Two days ago, Nature published an editorial about Jason Arday.

Nature is one of the most prestigious scientific publications on earth. If journals had an Ivy League, Nature is Harvard.

The title: “The death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection.”

When I saw it, part of me was hopeful.

Because there is so much to reflect on.

Maybe they’d reflect on how a man who:

• Lied about visiting professorships at three universities

• Lied about a book that was never published

• Lied about millions in charity money that doesn’t appear in any record

• Claimed to run 600 miles in 6 days

• Claimed to not be able to speak until 11

• Claimed to not read or write until 18

Rose to one of the most prestigious positions in academia without anyone checking.

Maybe they’d reflect on how suspicions were raised to Cambridge in May 2023 and they declined to look.

Maybe they’d reflect on what it means that his own peers had doubts and said nothing.

Maybe they’d reflect on why public confidence in higher education has fallen from 57% to 38% in eleven years.

Maybe they’d reflect on whether a system that rewards hardship stories might attract people who invent them.

No.

Here’s what we got instead.

Nature announced it would focus on two issues.

One: how academic institutions should handle misconduct investigations when the media is watching.

Two: how the media should report on misconduct without causing harm.

Just those two.

Not whether the allegations that Jason lied were true.

Not why nobody checked.

No - they focused on media conduct, and administrative procedure.

Instead of focusing on Jason’s actions, and the incentive structure that enabled it, they focused on everyone’s reactions.

The only Cambridge failure they actually specify is that Cambridge announced its investigation too publicly.

Not that Cambridge declined to investigate for three years.

Nature’s question is: “Why did it feel the need to announce its investigation publicly - and did this decision reduce Arday’s chances of getting a fair hearing?”

So the only institutional failure Nature identifies is a confidentiality breach.

Nature writes:

“There is systemic racism in academia. It is an unwelcoming place for many who enter it through hardship and struggle, as Arday’s story illustrates.”

Jason’s story of hardship and struggle is the thing that was fabricated.

The 600 miles.

The charity millions.

The professorships.

The book.

The claim about being on Seven Up.

All of it collapsed under the most basic checking.

Even now, when we know he fabricated his story of hardship, they make the story about his hardship.

Nature calls him “an autistic Black scholar who inspired a generation.”

There is no public documentation of that diagnosis. Nobody has produced it.

The only source for it is Jason.

And Jason lied about his professorships, his book, his charity totals, and his running.

Nature asserts it as fact, in an editorial about an evidentiary dispute, in the most prestigious science journal in the world.

They talk about him inspiring a generation, without mentioning that he lied to a generation.

And in an entire editorial about Jason Arday, Nature does not mention the fabricated CV once.

Americans' confidence in higher education was 57% in 2015. It's 38% today.

That’s a 19-point collapse.

Over the same period, confidence in other core institutions - Congress, the Supreme Court, big business, organized religion - fell 5 points on average.

Higher education is falling about four times faster than institutions people already hated.

Seventy percent of Americans now say higher education is going in the wrong direction. In 2020 it was 56%.

You can blame Trump. You can blame social media. You can blame the pandemic.

Some of that is fair.

But when things are going badly in your life, there are always factors outside your control and factors inside it.

And a person who focuses only on the ones outside develops learned helplessness.

So does an institution.

This was a terrible response from Nature.

The entire Jason Arday situation could have been avoided if academics - whose sole job is to seek truth - sought the truth.

Instead they bought Jason’s obvious lies, because he was black.

But even in their reflection, the academic establishment fails to understand why Jason was scrutinized so heavily.

They fail to understand that years of institutional focus on race - in admissions, in hiring - is the thing that built up the pressure that was unleashed on Jason, who lied grotesquely.

The racial promotion strategies of these institutions are what created a rational basis for suspicion of black intellectuals.

DEI put an asterisk on every meritorious black person’s achievements.

In an effort to correct past systems of racial discrimination, they created a new one.

The reaction to Jason was the consequence of that system.

Every academic should view the acceptance of Jason’s lies as the primary issue.

Because he did the opposite of what academics are supposed to do - present the truth.

But instead, Nature and others misdirect attention from his actions and the failings of academia, to the public’s reactions.

What a tragedy.

Our academic institutions disgrace themselves further with every passing year.

Please - stop being activists.

We need academics.

In the next section, we'll talk about the systemic racism claim, and how it completely derails rational discourse and accountability.

From here, you'll learn:

• Why an explanation that accounts for everything accounts for nothing

• The three conversations that become impossible the moment systemic racism is the answer

• Why being told the world is against you feels like power, and what it actually costs

• What the faculty numbers and the Harvard admissions data do to the theory

• Blumenbach’s five racial categories, the three we quietly dropped, and what’s still built on the rest

Read more

Seize the means of production?

What does that mean??

Well, that’s what socialism is.

It’s not universal healthcare.

Or free childcare.

It’s not what Nordic countries are.

It’s not what China is.

It’s not even what his “city-run” grocery stores are (more on that later).

Socialism is an economic system characterized by collective ownership of the means of production.

AKA, the government owning the farms, factories, and companies.

(You’ve seen me hammer this definition in several letters now. I’m going to keep hammering it, because definitions determine decisions.)

62% of Americans aged 18 to 29 have a favorable view of socialism.

But as of 2018, only 17% of all Americans could correctly define it.

Most Americans are confused about what socialism is.

Mamdani is not.

He is advertising socialism, and selling it with something else.

Before I go further, I want to be clear about something.

This isn’t a piece about Zohran Mamdani.

I’ve listened to hours of his long-form interviews. He’s sharp. He understands the practical problems better than most of his critics do. He is a generational political talent.

If he called himself a social democrat, I’d have almost nothing to say.

But he isn’t one man.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America this month, after her membership had quietly lapsed for seven years.

As of this writing, prediction markets have her as the favorite for the 2028 Democratic nomination.

This is a movement with a written end goal.

Mamdani is just its most talented marketer.

The Word He Didn't Choose

Under socialism, the government owns the farms, factories, and companies that produce things.

Cuba, where the state still produces about 85% of output, is socialist.

China, where state-owned companies produce about 25% of GDP, is not.

Denmark and Norway sit near 22%. America is at 13%.

But those numbers are measuring two different things.

In Denmark, the government runs the hospitals and the schools.

In Cuba, the government runs the hospitals and the schools - and the farms, and the factories, and the stores, and the hotels, and the banks.

That’s the difference between a welfare state and socialism.

There is a word that describes almost everything Mamdani is actually selling.

Free buses. Universal childcare. A rent freeze. Higher taxes on corporations.

That word is social democrat.

Social democracy is somewhere between capitalism and socialism. The best way to think of a social democracy is as a welfare state.

It describes Denmark. It describes Norway.

It describes a mainstream position inside the Democratic Party.

It is not controversial.

But Zohran doesn’t identify as a social democrat.

He picked democratic socialist.

Those two words are not synonyms.

They differ on exactly one thing: who ends up owning the farms, the factories, and the companies.

A social democrat taxes private companies and spends the money on people.

A socialist wants the public to own the companies.

A social democrat wants to exist within a capitalist framework, with limited state ownership.

A socialist wants to abolish a capitalist framework, with total state ownership.

The similarity of the terms is a point of confusion for a lot of people online.

This is not a minor semantic quibble - it’s a hugely important point.

Because if you sell people something they like, but brand it as something different, they start to like both the thing you’re selling and the brand - even if the two are totally different.

Think of it this way.

Imagine someone gives you a bottle labeled OxyContin.

Inside is Tylenol.

You take it for a headache. It works. You feel good.

Now you have a positive association with the brand OxyContin, not knowing it’s Tylenol.

Then one day the same person gives you a bottle that actually contains Oxy - and you take it the same way you took the last one.

Too much Tylenol gives you a stomachache.

Too much Oxy stops your breathing.

We can argue about whether you needed Tylenol.

There’s a legitimate argument for it, and it has a strong track record of having worked before.

But it’s much harder to justify Oxy.

Especially when Oxy has destroyed so many people’s lives in Cuba, Venezuela, China before 1978, the Soviet Union, and many other countries.

Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America are advertising OxyContin and selling Tylenol.

But their end goal is that we take Oxy.

That is a deliberate choice - they are not confused about what socialism is - even though most Americans are.

The Democratic Socialists of America say they want social ownership of ALL major industry and infrastructure.

They have chosen the socialist label.

They have chosen the socialist end goal - seizing the means of production.

And they are relying on social democracy and the successes of capitalism to make socialism more appealing.

Socialism’s Stolen Virtue

Mamdani keeps using capitalism to solve problems and calling it socialism.

1. The Budget

The promise:

Several months ago I wrote about how Mamdani balanced New York City’s budget, which had a $12 billion deficit.

He said he didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people.

He branded it as a win for democratic socialism.

That second claim is false.

The reality:

Even if we stretch the definition of socialism to mean taxing the rich:

In reality, about 5% of the budget gap was closed by taxing the rich.

About 53% was mostly by taking money from people who don’t live in New York City, and future taxpayers - most of whom are working people.

So for example - I was born in the Bronx, which is in New York City, and when I was 10 I moved to Rockland County, a suburb in New York State.

If I still lived in Rockland, my tax money would be going to cover New York City’s tax deficit.

And about 35% of the budget gap was closed by predicting strong future performance from Wall Street - the capitalist center of the world.

(These are approximations. Budget rounds overlap across reporting periods, so the components don’t total to exactly 100%.)

But look at what that means.

They were counting on the revenues of companies that they want to eventually seize, to solve New York City’s financial problems.

And that might not sound like such a bad idea - after all, if they’re producing wealth, it’s not like that wealth will go away under socialism. The wealth will just go to the people who need it, right?

Well, we’ll talk about that in a moment.

But in summary, no, the budget deficit was not closed by socialism.

Unless you want to focus on the 5% of it that was closed by taxing the rich, and ignore the other 95%.

Mamdani is counting on the success of capitalists, taking taxpayer money meant to serve other parts of New York, and calling this a win for socialism.

2. City-Owned Grocery Stores

The promise:

A network of city-owned grocery stores. “A public option for produce.”

In his campaign video he said: “These stores will operate without a profit motive, or having to pay property taxes or rent, and will pass on those savings to you.”

The reality:

In July, the details came out.

The city owns the land, pays for construction, and covers rent and property taxes.

A private, for-profit grocery company runs the stores.

So the program built to prove that removing the profit motive lowers prices is being operated by a company that only exists because of the profit motive.

Which isn’t inherently a problem - that’s called a public-private partnership, and there are plenty of examples of them.

But remember - in socialism, there are no public-private partnerships. There’s just the public.

So he’s advertising something as socialist, but it relies on the productivity of capitalism.

And as I discussed in a previous newsletter - it’s pretty much the most inefficient model possible for creating savings for poor and working-class people. You can find a link to that letter here.

So he’s hiring capitalists to run the store, subsidizing them with taxpayer money, and yet again - claiming it as a win for socialism.

Mamdani’s city-owned grocery store project is perhaps the most inefficient way to help the poor, and unscalable.

It’s only optimal for one thing: marketing socialism.

But under true socialism - which is his goal - even the private companies he’s relying on cannot exist. Because the government owns the companies.

And that is the thing that is difficult for people to see.

There is a difference between redistributing the money generated by companies and the government owning the companies.

The first redistributes the wealth.

The second destroys the same source of wealth that you want to redistribute from - because the government is not good at creating wealth.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Venezuela sits on the largest proven oil reserves on earth.

In the 1990s they opened those reserves to private investment. ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and others put in billions and added more than a million barrels a day of capacity.

The state oil company already existed - Venezuela nationalized oil back in 1976.

But it was run by career professionals, working alongside private partners, and it worked.

In 1998 the country pumped 3.4 million barrels a day.

Then in 2002 and 2003, Hugo Chávez fired 19,000 of those professionals and replaced them with political loyalists.

In 2007 he seized the private stakes too - and they went from a public-private partnership to fully public.

By 2018 production had fallen to 1.3 million barrels a day.

And that was before a single US sanction hit the oil sector. Those didn’t start until 2019.

By 2021 Venezuela was pumping around 527,000 barrels a day.

Oil export revenue went from $73 billion in 2011 to $22 billion in 2016.

Some of that was the oil price crash.

And some of it was that they were producing a lot less oil.

Between 2013 and 2021 the economy shrank by 80%.

Venezuelans lost two-thirds of their wealth per person.

They went from one of the richest countries in Latin America to one of the poorest.

The oil never went anywhere. The people who knew how to get it out did.

3. Free Buses, Childcare, Rent Freeze

Free buses. Universal childcare. A rent freeze.

These aren’t examples of socialism. They are wealth transfers.

And some of them are defensible as transfers. Reasonable people can argue about whether a city should subsidize buses or childcare.

But none of them are socialism. And branding them as socialism is the tell.

Because every dollar of it comes from taxing people and private companies.

Which is fine - until you get what you asked for.

Because the goal of socialism is for the government to own those companies.

And a lot more often than not - when the government has taken over a profitable industry, it has stopped being profitable.

So what exactly funds the free buses after you seize the bus manufacturers?

What funds universal childcare when Wall Street is a state agency?

And this is the problem with socialism.

It puts management of wealth under people who don’t know how to create wealth.

It’s the political version of a founder who’s brilliant at raising money and bad at building anything.

The PowerPoint deck is beautiful. The story is compelling. Investors keep writing checks every round.

But he’s spending other people’s money, and eventually there isn’t any more to raise.

The philosophy is clear. Rich people have money. Poor people don’t. So take from the rich and give to the poor - fine.

Then what?

At some point somebody has to create new wealth.

And socialist ownership has a terrible record of preserving the wealth it wants to redistribute.

The socialists are marketing an agenda financed entirely by the thing they’ve promised to abolish.

They are funding a marketing campaign for socialism with capitalism.

What The Label Does To The Policies

So now you understand how Mamdani isn’t actually implementing socialism - he’s implementing social democracy, or relying on capitalism, while building public support for socialism.

If the socialists actually had power, their goal of seizing the means of production is fundamentally incompatible with the reforms Mamdani is producing.

So what is this strategy?

There’s a term for it in socialist strategy - “non-reformist reforms.”

It’s the centerpiece of the democratic socialist playbook: advertise socialism, deliver capitalism, and use the credit to eventually abolish capitalism.

It’s the same sequence Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Mao Zedong each used to take power.

And we need to study it.

Because those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

In the second half of this letter: how big this movement actually is, how we can have a socialist president in 2028, and the exact timeline each of those three men followed - including the quote where Castro explains, in his own words, why he lied about being a communist for 32 months.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The difference between social democracy and socialism, and why it comes down to who owns the farms, factories, and companies

• How Mamdani’s budget, city-owned grocery stores, free buses, and childcare plans rely on capitalism while being marketed as socialism

• The problem with funding socialist promises through the companies socialists ultimately want the government to own

• The strategy known as “non-reformist reforms,” and how the Democratic Socialists of America use popular reforms to build support for a complete break with capitalism

• The sequence Castro, Chávez, and Mao each followed

Read more

Lindsay Clancy did need help.

Mothers do need postpartum support.

She should get care.

In prison.

What happened

The date of the incident was January 24th, 2023. Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Lindsay Clancy was 32. A labor and delivery nurse at Mass General with three kids. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months.

She sent her husband Patrick out to pick up takeout and grab a prescription at CVS.

While he was gone she strangled all three children with exercise bands in the basement.

Then she cut herself and jumped out of a second story window.

She lived. She’s paralyzed from the waist down.

Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that day. Callan died a few days later.

Patrick came home to it. His 911 call is in evidence. It’s mostly screaming.

Why people are talking about it now

The trial is happening right now in Plymouth Superior Court, and it’s being livestreamed.

Closing arguments are this week.

Lindsay said she killed her 3 children.

Her lawyers aren’t arguing she didn’t do it.

They’re arguing she isn’t criminally responsible, because she was suffering from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis.

Guilty means life in prison without parole.

Not criminally responsible means a state mental health facility.

Her husband

Police ruled her husband Patrick out immediately.

There’s video of him in the pharmacy.

Video of him in the restaurant.

Text messages.

His drive home tracked.

The food and the medicine still sitting on the kitchen island when officers arrived.

Hours before it happened, he texted her calling her a good mama.

Days after, he released a public statement asking people to forgive her, the way he had.

He later said he wasn’t married to “a monster”.

He was married to someone who got sick.

He has since divorced her, remarried, and moved to New York.

The reactions

Outside the courthouse, there have been hundreds of women in pink, with shirts reading “Justice For Lindsay” and “She Needed Help”.

Women in pink rally in support of Lindsay Clancy outside her trial. (AP)

On TikTok, mothers filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay.”

Mothers filming themselves screaming, sobbing on camera in front of their toddlers, throwing things, and framing the rage as solidarity.

It has been widely embraced in the mom corner of TikTok as a healthy way for mothers to express anger.

And then there’s the “alternative theory” wing, which says Patrick did it.

One theory making the rounds: he drugged her, pushed her out the window, strangled the children himself, and framed her so he could marry someone else.

This wing treats his remarriage and move to New York as evidence of this theory.

This wing treats his testimony as evidence too, because people watched him take the stand and decided he sounded wrong.

Lindsay agreed to a stipulation of facts, which meant prosecutors didn’t have to present all of their evidence in court.

