is he a good person? No. Is he a smart or wise person? No. Would you want your kid to grow up to be like this? No. Even his own parents don’t want him to be like this. Do you think our society would be better off if more people were like this? Obviously not. Yet, if all of this is true, why is our society promoting people like this non-stop?

You know what Clavicular really is? He’s someone who paid attention to the values we’re pushing as a society today and went all the way in adopting them. He is the endpoint of what modern American society tells people to pursue. That’s why Clavicular is really just a symptom. The disease is the rot we’ve allowed to infest our culture.

Liberalism is Just a Never-Ending Psy-Op

John Hawkins — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 23:50:39 GMT

The Southern Poverty Law Center is in the news. You may have heard of them because supposedly, they’re left-wingers all about fighting, “hate groups.” You know, like the Nazi Party or Ku Klux Klan. In fact, they largely built their reputation on running the KKK into the ground with lawsuits, mostly in the 70s and 80s.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is almost like the perfect representation of that brilliant quotation from Eric Hoffer:

Even in the seventies and eighties, the KKK was barely even a shadow of what it had been earlier in the century, and there weren’t hordes of new hate groups replacing them. Yet, Democrats were desperate to portray America as a horrible, bigoted place, and being “against hate” was extremely popular with both rich liberals and corporations. So, how could the SPLC keep the money flowing in?

One new tactic they adopted was defining conservatives and conservative organizations as extremists or hate groups. Some of those targeted included the Center for Immigration Studies, PragerU, Ben Carson, and Ben Shapiro. They also targeted the Family Research Center, which led to a nutjob named Floyd Lee Corkins trying to KILL PEOPLE THERE. In a sense, this became the core part of their new mission of the SPLC: To use the credibility they built up fighting hate groups to label mainstream conservatives as HATE GROUPS.

Yet, that wasn’t enough to pad their numbers. So, they started to dramatically exaggerate the number and scope of hate groups in America. They counted chapters of the same group as different organizations and targeted tiny groups, barely active ones, or even just websites, as potential threats.

As it turned out, even that didn’t appear to have been enough for them. According to the Department of Justice, although though they took donations to fight hate, the SPLC turned right around, took that money, and used it to FUND PEOPLE ENGAGED IN HATE:

The SPLC has claimed that these people were “informants,” which seems like an extremely dubious claim. It’s the equivalent of Mothers Against Drunk Driving paying “informants” in the liquor industry to tell them about the latest plans to get more people drunk.

It just doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially since, according to the DOJ, some of the people on their payroll were DIRECTED to engage in hateful conduct. For example…

We could go on, but you get the idea.

What do you do if your business is convincing people hate is on the rise, and it isn’t? Apparently, you FUND THE HATE YOURSELF, then point to it, and fundraise off of it.

Now, people are talking about this case all over the place, but what I would like to point out to you is that the concept behind this cuts all the way down to the core of how the modern Left works.

Their ideas are terrible. Unworkable. Disastrous. There are an infinite number of examples we could point to, but this recent one really stuck with me:

How does it make sense to bring illegal aliens with AIDS into our country? That’s not just a bad idea, it’s INDEFENSIBLE INSANITY. So much of liberalism is like this, and the Left makes absolutely no effort to argue for it, explain why people should support it, or generally make the case for doing it to the general public in any way, shape, or form.

Instead, liberals do something completely different.

They try to boil everything down to…

1) We’re not debating this issue; we’re debating whether the people who disagree with us are evil or not.

*** or ***

2) The only thing that matters is that we say this is the popular, mainstream view.

If you’ve never thought about it this way, start paying attention to the arguments liberals make, and you will see it EVERYWHERE.

What is the Southern Poverty Law Center, really? It’s a way for liberals to brand America as racist, define liberals like themselves as the only people against racism, and define mainstream conservatives as racists.

This is actually very similar to the fact-checking scam. Liberal organizations were created to “check facts” to determine if they’re true or not. They actually do SOME of that, but many facts that are harmful to liberals or helpful to conservatives also get labeled as “false,” whether they are or not.

Why does every Hollywood awards ceremony revolve around a bunch of empty-headed celebrities trumpeting left-wing values and condemning Republicans? Because celebrities are popular with the general public, and they hope people will just go along with what the “popular people” say.

This is the same reason liberals are willing to lose staggering amounts of money pushing left-wing ideas into popular TV and movie franchises. They hope that if you see it enough times, you will just assume, “This must be the mainstream! After all, it’s in Star Wars, She-Hulk, and Velma!” Is it working? Not really, no. But they’re trying it.

Why does the NFL need to have left-wing slogans in the end zones? Because a lot of normal people like the NFL, and they want to browbeat them into embracing the liberal idea that America is overrun with racism:

Why do liberals keep claiming there’s a “scientific consensus” that global warming is occurring, even if it’s not true? They want you to assume that it’s unquestionably the mainstream view.

The job of mainstream news sources used to be to provide the public with “all the news that’s fit to print.” Now, it’s to push propaganda that protects the Left and assures the public that conservatives are horrible people. For example, what do you think caused this? It certainly wasn’t any sort of actual spike in “white supremacy” in America:

What was the social media censorship we saw during the Biden presidency? It was liberals in government and social media saying mainstream conservative positions were so outrageous that you weren’t even allowed to speak them out loud without getting banned while liberal positions were just the norm.

Why do many liberal pollsters deliberately skew their samples to make liberals look much more popular right up until the last minute in elections, when their results matter much more for their reputations? Because they want to present liberal ideas as popular and conservative ideas as hated.

In addition, liberals never debate the results of their policies. There’s always some made-up substitute issue where we’re supposed to be debating whether conservatives are evil instead.

It isn’t about whether we secure our border or not; it’s about whether conservatives are racist for wanting to obey the laws on the books. It isn’t about whether it’s a good idea to let a male sex offender slap on a wig, call himself Jessica, and go into the bathroom with your 5-year-old daughter; it’s whether conservatives are “transphobic.” It isn’t about whether Obamacare dramatically increased the cost of healthcare for most Americans; it’s about whether conservatives hate poor people or not.

Liberals will tell sad stories, make false accusations, switch topics every 30 seconds, contradict what they said 30 seconds ago, claim that your motivations are bad, outright lie – anything other than debate the actual policies they openly support and the enormous amount of harm they do to other human beings.

Liberalism is all one endless con. A perpetual psy-op on the American people that never, ever ends.

20 Smart Quotes from Some of History’s Biggest Monsters

John Hawkins — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:29:35 GMT

Ironically, hearing someone reference this quote from Andrew Tate was the inspiration for this column:

You don’t want a Ferrari to drive fast. You want a Ferrari because other men want a Ferrari and can’t have one. It’s hyper-competitive.

My first thought after hearing that was, “That’s insightful,” followed by, “Ugh, Andrew Tate is a horrible human being,” and then, “Oh wow, I wonder how many other horrible people said brilliant things?”

As it turns out, quite a lot. No one quoted below is a good person, but even the bad guys sometimes have smart things to say, although you may not be surprised to find that many of these quotes are tinged with a bit of darkness.

1) “It takes less courage to criticize the decisions of others than to stand by your own.” -- Atilla the Hun

2) “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” -- Al Capone

3) “No one gives it to you. You have to take it.” -- Frank Costello

4) “You pretty quickly run out of really effective ways to make yourself happier by spending money.” -- Sam Bankman-Fried

5) “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” -- Joseph Goebbels

6) “Would you rather have butter or guns? Preparedness makes us powerful. Butter merely makes us fat.” -- Hermann Goering

7) “I would rather die standing up to live life on my knees.” -- Che Guevara

8) “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.” -- Adolf Hitler

9) “I hate luxury. I exercise moderation… It will be easy to forget your vision and purpose once you have fine clothes, fast horses, and beautiful women. [In which case], you will be no better than a slave, and you will surely lose everything.” -- Genghis Khan

10) “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” -- Osama Bin Laden

11) “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” -- Vladimir Lenin

12) “The real strong have no need to prove it to the phonies.” -- Charles Manson

13) “Make criticism in good time; don’t get into the habit of criticizing only after the event.” -- Mao Zedong

14) “Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.” -- Karl Marx

15) “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” -- Benito Mussolini

16) “Hidden talent counts for nothing.” -- Emperor Nero

17) “Don’t try and get people to like you, but try to make sure they don’t dislike you.” -- Jimmy Savile

18) “The day you take complete responsibility for yourself, the day you stop making any excuses, that’s the day you start to the top.” -- O. J. Simpson

19) “The only real power comes out of a long rifle.” -- Joseph Stalin

20) “He who slanders the victim aids the executioner.” -- Leon Trotsky

Why America is at War with Iran

John Hawkins — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:59:50 GMT

The United States and Iran had a long, somewhat complicated history before the recent conflict. If you truly want to understand the current war, it helps to at least have a basic understanding of the backstory.

America’s entanglement with Iran really started when they elected a prime minister who soon thereafter nationalized their oil industry, which the British then controlled. We tried to mediate the issue between the countries, but we were closer allies with Britain and soon began to fear that Iran was going to drift toward the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. During the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviets treated the whole planet like pieces on a chessboard, this drove a lot of our foreign policy decisions. In this case, it prompted us to partner with Britain and help the Shah of Iran, who was already part of the government, to take FULL CONTROL of the country.

The Shah was friendly to us. He also wanted to Westernize Iran and make it into a regional power. He had some success on this front. Economic conditions improved rapidly, he gave women the right to vote (although voting for everyone was limited), their military became stronger, and things were going in the right direction in Iran in many respects.

That being said, the Shah was a dictator and would still throw you in prison if you stood against him. This led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Although many groups across Iran helped to get rid of the Shah, ultimately, the religious crazies led by the Ayatollah Khomeini ended up in charge. As it turned out, they were more oppressive than the Shah, more murderous, and the rapid improvement of Iran that happened under the Shah dramatically slowed down and even regressed in many ways.

This also turned out to be the beginning of America’s particularly hostile relationship with Iran because after the Shah was deposed, he came to America for medical treatment while Iran took American hostages that Jimmy Carter seemed powerless to free. However, because the Iranian regime feared what Ronald Reagan would do after being elected, they released the hostages on his inauguration day in 1981:

Since then, there have been numerous conflicts between the United States and Iran. Hezbollah terrorists, trained and supported by Iran, killed 243 American Marines who were in Lebanon as a peacekeeping force during the Beirut Barracks Bombing. We ended up smashing Iran in a Naval battle in the late eighties after they threatened and attacked tankers flagged as (or escorted by) American ships. Iran’s terrorist proxies in Lebanon continued to attack American targets in Lebanon. Iran also trained and backed militia groups targeting American soldiers during the war in Iraq. Eventually, we realized Iran was trying to build nukes, and we worked to stop that mostly through sanctions and deals they cheated on as their proxies attacked US forces in the region over and over again. Near the end of Trump’s first term, we wiped the man in charge of Iran’s proxy terrorist groups off the map in Baghdad, which led to Iran firing at US bases in the region. Iran then upped the stakes even more by attempting to have Trump assassinated:

It’s also worth noting that the radical Islamists in Iran support terrorism all around the region and have been actively seeking nuclear weapons, are known for chanting “Death to America” and refer to our country as “The Great Satan.” When you consider that they have continuously attacked and sponsored terrorism against Israel, which they refer to as the “Little Satan,” it should make any smart person leery of what they may do if they get nukes.