That left gaps in a televised trial, and content creators filled the gaps.

The man who begged the public to forgive his wife is now being accused of murdering his own children.

I’ve written about this pattern before — Spencer Pratt's LA mayoral run, Candace Owens' theories about who killed Charlie Kirk, Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It's a similar pattern every time.

1. Something happens.

2. People want answers within hours or days, and rush to find answers.

3. People have pre-judgments about who is guilty that are informed by their bias.

4. People confirm their bias by working backward to evidence and call it research.

5. They say “things don’t add up” or “something doesn’t make sense” — when in reality, they just don’t understand certain systems or technical details.

6. They say they “just are asking questions” when they are in fact not just asking questions — they are suggesting answers — and those answers are the low probability, high flammability answers that tend to get attention.

7. They are skeptical of the mainstream narrative as a rule, but don’t apply the same level of skepticism to the alternative narrative. They require perfect evidence to believe the mainstream, and merely possible explanations to believe the alternative.

The Lindsay Clancy case is about as clear a case as exists.

She confessed.

Her own defense team isn’t disputing that she strangled her children.

I’m not going to spend this letter on that theory.

What matters is what these reactions have in common.

Every one of them moves the weight off Lindsay. The alternative theory camp moves it onto Patrick.

The solidarity camp moves it onto her illness and onto a system that failed her.

Almost nobody in this conversation is arguing she should face no consequences at all.

The move is subtler and more corrosive. It’s a reordering of moral attention.

The conversation leads with her suffering.

What is put in the foreground is her mental illness.

The failures of the medical system.

The lack of a village for mothers.

The murder itself recedes into the background.

The three children recede into the background.

The moral center of gravity shifts from what was done to how the person who did it was feeling.

I didn’t hear about the Lindsay Clancy story until last Friday. A friend brought it up over dinner. My first reaction was pure disgust and shock. Three kids. Strangled. How could anyone look at that and start talking about justification or solidarity?

That was the emotional response. After I sat with it for a minute, I realized I didn’t actually know what the people defending her were saying. I only knew my own reaction. So I went looking.

One of the tools that helped me map the conversation quickly was Ground News.

Their bias comparison showed the split in real time.

Left-leaning coverage was framing defense of Lindsay as a maternal-health reckoning — language about women being “dismissed, neglected and ignored,” and the repeated line “care over prison.”

Right-leaning coverage stayed locked on the children’s deaths and treated the attendees as a “feminist mob” defending a “killer mom.”

Seeing those frames side by side did two useful things.

First, it showed me the actual argument the supporters were making instead of the cartoon version that shows up in quote-tweets.

Second, it surfaced details that hadn’t come up at dinner, including that a forensic psychiatrist had diagnosed her with postpartum psychosis after the fact.

I still think the emphasis in the coverage defending Lindsay is wrong — but now I understand the best argument for what I think is wrong.

I would rather disagree with the real position than the one I invented in my head.

This is the exact reason I’ve used Ground News for two years, long before they ever sponsored anything I made.

Most of us live inside feeds that validate us.

When a story is this emotionally charged, that becomes dangerous.

You end up reacting to a filtered version of events and calling it clarity.

Ground News is one of the few tools that forces the other framings into view without requiring you to go hunt for them yourself.

I use it on basically every major story I cover now.

If you want the same view, you can get 40% off their Vantage plan through the link below.

It includes the bias comparison feature and the rest of the tools.

Signing up for their Vantage plan empowers you, supports a great company, and enables my work.

Get 40% Off Ground News

Consequences and Compassion — In That Order

Lindsay is a mentally ill person who did a profoundly evil thing.

Her sickness, we should have compassion for.

Her actions, we need consequences for.

And we need to emphasize the consequences first.

The consequences must be in the foreground.

Because the reverse order has consequences of its own.

Internal states are difficult to verify and easy to narrate after the fact.

External actions are not.

A civilization that begins treating the internal state as primary and the external act as secondary will eventually weaken the very incentives that keep disordered people from acting on their worst impulses.

Sometimes humans do the right thing because it is right.

Sometimes we do the right thing because it benefits us.

Sometimes we do it because we fear the social and legal cost of doing the wrong thing.

All three of those motives are required for civilization to function.

Remove or muddy the third, and more evil will follow.

This is why the first and loudest statement must be about the boundary, not the explanation.

That should lead in the rhetoric.

Compassion should follow.

If the first and loudest thing is “she was failed by the system” the lesson is that being failed explains killing three children.

If the first and loudest thing is “this is evil and there will be consequences,” the lesson is that nothing explains killing three children.

Both should be said — and what we choose to emphasize has a meaningful difference.

Lindsay must face consequences.

Not out of spite.

Out of necessity.

Her judgment was compromised by her biology and psychology.

She was on thirteen medications in four months, as providers treated her symptoms and then treated her reactions to the treatments.

A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis after the killings.

Her husband went to her doctor the week before and said they were turning her into a zombie.

All of that is true.

And — Lindsay could have chosen good. She did not.

The voice

She told a hospital chaplain she heard a voice telling her to kill her children and herself.

If she heard a voice, there was a Lindsay hearing it. The hearer and the voice are two different things. That is what hearing means.

She could have refused it.

She chose to obey it.

Lindsay is not just her thoughts, feelings, and voices.

Just like you are neither your thoughts, nor your feelings, nor that voice that whispers dark thoughts.

You are you.

You are the one experiencing and responding to your conditions.

You are the cause of your actions, not just the effect of your circumstances.

Every court, every contract, every apology you have ever given or accepted assumes there is a you in there doing the choosing.

No matter how loud that dark voice was, there was another voice that Lindsay did not listen to.

Because even in the most chaotic consciousness, there is a voice that knows right from wrong.

That is called our conscience.

It is harder to hear for the sick. But it is always there.

The voice of society

When the sick struggle to hear their voice of sanity, they need to hear the voice of society.

Which says: if you won’t respond to your conscience, then we must ensure you respond to incentives.

Not to hurt you — to protect everyone.

People do the right thing for three reasons:

1. Because it’s right

2. Because it benefits them

3. Because they’re afraid of what happens if they don’t

The first is not enough and never has been. Before civilization, in a state of nature, there was far more violence.

The triumph of modern civilization is that it replaced merely trusting people to do the right thing with laws, contracts, and incentives.

The result is over 8 billion people being able to live on the planet in relative peace.

Consequences are the last defense against the individual not listening to their conscience.

The sicker someone is, the louder the backup needs to be.

That is why the first and loudest thing that all of us, men and women, must say when we see an atrocity like this is: Killing Children Is Wrong.

And we will help you heal, but we won’t let you harm.

Say it clearly. Because softening that boundary doesn’t help the sick.

It weakens the incentive stopping them from acting on their worst impulses.

Blur the line and you remove the last thing standing between a disordered person and ruination for them and those around them.

What compassion is

We need compassion and consequences.

To have compassion means to suffer with another, and to want to alleviate their suffering.

We can feel Lindsay’s suffering.

She sought help.

She went to the emergency room.

She called a hotline.

She was turned away from inpatient care.

She is paralyzed from the waist down and will spend the rest of her life knowing what she did.

It is genuinely difficult to be a mother.

After all, it takes a village to raise a child.

And mothers no longer have a village.

But we must never let a desire to alleviate suffering mean alleviating consequences.

The moral center of gravity must be someone’s external actions, not their internal state.

External actions can be verified. Internal states cannot. They are hard to check and easy to narrate after the fact.

Move the center of gravity to how someone felt — no matter what the pathology that led to those feelings — and you have moved it to the one thing nobody else can examine. The one thing that can be rewritten later by whoever tells the story best.

A society that treats the internal state as primary and the external act as secondary weakens the exact incentives that keep disordered people from acting on their worst impulses.

And the message that your internal state takes moral primacy over your actions has mortal impact.

Because the next Lindsay will also choose to obey the voice of evil, because society told her she was powerless to her feelings.

We must speak in one voice and say: she did not do the right thing. Not “she could not do the right thing.”

So yes, call for more care for mothers.

After saying that even the sick make choices.

Because there were only 3 people in this case who had no choice.

And they were all her children.

Underneath the division of this story are four additional layers:

1. The relationship between mental illness and evil.

2. Belief in, and the role of, free will.

3. The gender war between men and women.

4. The purpose of prison.

I address all of this in the paid section.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why the Greek word for sin is an archery term, and what “missing the mark” tells you about every evil act you’ve ever heard about

• The claim that all evil is mental illness, and the reason accepting it fully makes pathology useless as a defense

• The four words in Lindsay Clancy’s own account that establish she still had a choice, and why they hold up even if you don’t believe in free will

• The two grievances men and women each read into this case, both of them partly right, and the point where each one stops being an argument about her

• The thought experiment where she gets perfect care: the screening, the bed, the village, and the outcome that remains possible anyway

Read more

Last week, CBS News asked Americans what “socialism” means.

Socialism is defined and distinguished by the collective or government ownership of the means of production.

In the poll, 29% named some form of government control, government ownership, or collective ownership of production.

That’s the distinction and definition. Which means 7 in 10 Americans don’t know it.

12% said they didn’t know. 4% thought it had something to do with being sociable.

Republicans: 41%. Independents: 29%. Democrats: 23%.

It’s not a rosy picture. No group had a majority of people providing the right definition.

But Democrats want socialism the most, and understand what it is the least.

So the group most likely to like socialism is the group least likely to know what it is.

Here’s what Democrats said instead:

19% said government or public services.

15% said equality and fairness.

13% said the common good, or helping people.

None of those are what define and distinguish socialism from other mainstream political and economic theories.

Every one of them is an outcome somebody hopes socialism will produce.

AKA they’re describing what they want, not what the word means.

And they want it badly. 58% of Democrats view socialism positively. Only 32% say that about capitalism.

Then CBS asked those same people a question with no label attached: should the U.S. government own stock in private American companies?

7% of Democrats said good idea.

63% said bad idea.

Government owning shares is the mildest version of socialist ownership there is. Not control. Not operation. Not seizure. Just stock.

The people who like socialism most rejected it 9 to 1.

Now to be fair, you could argue those are two different things. Owning a slice of a private company is a sovereign wealth fund. Owning the company outright is socialism. Someone could reject the first and still want the second.

But that would mean they oppose the mild version and support the extreme one. Possible, but unlikely.

The simpler explanation is that most people who like socialism don’t know what it is.

So when you argue with someone about socialism, you’re usually not arguing with a socialist.

You’re arguing with what they want socialism to achieve.

That’s the foundation of why these conversations break down. When people who like socialism hear someone attacking socialism, they hear an attack on equality, fairness, the common good, helping people, and government services.

This helps illuminate why this conversation fails so often.

The term isn’t defined properly.

You can’t disagree with a word nobody defined.

You can only take turns being angry at different things.

The second problem is that the conversation gets abstract almost immediately. It becomes about philosophies rather than what people practically want.

So one person is arguing against what socialist countries have produced — poverty, ruin, and the erosion of freedom.

Meanwhile the person across the table is thinking about unaffordable housing, insufficient healthcare, and student debt.

On the last Clear Thinker Academy call I asked for a volunteer to play a belligerent socialist so I could demonstrate another way of having this conversation.

Here’s the clip.

And here’s the framework.

Step one: ask them to define it.

“When you say socialism, what do you mean by that?” Nine times out of ten you’ll hear: healthcare people can afford, housing people can afford, childcare, education.

This is a valuable opportunity to first understand what they think socialism is and what they want it to accomplish.

Step two: agree with the goals.

“I want people to have healthcare and housing they can afford too.”

That’s how you establish that you’re not competing — you’re collaborating.

Not identifying where there is shared alignment is how conversations become adversarial, and if you ever feel like the other person thinks you’re a bad person for disagreeing, establishing common ground will help dramatically.

Step three: offer the actual definition.

Now that you’ve established what they think socialism is, and how you support what they want it to achieve, you can say something like this.

“Can I share what socialism technically means based on the dictionary definition? It’s about who owns the farms, factories, grocery stores, and companies that produce everything. Socialism moves that ownership from entrepreneurs and businesses to centralized control — usually the government. The question it answers is who owns production, rather than which services people receive.”

If you just keep going without pointing to the dictionary definition of socialism, you’ll be arguing over the value of healthcare, housing, childcare, and education. By introducing the definition after letting them express what they really want (better healthcare/housing/etc.), you can ground the definition in facts without immediately rejecting their definition.

It’s an emotionally intelligent way of correcting a misunderstanding by gently guiding them toward the truth, rather than confronting them with it out of the gate.

Step four: If they bring up Nordic countries — Finland, Denmark, Norway, or Sweden.

“The countries you’re pointing to are capitalist with strong safety nets, funded by taxing private wealth creation. Their own leaders insist on this. So what you might want is better capitalism, and that, we can build.”

Here’s a useful fact you can cite. In 2015, after Bernie Sanders held Denmark up as a socialist model, Denmark’s prime minister flew to Harvard’s Kennedy School and said this:

“I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Look at where these countries actually sit. In Denmark, 22% of GDP is produced by the government. That’s a big public sector, and it’s nothing close to socialism, because the farms, factories, and companies stay in private hands.

They might also bring up China. Today about 25% of China’s GDP comes from state-owned enterprises, and China’s own government leaders say private firms produce more than 60% of it. That’s the World Bank’s estimate and Beijing’s own number, not mine.

When China had actual socialism, with roughly 100% of the economy owned by the government, 15 to 55 million people starved under the Great Leap Forward. You can read more about that here.

Step five: Show the failures of socialism.

There are myriad examples of failed experiments in socialism.

There’s also Cuba and Venezuela in the 21st century.

Now that you’ve listened to their desires, offered a definition, and shown that what people think is socialism is not, they will be more willing to hear about how it’s failed every time it has been tried.

Present it as data to consider, rather than as a gotcha.

Step six: offer an alternative.

“Here’s what I think would fix the thing you’re describing: get corporate money out of lawmaking, make it legal to build housing again, force price transparency in healthcare. Same goals you named. I think we can do it within capitalism, which is flawed but functional, rather than socialism, which has never been functional.”

Nobody trades a bad answer for no answer.

If your entire contribution is that their idea won’t work, they’ll keep it, because at least it points at their problem.

The person across from you isn’t your enemy. They’re looking at the same broken housing market you are and reaching for the only word anybody handed them.

Give them a better one.

That’s the method. Try it and watch your conversations transform from deathmatches to dialogues.

But knowing how to have the conversation only gets you halfway. You also need to know what to say when they push back, and they will.

Below the paywall, five more analyses, the specific objections you’ll hear, and how to answer each one:

• The one question to ask instead of rebutting “that wasn’t real socialism” — and the reframe that makes corruption a design feature rather than bad luck

• China and Venezuela — the year one country reversed course, the number of people it moved out of poverty, and the number who have left the other

• The billionaire tax argument you should concede immediately — what conceding buys you, and the single move that turns an ideological fight into a negotiable number

• Denmark’s top tax rate applied to American incomes — the salary threshold that ends the “just tax the rich” version of the conversation

• “Healthcare is a human right” — why agreeing is the strongest opening, the three countries that deliver universal coverage through private insurers, and the spending figures showing we’re not short on money

Read more

This video is also available on YouTube.

Jason Arday should not be dead.

He’s dead because he didn’t tell the truth.

And universities didn’t look for the truth.

And his peers didn’t ask for the truth.

Some of the attention on Jason was racist. The majority was not.

And focusing on a minority of racists to dismiss the majority of people who are rational is making us all irrational.

People avoided the truth, and it caused a tragedy.

Jason was a Cambridge University professor of sociology.

In March 2023 he was made Professor of Sociology of Education - one of the most prestigious positions in his field.

The 37-year-old was the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history.

And he had an extraordinary story.

Jason said he was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at three years old.

He said he couldn’t speak until he was 11, communicating in sign language.

He said he couldn’t read or write until he was 18.

And then he became a Cambridge professor.

Cambridge put that story in the press release announcing his appointment.

They called him “an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education.”

The story went global. BBC. CNN. The Guardian.

There was more.

Jason said he ran 600 miles in six days.

He said he raised £5.5 million for over 70 charities.

He said he held visiting professorships at Ohio State, Glasgow, and Nelson Mandela University.

He said he had a book with Palgrave Macmillan.

Jason published his first peer-reviewed paper in 2018.

He became a full professor in 2021.

In three years.

The normal path takes fifteen to twenty.

And his scholarly record was thin. Around 30 published works.

It looked like a mid-career lecturer’s record, not a Cambridge chair.

Somebody noticed.

In 2023, a sociologist named Martyn Hammersley wrote to Cambridge with evidence that Jason’s work was plagiarized.

Cambridge’s integrity office wrote back and said the alleged plagiarism happened before Jason arrived, so it wasn’t their remit.

Fair enough, that is in their rulebook.

But they had the option to recommend an alternative course of action.

It looks like they didn’t.

Instead of looking into the accusations, the head of the Faculty of Education wrote that Jason had spoken movingly about his experiences of racism and about health issues.

And that he had the department’s full support.

Nobody looked.

Two years went by.

The university where Jason was a PhD student, LJMU, investigated the claim.

They acknowledged citation failures, but called them honest and reasonable errors.

They said the overlap was well within the academic standards of the time.

And they blamed his supervision.