Now, this gives you a brief idea of the run-up to the current conflict, BUT, we still can’t properly address the war without talking about the ramifications of the Palestinians’ Oct 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

That is because Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian militias, and the Houthis are all trained, armed, funded, and to a large extent, directed by Iran. In other words, you can argue about whether Iran encouraged or even ordered the Oct 7 attack on Israel, but even during the Biden Administration, they acknowledged the role Iran played:

The Oct 7 attacks were so over the top that Israel didn’t just strike back at the Palestinians for a few weeks and then ratchet things back down to normal; it actually prompted the Israelis to take steps to dismantle Hamas. That meant blowing up tunnels under Gaza and obliterating every asset they had, which, since Hamas deliberately mixes civilian and military assets to prevent Israel from striking back, meant Israel had to level a big chunk of the Gaza Strip:

When Iran directed Hezbollah, the Syrian militias, and the Houthis to jump in and try to save Hamas, Israel gave them the same treatment. Even while Israel and America were stomping Iran into the ground, the Israelis were STILL laying a beatdown on Hezbollah until Trump told them to stop:

This is important because it stripped away a critical part of Iran’s defenses and left them in a fight alone against Israel and the US.

Of course, the hope was that this would never turn into a war.

The US and Israel hit Iran in “Operation Midnight Hammer” last year in an attempt to dramatically slow Iran’s nuclear program. In fact, Trump said we had “obliterated” it:

This has been a long-standing goal that Donald Trump has talked about over and over for at least the last 15 years.

As John Fetterman was honest enough to admit, Trump isn’t the only one who has been saying it either. Democrats have been tooting this same horn for a long time:

Of course, that raises an obvious question: How did we get from Trump saying we had obliterated their program (while many analysts were saying we may have just set it back a couple of years) to going to war over nukes? Israel’s disassembling Iran’s terrorist proxies certainly made the war possible, but what led to the actual fight?

This is where it gets interesting because Trump did not prepare the American public for a war, nor has he said EXACTLY why we had to go in now. However, there is an educated guess we can make based on publicly available facts.

Back in 2025, the IAEA said Iran had enriched uranium up to 60%. This is very important because there is no real civilian usage for that, and once you get to that point, with the right equipment, a nuclear bomb can theoretically be produced IN WEEKS.

So, it is entirely possible that when we hit Iran the first time, they were VERY CLOSE to getting a nuclear weapon. We may have “obliterated their program,” but that only set them back until they could rebuild it. As long as they could still access the enriched uranium, it meant they were still on the precipice of getting a nuclear weapon.

The other key detail here is that we were in talks with Iran about nuclear weapons before the war, and Trump publicly said that the talks were not going well:

So, what likely happened?

We’ve been talking to Iran about this issue for over a decade and getting nowhere. Then, we realized they were POTENTIALLY VERY CLOSE to nukes, and we concluded that our last-ditch efforts to talk this out had failed. So, at that point, Trump probably felt like he needed to act or accept that Iran was getting nuclear weapons. Granted, there might have been intelligence we haven’t seen or something Iran said in those talks that made us conclude it was “now or never,” but no matter how you slice it, we were running out of road fast. There was no way to know EXACTLY when Iran would have nuclear weapons, and if the decision to go in was punted three months, six months, or a year down the line, there is a genuine possibility that it may have been too late.

In any case, HOPEFULLY, the war is about to end, and we need to ask: Was it worth it? Well, it depends on what agreement we make with the Iranians.

If we take Iran’s enriched nuclear material away and they agree not to keep pursuing nukes, to no longer hamper trade through the Strait of Hormuz, and to stop sponsoring terrorist proxies in the region, it will be the biggest foreign policy coup for America since the Berlin Wall fell.

Will that happen? We don’t know for sure, although Trump seems to be optimistic about how things are going at this point:

Time will tell how it all plays out, but at the moment, it’s looking like Donald Trump is on track to pull off one of the most meaningful foreign policy victories since WW2.

There’s Something Wrong with Liberal Women

John Hawkins — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:19:28 GMT

Typically, Culturcidal doesn’t cover what’s happening in Great Britain, but since this article looked interesting and we see exactly the same kind of pattern happening in America, it seemed worth discussing.

Apparently, many women in Great Britain are quite angry, and my guess is, if you polled liberal women in the United States, you would hear many of the same sentiments you are about to read:

Let’s start with an excerpt from the article that gives you the gist of it:

...Women in middle-class professions are less likely to say they feel valued by society and are less likely to believe that if they work hard, they will succeed in life when compared with their working-class counterparts. Young men are now more likely to be unemployed than young women, yet young women are far more financially cynical: They are 21 points less likely than young men to believe they will ever out-earn their parents. White women are more likely to feel the country is racist than non-white women.
...Anna’s politics had become more radical during the long process of getting personal independence payments for her disability. She felt the whole system was set up against her. The experience made her feel dehumanised. “I no longer feel politically aligned with this country,” she said. She told me that all of the accounts she follows online are run by women or disabled or queer people. “There is this real sense of panic and hopelessness,” she said about politics. “We have policies that aren’t looking after us. We have a government that doesn’t seem to give a shit if genocide happens.”
Anna has a boyfriend, whom she described as “a fucking Labrador.” (Emphasis mine) “He’s reading books about how climate change isn’t actually that big a deal, and it’s hard to separate that from the fact that he’s not really faced much adversity in his life as a straight white man who was privately educated,” she said. “I’m probably the adversity in his life.” (Emphasis mine) When he and his friends talked about the world and politics, it sounded very different to the way she talked with her friends, who were all either female or non-binary. She couldn’t imagine a group of men sitting around at the pub, saying things like, “I’m really worried about what the DWP is doing to disabled people.”
...The literary conversation was winding down. I asked the table how they felt about the young men they knew. “I don’t care for them,” said a girl called Ruby imperiously. (Emphasis mine) She had red hair and lots of silver jewellery. “They’re not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic; they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot.” If a man is attracted to you, she said, he might talk about things like toxic misogyny. If he doesn’t fancy you, he won’t bother. “I feel like a lot of it is quite sexually motivated with men.”
I asked if they’d consider dating a man with different politics. They all immediately said no. “I don’t think I’d even be friends with one,” said one girl. “They don’t see you as human.” Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends (though she was worried this made her a “pick me,” trying too hard for male attention). (Emphasis mine) Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…” (Emphasis mine)
Ruby had recently carried out a survey for a course. She asked 30 final-year students – 15 men, 15 women – how they’d vote at the next general election. Most of the women said Green or Labour. Men said Conservatives or Lib Dem. (All the women around the table told me they’d vote Green.) Ruby also asked her respondents where they see themselves when they’re 30. Of the men, all but two said they wanted to be married with children; only three women said the same. Even the women in relationships didn’t want to get married. (Emphasis mine)
None of the Leeds group found this surprising. Most of their friends felt that way. “It’s a much bigger deal for us to become mothers – we have to get rid of our career,” Evelyn explained. “I’m not fully against kids. I just really don’t want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I want to still be me, and I will probably lose that.” (Emphasis mine)
...It all felt impossibly bleak. Most of the women I met were educated, engaging, bright, and charismatic. But they weren’t excited about their futures. They didn’t like the men they knew, or the idea of those they didn’t. Men were just a threat who could harm or trap them. (Emphasis mine) And the most privileged women were the most downcast.
... Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try.”
All the women I spoke to were involved in what they viewed as deeply moral missions to change a world that they believed didn’t care about them. Of course, it wasn’t making them happy. That was kind of the point, though. “I think to be a person that cares about other people,” said the Leeds student with the pink hair, “you’ve got to be pessimistic.” (Emphasis mine)

Wow, there is so much here to unpack.

To begin with, it’s worth noting that despite seeing a level of bitterness, rage, and unhappiness that practically reaches off the screen and grabs you by the collar and shakes you, these women do not live in countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, or Yemen, where women are heavily oppressed. They’re also not in a war zone like, say, Ukraine, Lebanon, or Iran. These are women who live in a Western country where they make roughly three times as much as the average person in the world. In other words, these women are certainly not repressed in any meaningful sense, and although they’re probably not doing as well as they would be in the United States, they do live in the top tier of economically successful nations.

Yet, what were some of the words tossed around to describe these, let’s be honest, fairly privileged women in this piece? “Financially cynical.” “Dehumanised.” “Panic and hopelessness.” “Stacked against me, no matter how hard I try.” “Pessimistic.”

They also seem to have pretty stereotypical views of men and marriage for feminists as well. They don’t want marriage, they don’t really seem to want children, and they seem to dislike men, who they view as a “trap” who will ruin their wonderful careers in… what? Podcasting? Middle management? Human resources?

Before we go further, let me just note that this phenomenon is happening in the United States as well. Not in EXACTLY the same way, but the data tells a very similar tale.

First of all, men haven’t changed much ideologically, while women have become MUCH MORE liberal:

Rather notably, as women became much more liberal, they also became much more mentally ill. So, which came first? The chicken or the egg? I’d posit that mentally ill people are drawn toward liberalism AND that liberalism makes people more mentally ill, but certainly that point could be argued:

Of course, there are real consequences to all of this that go far beyond politics. For example, conservative women have more children than liberal women:

Additionally, conservative women are MUCH HAPPIER with their lives than liberal women:

This begs, what seems to me at least, an extremely obvious question that is based on logic so old that even the Bible alludes to it:

If you are embracing an ideology that leads to unhappiness, mental illness, intense anger, a desire not to produce children, and an intense dislike of the opposite sex, how can that possibly be a good ideology? What is the upside to embracing a way of looking at the world that OBJECTIVELY makes your life worse across the board?

We could certainly argue about how much liberalism benefits the poor, the middle class, America and the world (I’d say it’s a huge negative for all of those groups and liberals would probably say it’s wonderful), but what exactly are these women accomplishing by ranting about some imaginary genocide against disabled people, raging that men won’t do what they want them to do or screaming at people in the street over whatever the latest trendy cause of the day is? Absolutely nothing. Not a thing.

Furthermore, it’s great that liberal women think they’re on “deeply moral missions,” but guess what? I write this Substack because I want to make a difference in the world. Elon Musk would tell you that he created his businesses to help humanity. So, we both think we’re on deeply moral missions. Know who else thinks they’re on a “deeply moral mission” of one sort or another? The Catholic church, Al-Qaeda, Iran, George Soros, the NAACP, the Mormon church, the NRA, Planned Parenthood, etc., etc. Some of them are right about the goodness of their cause and some of them are wrong, but there’s nothing unique about thinking you’re doing things for moral reasons.

However, for your own sake, I hope you realize that if your “deeply moral mission” requires you to live your life as an angry, bitter, outraged, anxiety-ridden, childless misandrist, then OBVIOUSLY you’re doing something wrong. Until you can see that there’s a problem and your way of thinking is at the root of it, there’s not really much that can be done to make your life better.

Staying Grounded in the Real

John Hawkins — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:00:49 GMT

Way back in the day, I was actually doing content for YouTube (and I may do it again someday), but over the last few years, my main priority with YouTube has been learning things. Whatever you’re interested in, from AI to car repair to bench press technique, there are videos on there teaching you how to do it. If a person only used YouTube for that, it would almost certainly improve their life.

Of course, that’s not all that’s on YouTube, and the algorithm there is quite clever at figuring out what will keep you watching longer. You watch a funny video, and they’ll offer up another one you may like. You look at one clip about how to play a video game, and they’ll serve up other similar ones that may catch your attention. True story: I once spent something like two hours over a couple of days watching different bosses from the game Dark Souls fight each other in simulations to see who would win. Meanwhile, not only have I never played Dark Souls, but I have ZERO INTEREST in ever playing it.

Two types of videos REALLY hooked me, though. Exciting clips from professional wrestling matches (which I haven’t watched on TV in years) and clips from different action movies (most of which I also hadn’t seen in years). One moment, you’re watching Bruce Willis get off a classic line from Die Hard, the next you’re watching an action sequence from Equilibrium, then it’s Jackie Chan in some crazy martial arts fight against 8 gang members in a convenience store. Suddenly, you wonder where the last 30 minutes of your life went.