Then, in July 2026, an academic named Nathan Cofnas published the plagiarism evidence publicly.

Cofnas is a self-described race realist. Some people consider him a racist and dismissed Nathan’s evidence on that basis.

Cambridge called the criticism from people raising concerns “a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”

A letter of solidarity with Jason got 13,000 signatures.

But now that the evidence was public, publications started to dig.

The Telegraph is considered right-leaning. The Guardian is left.

And the Guardian originally celebrated Jason’s achievement in 2023.

The Telegraph’s analysis found 188 matching sentences.

The Guardian investigated Jason’s biography and discovered:

The professorships Jason claimed to have? Fake.

The book he claimed to publish? Fake.

The charity numbers? Fake.

Ohio State, Glasgow, and Nelson Mandela University all said he never held the visiting professorships.

Palgrave said they took a proposal and never published the book.

One children’s hospice said he’d raised £10,800, not millions.

After questioning, Jason’s 600 miles in six days became 600 miles in twelve days.

When the Guardian asked him about the missing evidence, Jason said:

“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

Then on August 5th, Cambridge opened an investigation into his qualifications and honorary appointments.

Jason resigned hours later.

Nine days later, he was found dead in south London.

We don’t know how.

But it seems likely that he killed himself.

It seems impossible to have a rational conversation about race-based policies in education and college admissions or hiring.

So to help, here’s an analogy.

The NBA is roughly 78% black and 19% white.

But the U.S. is 13% black and 57% white.

So the NBA is not representative of the diversity of the United States. Not even close.

Now imagine the NBA looks at that data and concludes its system is broken, and must be fixed.

Imagine supporters of this decision say these gaps in racial achievement are explained by discrimination.

The NBA must be discriminating against white people.

So alongside points, assists, and rebounds, they start weighing abstract, subjective factors that are not performance-based - like lived experience and hardship.

Next year, the number of white players increases in the NBA by 50%.

The NBA immediately comes out with a statement and says “This record rise in the number of white players is a credit to their hard work and ability. We have not lowered entry standards.”

One day, a new player gets signed to the Lakers.

His name is Bob.

Bob’s white.

Bob’s STATS are mid.

Bob’s STORY is amazing.

He says he played college ball at Duke, Michigan, UConn - elite basketball schools.

He says he couldn’t even walk until 11.

He says he ran 600 miles in six days.

That he raised millions for charity.

Nobody checks - despite the fact that these are easy to check.

After all, he’s a minority, he needs protecting.

In fact, people who bring up doubts are called racist.

Now, on the court, other players notice that Bob isn’t very good.

They wonder - how did he make it to the league?

But black players don’t say anything publicly - they don’t want to be called racist.

White players don’t say anything - they don’t want to feed the racists.

Years go by.

And then another player, Nick, says Bob is lying.

Nick publishes evidence.

People say Nick is a racist.

Maybe they’re right.

But Bob is still lying.

Bob lied about his story, lied about his achievements, and lied about where he played.

The story goes viral.

Fueling that virality are 3 groups of critics.

Group A: Are actual racists who hate white people.

Group B: Is bigger. They don’t hate white people. They hate double standards. Because humans abhor an imbalance.

Group C: Is the biggest. They’re people who regularly watch basketball, who quietly suspected not all white players were the best, but didn’t have proof.

Now Bob’s defenders say all the critics are just group A - racists.

But B and C didn’t care about race.

They just care about the sport.

They just wanted to watch basketball played by the best.

Not those who are just good enough - the best.

Before the NBA said they need to be more diverse, and before the 50% increase in white players, groups B and C never doubted whether a white player was the best.

Because the NBA never gave them a reason to.

All the system selected for was performance.

But the NBA changed the system.

So fans rationally responded to the changed system.

Fans didn’t want to spend time thinking about whether a white player was the best.

They just wanted to watch the best players ball.

But now, every time they watched a game, of course they wondered if a white player was truly the best.

And now, even the white players who were there before the NBA’s racial equity initiative are getting questioned.

Because when you make race a factor in a system, people are going to wonder if race is a factor.

Even if the intentions were good.

Even if you say the bar wasn’t lowered.

Even if you’re trying to correct for the effect of past oppression.

Now - this hypothetical isn’t so hypothetical.

In 2018, Cambridge said it wanted more black students.

Their words: “committed to doing more to encourage young black students to aspire to the top grades to apply.”

And they’d just increased funding for Target Oxbridge - which Cambridge describes as “a programme which helps black students secure places.”

Within a year, black admissions jumped 50%. Cambridge credited the campaign.

And here’s Cambridge’s senior pro-vice-chancellor, Professor Graham Virgo, in 2021:

“Since the Stormzy Scholarships were announced in 2018 we have seen a significant increase in the number of Black students applying to study here and being admitted.”

Applying AND being admitted. Cambridge’s words, not mine.

And here’s what Virgo said about that 50% rise back in October 2019:

“This record rise in the number of black students is a credit to their hard work and ability. We have not lowered entry standards.”

That’s the same statement I put in the NBA story.

Because I didn’t write it. Cambridge did.

Now remember - admissions are competitive.

So if one demographic becomes more represented, another gets less represented.

But you don’t need to lower the bar for more black students to get in.

You either need a sudden influx of black students who are outperforming their peers but for some reason weren’t applying.

Which is possible.

Or, you pick black students who are underperforming their peers, but still clearing the bar.

Because meeting the bar is not the same as being the best.

Now here’s Cambridge’s own math, from Cambridge’s own website.

In 2017, Cambridge admitted 58 black students.

That was a third of all black students in the entire country who got the grades Cambridge requires.

Two years later, they admitted 91.

So where did the sudden influx come from?

Now, when you see a 50% increase in black students at Cambridge.

And endless initiatives aimed at increasing representation.

And endless slogans about diversity being a strength.

And you go from a system that had 1 priority, performance, to two priorities - that AND diversity.

Of course people are going to think that both admissions and hiring are no longer a pure meritocracy.

Of course they’re going to wonder if a black person who got in under the new system would have gotten in under the old system.

Of course there’s going to be a big reaction when one black person turns out to have told multiple major lies.

And you know who suffers?

The black people who are the best.

Not just met the bar - the best.

Because now, there’s an asterisk on their achievement.

Now, a suspicion that would have been irrational under a merit-based system, becomes rational under the new system.

And in Jason Arday’s case - black academics had private concerns about his competence.

To quote Afua Hirsch from The Guardian:

“The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted... They did not voice them publicly because we all know that whatever the truth or the outcome, he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.”

A valid concern.

Because when you’re in a high-profile position as a public person - you won’t be treated fairly all the time.

There are racists.

The media is biased.

People can be mean.

People have misinformation.

People have scores to settle.

And despite ALL OF THAT - WE MUST TELL THE TRUTH.

Because as much as we want to control reality by lying about it, reality cannot be controlled.

And given enough time, lies do backfire, as do double standards.

The black academics were right.

Everyone was damaged.

Not because black people can’t be the best.

But because this particular black person wasn’t the best, and he lied about it.

And he rose up in a system whose design creates reasonable doubt about whether the black people in elite positions are there because they are black, or the best.

Jason lied.

And everyone covered for him.

And in a well-intentioned attempt to protect him, and protect black people, they hurt both.

You know - I graduated from Harvard.

I’m grateful for that.

I’m also grateful for the black Americans and civil rights advocates who made that possible - because there has been genuine oppression and discrimination that they fought to overcome.

I’d also like to believe I would have been admitted under any system, merit-based, or merit plus race.

But you know what? I’ll never know.

It will always be an asterisk until proven otherwise.

I could yell at people who doubt me.

I could call them racist.

But the fact remains - in a system that makes race a factor, it’s reasonable for people to wonder when race was a factor.

And you know what - maybe you think it’s worth it.

Maybe you think we need these new race-conscious systems, to make up for old racially oppressive systems.

Perhaps that’s true.

But let’s just be honest about the downside.

Jason Arday was given a job he didn’t deserve, because he lied.

Cambridge avoided scrutinizing him, because he was black.

Cambridge attacked those who asked questions, because he was black.

Other black professors didn’t raise their private concerns publicly, because he was black.

This was all so avoidable.

Jason could have told the truth.

Jason’s employers could have looked for the truth.

Jason’s peers could have too.

And this could have all happened years ago, quietly.

Before Jason flew so close to the sun on waxen wings.

Before he fell from a height so great the crash killed him.

But for years, people decided the truth was not the most important thing.

Racial solidarity was.

They cared more about the reaction to Jason than about Jason’s actions.

Institutions tried to replace old discrimination with new double standards.

But double standards eventually collapse.

And now a troubled man is dead.

Because a life built on lies always falls apart.

A lot of Jason Arday’s defenders seem to believe that the media frenzy around Jason is because the media is racist and that this is some sort of “digital lynching.”

I see where they’re coming from.

Some of the attention on Jason is due to genuine racial animus.

When you have 9 billion people on the planet and something is a public event, you’re going to attract attention from the best elements, the worst elements, and everything in between.

But much of the attention is not about racial animus at all.

It’s animus toward a system of double standards in university hiring and admissions that people have felt afraid to speak up about.

Jason Arday, as a black professor who lied in a manner that specifically exploits that double standard, was the perfect fuel for a fire that was already simmering.

In the next section, I’m going to explain exactly why there’s so much media attention on this and a way that you can understand.

So you don’t have to settle for the claim that all the scrutiny is because of just racism.

It’s the cost of the system. It’s the logical consequence of creating double standards.

Below the paywall, five more analyses:

• The demographic gap: why unequal representation gets treated as proof of discrimination, and why the gap itself proves much less than people think

• The double standard: what happens when race becomes a criterion alongside performance, and why good intentions don’t change how it behaves

• The suspicion problem: why race-conscious standards create doubt about everyone who benefits, including the people who never needed them

• Why the reasonable go quiet: how fear of being called racist suppresses legitimate scrutiny and leaves the worst voices carrying the argument

• The pressure release: how years of silence turned one fraud story into 249 articles, and why other black academics now pay the cost

Read more

Yesterday, Luigi Mangione admitted that he shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

He killed Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024.

The following week, Emerson College ran a survey.

24% of registered voters age 18-29 said Luigi killing Brian was “somewhat acceptable,” 17% “completely acceptable.”

So 41% of people age 18-29 considered the murder at least somewhat acceptable.

This is a problem.

And it’s not helpful to simply dismiss these people as depraved.

That’s not going to change their minds.

My goal with this piece is to help you put words to exactly why this is a problem.

Because that’s our best shot at both fixing the fact that 41% of young people are sympathetic to murder, and fixing healthcare in this country.

Of Course We Need to Fix American Healthcare

The American healthcare system needs major reform.

Luigi Mangione wrote three words on the shell casings he left behind: deny, defend, depose.

Whatever you think of him, he did not invent those words.

They came from a book about how the insurance industry handles claims, and millions of Americans recognized them instantly, because they have lived them.

You pay every month for years.

Then the moment comes when you need it.

And what you meet is not a person saying no. It’s a process of endless obstacles.

A form that needs another form. A code that was entered wrong. A specialist who is out of network for a reason nobody can explain. An appeal window that closed while you were in the hospital. A phone number that puts you on hold and then disconnects you.

And eventually a lot of people just stop.

They give up.

It’s easy to see how this labyrinth gets constructed.

When a company saves money every time a customer quits, that company will never be in a hurry to make the process simpler.

Sometimes it’s by denying people coverage that they had a reasonable expectation of receiving.

Sometimes it’s by not denying coverage, but making people go through a maze to access it.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s not a necessary evil of capitalism.

Because the healthcare market does not behave like a healthy free market.

It is a market distorted by regulations that excessively favor corporations, because those corporations are influencing our politicians.

The healthcare lobby is the biggest lobby in America.

A record $868 million was spent by the healthcare industry to lobby politicians in 2025.

They aren’t lobbying to make healthcare affordable.

Or to have laws that are fair to both the companies and the customers.

These are companies acting in their self-interest - and the primary incentive of a business is to make money, just like the primary incentive of a living being is to live.

That’s not inherently a problem.

The problem is that customers’ self-interests are not getting properly represented - because the politicians who are supposed to be representing our interests are beholden to corporations.

As I’ve mentioned in prior pieces - we simply have too much money in politics.

But just like socialism is not the solution to the problems of capitalism, killing healthcare CEOs is not the solution to healthcare.

It feels emotionally validating to people who are understandably frustrated.

But it’s strategically ineffective, self-defeating, and morally confused.

Let’s address the strategic inefficacy first.

The Two Halves of the Story

If you look at the media coverage of this case, you’ll see a very clear difference between how the left and the right are framing this.

Left-wing media emphasize Luigi’s grievances and the grievances of his supporters.

Right-wing media emphasize what Luigi did, how it was pre-meditated, and condemnation of his supporters.

As you can imagine, if this is where the conversation ends we’ll have gone nowhere - the two sides are talking past one another.

That was a screenshot from the Bias Comparison feature from Ground News.

Ground News has been my favorite news source for two years now, since well before they ever sponsored me.

It aggregates reporting from thousands of sources and gives you a summary.

But its most useful function is that it helps me see exactly what the biases in reporting are, so I get a clearer picture.

Every time I check the Bias Comparison tab, I see essentially the same trend when there’s political violence.

The Left explains the emotional state and legitimate grievances of the people doing the violence.

The Right emphasizes the immorality of the violence.

The Left fails to properly explain why the violence is a problem, irrespective of legitimate grievances.

The Right fails to properly acknowledge the legitimate grievances.

I recommend you give Ground News a try so you can see this for yourself.

It has greatly enhanced my ability to see the gaps in reporting from both sides and see outside of my algorithm, which is right-leaning.

You can get 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx.

Signing up keeps you informed, and it directly supports the work I do here.

Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage plan

The Logic Chain

Calling people fanatics, depraved, or crazy doesn’t change those people’s minds.

Ad hominem - attacking the person, rather than the point - is an effective strategy for galvanizing people who agree with you, but it’s a terrible strategy for persuading those who don’t.

So I want to help you put words to what the issue is with 41% of young people thinking Luigi’s action was even somewhat acceptable.

This is a tweet from left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, made on the day Luigi Mangione publicly confessed.

I don’t know if he was commenting on Luigi. It’s reasonable to guess he was, though.

Regardless, the comment is a useful anchor for how a lot of people are thinking right now.

Note the word “kills.”

The logic chain goes something like this:

1. Healthcare is a human right.

2. When you deny someone a right, you aren’t refusing them a service. You’re taking something that was already theirs.

3. So when an insurance company denies a claim and that person dies, the company killed them.

4. Brian Thompson ran the largest health insurer in America.

5. So Brian Thompson killed people. A lot of them.

6. So killing Brian Thompson is acceptable.

The confusion arises from the first 2 links in the chain.

“Killing” vs “Saving”

That 114,000 figure is from a study. Yale School of Public Health, posted July 24 of this year. It hasn’t been peer reviewed yet.

Here’s what it says: if America switched to a single-payer system, we would save 114,174 lives a year.

Save.

The tweet says “kills.”

The study is measuring lives a different system would save.

The tweet is describing the system as killing people.

Those are not the same claim.

The first positions a person, system, or company as not saving the people that it can.

The second positions them as a murderer.

And in most societies, murderers get the death penalty.

This is a crucially important point, because it determines whether you view a healthcare CEO as a mass murderer who got the death penalty, or the leader of a business that could be saving more lives if it focused less on profits, but isn’t.

You can think both are bad, but they are distinctly different moral categories of bad.

To make this intuitively obvious - I’m sure you’ve all seen ads that say something like “You can save an African child from starving for just $3 a day.”

That is different from saying “If you do not give a starving African child $3, you will kill them.”

But equating the healthcare industry or its leadership with killing people is the exact kind of category error that causes 41% of young people to think that a young man shooting another man with a gun is acceptable.

Words have precise definitions.

Definitions determine decisions - like the decision to murder someone versus condemn them.

This is not a semantic quibble.

It’s a fundamental point, and the stakes of getting the semantics wrong are life and death.

So in Brian Thompson’s case, what could someone reasonably call a moral failing?

Brian was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

In 2023, UnitedHealth denied 33% of in-network claims on the ACA marketplace, against a market average of 19%.

A federal watchdog report this June found UnitedHealthcare denied 66% of inpatient rehab requests.

Sixteen other Medicare Advantage insurers denied 41%.

That’s a company denying care at higher rates than its competitors.

There’s a good case to be made that even in a bad healthcare system, UnitedHealthcare was particularly bad.

Now - in a world with better healthcare industry regulation, less healthcare lobbyist influence over our politicians, and the proper balance of customer vs company incentives - would UnitedHealthcare have provided coverage to more people?

Yes.

In that world, would fewer people be dead?

Yes.

Does that make Brian a murderer?

No.

Does that mean Brian deserved to be murdered?

No.

Why Political Violence Is Never Acceptable

Hopefully that helped you put words to the moral confusion gripping the 41% of young people who think Luigi Mangione’s action was even somewhat acceptable.

But there’s a deeper, and even more important reason why it was completely unacceptable.

Political violence is violence used to accomplish some political goal.

Luigi murdered Brian to make a point about healthcare. So it’s political violence.

Some people may legitimately think Brian Thompson was an evil person by virtue of his position as UnitedHealthcare CEO.