Perhaps oddly, I was thinking about that today when I heard something a fitness influencer named Michael Smoak said. Quite frankly, I wasn’t familiar with his work, but he apparently had an enormous number of left-wingers angry at him earlier this year. It seems they were demanding he address the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, and he did a video declining to do so because he wasn’t really paying attention to it, and it wasn’t in his lane anyway.

Well, he got enormous amounts of left-wing hate over that, lost a lot of followers, and… he didn’t really seem to care. When he was asked about why that was, he talked about how hard it was for him to take care of his father when he was dying. After that, he said, dealing with hate from a bunch of strangers, most of whom probably weren’t really fans of his work anyway, seemed trivial in comparison:

And so, my dad was a massive fall risk. And so, there was always anxiety with him just getting up to go get a glass of water. And there were just so many nights I remember at least half a dozen times my mom, because I moved home to help care for him, just barreling into my room, he’s falling again. I need your help. And going from a dead sleep to having to go pick your dad up off the floor and clean the blood off his head at 3 a.m., dude, that’ll light up your CNS. But it taught me what I was capable of. I could handle so much more stress than I realized. And it dissolved me of my ego. I remember people kept asking me how I was doing when sh*t kind of hit the fan on the internet and I was getting all the crazy comments. And I just kept thinking like, I had to carry my dying father to the bath and dress him. You think an internet comment bothers me? It doesn’t. Like, I know what real stuff is and I’m grateful for that. Like, I really am, because it raised my threshold for stress so much. I’m so much more patient. I’m so much more empathetic to people’s pain.

Now, you may be thinking, “Wait, what does this influencer ignoring an online outrage mob because he had dealt with real suffering have to do with which videos you’re watching on YouTube?”

Well, there are a lot of ways to say we only have so much time in life:

So, how much of your time do you want to spend rooted in meaningless, mostly online trivia, and how much time do you want to spend on what’s REAL in life? On what will move the needle forward for you? On what really matters?

Helping your dying dad get through a bad night. That’s REAL. When my father was dying in the hospital, I went day-after-day. Once or twice, he slept through me being there, and I didn’t want to wake him up because I wanted him to get his rest. Other times, he was a little out of it and may not have remembered that I was there, but I went. That mattered to him, and it mattered to me. I’m glad that I did that. That’s REAL. That MATTERS.

Getting beyond life and death, what matters to YOU? Your kids? Working on your marriage? Your friendships? Your health? Being happy? Having a good relationship with God? Helping out your community? Learning new skills? Becoming more informed? Becoming a better person? Trying to reach a goal you’ve been after for years? Just getting better?

These things MATTER. They’re REAL TO YOU. They have a huge impact on your life.

So, how much value are you getting out of watching Doc Holiday and Johnny Ringo duel in Tombstone again? What about arguing on some social media website or online forum with some random moron like this?

We could argue about whether it’s good for most people to be on social media at all, but setting that aside, what are you doing on social media? Keeping up with real-world friends on Facebook? Trying to learn new mobility and flexibility drills on Instagram? Learning about AI and keeping up with real news on X? Or… are you using social media to look at hot girls on Instagram, distracting yourself on TikTok, and trying to keep up with influencer gossip on X?

If you’re into politics, are you following people who teach you something or who inform you? Back when Rush Limbaugh dominated the airwaves, I used to enjoy listening to his show not just because he was entertaining, but because he had a keen mind for politics and a gift for seeing things other people were missing. Do you get a better understanding of the world because of the political influencers you’re listening to, or is it just, “How can they say that stuff and not get banned?” or “Everyone is ‘Big Mad’ because they said that! Hahahah!”

How much time do you want to spend on pornography vs. making love to your wife or, alternatively, finding a girlfriend? What’s real? Getting sexually activated looking at a screen or (ladies) reading a romance novel — or just getting out of the house? Why not go to church, a meetup, or some event where you can meet real humans that will hang out at your house, go to dinner with you, or introduce you to their hot cousin?

A lot of people get into arguments about the value of playing video games, but how about this: How much time do you want to spend playing some video game you’re lukewarm on? Not some new God of War vs. Invincible crossover game you’ve been looking forward to for months, but some game you find barely better than watching sitcoms?

In a world where your attention is a commodity that everyone wants to use for their own purposes, get more value out of your time by grounding yourself in what makes your life better, what matters, and what’s REAL.

His Girlfriend Wants an Open Relationship. Should He Stay with Her?

John Hawkins — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:06:40 GMT

Every once in a while, it’s fun to dip into a cultural issue that gets brought up on Reddit. In this case, the issue is “open relationships.” It starts with this unfortunate story:

I 20M broke up with my 21F girlfriend after she proposed to open up our relationship and now everyone is telling me to get back with her basically
I need to explain our history cause that may explain why everyone is telling me to get back with her.
Our parents were college friends and so decided to move close to each other. So i have known her since we were kids and we saw each other almost everyday even in the weekends outside of school days.
Our parents had been playing matchmaker i guess but i asked her out when we were in high school and i won’t lie i was very happy with her and we even took a gap year to just travel together.
So last year i moved into my university campus cause it’s a 2 hour commute with the train from my house and i don’t wanna be awake at 5 to get to a 8 am class. She stayed with her parents since she went to a local college which was a 10 minute drive from our neighborhood.
I of course did try to visit each weekend if i wasn’t busy with studying.
So 2 weeks ago while i was visiting she just seemed a little off the same way she was when she wanted to give me a present or something so after a while she eventually just tells me what she was hiding and she brings up having a open relationship. I personally never would be in one and for me things like intimacy are supposed to be monogamous. And im kinda sitting there in shock cause the girl i honestly thought i was gonna marry is telling me she wants to sleep around. And at this point like i just ask her if she has anyone in mind and she again becomes a little nervous and admits she has a guy in mind and this part is what i would do differently but i like lose my temper and while i don’t scream i do shout at her and i basically called her unfaithful alongside some other stuff which again wasn’t okay. At this point she is crying and like im grabbing my jacket to leave and as she starts apologizing and is like ugly crying saying she should never have brought it and basically pleading for me to not leave angry with her and that we should at least talk it out but i just leave.
I just went back to my campus which wasn’t ideal cause my usual 2 hour ride is a 4 hour ride by night time thanks to less trains running. And like by the next day im guessing my mom had found out and she is calling me and like at this point my anger is still at his peak so just call my gf some nasty words over the phone and call her unfaithful and my mom flips out on me which in hindsight i understand but like i just hung up on her.
Ever since my mom calls me and messages me every day and like my breaking point came was when my dad of all people called me and told me to at least hear it out and talk to my gf and he also mentioned she wasn’t eating well and was skipping her classes but i honestly i think that’s guilt tripping bullshit her parents probably told my parents.
Im just so conflicted cause my dad usually isn’t the type to involve him with these kinds of things and even he called me. I’m wondering if I should actually listen to my dad and give her a chance to explain herself or if that’s just going to make things worse for me. How do I know if it’s worth sitting down and talking it out like they want me to?

One of the reasons this is worth discussing is that it feels like popular culture is CONSTANTLY pushing this idea on people. You know what I mean…

Also, it’s worth noting that the world’s richest and arguably most influential man, Elon Musk, is essentially living a variation of that lifestyle:

Personally? I’d be surprised if Elon doesn’t have a bunch more kids out there that are being kept quiet because the mothers don’t want the attention. In all fairness to Elon, he’s in a position more comparable to the kings of old that had harems. Of course, how comparable are any of them to normal people? If wife #11 got out of line, the king could have her guillotined. Elon can’t do that, but he can be like, “Sorry, I’m four states away, and I’ll be super busy for the next few months, but the checks will keep coming, and you can talk to one of my assistants.” The rest of us? Not so much.

So, as a starting point, let me note that we’re going to be talking about open relationships in the US, not in some other country where they’re more common. We’re also not going to be talking about the moral implications of it, because people already have their opinions on that, and I’m probably not going to change them.

Let me also note that it’s easy to understand the appeal of an open relationship. If it worked, for a lot of people, it would be like the best of both worlds. You’d have that stable relationship at home with a person you love, but you also have potentially unlimited sexual variety. Maybe you’re thinking, “That wouldn’t be something I’d find interesting,” but everyone can see how some people might love the idea.

Still, there’s the theoretical fantasy, and the reality of what tends to happen in these relationships. So, let’s just talk about the reality of open relationships, polyamory, polygamous relationships, throuples, etc., because like most people who have been around the block and have gotten a little older, I’ve seen a lot of this play out in the real world.

Along those lines, here’s a story I wrote about a few years back that involved someone I knew in a position very comparable to the guy in the Reddit thread above:

In any case, after my friend from back in the day split from his wife, I asked him what happened. He told me that one day, she came to him out of the blue and said she wanted an open marriage. He reluctantly agreed because he was afraid he’d lose her if he didn’t. Next thing you know, she was bringing home different guys to THEIR HOUSE every other weekend and, as in this case, she wasn’t even sleeping with him. Things got more and more intolerable for him, and he said the last straw was when one of the guys from work called him to ask for his wife’s number. I’m not sure who technically filed for divorce from whom, but it was basically destined at that point.

Once someone is in a committed relationship with you and they tell you they want to open it up, that’s an EXTRAORDINARILY bad sign. It’s shorthand for, “I don’t really want to be in this relationship anymore and have my eye on someone I want to sleep with, but I am not going to deal with the implications of openly just saying that, so how about I put the ball back in your court by asking to open things up?”

Is that what’s going on with the guy from the Reddit thread? Yes, probably. Did he have the right instincts to cut ties and go in a different direction? Yes, he did. Why don’t his parents see that? It’s hard to say. Maybe they haven’t gotten the full story, or they’re just naïve. Whatever the case may be, his parents aren’t in a relationship with her; he is. If he were a friend of mine? I sure wouldn’t be encouraging him to try to patch things up with her.

Along similar lines, I have seen people in open marriages stay together. At least for a while. Would I call them happy marriages? From what I’ve seen? No. Are there all sorts of sketchy things happening? Usually, yes.

Just to name one example, a friend of mine used to date this hot girl, and they broke up, but stayed friendly. She moved away, got married, and she came back into town with her husband. Next thing you know, she tells my friend that she’s in an open marriage and the two of them slip off to sleep together. I asked him if they were REALLY in an open marriage, because she certainly hadn’t been bringing her husband around to meet us. He basically shrugged his shoulders, was like “I don’t know, I guess,” and didn’t worry about it that much.

I’ve seen multiple relationships implode over threesomes. Why? Because when it comes to our mates, we humans tend to be jealous, attached creatures. Men don’t want to see some other guy railing our girlfriend. Women get upset if their man seems more interested in somebody else in bed, which is pretty much guaranteed to happen if they’ve been together for a while, and bring in a new woman.

On top of all this, we do not live at the turn of the last century, when men and women felt like they needed each other a lot more, and divorce was rare and stigmatized. Today, having and maintaining a healthy relationship is orders of magnitude harder than it used to be, and divorce is common.

So, how much do you want to raise the difficulty level of all that with an open relationship? Some people will tell you a little bit of fear that your partner could get someone better is healthy for a relationship, but I’m not sure that really extends to her literally going on dates with the other guy and going back to his place to have sex. Similarly, how do you think you’d feel if you looked at your husband’s texts and he was calling some other woman a pet name he used for you? What if you found out your partner did something sexual with the other person that they wouldn’t do with you? How would you feel if a friend asked you about your boyfriend making out with another woman in a bar last night? What if the guys at work called you a “cuck” because they saw another man grab your wife’s butt, and you said you were fine with it? What about if you’re a “throuple” and your girlfriend is mad at you, so she spends a week deliberately buttering up the other guy in front of you?

There’s almost an infinite list of potential problems like this that can crop up. Theoretically, with the right two people, with the right “rules” in place beforehand, you MIGHT be able to navigate this maze and miss most of the landmines, but are BOTH of you up to that? At what point does one of you go, “Damn, I don’t want to deal with this drama anymore. I just want a normal relationship with a normal person who only wants me, not whoever they run across at the bar tonight?”

No hate for the people that do this (and I have known some people I like a great deal that do), but for the vast majority of human beings as we find them in America today, this is a wildly unstable form of relationship that is highly unlikely to work out.

Are There People Who Deserve to be Oppressed?

John Hawkins — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:29:54 GMT

I will be the first to tell you that it seems a little weird that a streamer who spends an inordinate amount of time gaming, like Asmongold, is one of the most interesting conservative thinkers today. Is that because he’s unusually gifted at cutting to the nub of certain issues? Maybe.

It could also be because conservative “intellectuals” seem to have dropped off in quality after people like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and David Horowitz left the scene, while many other prominent influencers on the Right have become so focused on chasing traffic that they just don’t bother with much harder to monetize original thoughts. Whatever the case may be, Asmongold has a gift for describing issues in a way most other conservatives don’t.

For example, have you ever considered that some people may DESERVE to be oppressed? At first glance, that seems outrageous, but it actually makes a lot of sense as you listen to Asmongold explain it.

For example, any time someone gets shot by the police, (liberals) automatically take the side of the person that gets shot. Any time something bad happens to the US, they take the side that’s not the US because the US is seen as the oppressor. So, the entire ideology is built around this dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. And they systematically always take the side of the oppressed.
But, the problem is that there’s a lot of people that are oppressed for good reason. There are a lot of good reasons to oppress people. And I think Iran is a perfect example of that. But, the problem is that the ideology is crafted in a way to explicitly subvert that, to explicitly misunderstand that, and to take advantage of that blind spot.
Because it is a good thing to try to look out for people that have less than you. It is a good thing to try to help the downtrodden and the oppressed. But, the reality is that you also have to look at, ‘why are people oppressed?’ And in some cases, there’s a good reason why they’re oppressed and you should probably oppress them even more.
They deserve it. I think Iran is a good example. Same with criminals, stuff like that. Shoplifters. The entire ideology they have is built off of that completely one-dimensional dichotomy that is applied to everything bigger and smaller. Whether it’s power dynamics in relationships because of age gaps or geopolitical struggles between Iran and the United States, the same ideology is being applied in the exact same way. And that’s the way they make every decision.

Normally, people see the word “oppressor” as inherently negative and make the assumption that someone who is “oppressed” doesn’t deserve it.

However, Asmongold is correct that the Left uses these terms as little more than a description of a power dynamic. (Well, for anyone other than themselves. No matter how abusive liberals in power may be – and they’re frequently EXTREMELY abusive – they never seem to believe it’s possible for them to oppress people who disagree with them.)

One of the core problems with liberals (and too many other people in our society) is that they don’t have any standards of behavior. For them, there are very few, if any, things where the same rules should be applied to white and black people, Jews and Muslims, Americans and immigrants, conservatives and liberals, straights and gays, etc., etc.

Because of this, liberals tend to abandon right and wrong and judge things on, “Which of the two conflicting parties is considered more oppressive or most oppressed by liberals right now, compared to the other?”

So, for example, with liberals, if there’s a conflict between a…

…cop and a criminal, the criminal is right.

…black woman and a white woman, the black woman is right.

…white woman and a trans woman, the trans woman is right.

…Israel and the Palestinians, the Palestinians are right.

…black conservatives and a white liberal man, the white liberal man is right.

…straight man and a gay man, the gay man is right.

…Muslim and a Christian, the Muslim is right.

…American citizens and illegal aliens, the illegal alien is right.

…business owner and bums squatting outside their business, the bums are right.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it’s completely divorced from any sort of standards, logic, or sense of right and wrong. It also makes any sort of rational debate or discussion impossible. You can try to explain why Kyle Rittenhouse was right to shoot the rioters that attacked him, Daniel Penny was right to defend the people on his subway car from a deranged homeless man threatening violence, why an ICE agent made the right call to shoot Renee Good when she tried to run over him, why the US is right to hit Iran, or Israel was right to hammer the Palestinians and a normal person might agree or disagree with your arguments. Fair enough, right? However, liberals can’t even mentally process what you are saying in a meaningful way because they start with a pre-ordained conclusion based on where both sides fall in their hierarchy of oppressors and the oppressed that forces them to take a particular position before a debate even begins and work backward from there.

In those situations, no matter what, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, the ICE agents, the US, and Israel are ALWAYS going to be wrong to liberals, and the side more favored by liberals is always going to be right.

Along similar lines, they believe that a white man can get an ID, but you can’t expect a black person or a liberal woman to do the same. Rioting is a “voice of the unheard” when liberals do it, but when conservatives do the same thing, it is an “insurrection.” People should be able to shoplift whatever they want from stores because they need it, but if those stores shut their doors and leave because of the theft, it’s racism or corporate greed or something.

Unfortunately, societies cannot properly function based on fuzzy, ever-shifting opinions about which group is supposed to be more oppressed. That goes double since we don’t even agree about who’s “oppressed,” if anyone is “oppressed” at all.

My general opinion is that if you live in the United States and think you’re meaningfully “oppressed,” you’re full of sh*t. Furthermore, if we just want to categorize who’s “oppressed” as who’s treated more unfairly, I’d say…

…men have it worse than women.

…Christians have it worse than non-Christians.

…conservatives have it worse than liberals.

…whites, Asians, and Jews have it worse than everyone else.

…the cops are treated more unfairly than criminals.

In the end, it still doesn’t matter very much if I think that, because I still believe conflicts need to be decided by standards of behavior.

So, just knowing a Christian is in a dispute with an atheist, a Jew is in a dispute with a Muslim, or a white man is in a dispute with a black man doesn’t tell us anything about who’s right and wrong because we need to judge each situation individually.

That being said, some people and even some groups of people behave horribly and deserve to face consequences for that. For that reason, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the chronically homeless who want to live on the sidewalk and get high all day. My heart does not bleed for Palestinians who chose to be led by a genocidal terrorist group, cheered 9/11 in the streets, and were thrilled that they raped and murdered large numbers of Israeli civilians. The loonies that run Iran have been pursuing nukes, sponsoring terrorism, trying to assassinate Trump, and regularly chanting “Death to America,” so I’m just fine with them getting bombed. I don’t think criminals who get arrested over and over deserve to walk free. I don’t feel bad for people who want to live off welfare, after they’re told they have to start working for their money. It’s hard to weep over some moron who gets shot attacking a cop or a man who chooses to dress like a woman who’s upset over being told he can’t use the ladies’ room.

The truth is that there are a lot of bad, reckless, immoral, evil and foolish people in the world who are happy to play the victim to avoid being held responsible for their actions. What liberals like to call “oppression” is often just what the rest of us see as them finally being held responsible for what they’ve done.

40 Quotes to Guide Your Whole Life

John Hawkins — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:38:27 GMT

Most of us have young people (and a few wayward adults) in our lives that we want to help succeed, but it’s tough to break through to people for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes they’re just not ready to change; other times, they need to hear the same advice from a different person before it sticks in their brain, and perhaps most importantly, it can sometimes feel like such an ordeal to learn things. You know, go read this book, take this class, work there as an intern, grind away at this for a couple of years… It’s just a lot.

So, one thing that occurred to me that would make things simpler was, “What if the only advice we could ever give to people about their lives was just 40 quotes and nothing more? If people took just those 40 quotes to heart, would it be enough to move their lives in the right direction?”

While there’s no way to really know the answer to that question, it did occur to me that whether it worked out or not, it made a lot of sense to come up with those 40 quotes, all of which would need to be easily understandable and apply to a wide variety of people. So, with that in mind, here are those quotes that I think almost everyone could use to guide their lives in the right direction.

1) “It’s likely that whatever challenges you have faced in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream.” -- Anonymous

2) “Losers find excuses, winners find solutions.” -- Anonymous

3) “Find something you love to do so much that you’d do it for free and find a way to make it into a career.” -- Anonymous

4) “Evil is not likely to result where people firmly believe that ends do not justify the means.” -- Roy Baumeister

5) “Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else.” -- Henry Ward Beecher

6) “Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God’s Paradise.” -- Phillips Brooks

7) “I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.” -- George Burns

8) “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” -- Dale Carnegie

9) “Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” -- Francis Chan

10) “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” -- Chinese Proverb

11) “To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.” -- Confucius

12) “The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.” -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

13) “What gets measured, gets managed.” -- Peter Drucker

14) “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

15) “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” -- Epictetus

16) “Above all, it’s the quality of your relationships that will determine the quality of your life.” -- Tim Ferriss

17) “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” -- Galatians 6:7

18) “I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.” -- Edward Gibbon

19) “Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.” -- Jim Kwik

20) “If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.” -- William James

21) “If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.” -- William Law

22) “Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times. And a very small number, really.” -- Brandon Lee

23) “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.” -- C.S. Lewis

24) “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” -- Abraham Maslow

25) “Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.” -- Earl Nightingale

26) “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” -- Mark 8:36

27) “If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?” -- W. Somerset Maugham

28) “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.” -- P.J. O’Rourke

29) “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do, and you’ll achieve the same results.” -- Tony Robbins

30) “If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.” -- Nora Roberts

31) “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” -- Jim Rohn

32) “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” -- Teddy Roosevelt

33) “The superior man blames himself. The inferior man blames others.” -- Don Shula

34) “It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” -- Socrates

35) “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” -- Thomas Sowell

36) “The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.” -- Ben Stein

37) “Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.” -- Margaret Thatcher

38) “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” -- Henry David Thoreau

39) “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” -- Often attributed to Mark Twain

40) “The truth is never the problem. The problem is always the problem.” -- Jeff Vanvonderen

5 Things People Get Wrong About Christians

John Hawkins — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:45:49 GMT

Christianity has been the most successful faith in world history and has been integral to America’s success, although you will rarely hear people say that these days. Instead, we get non-stop criticism of Christians. It would take a book to respond to every criticism and slur aimed at Christians, but it is worth taking the time to answer some of the most popular gibes here.

1) Christianity requires people to be judgmental: On the contrary, Christians have been instructed to love the sinner and hate the sin, which is good because we’re all sinners.

Christians also frequently have rules we are supposed to follow that we wouldn’t have necessarily come up with ourselves. For example, if I were writing the rules, I’d very selfishly make it morally acceptable to have sex outside of marriage. Nevertheless, sex outside of marriage is a sin regardless of how I may feel about it. As a Christian, I don’t hate people (uh… including myself – I would never claim to be perfect) who have had sex outside of marriage, but as a Christian, I am not allowed to say it isn’t a sin.

Those are just the rules, but again, there are no rules that require Christians to hate people who disagree with them. Quite the opposite, in fact:

Just to be clear, Jesus wasn’t endorsing their behavior; he was just being kind to them in spite of it and hoping to guide them to the light. We Christians should aspire to do the same thing. If you need a Christian to endorse your bad behavior, hopefully you won’t find any takers, but that doesn’t mean they hate you or find you irredeemable.

That being said, are there Christians who spew venom and hatred at people they disagree with morally, anyway? Of course, because being Christian doesn’t transcend being human, and we humans often tend to be petty, hateful creatures. At least Christianity, as it should be practiced, tries to get us to transcend our hateful tendencies and follow Christ’s example.