So this section is addressed to them.

Maybe you think Brian got what was coming to him.

Maybe you think that this is what needs to be done for change.

I won’t tell you to feel sad.

But I do want to show you where this is headed.

Because when Luigi squeezed the trigger, he didn’t just shoot at Brian.

He shot at all of us.

Political violence is on the rise, against political and business leaders.

Melissa Hortman. Paul Pelosi. Josh Shapiro. Donald Trump. Charlie Kirk. An arson attack at Sam Altman’s home.

In every single one of these cases, there was someone absolutely convinced they were doing the right thing.

Someone who found a way to justify physical violence.

Someone who said “what about what he did?”

They didn’t just think they were right, they were so convinced in their moral authority that they acted as judge, jury, and executioner.

Our opinions are abstract.

But physical violence is concrete.

It’s understandable that you’re frustrated with the American healthcare system.

It can and should be a lot better.

But amidst your critiques, do not forget this.

Nature is governed by violence.

For most of human history, disputes were settled by violence.

Before civilization, in some places 50% of people were murdered.

Half the people would kill the other half.

That’s why we gave governments - not individuals - the right to use force.

But sometimes as individuals, we find an individual so repulsive we are convinced it’s okay, just this one time.

“I don’t condone violence…but” the statement begins.

That “but” is a dark whisper.

There should be no “but.”

Everything after “but” is permission for the next bullet.

Any political killing should be considered the highest threat.

But we’ve become desensitized to violence.

We think it’s just pixels on a screen.

We think it will go as far as we want, but no further.

So we judge people we don’t know.

Our tribe becomes the jury.

And we applaud the executioner.

But here’s the thing.

It’s never just one bullet.

The gun that is aimed at your enemy today gets aimed at you tomorrow.

Today, the bullet might be aimed at a leader you hate.

Tomorrow, it might be aimed at someone you love.

Next week, it could be you.

Suddenly, the cheers around you now become the silence around your own grave.

This is why we must condemn everything that comes after the “but.”

Even if it comes from our own side.

Yet, we’ve become arrogant.

Certain we know the whole truth.

That all the angels are in our tribe, all the demons in theirs.

We are obese with knowledge, but starved for wisdom.

We think we see the world as it is - when in fact we see the world as we are.

The message that was sent by Luigi was clear - I am above civilization.

I know what’s right and wrong.

I get to express my grievances with bullets.

This wasn’t just an assassination.

It was an attack on civilization.

Our nation is held together by a thread, and that thread is fraying.

Social fabric is tearing, and we must unite to weave it anew.

We need humility.

We need to attack ideas with words, not people with bullets.

So we all have a choice to make.

We can choose to heal.

Or we can choose an eye for an eye.

Until we are blind and cannot see.

When the next bullet is aimed at you.

Or, it could be me.

Destructive vs Constructive Anger

People are understandably angry about healthcare in this country.

The question is not the validity of the emotion, but the efficacy of the solution.

When confronted with the challenges of life, we are perpetually faced with two choices - to be constructive or destructive.

Luigi chose destruction. Not just of Brian’s life, but his own.

But there is a constructive path ahead.

And we need to be aware of it, lest it become the road less taken.

So let’s talk rationally about what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Below the paywall, five more analyses:

• The 41% — who they actually are, what the polling says about the age split, and why the number is a warning rather than a verdict

• What Brian Thompson actually controlled — the decisions a CEO makes versus the ones written into statute, and why the distinction is the entire argument

• The denial-rate numbers everyone cites — where they come from, what they do and don’t prove, and how to use them without overstating them

• Why the killing set the cause back — the specific reforms that lost momentum in the weeks after, and who benefited from the shift in attention

• The four-second conversation — what to say when someone in your family posts the meme, and the opening line that keeps the exchange alive

Read more

This letter is part of my ongoing series on socialism and capitalism. The last entry: South America Just Rejected the Ideology Mamdani Is Selling. So Why Is North America Buying It?

A few days ago I made a video about the fact that most Americans don’t know what socialism is.

This was one of the top comments.

Man. What are we teaching people in schools?

The comment is right about the 900 million people being lifted out of poverty.

And wrong about everything else.

This letter is about that comment.

Because it shows the biggest problem with the discourse around socialism.

We have a massive education problem in America, and it has left us vulnerable to bad ideas.

It’s virulent in both lower and higher education.

It’s showing up in the belief that socialism is universal healthcare - which is false.

That it’s what Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have - false again.

Socialism is defined by one primary economic feature - a collective (e.g. the government) owning the means of production - aka the farms, factories, and companies.

Americans are confused on this point.

According to a Gallup poll from 2018, only 17% of Americans were able to identify socialism as defined by government ownership or control of the economy.

And that confusion is making socialism appeal to those who never lived it.

While people in countries who have lived under socialism are rejecting it.

Before talking about the larger problem, let’s correct the comment.

Because the mistake inside it is the same mistake driving socialism’s rise in America right now.

China is not socialist.

China is not a socialist country.

China is not a communist country.

It’s understandable why people think that it is.

After all, China’s ruling political party brands itself the “Chinese Communist Party.”

And the Party’s official doctrine is “socialism with Chinese characteristics” - a phrase Deng coined in 1982 that Xi still repeats today.

But the condition for whether a country’s system is socialist is not what its leadership self-identifies as.

It’s what the leadership actually does.

Socialism always requires that a collective - usually the government - own the means of production.

This is a necessary condition.

If that condition is not met, the country is not socialist.

Private firms contribute approximately 60% of China’s GDP, 70% of its innovative capacity, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs.

That’s according to China’s own business federation - All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.

The confusion on this point likely arises from 3 sources:

1. China’s ruling political party calls itself the Chinese Communist Party

2. China is less capitalistic than America, in the sense that more of America’s GDP comes from the private sector

3. China has an authoritarian political system, not a democracy - and people are equating authoritarian with socialist.

But intuitively, it’s understandable why calling America and China capitalist in the same breath feels incomplete.

Surely the people who think China is socialist or communist aren’t completely wrong.

Surely there’s a term that expresses the legitimate differences between America’s economic system and China’s?

There is. That term is “state capitalism.”

Cambridge University Press published a full volume titled The State and Capitalism in China in 2023.

Branko Milanovic, the former lead economist at the World Bank, wrote an entire book for Harvard University Press called Capitalism, Alone. His thesis is that capitalism is now the only economic system on earth, and that it comes in two varieties: the liberal capitalism of the West, and the political capitalism of China.

The Economist ran a special issue on state capitalism in 2012, focused on China.

The term is well-established in the literature.

There is some debate regarding the term.

“State capitalism” is a standard academic term but not universally agreed upon.

Some economists argue the category is incoherent and China is simply a mixed economy.

What is overwhelmingly agreed is the underlying fact: private firms drive the economy.

Whatever you want to call that, it isn’t socialism. Because socialism means the public owns production - and in China, it doesn’t.

A quick note on terminology, because I’ll use both words.

In Marxist theory, socialism and communism are closely related. Socialism is the stage where the state owns production. Communism is the theoretical endpoint - stateless, classless. No country has ever made it to full communism.

Communists often use socialism as a transitional state to communism. Not all socialists are necessarily communists, but all communists utilize socialism.

So communist parties governed socialist economies.

That’s why the Soviet Union was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics while being run by the Communist Party.

The party name described the destination.

The country name described the system actually in place.

Mao’s China was the same. Communist Party, socialist economy.

But China WAS Socialist. And It Was A Disaster.

For about thirty years. 1949 to 1978.

Do you want to know what happened during the years China was actually socialist?

That’s the death rate in China through the middle of the 20th century.

You see that spike?

That was the Great Leap Forward. 1958 to 1962.

In 1958, China adopted a policy called the Great Leap Forward, under Communist dictator Mao Zedong.

During the Great Leap Forward, the government collectivized farms and abolished private farming. Pulled farmers off the land to make steel in their backyards.

AKA, seized the means of production.

Grain production collapsed.

And peasants were forbidden from leaving their villages to find food.

Around 20 to 30 million people starved to death. Some estimates go as high as 55 million.

The national death rate more than doubled, from 10.8 per thousand to 25.4.

By the end of 1960, China’s population was 10 million lower than the year before.

That’s the most populous country on Earth shrinking.

In peacetime.

Because of policy.

China’s own statistics bureau confirms it. When the population declined again in 2022, it was reported everywhere as the first drop since 1961.

The Failed Experiment Was Run Twice.

The Great Leap Forward was abandoned in 1962.

Private farming came back and output began recovering almost immediately.

Then Mao reversed it.

In 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, purging the officials he called “capitalist roaders” - the ones who had allowed those small market reforms.

Universities closed.

The economy stagnated for a decade.

So what is it that turned China from a place where tens of millions of people starved and languished in poverty?

Capitalism.

Socialism Crushed China. Capitalism Saved It.

Mao died in 1976.

Two years later, Deng Xiaoping took power.

And Deng did a bunch of capitalist things.

He broke up the collective farms.

Every family got its own plot.

Grow a quota for the state, keep the rest, sell it for profit.

AKA - private property.

He legalized private business.

In 1978, having a private company in China was a crime.

Today, China has more than 50 million of them.

He opened the country to foreign investment.

Coca-Cola came back in 1979. Boeing and Volkswagen followed.

And he created Special Economic Zones - cities where market rules applied.

The first was Shenzhen, a fishing town of about 30,000 people.

Today Shenzhen has 17 million people and makes your iPhone.

Deng summed up his whole philosophy in one line: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

Translation: I don’t care about ideology. I care about what works.

He wasn’t committed to communism, socialism or capitalism.

But it just so happens that the reforms he made were what we’d call capitalism.

And it worked.

In 1981, 88% of China lived in extreme poverty.

By 2015: 0.7%.

By 2019: 0.2%.

That’s roughly 800 million people out of poverty.

The largest and fastest escape from poverty in human history.

Now, did the socialist era leave anything useful behind?

Yes. Literacy improved. So did basic rural health.

But those things existed in 1978 too - when 88% of the country was still in extreme poverty.

The decisive change was the move toward capitalism.

The poverty didn’t end while the state owned the farms and the factories.

It ended when families, entrepreneurs, and businesses got to own things again - and keep what they produced.

Socialism starved China.

Capitalism fed it.

The Strongest Counterarguments

Two objections worth taking seriously.

Objection one: “China’s state sector is growing.”

True.

State-owned enterprises went from about 10% of GDP in the mid-1990s to roughly a quarter today.

That’s significant.

And it’s a quarter. The other three quarters is private industry competing in markets.

Now, this is a good place to be honest about something.

No country is 100% anything.

America isn’t 100% capitalist - our government produces about 12% of GDP.

China isn’t 100% capitalist either - its state produces about 25%.

Capitalism and socialism describe what characterizes an economy - who owns most of the means of production.

Draw the dividing line at 50% if that makes you feel better.

China sits at roughly 25% state ownership.

There is no world in which China is socialist.

You could argue that China is now driving in a more socialist direction - and we’ll see how that fares in the coming decades.

But that’s a different claim than saying China is a successful example of socialism.

Objection two: “America has gone too far toward capitalism.”

Now this is a conversation worth having.

I don’t think the issue is that we’re “too capitalist.”

Again - definitions determine decisions.

Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production.

Not billionaires and corporations having too much influence over politics.

Not unaffordable housing.

Not unaffordable healthcare.

I agree that all of those are issues.

But they are not a problem of “too much capitalism”.

We don’t need to be “less capitalistic” - that would mean nationalizing industries and putting them under government ownership.

Our problem is that the regulations are designed to help companies - because companies are lobbying the Congresspeople who write them, and paying for their political campaigns.

They are issues of bad incentives, bad regulations, and bad influences on our politicians.

The solution to that is not companies, farms and factories being owned by the government.

The solution is to return to the Founding Fathers’ vision - a country that is regulated by laws that represent the people instead of the corporations.

Regulating a company and owning a company are two different things.

The first is about fixing our politics.

The second is socialism.

And that experiment has been run.

Tens of millions of people paid for the results.

Quick note before we go further.

Notice what I just did in that section. I gave the other side their strongest argument before I answered it.

That’s called steelmanning.

Steelmanning does more than just make my arguments better.

It also makes people more open to listening to my arguments because it shows that I understand what they think and that I’m taking them seriously.

This is a conversational technique that, when mastered, will completely transform how you converse with others.

Not just about politics, but about any topic.

You’ll become better at changing both minds and hearts - and that’s the key to having these conversations without losing loved ones.

It’s easy to understand conceptually.

It’s hard to do when you’re discussing socialism with your son and he just won’t listen to you.

That’s what Clear Thinker Academy exists to fix.

It’s a dojo for having rational conversations about difficult topics, without losing relationships.

You get live practice sessions with me, plus a course on seeing through the bias in mainstream and social media.

Join Clear Thinker Academy

Words Have Precise Definitions, And Precision Matters.

Socialism always requires collective or government ownership of the means of production - the farms, the factories, the companies that make things.

That is the necessary condition. Not high taxes. Not a big welfare state. Not universal healthcare.

If that condition is not met, the country is not socialist.

Socialism is not healthcare for all.

It’s not affordable housing.

It’s not a synonym for “all the things I want but am not getting in my capitalist country.”

It’s not a “vibe.”

It’s about collective or government ownership of the means of production.

But people believing it means all those other things is exactly why it’s winning.

62% of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of socialism.

66% of Democrats view it positively.

And among Americans aged 18 to 34, socialism now polls better than capitalism - 49% to 43%.

China is not socialist.

The Nordic countries are not socialist.

And the belief that these countries are socialist is a large part of what is making socialism appealing.

Which brings me to the real problem - the one underneath the comment sections.

The voters are confused about what socialism is.

The socialists are not.

In the second half of this letter, I’ll show you Zohran Mamdani defining socialism two different ways.

One version when he’s talking to the general public.

One version when he’s talking to other socialists.

They are not the same.

And there’s a name for that rhetorical tactic. I’ll teach it to you, so you can spot it every time someone runs it on you.

Plus: why this confusion is a threat no military can defend against, why democracies are uniquely exposed to it, and what we actually do about it.

Below the paywall, five more analyses:

• The three-sentence definition of socialism that ends the Denmark argument — and why Danish officials keep saying it themselves

• What actually pulled hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty — the year the policy changed, what replaced it, and why the timeline is the whole argument

• Motte and Bailey in the wild — how to catch the swap in real time, and the exact phrases that signal it’s happening

• The response to “that wasn’t real socialism” — what to concede, what not to, and where the conversation actually turns

• Why the failures weren’t accidents — the mechanism that produces the same outcome in Venezuela, Cuba, and the USSR regardless of who’s running it

Read more

You can check out Clear Thinker Academy here.

I’ve been in Colombia for the last three months.

Yesterday, right-wing Abelardo de la Espriella, aka “The Tiger,” was sworn into office, succeeding left-wing self-proclaimed socialist Gustavo Petro.

Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador — all of these Latin American countries had explicitly socialist, far-left, or Marxist governments that they rejected within the last three years:

Bolivia. Last October, voters ended two decades of rule by a party named the Movement Toward Socialism.

Chile. In December, voters chose José Antonio Kast over a Communist Party candidate.

Honduras. In November, they voted out the democratic socialist party of President Xiomara Castro.

Ecuador. Rejected the heirs of Rafael Correa’s socialist project for the second time in two years.

El Salvador. In 2024, the party of former Marxist guerrillas that governed for a decade — during which the country became the murder capital of the world — was wiped from the legislature entirely. Zero seats.

Peru. Two weeks ago, Keiko Fujimori was sworn in after defeating a leftist who served in the cabinet of Pedro Castillo, the Marxist president Peruvians impeached and imprisoned.

Argentina. The left-wing governments that ran the country for most of two decades nationalized the oil company, the airline, and private pension funds. Inflation passed 200%. In 2023 voters elected Javier Milei, who campaigned on reversing all of that.

Applying the socialist label can be tricky, because it’s an abstract ideology.

Some will argue that a few of the examples I gave aren’t socialism.

They’re right — about the labels.

These movements went by different names.

Some called themselves socialists.

Some were Marxists who never used the word.

Some skipped labels entirely and just governed the same way — nationalizing industries, centralizing control.

Different branding. Same ideology: state control over the market, and wealth as something to seize and redistribute rather than create.

That’s what I mean by “socialism” in this letter.

That’s the worldview that the leaders of all of these countries had.

And it’s what voters rejected.

It’s an abstract ideology, with some variation.

I’ll get more into what socialism technically is later to make things concrete.

But what wasn’t abstract were the results these administrations produced: increased crime, gang violence, unchecked immigration, economic problems.

What wasn’t abstract was the experience of voters who had to live with the actual results of abstract theories — and rejected them.

Meanwhile, in America — the country people fleeing socialism risk everything to reach — socialism is growing in popularity.

66% of Democrats now view socialism positively.

62% of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of socialism.

South America is moving away from socialism, after having tried it.

North America is moving toward socialism, having never tried it.

We shouldn’t have to learn this lesson the hard way.

In my first month in Colombia, on my way back from Spanish class, I met a man who explains all of this better than any thinkpiece could — a deported Venezuelan who called Trump the modern-day Hitler.

But then thanked him in the same conversation.

More on that later.