2) Christians are anti-science: I’ve never actually met a Christian in America that I think it would be fair to call “anti-science.” I have met Christians who don’t buy into global warming or argue against the validity of COVID vaccines because they believe the scientific evidence is lacking for those things, but of course, that’s a disagreement over science, not being anti-science.

Sometimes, people like to claim Christians are anti-science if they disbelieve in evolution. This is quite silly, seeing as how if evolution exists, that was merely the manner in which God chose to create and change life. As a Christian, I see no scientific conclusions from the Big Bang on down that potentially conflict with my faith. The vast majority of us see it the same way.

All that being said, I have met a great number of people of all types who feel very comfortable disregarding scientific evidence when it conflicts with their ideological agenda, policy goals, or self-interest. For example, start asking people who claim Christians are “anti-science” what a woman is or whether a man can become a woman just because he chooses to do so, and you will probably find their answers have very little to do with science.

3) Christians want a theocracy: In my entire life, I have yet to ever actually meet a Christian who wants a theocracy, although like every other form of weirdness under the sun these days, I’m sure they exist online.

That being said, the idea that devout Christians would like to overthrow our republic to replace it with… oh, I don’t know, the Pope, Franklin Graham, and Joel Osteen, is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.

Christians just want their rights preserved under the Constitution like every other group in America, and once you study the early years of America and see how infused it was with the Christian religion, you’ll find Christians have a lot of valid complaints about the way, ”separation of church and state” is legally interpreted, particularly since that phrase isn’t even in the Constitution.

4) Christianity keeps people from doing all the “fun” things they want to do: Christians can do anything they want, just like everyone else. The difference is we have a moral code we’re expected to abide by, and if we commit adultery or rob a bank, it makes it very hard to do the normal thing humans do, which is engage in all sorts of intellectual backflips to convince ourselves why it’s actually moral and good that we did something horrible.

Here’s the thing most people miss, though: Ultimately, almost everything Christians believe is a sin is also a bad idea that you would be better off not doing in the first place, despite it potentially being enjoyable. Even the Bible itself notes that sin can have “fleeting pleasures.”

It’s fun to sleep with someone else’s wife until it ruins their marriage and the husband tries to kill you. It’s fun to steal money and spend it until you get caught. It’s fun to get your way by lying until people find out about it, and you have to deal with the consequences.

I would argue with you that most of the sins in the New Testament are like this. What that means is that even if you didn’t believe in Christianity at all, you’d still almost certainly have a better, happier life if you avoided the things the Bible tells you not to do.

5) Christians are hypocrites: It’s always a great scandal when someone who professes to be a Christian, cheats on his wife, gets caught with a prostitute, or otherwise sins. That’s fine as far as it goes. In fact, at this point in our culture, our country would be better off if Americans were much, much more easily scandalized by the immoral behavior of prominent people, Christian or otherwise.

However, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to believe that Christians will never do immoral things because we Christians ourselves will openly tell you that…

We Christians know we’re weak, fallible, and broken creatures embracing Christianity in an effort to become saintly people. However, we will NEVER reach our goal. We will never be perfect like Jesus.

On the other hand, a man who shoots at the stars and falls short may still reach the moon. We can’t be perfect, but we can be better. If this is hypocrisy, be glad of it. The alternative is a society dragged into a sewer by sociopaths who refuse to condemn any sort of degenerate behavior on the grounds that they don’t want to be hypocrites one day if they engage in it.

What If I Told You That You Were Doing Exactly What You Wanted to Be Doing?

John Hawkins — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:01:26 GMT

You have a lot more choices than you think you do.

At first glance, you may think that’s crazy, but is it?

For example, I heard someone ask, “Where would you be living if you could be live anywhere in the world?” My answer is, “Here, because that’s where I’m living.” If I wanted to live somewhere else, I would MOVE there.

Granted, you might say, “You couldn’t live in Afghanistan! Look at how dangerous it is there! You couldn’t live in Beverly Hills because you couldn’t afford it!” But aren’t those just excuses?

First of all, I probably could live in Afghanistan. Granted, the American embassy is closed there, there is no formal VISA process and I think the State Department travel status on it is something like, “If you go to Afghanistan, there’s an 80% chance you will get kidnapped, they’ll rip off your fingers with pliers and leave you to die at the bottom of a cave,” but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t fly to Karachi, bribe someone, and get a VISA into Afghanistan. Would I be stupid to do that? Oh yeah, but I could. Similarly, if there theoretically was some zip code it seems like you couldn’t afford to live in, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t move into a nearby zip and drive through there every day, or you could get a job as a live-in butler or maid. You might say, “I make decent money for where I live now, and I don’t like cleaning, so I wouldn’t do that,” but YOU COULD. You just choose not to do it.

You might say, “Okay, smart guy, I want to live on the moon! What’s your answer now?” Well, it’s true that you can’t live on the moon, but you can’t change your sex either. Yet there are millions of mentally ill people who pretend to be members of the opposite sex, and many of them go so far as to mutilate themselves surgically to do it. Would I recommend that? Absolutely not, but they do. Similarly, you could try to build a cramped little moon cottage for yourself, put chunks of meteorite and autographed astronaut photos in it, and never come out of it because you want to pretend Earth doesn’t have an atmosphere, just like the moon. Again, would I recommend that? No, but you can do it.

Granted, there are things that can limit your options, primarily being that you can’t go back in time and that you can only control yourself, not other people. In other words, you can’t roll your life back like a movie clip and not get old, not smoke for the last 40 years, or tell your cousin that it would be a mistake to go hang out with that nice Jeffrey Dahmer guy he met at the bar. You also can’t make your girlfriend love you again, you can’t make your husband stop drinking, and you can’t make George Soros give you a billion dollars because you’re such a nice guy. Granted, you can TRY all sorts of things with other people, some advisable, some not so much, but ultimately, they get to make their own choices, not you.

Beyond that, pretty much everything you want to do in life, you can do it or do something fairly similar.

You might not be able to play in the NBA, but you could probably play in a rec league. If you can’t play in a rec league because you’re a fat, old guy over 50, you could be the one to start a fat, old guy over-50 league at the local YMCA.

Granted, the longer you wait, the fewer options you have on this front.

Once, I heard someone say that Ann Coulter had fully stocked places to stay in multiple cities where she worked or liked to visit. I liked that idea so much that I decided to do it. I got an apartment in Raleigh, and for a few years, I would spend a few weeks in Raleigh, come back to Myrtle Beach for a week or two, and then go back to Raleigh. That didn’t last forever, but it did occur to me that I might want to do it again. However, this time I have a bonkers Catahoula Leopard dog who loves having a backyard, doesn’t particularly like long car rides, and is used to going in and out via a doggie door. I’m not so sure she’d do great splitting time between here and Raleigh, so I haven’t even seriously considered it. However, that is a choice. I could get around that by giving her away, paying someone to take care of her when I’m in Raleigh, or by putting her in a “you can like it or lump it” situation and just taking her. Maybe she would do okay? Who knows?

What I do know is that people use seeming limitations like this to explain why they have “no choice” all the time.

“Oh, I can’t because I’m married.” Setting aside the fact that you don’t have to stay married, aren’t there other married people doing what you want to do? “Oh, I can’t because of my kids.” Setting aside the fact that you could put your kids up for adoption, aren’t there other people with kids doing what you want to do? “Oh, I don’t have enough money.” Maybe you don’t have enough in your bank account, but could you get a loan? Could you sell your house? Would you have enough if you worked a 2^nd job for a year? What if you sold your car and got a beater instead? “I couldn’t do that because I’d have to go back to school for two years.” But you could quit your job, find a cheap school, and work your way through, couldn’t you? Aren’t there lots of online universities now? Maybe there’s even a shorter or more intense course you could take to get it done faster.

Incidentally, we don’t even know what specific thing we’re talking about here, do we? So, I’m not saying you should DO any of these things. I’m saying YOU DO have a choice.

You can choose where to live, who to associate with, what to spend your money on, and what mental habits you engage in. I would even make the argument that many people disagree with, that you can MOSTLY choose how you feel. That’s not to say that people don’t have habits, tendencies, and SOMETIMES (mental wiring issues) that play a role in how they behave, but I absolutely don’t think that’s the case most of the time.

For example, the vast majority of people who tell you, “I’m depressed because there’s something wrong with my brain,” focus on negative things all day long, immerse themselves in negative messages, and habitually highlight the negative things that happen to them while shrugging off the positive things. It’s not “brain chemistry” making those people depressed; it’s how they think.

The same goes for many of the people with “anxiety.” My dog used to be terrified by a vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t love it now, but it also doesn’t freak her out. Know why? I grabbed my sweet little dog by the collar and held her near the vacuum cleaner until she realized she wasn’t going to die. Show me an anxious person who becomes committed to doing the things that they fear, and the vast majority of them are going to get their anxiety under control in the very near future.

The point of all this is that most people fall into a way of living and tell themselves, “I don’t have any other choice,” when that’s not even remotely true. They actually have an enormous number of choices, but they CHOOSE to limit their options.

Those choices MAY BE rational.

For example, it’s true that I don’t know how to sew, but could I learn even if my day was crammed full of other things? Absolutely. For example, I could get up 30 minutes early every day and work on it until I get competent at sewing. Do I want to do that? No. Because I don’t really need to know how to sew as long as I can pay people to do it for me.

Maybe you have a bad day sometimes, where you don’t have a “choice” in how things go, or you just “choose” not to do certain things for certain reasons. That’s perfectly acceptable. But also understand that your life is mostly the way it is because of the things you choose to think about and do.

This is simultaneously one of the most liberating and terrifying concepts you can ever learn.

Why?

Well, it’s liberating because it means YOU ARE IN CONTROL of your life. If you don’t like how it’s playing out, it means YOU have the ability to do something about it. That’s pretty amazing, right?

However, it’s also terrifying because it means YOU ARE IN CONTROL of your life. If you don’t like how it’s playing out, it means it won’t get fixed unless YOU do something about it. That’s pretty scary, right?

Ultimately, all I can do is give you a message: You have a LOT OF CHOICES. It’s up to you to examine your life, consider what needs to be done, and make them.

Capitalism Isn’t Bad Because You Suck at Life

John Hawkins — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:27:15 GMT

Technically, Bill Maher is supposed to be Libertarian, but in recent years, he has struck me as one of the last few semi-sane liberals. In any case, during a conversation with one of his guests about Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist (cough cough, Communist) Mayor of New York, this gem was dropped,

Bill Maher: “Humans need to be incentivized by selfishness. It is nature to be selfish. Animals are selfish. Watch them.”
Rob Riggle: “Yeah. I heard a song the other day, and it was… basically, ‘Capitalism isn’t bad because you suck at life.’”

First of all, before we dig into that quote, it’s worth noting that although socialism and its big brother Communism are looked down on by a majority of Americans, they still have a lot of support in our country.

In fact, not very long ago, noted left-wing streamer (and open America hater) Hasan Piker along with a number of other left-wing quasi-celebrities decided to show their support for Cuba by going on a cruise there. It was just as ridiculous as you’d expect,

This kind of thing is actually nothing new. In fact, way back in 1982, P.J. O’Rourke went on a similar junket to the Soviet Union with a bunch of aging hippies so he could write an article about it. The best line from it was,

America is not a socialist nation. It never has been and God willing, it never will be. If you really think socialism is so great, you don’t need to change America to get it, you can just leave. Personally? If I thought America was a terrible place to live and there were much better economic opportunities elsewhere, I’d sell everything I owned and move there (Legally, illegal aliens! Legally!) That’s probably the attitude most people have about it, which is why, for example, the Soviets needed a wall to keep East Germans from ESCAPING to capitalism and freedom.

Yet, what do we see in America? Almost nobody leaves our country. We have 341 million people who live here, yet here are the number of people that renounced their citizenship over the last few years.

Not only do the people that live here not want to leave, even the people that are here illegally don’t want to leave and we’re the top destination for immigrants on the entire planet. If we were so inclined, which we SHOULD BE, we could bring the Crème de la crème of immigrants on the entire planet here instead of allowing Somali welfare queens, fruit pickers and radical Islamists who sign their name with an X to come to our country (but, that’s a different column).

If socialism is so great and we’re not socialist, why do they want to come here?

Because we have the biggest economy in the world, the strongest military in the world and the most opportunity in the world. If you could only pick one country on earth to go to in order to make a good life for yourself and your family, America is #1 and we’re so far ahead of everywhere else, there is no number 2.

So, what’s supposed to be appealing about socialism?

Well, socialism looks great to people who are lazy, failures or living in a world of delusion along with the sort of people who try to appeal to people like that, usually to get political power or even more ironically, to make massive amounts of dirty, capitalist cash (See Hasan, Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, Rage Against the Machine, etc, etc).

Americans who love socialism are always some variation of the sort of people who….

* Imagine themselves permanently sitting on the couch, smoking weed and playing videos games while other people pay for it.

* Falsely convince themselves people somewhere are playing on easy mode because of some “free” something they get without realizing that there is no free lunch, and those people pay for it elsewhere.

* Know nothing about history, economics or the world, but do know that they heard a college professor say, “socialism is good.”

* Hopelessly screw up their own lives and like to imagine that they wouldn’t have the same problems in a different economic system.

* Live in text books where they conclude socialism “theoretically” looks great, without ever paying any attention to the results it produces in the real world (“The right people just haven’t tried it yet!”)

* Think they deserve to have all the same things their parents have at 60 when they’re 20.

* Just can’t hack it at life and blame everybody and everything except the person they see looking at them in the mirror every morning.

Nobody can tell you that capitalism is perfect or that some generations have challenges that other generations don’t. For example, a lot of people in Generation Z have been throwing pity parties for themselves because houses are so expensive right now, but how tough is that compared to fighting WW1, WW2 or Vietnam? What about going through a Depression? Even setting all that aside, contrary to the revisionist history you hear from people, Americans today are four times richer in constant dollars than they were in 1960.

Additionally, once you get past the tiny countries to the bigger nations with 10 million plus people, Americans have more disposable income than any other nation in the world.

In other words, yes, our country has things to work on. We always have and always will, but there’s no “magic” in socialism. There is poverty though and sometimes people eating their pets to survive, but no “magic.”

Unfortunately, there is no “easy mode” in life (other than maybe being born a Bush or Kennedy), but the truth is that the closest you’re going to get to it on planet earth right now is under capitalism in America. If you still can’t cut it, socialism isn’t going to fix it, because the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s you.

The 36 People That Sustain the Whole World Work

John Hawkins — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:00:51 GMT

Neil Gaiman is a talented writer who has brought some truly extraordinary literary works to life in the world. Although I have been much more of a non-fiction reader over the last couple of decades, I would strongly recommend The Graveyard Book and his Lucifer graphic novels (more on those here) to you.

Recently, I started digging into his Sandman graphic novels (So far, so good!), and in passing, it mentioned the story of the 36 Tzaddikim:

They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints – 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them, the world continues to exist.

I was fascinated by that concept, so I looked it up to see if it was a real thing. As it turns out, it was.

It’s from the Jewish Talmud, although there is apparently debate among Jews about whether it’s meant to be figurative or literal.

Here’s the ChatGPT explanation of the concept:

In Jewish tradition, the “36 hidden righteous” are 36 unknown, humble people whose goodness helps sustain the world.
The idea is that civilization may survive not because of the powerful or famous, but because of a few deeply decent people quietly carrying moral weight in the background.
It’s the belief that there are always a small number of truly righteous people — often invisible, ordinary, and uncelebrated — whose existence is part of what keeps the world from collapsing.

You know something? I believe this. Not the part about there literally being 36 righteous people who the whole world depends on, but the idea that our whole society rests on the backs of humble, unknown people whose goodness sustains it.

In other words, leaders, inventors, business tycoons, laws, and economic policies matter. But ultimately, what matters most is the quality of the people in a society. Are they good people? Do they want to work for what they get? Do they want to make the world a better place? Are they selfish or do they care about other people, too? Does what happens to future generation of Americans matter to them? Past generations of Americans, flawed though they may have been, seemed to at least mostly have their heads screwed on straight when it came to questions like these.

If we go back to let’s say, the Greatest Generation, we find people who aspired to be moral, honorable, and prove their worth with their character and accomplishments.

That changed over time, and eventually, as the Internet and the social media age started to take hold, we morphed into a culture that became much more obsessed with victimhood and gaining fame.

Today? It feels like we’ve become a society that, for far too many people, seems to equate your value as a human being with how much attention you can get by almost any means necessary.

This is why Bonnie Blue had sex with 1,000 men:

It’s why Clavicular became a well-known influencer by telling people that the only thing that matters about you is your looks:

It’s why numerous influencers have publicly tormented Erika Kirk, not because she did anything wrong, but because going after the wife of the most prominent assassination victim since MLK is a great way to get people talking. It’s 100% immoral, soulless, selfish behavior by horrible human beings:

Of course, it’s no coincidence that as our society has embraced these kinds of values, it has also rapidly deteriorated.

That’s because the more your life solely revolves around your needs, your wants, and your feelings at the expense of everyone else, the more depressed, anxious, mentally ill, and, let’s face it, useless to the rest of humanity, you’re likely to become.

So many people believe the more people know your name, the more important you are, but not only is that false, it’s harmful. By definition, the vast majority of people can never achieve any degree of fame. Even if they do manage to “go viral,” then they have to find a way to do it again and again and again, usually by sinking lower and lower into the sewer. This often creates a selfish mindset where all human decency and concern for other human beings have to be shoved aside to do what it takes to get attention. Meanwhile, even if it works, do you like who you see in the mirror after doing it? Probably not. Do you immediately feel pressure to go even further to do it again? Probably so. Did you make anyone’s life better? Again, probably not.

So, let me suggest an alternate way of looking at life, one that philosophically fits with that story about the 36 righteous people who hold the world together.

Instead of seeking fame, seek to do the right thing. Instead of being obsessed with yourself, look out for yourself, but look out for other people, too. Make your own life better, but don’t do it at everyone else’s expense. Treat the people around you like they matter, because they do.

It’s true that people who think that way typically aren’t the ones who get the most attention, but back in the real world, where it matters, they’re the ones who “sustain the world.”

Some people get intimidated by this concept because to them, it means, “So, are you saying I have to devote my life to helping the poor, like Mother Theresa? I like playing softball on Saturdays. Do I have to give that up to start working in a soup kitchen? Heck, I’m not a billionaire. I’m not Mr. Beast. What can someone like me even do that matters?”

There is nothing Elon Musk, Mr. Beast, or even Donald Trump can do that will do more to improve the quality of life more than tens of millions of Americans committed to doing the right thing when they can, with what they have, where they’re at.

What could that mean day-to-day? A lot of things, great and small. Like…

* Taking your shopping cart back.

* Being kind and patient to the people serving you in a desperately understaffed restaurant.

* Giving someone you don’t know a compliment you think they deserve.

* Buying a week’s worth of groceries for someone who needs them.

* Letting someone merge onto the freeway.

* Helping a friend move.

* Being the guy who picks up someone’s wallet that they’ve dropped and handing it back to them.

* Taking someone a meal after a death in the family.

* Encouraging someone who’s down.

* Letting someone with just a couple of items go ahead of you at the grocery store.

* Stopping to help someone whose car has broken down.

* Taking someone a package that was delivered in error to your house.

* Coaching Little League or teaching Sunday school.

* Giving someone who needs it, food or clothes you no longer need.

* Giving someone you don’t know condolences because someone who mattered to them died.

* Agreeing to watch your neighbor’s dog when they have an emergency.

* Anonymously picking up the check in a restaurant for a soldier and just writing “Thank you for your service,” on the bill.

We could go on and on with small things, but here’s the thing: You don’t have to devote your life to serving other people. You don’t even have to do all these things. Just do a few. Get into the spirit of it, and you know what will happen?

It won’t make you famous, and the whole world won’t step up to pat you on the back for being such a good person. But you’ll be making the world a better place. You’ll be setting an example for other people to follow, and guess who will know what you’ve done? YOU WILL. You will know that you’re one of the people helping your neighbors, helping your country, and making the world a better place.

That matters because there is no attention you can get or thing you can buy that is going to mean more to you than liking who you see when you look in the mirror. It’s people like that, the sort of person you can choose to be today if you want, who sustain our whole country and the world.

Americans Have Become Slaves to the Worst People Among Us

John Hawkins — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:00:31 GMT

There’s something I like to think of as the “Fish Tank Effect.” The “Fish Tank Effect” includes our assumptions that are so baked into the cake that we don’t even question why it’s like that anymore, just as the fish in the aquarium don’t question why there’s a castle in the sand, how their water gets cleaned, or why there are barriers all around the area they live in. To them, it JUST IS. To us, certain things just are.

The quote that we started the article with is truly brilliant because it encourages us to notice the fact that so much of our entire society now revolves around catering to relatively small, but extremely dysfunctional groups of people.

Not the rich. Not the middle class. Not the taxpayers. Not the forgotten majority that makes our country work.

No, much of our society now revolves around empowering and placating the most dysfunctional, least law-abiding, laziest, and most broken people in our entire society.

Our mentality is not, “Let’s encourage people to copy success,” “Let’s give taxpayers value for their money,” or even, “How do we make life easier and better for the majority of people,” it’s how do we drag the biggest losers in life across the finish line in spite of themselves.

As we speak, we’re currently enduring a partial government shutdown because Democrats want to try to prevent ICE from deporting illegals. These are people who knowingly and intentionally entered our country illegally and are refusing to leave. Setting aside the fact that there’s nothing more reasonable than a nation being allowed to control who does and does not enter their borders, all of these people knew the penalty for entering America illegally was deportation. Now, we’re being told, “Oh, but it’s not fair! Jose hasn’t had a drunk driving offense since 2024, so how can we send him back to his home country? Also, Camila may have entered the country illegally and ignored a deportation order, but nobody can prove her boyfriend is a member of MS-13, so she should be able to stay.” We even have “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with ICE to such an extent that they won’t hand over illegal alien pedophiles and rapists to be deported.

We’ve gone to these bizarre extremes over a subject that shouldn’t even be a debate in the first place.

We could ask similar questions about immigration. Why would we want people here from third-world hellholes like Somalia? Why would we want to import radical Muslims into our country? What is the upside of bringing in huge numbers of “refugees” who game our system, barely speak English, and end up on welfare? It’s a hill to die on for a lot of people on the Left.

Yet, why should we feel obligated to bring in dead weight for everyone else to carry when we can have our pick of the best immigrants from all around the world? They’re not even AMERICANS yet, and the ones we’ve already brought in have been a mess. Why continue that?

What about homelessness? Just California alone has spent 24 billion dollars fighting homelessness, only for the amount of homelessness in their state to INCREASE. That’s because what passes for “fighting” homelessness in America is mostly just enabling homelessness. It’s refusing to enforce drug and panhandling laws, it’s allowing them to put tents wherever they want, and it’s giving them food and shelter when times get tough in return for nothing. It’s hard to miss the fact that the more we cater to the homeless, the more homeless people we get. Why is that?

It’s because the real problem isn’t that the chronically homeless don’t have a home; it’s the terrible behavior of the chronically homeless that leads to them not having a home.