Americans Don’t Know What Socialism Actually Is

The problem with discussing socialism is that often when it’s discussed, we’re not all talking about the same thing.

Many of the Americans excited by socialism think it’s defined by universal healthcare, affordable housing, free childcare.

That is incorrect.

Many Americans also think socialism is what Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) do.

That is also incorrect.

In the words of Denmark’s own prime minister, from a talk he gave at Harvard in 2015: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

AKA — capitalist.

The confusion is measurable.

According to Gallup polling: in 1949, 34% of Americans defined socialism as government ownership or control of the economy, and only 2% said “benefits and services.”

The 34% were correct.

By 2018, government ownership had fallen to 17% while “equality” had climbed to 23% — the single most common answer.

The word has drifted from being understood correctly as a description of how an economy operates, to a vibe about fairness.

So let’s restore the definition, because clear thinking requires clear definitions.

Socialism is defined by one thing: who owns the means of production.

The “means of production” are the infrastructure used to produce goods and services — factories, land, firms, capital. Whoever owns them captures the wealth they generate.

Under capitalism, private individuals own the means of production and keep the profits.

Under socialism, that ownership is through collectives, or the government.

In practice, it’s almost always the government.

That’s the dividing line. Not tax rates. Not government benefits. Not wealth inequality. Not social justice.

You can have a capitalist system with high taxes, high government benefits, and low wealth inequality — that’s what Scandinavian countries are.

You can also have a capitalist system with low taxes, low government benefits, and high wealth inequality — like Singapore.

Or you can have America — which is in between.

And there are socialist countries where the state controls the money, benefits are generous on paper, and inequality is low. Venezuela. Cuba.

Countries where the taxes are high, but the money doesn’t actually help people.

Countries where government benefits are high on paper, but low quality in reality.

Countries where there’s low wealth inequality — because everyone is poor.

Fortunately for the Latin American countries that recently rejected socialism, they cut the socialism experiment short before it wrecked them.

Some countries, like Venezuela, weren’t so fortunate.

The Venezuelan Who Called Trump Hitler — and Thanked Him

While in Medellín, I met a man who was born in Venezuela and brought to America by his parents when he was a boy.

He lived in America for 34 years.

He was deported by ICE and is now homeless on the streets of Medellín.

He asked me for money, so I gave him some.

We had a conversation about his experiences.

He described Donald Trump as the modern-day Adolf Hitler.

Now you might wonder — why is a Venezuelan-born man who was deported from America living in Colombia? Why not go back to Venezuela?

Because Venezuela has been ruined by socialists.

How bad must the effect of socialism be for a man who literally thinks Trump is the new Hitler to be grateful to him for invading his country of birth and removing its leader?

I’ve heard this story over and over from the many Venezuelans I’ve met here.

Because it turns out that there are many Venezuelans in Colombia.

Because they left Venezuela.

Because of socialism.

Venezuela, which used to be a thriving society — with a capitalist system, oil wealth, and a well-educated population — is just one of the many countries that fell victim to the false promises of socialism.

And in doing so, it’s impacted other countries too.

Like Colombia, which has a large population of Venezuelans looking for a better life, and now has to deal with the challenges of integrating a large foreign population fleeing socialism.

While Colombia itself suffers from the effects of guerrilla violence, which increased under Petro.

Most Americans, especially those under 30, aren’t well-educated on the actual impact of socialism in history or modernity.

I’ve had multiple Venezuelans tell me in frustration that they see Americans who don’t know anything about Venezuela standing and protesting Trump’s arrest of Maduro, while those who actually lived under Maduro are thrilled to see him go.

Venezuela followed a familiar pattern:

1. Socialists and Marxists promise people abundant free services and equity, and get in power.

2. They redistribute wealth — through taxes, seizures, and state revenues.

3. They replace private industry with government control.

4. Initially, things seem to be going well.

5. Over time, less wealth is created, because private industry is always better than government at creating wealth.

6. Over time, the public sector goes from being controlled by the people to being controlled by the bureaucrats.

7. Bureaucrats continue to seize control, because the people don’t have economic leverage (the wealth has been seized) and don’t have physical leverage (they don’t have weapons).

8. Removal of the bureaucrats becomes impossible without force — which the people no longer have.

At least everyone is equal now — equally poor.

Socialism hasn’t just “not been done right.”

It almost certainly can’t work, because it destroys the source of wealth it seeks to redistribute.

I say “almost” because there’s a nonzero chance technology someday makes massive, efficient government possible.

Unless today’s socialists have a secret AI model that can do this — that day is not today.

“But That’s Not Real Socialism”

Most of these countries never completed the conversion to socialism.

That doesn’t mean socialism wasn’t tried. An ideology is tried whenever the people who hold it get power — and it’s judged by what they do with it.

Petro said it plainly in 2025: “I am a socialist.” He never made Colombia socialist. His worldview still ran the country for four years.

Mamdani is running New York right now. If the city declines under him, “but New York never became fully socialist” will not be a defense of socialism. A socialist with power, governing from a socialist worldview — that is socialism being tried, whether or not the conversion completes.

That’s what happened across Latin America.

Voters didn’t reject an abstract ideology.

They rejected its concrete results.

And the deeper the conversion went, the worse it got — Venezuela went furthest and fell hardest.

“It just needed more time” is not the lesson.

The reverse objection comes from the other direction: “Norway’s government owns oil companies, so Norway is socialist.”

No. Socialism is when public ownership is the rule. A few state-owned companies are the exception that proves the rule — Alaska has oil revenue too.

How to Talk Someone Out of Socialism Without Losing Them

I’m writing a lot about socialism because I think it’s a bad idea.

That said, simply calling something a bad idea doesn’t change people’s minds.

Many of you have friends or family who find socialism appealing.

Here are some concrete instructions to help you in those conversations.

First. Never argue against socialism in the abstract. You’ll both lose. Do this instead.

Step one: ask them to define it. “When you say socialism, what do you mean by that?” Nine times out of ten you’ll hear: healthcare people can afford, housing people can afford, childcare, education.

Step two: agree with the goals. Sincerely — assuming you share them, and I do. “I want people to have healthcare and housing they can afford too.” You’ve just converted a duel into a collaboration. Most political conversations die before this sentence gets said.

Step three: offer the actual definition. “Can I share what socialism technically means? It’s about who owns the farms, factories, grocery stores, and companies that produce everything. Socialism moves that ownership from entrepreneurs and businesses to centralized control — usually the government. The question it answers is who owns production, rather than which services people receive.”

Step four (if they bring up Scandinavia): “The countries you’re pointing to are market economies with strong safety nets — funded by taxing private wealth creation. Their own leaders insist on this. So what you might want is better capitalism — and that, we can build.”

Step five: only now, the evidence. Venezuela, where socialism went all the way. A continent’s rejections everywhere it went partway. Presented as data to consider, rather than as a gotcha.

We practice conversational strategies like this in Clear Thinker Academy, and help people be honest without losing relationships.

If you’d rather train these skills than just read about them, that’s what the Academy is for: clearthinkeracademy.com

The Fix: Revert to the Previous Working Version of Capitalism

The worst way to fight socialism is to defend the current version of capitalism. The current version is the recruiting poster for socialism.

What we’re running now is captured capitalism.

Since Citizens United, outside political spending exploded from $574 million in 2008 to $4.5 billion in 2024.

A single billionaire matched the combined donations of three million small donors.

Corporations shipped labor abroad, institutional investors outbid families for starter homes, and the rules are increasingly written by the industries they’re supposed to govern.

Young people conclude the game is rigged because, in the ways that touch their lives most, it is.

Socialism’s appeal is a symptom. Captured capitalism is the disease.

And the cure isn’t even theoretical.

We can start by just reverting to the previous working version of capitalism.

In 1996, socialism had no constituency in this country.

Because capitalism was delivering: rising wages, attainable homes, a middle class that could plan a future.

That system — markets that compete, a government that isn’t totally for sale — was the last working version, and restoring it is a repair job: through campaign finance reform and smarter laws so more housing can be built.

The way to beat socialism is to give people a capitalism worth keeping.

Know a Tree by Its Fruits

You don’t need history books to evaluate socialism anymore.

You don’t even need a passport.

You can go look at the results in the present day — or talk to the people in America who escaped them.

The evidence is alive, it speaks Spanish, and for three years it has been voting — in country after country — against socialism.

An entire continent tried this worldview at every level of intensity and is climbing out of the hole.

America needn’t stand at the edge of that hole, asking what would happen if we jumped in too.

Below the paywall, four more analyses:

• A Latin American socialist associated his opponent with “Hitler” — sound familiar?

• The socialist playbook — the same tactics, in every country, and the tells to watch for as they arrive here

• The strategic errors the right is making in response — and why they’re handing socialists easy wins

• And the USAID question: was this socialist control paid for with U.S. money?

The Socialists Use the Same Tactics Everywhere

Read more

Last week, between Wednesday and Friday, somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people forced their way into Ceuta — Spain’s territory on the North African coast, bordered by Morocco.

Ceuta has 84,000 residents.

Proportionally, that’s like 240 million people entering the United States. In three days.

They came around the border fence, swimming past the breakwater in wetsuits and on inflatables.

It was the largest mass crossing in the territory’s history, and the largest single surge of irregular arrivals ever recorded on EU soil.

At least 72 people died trying.

And within days, it was essentially over.

Spain deployed the military, installed a floating barrier, and returned almost everyone to Morocco — some expelled under a 1992 agreement between the two countries, and many walking back on their own once they discovered there was no food, no shelter, and no future waiting for them.

By Saturday, Spain’s interior minister said the situation was practically back to normal.

By next month, the invasion itself will be a footnote. The feed will have moved on, and this crisis will just be another news cycle that came and went.

So why write about it?

Because I’m not writing about what happened at Ceuta.

I’m writing about what Ceuta surfaced: the quality of thinking about immigration in the West is abysmal.

Not just the quality of the policies — the thinking.

And I can tell you exactly how it got this bad.

For a decade, the West ran a censorship regime on this topic.

Not just through laws — through social annihilation.

Say you want to be selective about who enters your country — racist.

Say you care whether newcomers share your values — xenophobe.

Suggest there should be a limit, any limit at all — far-right.

Is racism real? Of course.

And the racism of a few has been used to shut down the concerns of the many.

Because the accusations didn’t eliminate racism.

They eliminated honesty.

And when honest conversation ceases, two things replace it:

1. The first is avoidance presented as complexity: “Well, it’s complicated. There are systemic factors.”

2. The second is shutdown: “We’re not having this discussion because you are a bad person, or have bad intentions, or lack empathy.”

A decade of that, and the West has forgotten how to talk about immigration at all.

A fundamentally simple question — who should enter your country, and on what terms — became untouchable.

And as we all know from our personal lives — when you avoid problems, they compound.

That’s why immigration is now a legitimate problem in America.

And a full-blown crisis in Europe.

So this essay uses Ceuta as an anchor for the conversation we need to have.

Immigration is one of the simpler policy questions a country faces.

We already know the right answer.

We practice it every day at our own front doors.

We just need permission to say it out loud, and the skill to speak about it gracefully.

Humans Are Hardware. Culture Is Software.

Permission is one thing. You also need a way to actually have the conversation.

When a censorship regime punishes everyone who raises a concern, the only people left willing to talk are the ones with nothing to lose: the angriest, the most resentful, and sometimes the outright racist.

The unreasonable, extreme minority of voices become the mascots for the reasonable, moderate majority.

Because the reasonable, moderate majority decides to stay quiet — both for fear of being canceled, and for fear of being associated with extreme voices.

But extreme voices dominating a conversation doesn’t mean no honest, reasonable, compassionate version of it exists.

There is a way to talk about immigration that never demonizes an individual and is still honest about demographics and compatibility.

Here’s the framework, from the full piece I published last week:

Humans are hardware. Our biology. There are variations between individuals, but they are relatively small. Fundamentally we’re all running the same machine. Nobody is a better or worse human by birth.

Culture is software. The beliefs, norms, and behavioral expectations a population runs on. And software varies far more than hardware.

Some software is highly compatible. Like Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.

Some has major compatibility issues — try getting Adobe Photoshop and Excel to work together.

That’s not a judgment about which system is “better.”

It’s a statement about integration: try to get two programs with low compatibility to work together without doing the integration work, and you get crashes, no matter how good each program is on its own.

Why does this matter? Because right now, an honest conversation about immigration requires an hour of preamble. You have to:

1. Prove you’re not a racist

2. Prove you’re empathetic

3. Prove you care about the less fortunate

Checkpoint after checkpoint, always on the defensive — before you’re permitted to say anything true.

The hardware vs software framework ends the preamble.

It’s not about anyone being a better or worse person — same hardware.

It’s about software being more or less compatible, and how much unintegrated software a system can absorb at once.

Say it that way, and you can be honest while being tactful.

Knowing the framework isn’t the hard part. Using it in front of your sister-in-law is.

The social risk is high.

People are losing friendships over this.

Losing family.

Watching their own kids look at them like they’ve become something ugly.

So they go quiet — and we end up with the two worst possible extremes at once: in real life, nobody says anything true, and online, everybody says it in the worst possible way.

That’s what Clear Thinker Academy exists to fix.

It’s not just about thinking clearly on these topics. It’s about communicating calmly and clearly under pressure — saying what you actually believe, honestly and without cruelty, without torching the relationships that matter to you.

Join Clear Thinker Academy

Now let’s apply the framework to Ceuta.

The Filter

Reuters interviewed one of the men who made it in — a young Moroccan who climbed a wall, crossed the sand, and swam 200 meters around the border.

He has fundamentally the same hardware as you and me, and is responding to the incentives in front of him.

If he manages to break into Ceuta and stay there, he stands to gain:

1. Food, housing, and support paid for by Spanish citizens

2. Easier access to the rest of Spain and Europe

3. Asylum status

4. Eventually, full legal residency — as Spain demonstrated in January, when it launched an amnesty that drew over a million applications

Given the same situation, we’d probably take those odds too.

Because wanting a better life is universal.

It’s the same thing wanted by the millions of people waiting in line every year to enter Western countries legally.

So if everyone has the same desire, but a country can’t absorb infinite people — how should that country decide who gets in?

By assessing whether the applicant is a net positive for the current inhabitants.

Imagine you’re designing the perfect legal immigration system from scratch.

You get to choose who enters your country.

Would you choose the people whose first act on your soil is breaking your law?

Would you choose based on who can climb a fence or outswim a coast guard?

Would you choose a crowd that is, by every image and account, overwhelmingly young men — no families, no vetting, no paperwork, no idea who anyone is?

Of course not. Nobody would.

Open borders, or policies that indiscriminately admit people based on specious asylum claims, select for exactly the traits no sane country selects for, and filter out exactly the people every sane country wants — the patient, the qualified, the ones respecting your rules from day one.

Last week I argued that immigration policy should screen for four things:

Similarity. How close is the incoming culture to the host culture — language, religion, shared history?

Screening. Who arrives, and how carefully are they chosen? Their skills, their reasons for leaving, and whether anyone checked for fit at all.

Concentration. Where do they settle — dispersed through the society, or packed into parallel enclaves?

Pace. How fast is the change happening, relative to the society’s capacity to absorb it?

The Ceuta invasion obviously fails all four, visibly.

But Western immigration policy has been failing all four, invisibly, for years.

We’ve been merging code without checking for compatibility.

It’s About More Than Just Crime

Now, the argument everyone fixates on: crime.

The left has a favorite statistic here: in America, illegal immigrants — largely from Central and South America — commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born.

It’s true.

It’s also not the point.

Crime is one item on a long list. Introducing a new population without the consent of the governed erodes trust, creates compatibility issues, and breeds resentment between groups.

Fixate on the crime rate and you’ve agreed to argue a narrow part of the problem.

But fine — say crime is the only thing that matters.

Even then, the crime rate isn’t the only thing that matters.

Admit a million people illegally, and if 10,000 of them commit crimes, that’s 10,000 crimes that would not have happened.

The issue is not that the illegal immigrant population is more crime-prone than the native population — it’s that they were never supposed to be admitted in the first place.

They were admitted through an illegal process without the consent of the governed.

Every one of those victims is the cost of a process that got skipped.

A low crime rate doesn’t undo that.

And an influx of illegal immigrants who aren’t crime-prone in one place doesn’t tell you anything about the next one.

Because when you let people in unchecked, you don’t know what you’re getting. You get whoever shows up. It’s roulette.

Maybe you draw a population that commits less crime than your natives.

America largely did, with Latin America.

Maybe you draw one that commits more crime.

France did — and I spent last week’s essay documenting the results.

Maybe you draw tens of thousands of military-age men with no records, no families, and nothing to lose.

Maybe you draw the guy who chases a reporter down the street with a knife.

Obviously, not all immigrants are the same.

Many are just responding rationally to irrational incentives set by Western governments.

Many are hardworking and not seeking welfare payments.

Some will even provide more economic value than natives.

Without rigorous vetting, you don’t get to choose which ones you get.

You’ve handed the decision to chance.

It’s like leaving the front door to your home open.

Maybe the person who walks in becomes your best friend.

Maybe they clean your apartment and leave.

Maybe they trash the place and take the valuables.

Maybe they refuse to leave and demand you fund their life — they’re just trying to have a better life, after all.