Not only should we slash the amount of money we’re spending on the homeless, under no circumstances imaginable should we put the lives of the people paying to help the homeless with their behavior problems BEHIND the homeless. No lawbreaking should be allowed. No tent cities on the sidewalks. Enforce vagrancy laws and put the crazy people walking around mumbling to themselves in asylums.

To the extent homeless people are victims, they’re victims of themselves, so why should people like that be allowed to degrade the lives of everyone else by sh*tting on the sidewalk and harassing everyone who walks by for money?

Similarly, we need to ask how the rights of criminals to get away with crimes somehow became more important than the rights of law-abiding people not to be victimized. There are people like this just walking around out there.

Did anyone really think this guy was going to turn it around between arrest 91 and arrest 92? Who even wants people like this on the streets? Oh, right….

“We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence.”

The hell we can’t.

Locking up criminals (and executions) have been the most effective answers to crime-ridden societies since the dawn of civilization, and they still are, so why are we still having this debate? Why should we keep punishing the innocent by refusing to make criminals pay for their crimes?

Of course, there’s nothing that fits this whole concept better than the trans issue. We’ve spent endless amounts of time over the last decade fighting over the right of a tiny, deeply mentally ill, mostly perverted group of men in dresses to be able to pretend to be female in locker rooms, sporting events, and even women’s prisons.

The idea that you can be a man today, put on a skirt and call yourself “Tammy” tomorrow, and you’re free to compete in female sporting events and wave your c*** at 14-year-old girls in the women’s locker room is insanity:

Why is half the population being forced to endure this lunacy instead of just telling trans people the truth, which is that they have terrible mental problems?

We can go on and on and on with this. Why are the worst, most disruptive students allowed to interrupt the schooling of kids that want to learn over-and-over again? Why do we allow squatters to simply set up shop in people’s homes and refuse to move them for months? Why do we put everything on store shelves behind glass instead of just putting shoplifters in jail? It’s hard not to miss the fact that DEI is all about giving jobs to incompetents who could have never made it based on merit just because of their skin color, race or disability.

One of the biggest problems with America is that we’ve flipped the whole idea of giving basic protections to even the worst people among us on its head, and instead, we’re prioritizing them ahead of everyone else.

That is exactly backward.

WOMEN are more important than mentally ill men who think they’re women.

LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS are more important than criminals.

AMERICANS are more important than foreigners who want to come to our country.

TAXPAYERS are more important than people who don’t pay taxes.

The MAJORITY is more important than the minority.

That doesn’t mean those other groups have zero importance or shouldn’t have rights, but it does mean that we’re not their slaves, and the rest of us should no longer be treated as second-class citizens so that we can cater to the worst people in our whole society.

The 5 Most Toxic Traits of Liberals

John Hawkins — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:06:21 GMT

Calling politically active liberals “toxic” is like calling Elon Musk “rich” or Shaquille O’Neal “tall.” Granted, you may say, “My aunt is liberal, but she barely pays attention to politics at all. She doesn’t even know who Rachel Maddow is.” In that case, realistically, much of this may not apply to her.

On the other hand, if your liberal Aunt Karen loves AOC, thinks Stephen Colbert is hilarious, and believes America is sexist for not supporting Hillary Clinton and thinks Bernie Sanders is a wise man, all of this applies to her right down to the use of “and,” “the,” and punctuation.

Liberals believe all kinds of foolish ideas, but there are particular ways the more politically active liberals behave that make them so unbearable.

1) They’re perpetually angry, outraged, and hate-filled: Inglorious Basterds is a Quentin Tarantino WW2 flick that imagines an American Black Ops unit sent behind the lines in Nazi Germany to create fear among the Germans:

Obviously, scalping people, carving swastikas into their foreheads, and burning them alive are horrible things to do, but the Nazis were horrible people, and we were at war, so the movie works.

Liberals have this same kind of approach to politics (“Anything goes! There’s nothing you can do that’s over the line!”). Except we’re not at war, and their idea of a “Nazi” is someone who wants lower taxes, a woman who doesn’t want a grown man in a dress sharing a dressing room with her, or their grandma who likes Trump and thinks people should enter the country legally.

2) Everything is a vehicle to push liberalism: How do you get along with people when you have irreconcilable political differences with them? You do it by shutting up about politics and discussing other things. You know, “We don’t agree on politics, but we get along great because we work at the same place, both like the UFC and both love playing Settlers of Catan.”

This is impossible with liberals, because for them, EVERYTHING IS POLITICS.

Schools are a place to indoctrinate kids into liberalism.

Thanksgiving dinner is an opportunity to argue politics with your family.

Church is a place to try to use God as an excuse to push your political beliefs.

Movies are a way to try to push your political beliefs out to the public.

The NFL is a way to get football fans interested in your political views.

It goes on and on and on, and it makes it impossible to simply live and let live with liberals.

3) They aren’t capable of debating their ideas: Liberals always seem to know exactly what they have to believe to be in good standing with other liberals, but they can’t defend what they believe to save their lives. Worse yet, if they actually had a good faith debate with someone and changed their minds, even if it’s just on an issue or two, they would no longer be a liberal in good standing, as we’ve seen with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and JK Rowling.

Because of this, liberals will lie, pretend not to understand what you’re talking about, set up straw men, question your motivations, try to censor you, hurl insults, and pretty much ANYTHING else, other than honestly debate what they believe. This means that open discussions with them are essentially impossible.

4) They don’t care very much about the long-term consequences of their actions: At the end of the day, liberalism almost entirely revolves around liberals trying to look cool to other liberals, and the real-world consequences don’t matter very much to them.

Questions like “Does this policy work?” or “Is it good for the country?” never enter the conversation for them. It also makes it completely futile to point out the consequences of allowing people with 40+ arrests to roam around, refusing to secure our borders, or putting weird, male sex offenders in women’s prisons because they’ve decided they’re female now. They literally do not care about the results of their policies, which means they can promise people ANYTHING to get votes without worrying about what that means for America down the line. This is how they constantly create massive disasters that everyone else has to either fix or just live with. Either way, as far as they’re concerned, it’s not their problem.

5) Liberals don’t think the rules apply to them: When millions of liberals were publicly celebrating another liberal assassinating Charlie Kirk, it permanently altered the way many of us looked at liberals. However, there was something else that stood out about it. It was people like this:

Look at this person openly, publicly calling for executions and a liberal reign of terror. Does she strike you as someone particularly well-suited for the sort of savage, violent, kill-or-be-killed world she wants to bring about? Of course, not. So, why would she openly make the call for violence? Because like almost all liberals, she thinks OTHER PEOPLE will be doing the bloody, dangerous, dirty work while she sips on $7 cups of coffee and writes nifty slogans about revolution for everyone to see on Instagram.

This is the rule, not the exception, with liberals. They should be able to attack Kyle Rittenhouse with impunity without getting shot. They should be able to block traffic and attack cars without those people potentially hitting them when they speed to safety. They should be able to put Donald Trump in prison because they don’t like him, but no one should do the same to them. They should be able to kill people they disagree with, but no one should ever retaliate.

Except the world doesn’t work that way. The harder you push, the more you guarantee that you’re going to get pushed back even harder. In fact, in a very real sense, that’s what Donald Trump was elected. Conservatives rallied behind someone that they thought would give liberals a taste of their own medicine and show them that the rules they impose on other people apply to them, too. Soon, if liberals keep pushing, they’re going to start getting Republican presidents pushing so hard in the other direction that they make Donald Trump look like Mitt Romney.

We're Now Entering the Era of Reality Apathy

John Hawkins — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:23:15 GMT

What happens when what’s true and what’s false becomes increasingly irrelevant to a large percentage of the population?

Twenty years ago, this would have seemed like a question about some kind of fantastical world that could never exist, but today?

Not so much.

As the mainstream media has completely lost credibility with many people, every claim under the sun is being made by people on social media and we’re now regularly seeing fake and staged videos presented as real, we’re starting to get a preview of what a post-truth world looks like.

G.K. Chesterton once said:

I would say something similar to you about the truth.

When people no longer know who they can trust, they don’t trust no one, they become capable of trusting anyone.

In other words, when you have a good understanding of the world, a strong moral framework, and have a number of smart, competent people that you can trust to interpret things, 95+% of bad ideas just bounce off of you like a bird flying into a windowpane.

If you have none of those things, then everything from Erika Kirk putting out a hit on her husband to a transexual genocide happening, to the claim that Sandy Hook was a false flag event, to the idea that planes never hit the Twin Towers can all start to seem plausible to you. After all, who’s to say those things aren’t real? You? Me? The news? What if you don’t trust any of us and some entertaining rando on YouTube or X says differently? Who’s to say we’re right and they’re wrong?

Of course, things are about to get much, much worse because AI videos have started to improve to the point where some of them are hard to distinguish from the real thing, and soon, enormous numbers of videos that can’t be obviously differentiated from the real world will be coming at us from every direction.

Gurwinder Bhogal, in a conversation with Chris Williamson, speculates on the dark place we’re now headed for because of this:

Gurwinder Bhogal: I think the problem is that the cost of determining what’s actually true is going to become so high—it’s going to require so much effort—that people are essentially going to give up really valuing truth as a principle.
Chris Williamson: This is one of my favorites from you: “reality apathy.”
When the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth costlier than the value of knowing it, people give up trying to be accurate and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least. Slop doesn’t just threaten the truth, but the very worth of truth.
And it’s this sort of overwhelm. The goal of propaganda isn’t to make you believe any one narrative—sometimes it’s simply to make you more pliable at not wanting to believe anything.
Earlier today, in one of the old group chats from the guys who used to work for me in Newcastle, one of them said, “Is anybody else’s algorithm getting peppered with all of this Epstein stuff at the moment?”
These are blue-collar guys from the northeast of the UK—maybe they’re working in London or something. Epstein is not supposed to cross their threshold, and it’s obviously hit a volume where they think, holy shit, this is so much Epstein stuff.
Then he said, “I’ve just seen—I’m now convinced that he’s playing Fortnite in f***ing Israel. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
And that’s literally reality apathy.
It was so funny to see that message come in and realize this is the overwhelm of information and conflicting points of view going in opposite directions—literally happening in front of my eyes.
Gurwinder Bhogal: Yeah. And I think one of the challenges going forward is going to be trying to convince people that it’s actually worth pursuing the truth.
More than convincing them of any particular truth, just convincing them of the value of truth is going to be extremely important.
Because we’re essentially entering a world of virtual reality. You can create your own reality now. You can do it figuratively through social media echo chambers, but you can also do it literally—by sequestering yourself in your bedroom and living your entire life through your headset, your laptop screen, or whatever, and using AI to generate whatever reality you want. This is not far away.

Folks, this is already a big problem. Just yesterday, I saw a piece from someone essentially claiming that all you had to do to make everyone rich was print more money:

I was trying to figure out if this is satire, so I looked this guy up, and it turns out he’s a bit of a loony professor. At that point, I was rolling my eyes at the fact there’s a professor out there who doesn’t understand that money is not value in and of itself, it’s only a REPRESENTATION OF VALUE that allows someone to say, buy a Tesla with pieces of paper, instead of having to come to the showroom with 20,000 chickens in an attempt to barter… then, something just didn’t seem feel right about it to me, so I asked Grok if this was part of a wider lecture. It turns out that it was. This guy was shooting holes in modern monetary theory, which is exactly the sort of idiocy he SEEMED to be pushing in that video.

That’s a lot of work just to find out the truth behind one clip. And of course, we could point to lots of other examples like this.

Remember how the media lied about Nick Sandmann and falsely claimed he was tormenting a native American activist?

How about the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” lie about Michael Brown that was spread everywhere and led to nationwide protests?

What about the lie, repeated endlessly by the Democrats, that Donald Trump said the white supremacists at Charlottesville were “very fine people?”