Maybe they start imposing their house rules instead of honoring yours.

You don’t know. That’s the problem.

Not that every stranger is dangerous — but an open door means you find out after they’re inside.

Which is why nobody runs their home this way.

You don’t let someone in just because they want in.

You assess whether they’re safe.

You assess what value they’re bringing.

You assess whether they’ll respect the place.

Every person on earth practices this at their own front door.

And we should be doing it at the doors to our civilizations.

The Invitation

Now the question the coverage keeps dancing around: why did 60,000 people decide, in the same week, that the invasion would work?

Definitely because Spain created the incentive structure. Possibly because Morocco’s government exploited it.

Incentive one: the court ruling. On July 8, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants intercepted at sea cannot be summarily returned.

The ruling doesn’t apply to land entries — but that nuance was lost.

Spain’s interior minister says trafficking networks spread misleading interpretations of the ruling to vulnerable people: the door is open—go now. Seventy-two people died — at least some of them acting on legal advice from criminals exploiting illegal immigrants.

Incentive two: the amnesty. In January, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez launched a mass regularization program for migrants living in Spain illegally.

More than a million people applied.

When a country periodically converts illegal presence into legal status, illegal entry becomes a way of entering a waiting room for legal status.

Amnesty becomes an advertisement.

Incentive three: Morocco. Ceuta has been Spanish since 1580, and Morocco has claimed it since independence in 1956.

In 2021, after a diplomatic dispute, Moroccan border forces stood aside and let roughly 8,000 to 12,000 people cross in two days.

Spain’s defense minister called it “blackmail” at the time.

This time, a veteran Spanish journalist who covers the region observed that Moroccan security forces appeared to be doing the same thing they did in 2021.

Notice what Morocco’s government understands that Europe pretends not to: migration is leverage.

Morocco’s government doesn’t believe the “all immigration is good” platitude — it weaponizes its own poor precisely because it knows Europe experiences mass arrival as a crisis.

The gate opens when Morocco’s government wants concessions, and closes when it gets them.

People respond to incentives. Migrants do. Smugglers do. Governments do.

Rational policy is built on rational incentives.

Western Civilization Is Worth Protecting

I was traveling through Europe when the invasion happened, and spent a week of those travels in Madrid.

Something happens when you walk through a city like that.

Stone walkways worn smooth by five centuries of feet.

Buildings older than my entire country, still standing, still beautiful, still used.

Walking those streets, I felt elevated as a human being — inspired by what humans can build when they build across generations.

Then I remembered Washington, D.C., in January 2025, when I was there for the inauguration. Our capital.

The seat of American power. And large stretches of it feel like a place nobody loves.

It is much, much easier to destroy than to create.

It took centuries to build Madrid into what it is now.

Two thousand years to build Paris and London.

One generation of bad decisions to destroy them.

A civilization is not a landmass with an economy attached.

It’s an inheritance — and the most natural instinct in the world is to protect what you love.

Guarding the door is love of the thing behind it — the inheritance that makes people swim oceans to reach it in the first place.

A civilization that won’t guard its door will eventually have nothing behind the door worth reaching.

Love your civilization enough to decide who enters it.

Because love is not just about empathy.

It’s also about boundaries.

That’s the case for guarding the door.

But you’re not going to win this argument by loving your civilization. You’re going to win it by answering the specific things people say.

And the Ceuta invasion surfaced every misguided argument used to justify unchecked immigration and open borders in the Western immigration debate at once — about colonialism, climate change, jobs immigrants fill, etc.

Nine of them, all with real emotional appeal, all of which fall apart the moment you think about them.

Here they are, and here’s how to answer each one.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why “they just want a better life” can be true without answering who a country should admit.

• How turning asylum into a backdoor hurts the genuine refugees the system exists to protect.

• Why climate, labor shortages, and “diversity is a strength” all fail as defenses of unvetted immigration.

• What America’s immigration history, Ceuta’s legal status, and the record of former colonies actually show.

• The one population missing from all nine arguments—and how censorship manufactured the backlash it was supposed to prevent.

The “Pro-Immigration” Arguments

Read more

On Monday, Mayor Mamdani announced the details of his signature campaign promise: five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, funded with $70 million in capital costs just to build buildings, and recurring costs to fund staff and overhead.

A core basket of groceries — all fresh produce, meat, and seafood, plus about 20 categories of staples — will sell at a 30% discount, with prices locked in monthly.

The city covers rent, property taxes, and construction.

Private grocers run the day-to-day.

And the discount applies to everyone, at every income level.

Let me be upfront about why I’m writing about this.

In one sense, it’s a small story.

$70 million is a lot of money to you and me.

Relative to New York City’s $100+ billion budget, it’s tiny.

But in another sense, it’s crucially important.

Because it’s the perfect example of what’s wrong with socialism, and a tangible opportunity to make that clear.

And to show my cards: I am extremely concerned about the rise of socialism in America.

It’s much more likely that socialism doesn’t work in principle than that it just hasn’t worked in practice.

Because it violates basic economics the way a perpetual-motion machine violates basic physics.

Mamdani’s grocery store “experiment” shows exactly how. More on that word later.

The math

Grocery stores survive on 1-3% profit margins. Among the thinnest of any industry.

Mamdani’s plan mandates a 30% discount on the most expensive, most perishable categories in the store: produce, meat, seafood.

The city’s contribution — covering rent and property taxes — buys back maybe 10 of those 30 points.

If you live in New York, the other 20 come from you, through an ongoing taxpayer subsidy.

Which means the more groceries these stores sell, the more taxpayers pay.

These will be the only stores in New York where success makes the owner poorer.

You’re the owner.

We don’t have to speculate about where this leads, because the federal government already runs this exact model.

Military commissaries deliver roughly 24% savings for service members, and it takes about $1.4 billion in taxpayer funding every single year to sustain it.

The discount was never free.

It was billed to someone else.

So these stores don’t lower the price of groceries.

They move who pays, from the person at the register to everyone else.

Now, that isn’t a problem in principle.

We run several safety net programs in America: Welfare. Food stamps.

None of them are profitable. None of them are designed to be.

They exist to move money toward the people who need it most.

I’m fine with that.

The question is never whether we help.

The question is how efficiently the help arrives.

And this is one of the least efficient ways anyone has come up with.

Where the money actually goes

Start with $70 million to build the buildings.

Then recurring costs for rent. Property taxes. Staff.

Every one of those dollars is spent before a single dollar reaches a shopper as a discount.

The subsidy on the groceries is the only part that actually helps anyone. Everything else is overhead.

Now put a number on it.

The city projects the discount saves a household about $1,000 a year.

The buildings alone cost $70 million.

For the price of the construction alone, you could hand $1,000 to 70,000 households.

The East Harlem store by itself costs $30 million.

That’s $1,000 that could be given to 30,000 households, more than half the households in the neighborhood it’s being built in.

And that’s before rent. Before staff. Before a single discounted apple.

The other counterargument would be that the $70M+ is a capital expenditure — you spend a lot up front so that you get efficiency down the line.

The logic would be: the upfront cost of building infrastructure is high, but the high fixed costs are made up for with lower variable costs over time.

That logic is sound. It’s how every serious business thinks about investment.

But that’s not what’s happening here.

Mamdani is building a bunch of infrastructure that doesn’t need to be built to deliver groceries to people who already have access to groceries.

These buildings don’t lower the cost of a single item on the shelf. The discount runs entirely on subsidy, forever, whether the building exists or not.

Poor people don’t need more grocery stores.

They just need groceries to cost less, or more money to buy them.

And it costs time

This is not just an inefficient use of money, but also time.

Mamdani was elected because people want relief from the high cost of living ASAP.

The first store opens at the end of 2027. East Harlem waits until 2029.

So a family that can’t afford groceries this month gets nothing from this for 1.5-3 years.

A check clears in a week.

He is spending $70 million and several years building something people don’t need in order to eventually deliver something they could have had immediately.

Moreover — this is creating competition with privately owned grocery stores, which are operating on 1-3% margins, largely because of high costs.

Helping them would help the poor in a far more sustainable fashion.

See Through The Spin

Everything I just walked you through took me a couple of hours. The city’s own release. What the $70 million actually buys. When the doors even open.

It took me hours because I wanted to give you a deep dive and analysis.

But it doesn’t need to take you hours to get the key info if you use Ground News.

It’s been my favorite news app for two years, since well before they ever sponsored me, and Bias Comparison is a huge reason why.

It turns bias into data you can see instead of distortion you absorb.

Look at this story. 122 sources. 50% right-leaning, 30% left, 20% center.

Right away that tells you something. This story is being covered more heavily on the right than the left, and the split follows a pattern you’ll see in almost every one of these fights.

The right is framing this as bad policy and incompetence.

They’re correct.

The left is framing it as helping the poor, and they keep stressing the savings.

They’re correct that we need to help the poor.

They don’t seem to understand that this is a terrible way to do it.

But the right is once again not taking the opportunity to solve it either.

They’re pointing at the failure.

They’re not offering anything better.

Being right about a bad plan is not the same as having a good one.

You can see all of that in one screen with Ground News, which helps you escape echo chambers.

When you can see how each side is spinning a story, you can also see what both of them are leaving out.

And usually that’s where the actual answer is.

You can get 40% off the Vantage plan at groundnews.com/kaizenx.

Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage plan

Signing up keeps you informed, and it directly supports the work I do here.

The best argument against me

There’s one serious objection here, and it deserves a straight answer.

A mayor can’t expand food stamps. SNAP is federal. And right now federal work requirements are pushing thousands of New Yorkers off their benefits. So when I say “just give people the money,” a defender can reasonably respond: he doesn’t have that lever. Grocery stores are a thing a mayor can actually build.

That’s the strongest version, and it’s still wrong.

New York City funds its own cash and voucher programs all the time. It does not need Washington’s permission to put money on a card.

If the city can find $70 million for construction, it can find $70 million for groceries, and the second one arrives this year instead of 2029.

The experiment

Whenever this plan gets challenged, the same word shows up in its defense.

“Experiment.”

“It’s an experiment. A test. Five stores. Let’s see what happens.”

An experiment requires genuine uncertainty.

You run one when you don’t know the answer.

You have a hypothesis, you design a test that could confirm or deny it, and you accept whatever comes back.

So what’s the hypothesis here?

That subsidized groceries will be cheaper than unsubsidized groceries?

Of course they will. Taxpayers are paying the difference. The result is guaranteed before the doors open.

It would be like me saying: I’m going to run an experiment where I knock over a glass of milk to see whether the milk falls out of the glass.

You already know the milk falls out of the glass.

All you’re doing is making a mess and calling it an experiment.

If prices come in lower, you take credit for a result you prepaid with public money.

If the whole thing collapses, well, it was only ever an experiment.

Heads, they win. Tails, you paid for it.

These stores will open. They’ll be busy. Prices will be lower. There will be a ribbon cutting and a press release with a number on it.

That’s not success.

The question was never whether you can sell groceries below cost.

Anyone can sell ten-dollar groceries for seven if someone else covers the three.

The question is whether this is the best use of the three.

It’s not. Not even close.

So why does this keep happening?

Not the politics of it. The thinking behind it.

Because this same mistake shows up in socialist policy after socialist policy, and once you can see the pattern, you can spot it coming a mile away.

That’s what I want to get into below: the specific blind spot that produces plans like this, why it’s so persuasive to young people — even the really smart ones — and what actually solving this problem would look like.

From here, you’ll learn:

• How building my first business changed what I understood about where money actually comes from.

• Why even brilliant people confuse prices with choices, wealth with theft, and redistribution with creation.

• How zero-sum thinking turns “billionaire” into an accusation and makes socialist policies feel morally obvious.

• The only three explanations I can build for a grocery plan that cannot work—and the explanation missing from the list.

• What competent compassion would actually do to lower grocery bills and fix capitalism instead of replacing it.

Read more

Note: This article was written before the recent migrant invasion into Spain.

I’m writing this from Madrid.

A week and a half ago, on July 19, I was here when Spain won the World Cup, defeating Argentina.

I’d never seen anything like it, and perhaps never will again.

An estimated nearly two million people parading the streets, dripping in their country’s red and gold.

Spaniards spontaneously erupting into anthems they all somehow knew.

And this continued for 24 hours.

I saw everything one would hope to see when a country wins a major sporting event — happiness, camaraderie, revelry.

What I did not see: Riots. Burned cars. Looted stores.

The official tally for the celebration: seven arrests — out of two million.

The Spanish government’s own summary of the night: no serious incidents.

Two Cities, Two Nights

You don’t need to go far in space or time to witness a similar event with an opposite reaction.

A few hundred miles away and a few weeks prior, on May 30, 2026, Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League — soccer’s most elite club competition — for the second year in a row.

The result was bedlam.

890 arrests nationwide.

219 people injured. 178 of them were police and security forces.

One death.

Cars torched. Stores looted.

A crowd tried to storm a police station in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Paris.

And the French government saw it all coming. They deployed thousands of officers in advance.

Because it happened the year before.

PSG also won in 2025.

That night: 559 arrests. 264 vehicles burned. More than 190 injured. Two dead.

Two cities. Similar achievements. Wildly different nights.

This Didn’t Use To Happen

Some might argue the difference is that the Champions League is about clubs and the World Cup is about countries.

The timeline says otherwise.

1998: France wins the World Cup. More than a million people flood the Champs-Élysées. The night is peaceful, unifying, legendary — marred by one tragedy, when a panicked driver plowed into the crowd and injured 80 people. An accident, not a riot.

2006: France merely reaches the final. Two dead, 189+ arrested in Paris, cars torched.

2018: France wins again. 292 detained across the country. 45 police officers injured. A luxury store on the Champs-Élysées looted. Tear gas and water cannon.

2025 and 2026: PSG wins back to back. You just saw those numbers. They’re the worst on this list, by far, and they land two years running.

Paris is not fundamentally more chaotic than Madrid. In 1998, Paris partied the way Madrid just did — peacefully.

The difference is not that the French are violent and the Spaniards are peaceful.

The difference is immigration.

But probably not in the way you think.

Immigration and the R-Word

The trouble with talking about immigration is that it’s littered with landmines — race, culture, comparison.

Say the wrong thing and you’re a racist or a xenophobe.

So most people just avoid it. Which resolves nothing.

That leaves the field to two groups: the unusually brave, and the actually racist. The first is rare. The second gets treated as the face of everyone with concerns, most of whom stay quiet.

As a black person whose parents are immigrants, I have a built-in defense against those accusations.

It’s a superpower in this discourse — one that shouldn’t exist, because arguments should stand on what’s said, not who says it. But here we are.

I get called a race traitor and panderer to white people instead — but those don’t shut a conversation down the same way.

So let me use the superpower to help provide you a framework for thinking and talking about this.

Here’s a way to think about immigration, race, and culture that helps avoid conversational triggers.

Technical readers, forgive the oversimplification. It’s just an analogy.

Humans Are Hardware. Culture Is Software.

Think of people as having two parts: hardware and software.

Our hardware is physical. It’s our biology. Humans have fundamentally the same hardware — the variance between individuals and populations is small.

We run on different keyboards and monitors, but the differences between a Mac keyboard and a PC keyboard don’t start wars.

Humans are hardware. But we run software.

Culture is software — the beliefs, norms, and behavioral expectations a population commits to.

And it varies massively. And when the variance is sufficiently large, it can lead to war.

Some software is compatible: Photoshop and Premiere run together seamlessly. Some isn’t: a program built for Mac won’t run on Windows without an intensive code rewrite.

The good news is someone’s hardware is nearly impossible to change, but software can be rewritten — and almost any hardware can run almost any software.

Western democracies run software built on individual rights, universal principles, and the rule of law.

Many developing countries run software built on tribe, honor, custom, and heritage.

That’s fine. Every culture is optimized for different things, at different stages of its development.

But mix that software in one country without doing the integration work, and you get compatibility issues.

Not because the newcomers are worse people — same hardware, and anyone can install new software.

But installation is work.

Push too much new code too fast without checking compatibility, and you get bugs.

Sometimes the merged culture ends up better.

Sometimes it just breaks — people who share little with the country around them, and were never brought into it, don’t hold together with it.

Like rioting and burning cars during what should be a celebration.

Why Madrid Partied and Paris Burned

The issue is not the size of the immigrant population.

Because Madrid actually has a higher share of foreign-born residents than Paris.

30.5% of Madrid’s residents were born abroad, as of January 2026.

In Paris, it’s about 25%.

If raw numbers caused the riots, Madrid should have burned first.

It didn’t.

The size of the foreign-born population explains almost nothing here. Composition and assimilation explain almost everything.

This becomes clear across 4 axes:

1. Similarity. How close is the incoming culture to the host culture — language, religion, shared values? This is the one that decides whether integration is even achievable. The wider the gap, the harder people are to integrate. And integration is what produces cohesion — the shared sense that we live under the same rules and belong to the same place. High similarity, cohesion comes cheap. High dissimilarity, it may never come at all.

2. Screening. Who arrives, and how carefully are they chosen? Their skills, their reasons for leaving, and whether anyone checked for fit at all.

3. Concentration. Where do they settle — dispersed through the society, or packed into parallel enclaves?

4. Pace. How fast is the change happening, relative to the society’s capacity to absorb it?

Now run Spain and France through those axes.

Spain’s foreign-born population is roughly half Latin American. Colombians, Venezuelans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians — people who arrive already speaking the language, already Christian like Spain, already steeped in five centuries of shared history.

The software is nearly identical. Installation is fast.

France is the inverse. The Paris region’s largest immigrant origin countries are Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, alongside large populations from Mali, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Different language.

Different religion — Islam.

Different norms about law, speech, and the role of faith in public life.

Low similarity, at scale.

And the scale runs one direction. France is roughly 10% Muslim. Spain is about half that. In the Paris region the concentration is higher still, while Spain’s mix is shaped far more by Latin America.

One thing before I go further — on Islam, since it’s a part of the immigration discussion.

None of this is a judgment on Islam as a religion, or on Muslims as individuals.

There are Muslim societies so desirable that people leave wealthy Christian countries for them — like Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

There are Muslim empires that rivaled their Christian contemporaries — like the Ottomans.

I am not interested in analyzing which religion is “better.”

And this is not a claim that Muslims, in principle, are the problem.

Every religion can be read in ways compatible or incompatible with a free society.

There are Christians who read the Bible to justify slavery or stoning gay people — a tiny fringe, but a real one.

There are millions of Muslims whose software is fully compatible with the West, and who live it every day.

I know many on the right believe Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the West.

But the key question for determining immigration policy is not whether Islam is compatible in the abstract — it’s whether the specific people arriving are running compatible software, and how you make sure of that regardless of what religion is on the box.

But it’s also true that in many of the countries sending immigrants to the West, Muslims interpret Islam in a way that is not compatible with the West.

That’s a large gap in similarity. And a large gap, left unclosed and concentrated, is what erodes cohesion — which is the ground disorder grows from.

I’ll expand upon this when we get to Islam directly.

First, the other big factor besides religion.

France added concentration.

Paris’s immigrants are packed into the banlieues — the low-income housing estates ringing the city. Seine-Saint-Denis, the department just north of Paris, is the poorest in mainland France.

So you have immigrants with: Low similarity. Low screening. High concentration. High pace.

That’s how you get dysfunctional software.

“But the Rioters Are French”

Most of the young men burning cars in Paris were born in France. They’re second-generation — the sons of immigrants.

Which actually makes immigration more of a concern.

Bugs in software don’t disappear by themselves. When they aren’t fixed in an earlier version, they show up in later versions — and sometimes they’re harder to track and fix.

France imported millions of people, concentrated them in estates outside its cities, demanded little in terms of assimilation — and is now two generations into the compatibility crisis.

Today, 41% of the Paris region is either an immigrant or the child of one.

And the fact that it’s the sons, not just the fathers, is the tell.

First-generation poverty fades.

Discrimination alone would hit every immigrant group.

But this pattern holds into a generation born in France, which means something is being passed down that neither poverty nor prejudice explains on its own.

That something is culture.

And this is where it shows. These young men share almost nothing with France — not the language fully, not the values, not a stake in the place.

It’s the absence of anything holding them to the country they were born in.

That’s a compatibility issue that causes bugs.

You can watch the bugs accumulate in the event record. The 2005 banlieue riots. The 2023 riots after the police shooting of Nahel Merzouk. The cars that burn across France every single New Year’s Eve.

And apparently, every time Paris wins something.

None of this requires believing anything ugly about any individual. Again — same hardware.

It requires believing something obvious about policy: cultures don’t integrate themselves.

If you aren’t intentional about what culture you allow in, how much of it you allow in, and how you’re going to integrate it — you get software no one wants to use.

The mayor of Paris said it plainly after this year’s riots: the vast majority of Parisians celebrated with joy, unity, and respect.

He’s right.

A minority of individuals burned the city, as the result of an immigration policy that made that minority larger, year after year, without ever assimilating it.

The Choice

So the pattern is clear.

The harder question is which specific incompatibilities keep causing the crashes.

Which brings us to Islam and its compatibility with the West — perhaps the most treacherous conversational minefield there is.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why compatibility, not superiority, is the real question, and where certain interpretations of Islam collide with liberal democracy.

• What the data on blasphemy, apostasy, and sharia actually show, and what they do not prove about individual Muslims.

• Why screening the software instead of the label produces a radically different approach to immigration.

• The strongest case against this argument: poverty, exclusion, and the long history of immigrants once considered impossible to assimilate.

• The four questions every immigration system should answer, and why preserving a civilization requires integrating newcomers on purpose.

Read more

Last week I was in Madrid when Spain beat Argentina to win the World Cup.

The atmosphere was festive and replete with national pride.

Spanish flags and jerseys dotted the landscape.

There were Argentine flags too, which made sense.

Madrid has one of the largest Argentine populations of any city outside Argentina.

But there was one flag I didn’t expect to see.

“Must everything be about Palestine?” I exclaimed to a friend, almost involuntarily.

There, at a soccer celebration, was a Palestinian flag.

Early in 2025, when anti-ICE protests were at full blaze in Los Angeles, I attended one such demonstration downtown.

Unsurprisingly, Mexican flags were the most common.

Surprisingly, the second most common flag, and by a narrower margin than one might expect, was not the American flag.

It was the Palestinian flag.

At an American protest.

In an American city.

About American immigration policy.

And the flag of a territory seven thousand miles away was more visible than the flag of the country whose laws were the entire subject of the demonstration.

In this essay, you’ll learn:

• Why local American politicians are making high-stakes promises about international policy they have zero legal authority to enforce.

• How a single foreign conflict transformed into an all-encompassing ideological purity test for domestic politics.

• The stark difference between political performance and practical, real-world outcomes.

• How to spot when a political movement starts valuing ideological alignment over actual competence.

The Promise

In December 2024, Zohran Mamdani sat down with Mehdi Hasan and was asked whether he would welcome Benjamin Netanyahu to New York City.

He said that as mayor, New York City would arrest him.

He repeated it through the campaign.

He won in a landslide.

Netanyahu is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly in September.

On Tuesday evening, Mayor Mamdani posted a video announcing that his administration had reviewed every avenue under applicable law and concluded that the city does “not have the independent legal authority” to enforce the ICC warrant.

In the same video where he conceded he could not do the thing he promised, he called Netanyahu a war criminal, called him the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people, said he was not welcome in New York City, and called on the federal government to arrest him instead.

Mamdani is a generational political talent. He has extraordinary intuition about how to use social media.

And he deftly managed to shift his audience’s attention away from the fact that he wasn’t going to fulfill his promise and toward a fresh round of condemnation — and to shift fulfillment of his own promise from him to Trump, without naming Trump.

It worked. His base loved it.

Politically speaking, it was skillfully done.

It Was Obvious the Whole Time

Zohran isn’t even the thousandth politician to make a promise he didn’t keep.

That isn’t unique to him, or the left, or socialists.

What’s worth commenting on is that the promise was such a powerful political tool in the first place.

Because it’s a promise he never should have made.

A mayor has no authority to enforce an international court’s warrant.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, which is the treaty that created the ICC and obligates member states to arrest people it charges.

No mayor can convert an ICC order into a New York warrant by executive direction.

He did not need to be in office to know this.

It’s both intuitively and legally obvious that a mayor of a city can’t arrest the prime minister of a country.

Other Democrats knew it too.

During the campaign, the Manhattan congressman Jerry Nadler said the proposal was simply unrealistic, and that “The City of New York has no jurisdiction to do such a thing.”

His own party said it.

It didn’t matter.

Zohran promised something there was no way he could deliver, about a matter that isn’t part of the New York City mayor’s role.

He got all the upside of making a promise, and none of the downside of keeping it.

And people are willing to overlook it, because Palestine is such an emotionally charged issue that they are abandoning rationality.

And if the reporting is right, this wasn’t just a calculated move.

It was calculated before Zohran was ever in office.

I didn’t know that until I went digging, and I found it the way I find everything now. Through Ground News.

The moment a story like this breaks, social media makes it worse. Louder, more confident, more contradictory. You can scroll for an hour on the Mamdani video and come away knowing less than when you started, a little dumber and a lot angrier.

So I track these stories on Ground News instead. It’s been my favorite news app for two years, since well before they ever sponsored me, because it hands me the high-level picture without the scrolling and the mental pollution that comes with it.

I pulled up the Mamdani story and it showed me 80 different sources covering it, and it tags each one with its bias right on the card.

That’s where I found the thread. A Vanity Fair piece, tagged left. That matters here. When a publication sympathetic to Mamdani is the one reporting the pivot was premeditated, that’s not partisan spin. That’s a friendly outlet telling on him. And seeing the bias on every source means you absorb the slant on purpose instead of by accident, which is the whole game I’ve been showing you in this piece.

I clicked through and read the Vanity Fair piece in full, because I always verify before I put something in front of you.

The headline oversells it, but the reporting underneath is damning. His own communications director says the pivot was planned during the transition, before Mamdani took office.

At best, he made an irresponsible promise.

At worst, he knowingly made a promise he couldn’t fulfill, per the Vanity Fair reporting.

I don’t read Vanity Fair.

So Ground News handed me a thread I’d never have found on my own.

You can get the full picture across the spectrum for 40% off the Vantage plan, their top tier, at groundnews.com/kaizenx.

Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage plan

Signing up keeps you informed, and it directly supports the work I do here.

What the Warrant Actually Is

While we’re here, it’s worth clarifying what the International Criminal Court did — because it did not designate Netanyahu a war criminal.

Under Article 58 of the Rome Statute, an ICC Pre-Trial Chamber can issue an arrest warrant when it finds reasonable grounds to believe a person committed a crime within the court’s jurisdiction, and that arrest is necessary to secure their appearance.

That is a threshold finding to compel appearance. It’s roughly analogous to probable cause in the American legal system.

It is part of the investigative process.

There has been no trial and no verdict.

People are entitled to think Netanyahu is a war criminal.

That’s just not what the ICC has said yet.

Palestine Is No Longer a Topic, It’s a Worldview

I’m not going to litigate the conflict here.

I’ve commented on it a few times tangentially. I’ve said what I think Israel needs to do better.

I’ve commented on statements like this one from Ben-Gvir, a high-ranking member of Israel’s government, which is a profoundly destructive and psychopathic thing to say.

I’ve also pointed out that for all the condemnation the pro-Palestine movement has for Israel, very little focus seems to be on Hamas — which kills its own people, hides in civilian clothing, and plants infrastructure among civilian neighborhoods.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have marched against their own government’s handling of this war.

I have never once seen a Free Palestine march in the West turn out against Hamas.

Many more Israelis are visibly holding Israel accountable than Free Palestine people are holding Hamas accountable.

The suffering in Gaza is catastrophic, and being horrified by it is the correct response.

And horror doesn’t build a solution. It’s fuel.

But a movement that runs on outrage alone, that never turns it into pressure on Hamas — which shares responsibility with Israel for endangering Palestinian lives through terrible leadership — isn’t helping the people it grieves for.

A serious peacemaking effort has to address the excesses and responsibilities of both parties, even if you think one is more culpable than the other. The Palestine movement isn’t doing that.

So that’s what I’ve said so far. I may comment more on the conflict itself, but it’s not the focus of this article.

What I primarily want to comment on here is the fact that Palestine has become a worldview in and of itself, and it is distorting American politics for the worse.

From here, you’ll learn:

• How a rising progressive star got targeted by his own organization over a single trip, and what it reveals about modern political purity enforcement.

• Why political candidates with massive personal red flags can still dominate primaries simply by signaling the right tribal allegiance.

• The simple analytical framework that transforms complex local issues like housing, rent, and policing into black-and-white moral tests.

• How real-world peace deals and hostage returns actually get negotiated—and why ideological movements struggle to acknowledge practical wins.

• Why statements routinely made by Democratic leadership a decade ago are now treated as political heresy within their own party.

Read more

We are 105 days from the midterms.

Prediction markets give Republicans a ~17% chance of keeping Congress.

The single most likely outcome on the board is Democrats taking both chambers, at 48%.

Losing one chamber would be a serious blow to Trump’s ability to deliver anything he promised.

Losing both would be catastrophic.

That’s the backdrop for everything that follows — keep it in mind.

Because Thursday night, Trump gave a primetime address about the 2020 election.

He’s right about what we need to do — pass voter ID.

He’s fighting a worthy battle.

But it comes at the expense of the war.

The war to solve the economic problems that most Americans actually care about — and that are radicalizing the youth.

One more thing before I start.

If you’ve noticed I’ve been pushing back more on figures on the right lately, there’s a reason.

It’s a specific kind of reasoning I want to name — a reflex to treat suspicion as evidence, to turn every irregularity into a conspiracy.

It’s the claims that the election was stolen from Spencer Pratt.

It’s the claims Candace Owens is making about Charlie Kirk’s death.

It’s the claims Trump has made about the 2020 election.

The issue is not making claims.

It’s that the way the claims get made lacks intellectual rigor.

And I think it’s genuinely damaging — to the credibility of the right with independents, who are now the largest political bloc in this country, and to the many correct points people on the right are actually making.

I’m saying this as someone who agrees more with the right than the left.

Someone who voted for Trump, who doesn’t want to see the right lose the midterms, and who doesn’t want to see a Democratic Party that’s drifting further left gain more power in this country.

I’ll explain what I mean at the end. But first, let me tell you where Trump is right.

1. Where He’s Right

Trump is right: We need voter ID.

Not because the last election was stolen.

Because a democracy runs on trust, people have little, and it needs to be restored.

When a large share of the country doesn’t believe the results are clean, that belief is a crisis on its own — whether or not it’s correct.

Voter ID is part of how you rebuild it.

It’s cheap, it’s simple, and roughly 8 in 10 Americans support it.

It’s a no-brainer.

The argument that people have made against the SAVE America Act is that it doesn’t require any old ID — it requires proof of citizenship: a passport or birth certificate.

The former, many have never owned, and the latter can be tedious to get, particularly for poorer people and those with less time.

But getting a birth certificate is a solvable hurdle, not an impossible one.

Where it’s genuinely hard, fund it and make the document free. Lower the cost of clearing the bar. Don’t pretend the bar shouldn’t exist.

This should already be law, and the Democrats are in the way.

He’s Also Right About the Media

ABC and NBC declined to carry the president’s address on their primary broadcast networks.

The sitting president of the United States addresses the nation about the integrity of its elections, and two major networks decided you don’t get to see it on the channel that actually reaches you.

Networks have editorial discretion, and they should keep it.

They should not lose their licenses for this, as Trump has threatened.

But their job — the entire reason the profession exists — is to give people the most relevant information and the context to process it.

When the president speaks to the country about something this fundamental, that should be aired, on the main channel, no matter what you think of him.

If what he’s saying is false, your job is to put it in front of people and counter it — in real time, with your best reporters and the truth.

You don’t fight falsehood by suppressing it.

That just guarantees the claims spread everywhere without fact-checking.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes people stop trusting the press.

They didn’t protect the public.

They made a decision on the public’s behalf about what it could handle.

Paternalism instead of journalism.

2. The Battle and the War

But while Trump is spending massive amounts of public attention and patience on this battle, he is losing the war of public opinion, and losing political capital.

And the polling reflects that.

The energy he’s pouring into this fight — the primetime slots, the declassified document drops, the running war with the networks — is energy not spent on the thing that actually will decide the midterms, and his ability to execute his agenda.

To the public, it looks like he is majoring in the minors.

The war is not with China, which he’s newly accusing of “compromising” the election.

The war is not with the Democrats, who he accused of stealing the election.

The war is with the economic problems that will make Americans sympathetic to both of them.

It’s that young people can’t afford a home. Can’t afford groceries. Can’t afford gas.

That’s the fertile soil that socialism is growing in.

That’s what makes the Chinese model increasingly appealing to young people, regardless of what China does.

That’s what makes Gen Z — a demographic Trump made historic gains with in 2024 — increasingly far left.

When people feel the system isn’t delivering, they go looking for something — anything — that promises it will, whether that’s a foreign model or a domestic one.

The affordability collapse is the war.

And right now people see the president focused on skirmishes.

3. The China Chapter in the 2020 Election Saga

Look at the address itself through that lens.

Trump released hundreds of pages of declassified intelligence and made three claims.

1. China illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files.

2. The intelligence community buried it, filtering China out of his briefings while an FBI official texted that she was running a “shadow government.”

3. Venezuela ran an experiment swapping votes on its own machines. The implication is that this could happen on our machines.

Then he told Congress to pass the SAVE America Act.

Now watch what’s happened to Trump’s election claims over time.

He changed the enemy. For years, the story was that Democrats stole the election. Thursday night, the villain was China.

He softened the claim. For years, the word was “stolen.” Thursday, it was “compromised” — the system has holes.

Those are different accusations, and “compromised” is the weaker one.

He kept the spectacle, but weakened his claim.

This is not mere semantics.

Look at the statement from John Solomon — the man Trump brought into the White House last month to run this release.

Shortly after the speech, on camera, he admitted the intelligence community has “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ‘22 or ‘24.”

The full document-by-document audit is in the paid section.

So here’s the pattern:

First the election was stolen; now it was compromised.

First it was the Democrats; now it’s China.

It’s whack-a-mole — and every version proves at best intent to meddle, never a stolen vote.

Which, I speculate, is why they swapped “stolen” for “compromised.”

To be clear: we should assume our rivals always want to influence our elections — including China.