The unfortunate truth is that we have LEGIONS of people in our society deliberately telling lies and distorting the truth on a daily basis. Meanwhile, for good or ill, there are no gatekeepers screening out those lies before they get to the public. Additionally, the actual mainstream media and (what a joke) “fact checkers” are all extremely untrustworthy propaganda outfits that regularly misrepresent the truth themselves. There are honest people who care about the truth, although there are very, very, few of them on the Left, but there’s absolutely no one accepted as an unbiased truth teller by both the Left and Right.

Against that backdrop, you’ll hear people say, “Well, do your own research,” which is completely ludicrous in a lot of cases. What percentage of people are smart enough to reliably do their own research in the first place? Now, of those people, how many of them have enough expertise and knowledge in a given field to do it? Out of that much, much, smaller subset, how many have the time to check behind story after story? Now we’re down to a tiny, tiny group of people.

So, what happens in the coming months when we get 50 big AI-created stories made up per day that are shared endlessly on social media and echoed by everyone from media outlets to politicians?

Just imagine what it might look like.

Hey, here’s what appears to be a legitimate sealed New York Court document that seems to show someone saying they were paid half a million dollars by Hillary Clinton to kill Vince Foster, in an effort to cover up their affair. Ten minutes later, there’s what appears to be a real video from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declaring that they lost billions this quarter, which causes the stock to plunge, followed by a goat going berserk and scaring off a bear to save a sweet little boy it was menacing on their farm, before you see what looks to be an absolutely real news report from CNN featuring Donald Trump being heard on a “hot mic” saying a racial slur while talking to the Prime Minister of Japan… Except none of these stories are real. They’re all made up.

So, multiply that by 50, every day, from here on out, after AI gets JUST A BIT better than it is right now, and what does that lead to in our country?

Gurwinder Bhogal would probably say, “reality apathy.” I would say, “madness.” They’re essentially the same thing because if not knowing what’s real and what isn’t doesn’t constitute “madness,” then nothing does.

Financially, Most People End Up Where They Deserve to Be

John Hawkins — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:10:45 GMT

This particular clip of Asmongold talking about why some people dislike a guy on YouTube who helps people with their financial problems resonated with me because it echoes exactly what I believe:

It starts with a woman complaining that the government isn’t out to help “the common man,” which is true as far as it goes, but Caleb Hammer goes on to note we actually have an incredibly progressive taxes, which is also true. How progressive? Well, this recent Tweet certainly stuck with me:

How much more progressive can a tax code get than 200 people paying 47% of the taxes for a state with 40 million people in it?

Anyway, she goes on to complain about not getting more help from the government, and he tells her she needs to go get a better job. Although I had only seen this clip, I was interested in getting more details on this couple’s situation, so I skimmed his 1.5-hour episode with them:

They’re an unmarried couple, and she makes 43k per year, and he makes around 48k. That doesn’t seem so bad, right? But even though he’s paying for the vast majority of the monthly expenses and she has gotten some settlement money on top of that income because of a childhood accident, she’s still down to $8.10 in her bank account and has debt. How? Complete financial irresponsibility. She’s constantly eating out, has all kinds of subscriptions, and is paying the minimum on what she owes (one of those credit cards had a 36% interest rate).

The guy is better than her, but he’s spending $50 per week on weed, has a 14% interest rate on a Mustang that’s worth 5k (but he still owes more than 8k on), is talking about choosing not to pay taxes this year, and is eating into the savings he did have to support her.

If you look at these people, what it comes down to is that they have no budget, zero financial discipline, and they’re really not even thinking about things like paying off debt, saving money, or investing. It’s basically just, “All I care about is getting through next week.”

No matter which party is in power or what the economy looks like, one thing you will continuously see is that roughly 60% of people live paycheck-to-paycheck – and some of those people make an extraordinary amount of money:

Data shows that while 57% of earners with an annual income of $50,000 or less live paycheck to paycheck, 40% of those earning $300,000 or more have found themselves in this cycle.

If you make $300,000 per year, you can live fairly well and put back a good amount of money, even in places like Manhattan and San Francisco.

So, how can it be that so many people struggle financially? Is it the “system?” Is it that “hard for Generation Z?” Is it that “There are no more financial opportunities anymore?”

No, maybe 99% of the time, it actually comes down to 1 of 4 things:

1) You’re young and haven’t had a chance to build up financially yet.

2) You have more kids than your income can support in style.

3) You got too sick to work.

*** This is the big one. The one that explains almost all of them. ***

4) You make bad financial decisions.

What kind of bad financial decisions? Well, just to name a few:

* Not having a budget.

* Not saving and investing even a small amount each month.

* Not putting back large amounts of one-time windfalls.

* Spending too much on cars.

* Spending too much on a house.

* Splurging on things because you feel stressed or think you deserve it, as opposed to spending money on things when you can actually afford it.

* Letting your spending rise to match your income instead of living below your means.

Why do so many people screw this up? Because we’re DELUGED with advertisements for products, bad financial advice, and opportunities to make our lives easier at a cost all day long, every day.

Meanwhile, the rewards you get out of being financially responsible don’t make you look cool on Instagram. Are you saving and investing money? That means you’re driving a car that’s a little older, living in a house that’s a little smaller, and not eating out as much. If that’s you, it can be easy to feel like, “You’re not keeping up with the Joneses.”

On the other hand, it’s EASY to go out to eat instead of prepping your lunch beforehand. It’s EASY to pull out a credit card and buy something that you can’t afford because you’re stressed and, “you deserve it” for working so hard. There’s a tremendous amount of social pressure on people to spend money they don’t have to impress people they don’t know.

So, if you don’t ACTIVELY take steps to safeguard your financial future, if you’re not disciplined, if you just go with the flow… You’re almost always going to be a financial mess. Chances are, you’re going to blow through everything or end up with not nearly enough money when you get older.

You may say, “Okay, well, what about the rich, though? Those guys just get handed everything, right?”

No, actually, for the most part, they don’t:

Just how deep does the myth that millionaires’ wealth simply fell into their laps go?
According to The National Study of Millionaires, about three-fourths (74%) of millennials believe most millionaires inherited their money, and more than half (52%) of baby boomers think the same thing. But our study of millionaires blows that theory out of the water. Here are the facts:
Only 21% of millionaires received any inheritance at all.
Just 16% inherited more than $100,000.
And get this: Only 3% received an inheritance at or above $1 million!
… Millionaires and the general population receive inheritances at nearly the exact same rate. So, don’t miss this: Millionaires are no more likely to get an inheritance than their neighbor who’s swimming in debt.
And if you do happen to get an inheritance, you’re probably going to have to wait a long time to get one. Most Americans get an inheritance in their 50s.

The thing about getting where you want to be financially is that typically, it takes discipline, a lot of work, and an awful lot of self-denial over a very long period of time for most people to end up on a sure financial footing. Some people do it and reap the rewards, while most people don’t and pay the price of failure. Ultimately, we mostly end up financially exactly where we deserve to end up.

The Left’s Violent Game of “I’m Not Touching You.”

John Hawkins — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:28:52 GMT

If you’ve been around kids in a car, particularly when they’re bored, frustrated, and mildly annoyed, you’ve probably seen them play a variation of the “I’m not touching you” game. The whole idea of it is to do as much as possible to annoy the other child, while still staying within the boundaries set by mom and dad, so you don’t get in trouble. This often leads to one kid sticking his hand in the other kid’s face or getting near their arm, which irritates the other child, who then calls out for help from their parents. Then, the kid who is deliberately annoying the other one will go, “But I’m not touching him!” This usually goes on until Mom or Dad tells them to knock it off or else.

Adults in relationships, particularly if one is passive-aggressive or loves drama, will also play their own form of this game. They’ll deliberately do or say that one thing that they know drives the person they’re with BONKERS and then pretend to be the victim when they “overreact.” You know, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Why are you getting so upset just because I invited my mother to stay with us this weekend without asking you? Yes, I know the two of you got in a screaming match the last time she was here, and I agreed that I wouldn’t do that, but are you saying I can’t see my own mother? Am I supposed to cut her out of my life?”

Well, do you know who else does this now?

Liberals.

Liberals do this all the time now and they do it in an attempt to create violence and they are quite literally hoping people will die because of it.

A great example of this is the way Democrats “protest.”

Sometimes a peaceful protest really is just that. But it’s also used as a cover for bad behavior and even criminal activity. We saw this CONSTANTLY during the George Floyd protests that caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage and cost more than 25 Americans their lives.

Liberals would scream profanity, loot stores, set things on fire, block traffic, attack people, and what do they fall back on when they get stopped? “They’re trying to take away our First Amendment right to protest! Look at those people over there just holding signs… right now. After curfew. After those ‘peaceful protests’ led to day after day of looting, rioting, and mayhem!”

During the ICE protests in Minnesota, liberals were actually setting up surveillance, blocking traffic, and chasing ICE agents in cars, then going, “We’re just protesting.” Since when does “protesting” involve attacking ICE agents, smashing up hotels they’re supposedly staying in, arming yourself and getting into a struggle with ICE agents trying to arrest you, or trying to run over ICE agents with your car? You’ll never hear me say what the Jan 6 protesters did was okay, but what just happened in Minnesota and places like Portland was a lot closer to an insurrection than what happened on Jan 6.

Another similar tactic liberals use is deliberately blocking traffic with their protests. They intentionally stand in the middle of the road. Not on the sidewalk. Not in a public area. In the middle of a road, you know, where CARS DRIVE, then they block those cars and often get aggressive with them. They jump on the hood. They pound on the side of the car. They kick the car. They try to open it. Then, the person who’s UNDER ATTACK, quite understandably, guns it to get away from the lunatics attacking their car, and the liberals pretend like they’re innocent victims, not the people deliberately instigating the whole mess.

Do you remember what happened with the Supreme Court when liberals feared (happily, correctly) that they were going to rule against Roe v. Wade? Liberals protested outside their homes, which was meant to be a threat to their safety. Despite the fact that it’s against federal law to try to influence a judge at their home, the Biden administration and liberals in charge of law enforcement in Maryland and Virginia allowed the protests to continue. Eventually, some armed nutjob showed up at Kavanaugh’s house and admitted he was there to kill him after he was caught, which, of course, is EXACTLY WHAT LIBERALS WANTED TO HAPPEN.

Similarly, we could point to liberals making a point of calling conservatives “fascists” right after a liberal with, “Hey, fascist! Catch!” written on his bullets murdered Charlie Kirk. It was very obviously an attempt to get other wacko liberals like Tyler Robinson to step up and kill more conservatives, but when conservatives pointed out what they were doing, it was, “Are you against free speech?”

Along similar lines, millions of liberals openly celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, a man who held mainstream conservative views. Celebrating his death was the equivalent of telling 100 million other conservative Americans who share his views that you want them dead, too. It wasn’t, “We look at the issues differently,” or “I disagree with you,” it was “I WANT YOU F****** DEAD.” When conservatives quite correctly started getting people fired who did that, it was, “What about free speech? Are you for cancel culture?”

Liberals in America are playing an extremely dangerous game. Because conservatives understand what liberals are doing, and ALL OF THEM are responsible for the violence that’s being encouraged. If liberals keep playing these games, if they keep pushing it and pushing it, they may create a situation where everyone from AOC to Bernie Sanders to Joy Reid to your mouthy liberal neighbor down the street is held responsible for liberal violence because in a very real sense, THEY ARE.

I genuinely, truly, hope it never comes to that because no one will really benefit if it does, but liberals have to want that, too. As of today? I think a lot of them think they can encourage violence and then say, “I’m not touching you,” but guess what? You’re not fooling us. We can see exactly what’s going on.