That’s a great argument for voter ID. It creates more trust in the eyes of voters.

It is not a reason to keep telling the country its elections were stolen when the government has not presented sufficient evidence six years later.

And it is not a reason to keep spending so much of the public’s attention and limited patience on what is not even a top-three issue for most voters.

This is a battle. And it’s worth passing a bill at some point.

But it is not the war.

And with three and a half months to go until midterms, all the energy needs to go to winning the war.

None of this means the concern is imaginary.

But voter ID is a concern, not a code red.

If a cataclysmic breach were exposed Thursday, or any time in the last six years, that would be one thing.

But that’s not what we got Thursday.

Instead we got more evidence that the system should be improved to create trust, not evidence that it’s broken.

This is a key distinction that keeps getting lost in the election fraud discussion.

I’ll address that later in the article.

4. The Public Doesn’t Like These Priorities

One of the easiest ways to win a campaign is to find an enemy, as Trump has done with the Democrats and is now doing with China.

But right now, the war that needs to be waged is not on a people — it’s on problems.

60% of Americans say Trump is not focused on the country’s most important problems.

The top three, in every poll, all term long: inflation, jobs, the economy.

What people see him focused on is an unpopular war in Iran, ICE, and election fraud.

And at the top of every speech, he tells us the economy is doing great.

That’s not what people feel.

“The economy” is not the stock market to most people.

These kids voting for Zohran Mamdani don’t own stocks.

They own debt.

They need cheap groceries and gas.

They want homes.

That’s the economy that decides elections, and it’s getting 20% of the airtime when it needs 80% — at least.

This is not to say winning the Iran war isn’t important. Or that election security isn’t important.

It’s to point out that everything the president does is important, but not everything is of equal priority.

And right now, to 60% of Americans, Trump’s priorities appear backwards.

Nobody voted in 2024 to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. They voted to afford their lives.

The attention is inverted in the eyes of the public.

Eighty percent of it goes to the twenty percent of issues people care about least.

The public’s attention is a scarce resource. Its patience is scarcer.

And he is spending both on an issue the majority of voters don’t prioritize.

5. The Stakes

Prediction markets give Republicans a ~17% chance of holding Congress.

Nate Silver puts Democrats at 85 to 90% to take the House and says the markets are, if anything, low.

That is the crisis Trump is facing, and if he doesn’t solve this, his ability to solve all of the problems he wants to solve — including election security — will be crippled.

Election security matters, but despite all the pomp and circumstance, Trump’s announcement didn’t reveal a cataclysmic vulnerability in those documents.

Trump’s own task force member said so on camera.

The five-alarm emergency is in the polling, not the intelligence files.

And every day spent on a six-year-old grievance that is low on the list of priorities for most Americans is a day not spent on fixing the real cataclysm — the conditions driving the rise of socialism and its corrosive effect on our country.

I say this as someone who voted for him and wants him to win.

I’m not under any illusions that Trump will ever say he lost the 2020 election fair and square.

But he doesn’t have to say he was wrong to preserve political capital.

He just has to stop investing in this battle, for now.

Take the principle — that elections must be both secure and seen as secure.

Pass the bill without making the campaign for it about 2020 — or pass it later, if needed.

And let the rest go.

That’s the strong move and the smart move at once.

Refusing it is a gift to the people he’s trying to beat.

6. Why It Matters

I still believe Trump was the best option available in 2024.

And given what the Democratic Party is becoming — given the rise of socialism inside it — I’m more against the alternative than ever.

That’s precisely why the wasted attention is a strategic error.

Because the thing pushing young people toward socialism isn’t abstract unproven claims.

It’s not “the economy” in the aggregate, stock market and all.

It’s that they can’t afford a home, or groceries, or gas.

That’s the war.

And if Trump loses Congress in three and a half months, he doesn’t just lose power to fix the smaller things.

He loses power to fix anything — the economy included. Stalled bills, subpoenas, two years of trench warfare, and a wide-open lane for exactly the socialism we’re trying to stop.

He may win the battle over voter ID. He’s winning the battle over the media. He deserves credit for both.

And he is losing the war while he does it.

Pass the bill. Then go fight the fight that the majority of Americans want you to win.

Trump did make new claims about the 2020 election that are worth taking seriously.

In the paid section, I go claim by claim through what was released Thursday night — the 220 million files, the “shadow government” text, the “deliberately massaged” briefings, the Venezuela machines.

What holds up, what collapses, and the one thread that deserves a real investigation no matter which side you’re on.

And I answer the question underneath all of it: why this debate won’t die, in one picture — a bank vault — that will help make this whole election fraud conversation make sense.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Why invisible safeguards cause election paranoia, and why pointing at an irregularity isn’t proof of a stolen vote.

• What China actually downloaded, what was already public data, and what the intel actually proves.

• The recalled field report from Albany: the one live thread that holds actual weight and deserves answers.

• Why these claims trace back to a compromised source and actually argue against their own headlines.

• How treating suspicion as evidence sabotages credibility with independents when it matters most.

Read more

Two years ago, Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.

I remember vividly w…

Read more

On October 31, 2024, I went to a Trump rally and a Kamala rally. On the same day.

By that point I was at the end of a months-long journey. I had voted for Democrats all my life, but had come to believe Trump was the best choice in 2024.

I wanted to do one last thing before locking in my vote — go to a Trump rally and see the community for myself.

It confirmed my suspicion. This was not the white-supremacist red-hat fan club the media told me to expect.

It was a passionate, positive, surprisingly funny group of people.

By comparison, the crowd at the Kamala rally seemed energized, but fearful and negative.

Not quite a year later, I attended Charlie Kirk’s memorial at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

I wasn’t very familiar with Charlie’s work before he died. A year prior, I’d assumed he was a typical right-wing commentator making “own the libs” content, and that his shtick was embarrassing college students for views.

It was only after he died that I began to appreciate what he was trying to do — steer a frustrated, desperate generation of young people (facing a brutal job market, massive student debt, and astronomical home prices) away from bad ideas that have destroyed civilizations.

How prescient he was, considering the current rise of socialism.

And he was doing it with nothing but the force of good ideas, freely spoken.

He did so imperfectly, but successfully. And he seemed to be one of the few leaders even trying.

It was the malevolent glee of those who celebrated his death — along with the distortions of his more controversial opinions — that made me look at his work in long form, with fresh eyes, to see for myself if he was as bad as people said.

He was not. In fact — I concluded — he was a very good man attempting a very difficult thing.

So going into the memorial, I suspected I was walking not into a neo-Nazi rally, as social media would have me believe, but into something different.

What, I didn’t yet know.

What I experienced was an inspiring surprise.

Charlie’s death was catalyzing healing.

JD Vance proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ.

Trump and Elon making amends after a public falling out.

Erika Kirk forgiving her husband’s killer.

Less prominent speakers echoed her message.

Repeatedly emphasizing that Charlie put Christ at the center of his life.

For the most part, this was not a rally about taking an eye for an eye.

There were speeches I disliked.

Stephen Miller’s I found unhelpfully aggressive — a swordsman looking for someone to swing at.

I was disappointed by Trump’s admission that he hates his enemies, amused by his candor, and slightly heartened when he said maybe Erika could teach him not to.

I left inspired to go back to church, to double down on seeking and speaking truth, and hopeful that the Right would take cues from these leaders by turning the other cheek — and turning toward problems, not against people.

Candace’s Investigation

My hopes for that moment were dashed in the months that followed.

Before I continue, I want to make it clear: this is not meant to be a personal attack on Candace. It is an attack on her methods, which I think are bad, and the results they are producing, which are also bad.

I’m not interested in influencer infighting, character attacks, or speculating about her motives. None of those are things that anyone can verify, and I prefer to stick to what we can verify.

Five days after Charlie died, Candace posted an episode titled “They Are Lying About Charlie Kirk.”

Within days, she started implicating Netanyahu and Israel in Charlie’s death.

Within weeks, Turning Point.

Within months, Erika Kirk.

I suspected early that something was off in her analysis. Too much emotion. Too many appeals to intuition. Too little patience for boring explanations.

But… maybe she was right? I thought. I respect Candace’s skill as a speaker. I respect her courage. She cited names and events I didn’t know. She was tracking Israel more closely than I.

Maybe she knew something I didn’t?

But it’s said you will know a tree by its fruits. And the fruits of her arguments were rotten.

A pattern of claims that didn’t survive scrutiny, and a habit of personal attacks.

So I started looking at the tree.

It turns out the roots of her argument weren’t good either.

I decided that if I was going to examine her claims — and potentially speak on them — I wanted to do it right. So I spent over 20 hours on just a few of them. I shared the results here.

What I found was a mess of unscientific thinking. She gathers receipts, but doesn’t read them rigorously.

And the deepest pattern was this: when she couldn’t explain something readily, she filled the gap with low-quality explanations — and among all the possibilities, she reliably emphasized the most complex, most inflammatory, most nefarious one, while deemphasizing, missing, or ignoring the boring ones that are usually true.

In philosophy terms, she was failing to apply:

1. Occam’s Razor: the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is usually the right one.

2. Hanlon’s Razor: don’t assume malice when incompetence will do — because across enough cases, incompetence explains far more than malice.

It didn’t read like probabilistic thinking — weighing a range of possibilities against each other by likelihood. It read like a narrative: whichever version made the best story was the one that led.

Which is excellent for viewership. And useless for finding the truth.

It’s harder to refute BS than to create it.

To help you see what’s so wrong with what Candace is doing, I want to first introduce you to one of my favorite laws.

It’s called Brandolini’s Law — the bull**** asymmetry principle. Coined by an Italian software engineer named Alberto Brandolini in 2013:

“The amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

It’s ten times harder to clean up than to spill.

This matches my experience. It took me over 20 hours to properly examine one hour of Candace’s claims.

She has posted well over a hundred episodes since Charlie died, most of them about Charlie.

To casual observers this seems like a job well done. But it’s actually indicative of the opposite. Her level of output is the problem.

A real investigation is never drip-fed daily. For the same reason a scientist doesn’t publish her results while she’s still running the experiment.

You gather the data.

You analyze all of it.

You subject it to peer review.

Then you publish — once — and stake your name on it.

Why? Because early findings get overturned by later ones.

Publish as you go, and you will inevitably broadcast things that seem true on Monday and are false by Friday.

Multiply that by a hundred episodes and it becomes impossible — for the audience, for critics, even for the host — to track what was claimed, what quietly died, and what was ever corrected.

One example: for weeks in late 2025, Candace pushed a theory that Egyptian planes had been tracking Erika for years — dozens of location “overlaps,” flight-tracker screenshots, a coincidence probability she put at basically zero. Then people pulled the actual flight logs, and it fell apart — a large share of the “overlaps” simply didn’t hold up.

She later conceded on air that the way the data had been presented led people to overstate things.

But she didn’t retract the underlying theory.

She doubled down hard: she claimed the planes were actually flying in and out of Israel, that the panic over the theory proved it was true, and that the real story was the Israeli connection.

She frequently frames critics as Zionists or paid Israeli shills rather than addressing the data.

When presented with contradictory data, she regularly misinterprets it — intentionally or not, I don’t know.

And you don’t have to go digging to find examples. Here’s part of a tweet from just three days ago — and this one you can check yourself in two minutes.

But here’s the problem — that’s not what Lance Twiggs, Robinson’s roommate, said.

Per the AP, Twiggs said that Robinson “sometimes talked about politics, including Trump,” and that he “did not talk much about gender issues or LGBTQ rights.”

• Lance: “Sometimes talked about politics, including Trump” | Candace: “wasn’t political.”

• Lance: “Did not talk much” | Candace: “didn’t ever.”

These are substantive differences — what Candace said simply is not accurate.

The interview is public. You don’t need her, or me, to interpret it for you. You can just read what he said.

This is why professional investigations run on three principles that sound boring and exist for very good reasons.

• Slow — because complex evidence takes time, and new information invalidates old conclusions.

• Private — because publishing mid-stream contaminates the case. It attracts fame-seeking tipsters. And it tempts the investigator to serve the audience instead of the truth.

• Done in teams — because peers catch the biases no individual can see in themselves.

Slow, private, and peer-checked also means boring, unmarketable, and unprofitable.

In other words: the exact opposite of a Monday-through-Friday livestreamed investigation with audience tips, sponsor reads, and a merch store.

About those incentives

To be clear — this is not an accusation about her motives. I also make money researching and opining. I believe you can maintain integrity while making money as a commentator.

But I can tell you from experience: it is extremely difficult. And staying unbiased is nearly impossible.

Think about the position. Your livelihood depends on people’s opinions of your opinions.

Your sense of career progress is tied to income and follower count.

Contradict your audience too hard, you risk both.

Make a mistake, you lose trust.

Tell the truth too boringly, you lose attention.

It’s a brutal balancing act.

Frankly, it’s why I’ve avoided hosting a daily show. A three-minute video can take me five hours — much of that spent checking my own biases, trying to be opinionated while staying honest and fair.

The more content you must produce, the harder that bar is to hold.

What the courtroom just told us

Last week, Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing ran five days in a Provo courtroom — the first time this evidence left the world of podcasts and entered the world of oaths.

Start with the claim Candace’s camp hung its hat on for ten months: that a .30-06 round could not have hit Charlie’s neck without passing through — so the story must be a lie, wrong gun, second shooter.

On July 9, an ATF forensic examiner named Samantha Karner — a federal specialist with no connection to Turning Point, called to the stand by Robinson’s own defense — testified that the bullet recovered from Charlie’s body during the autopsy broke into multiple fragments consistent with a .30-caliber / .30-06.

So there it is, from a source under oath.

The bullet stayed in the body. It fragmented. And it was the caliber officials named from the start.

The fragmentation also quietly answers the question that launched a hundred episodes. How does a beast of a bullet stop inside a neck? A bullet that breaks into multiple pieces has dumped its energy inside the body — which is exactly what certain bullet types are designed to do. No man of steel required. No second rifle required. I identified this possibility months ago.

I mention this not as a victory lap, but to point out — anyone could have considered this possibility months ago, including Candace.

But she fixated on the explanation that matched her pre-existing suspicion.

When asked whether the fragments came from the specific rifle found in the woods, Karner would not say yes.

The comparison was inconclusive — the fragments were too deformed to carry enough unique markings.

Pressed on it, she stood her ground: “Saying anything but inconclusive was inappropriate.”

That is what a real investigation sounds like. Say what you know. Leave what you don’t know unconfirmed. Don’t speculate to fill the gap.

Candace, ten months in: there must be a second shooter, a planted gun, and Erika Kirk is complicit.

The examiner, under oath: the bullet was consistent with a .30-06, it cannot be tied to this specific rifle, and that is all we know.

One of these methods finds the truth. The other keeps an audience.

Behind the paywall: everything else five days of testimony established — the rooftop video, the rifle’s family history, the DNA, the engraved casings, the note, and what his own parents did.

Plus five questions that tell you — about any investigation, anywhere — whether you’re watching truth-seeking or theater.

What five days in court established

Here are some of the other key findings from the hearing. And note — this is evidence submitted in a courtroom, much of it under oath — meaning the people submitting it have strong incentives to tell the truth. Some of this information we knew before, but what’s new is that it was submitted as courtroom-tested evidence.

Read more

I’m not sharing that for sympathy. Strange as it sounds, I’m sharing it to inspire you.

We’re in an odd moment. The country is about as divided as it’s ever been, and at the same time more connected online than it’s ever been.

It used to be that if someone didn’t like what you said, you could tune it out. The disagreement stayed at a distance.

Now we’re piped straight into each other’s heads, into some of the nastiest thoughts people have.

And when the attacks come, we watch people do one of two things. They double down, or they retreat.

This is a guide to doing neither.

Why does it matter? Because you matter.

Everyone is an influencer. You’re shaping the people around you whether you mean to or not — every conversation you have, and every one you avoid, moves someone. Your friends. Your family. Your coworkers. The charged Facebook post you scroll past from someone you know and disagree with. The dinner table where you bite your tongue instead of saying what you think.

The way through is being neither offensive nor defensive. It’s courage — the courage to say what needs to be said, when it needs to be said.

Consider this a follow-up to my previous letter on how to have hard conversations with the people you love without getting cancelled.

Those people are only one audience. Sooner or later you may be called to speak to a wider one — a comment section, a feed, a room full of strangers. These are the lessons I’ve learned for that.

Lesson 1: It’s not about you

You’re an influence whether you asked to be or not.

Think about what influence even is. To influence someone is to change them. The whole act points outward, at them — never back at you. Two encounters taught me this in the same year:

These are two stories — one from someone with a positive perception, one with a more negative one. Neither was accurate.

The one who loved what I do and the one who almost hated me were reacting to the same thing — a render of me running in their own heads. You feed it a little material: a clip, a post, a story someone forwarded. You never touch the model itself.

So here’s the paradox. You’re the one expressing yourself, but the people reacting didn’t show up for you. They showed up for what they get from you.

The more you make it about you, the harder it gets to serve them — and the harder every insult lands, because now it’s personal.

I get a version of this question all the time. Someone’s post blows up, the negativity rolls in, and they ask me: What do I say back? How do I defend myself in the comments?

But here’s a question: Why do you need to defend anything?

If the thing you said is true, and you stand by it, and it came from a sincere place — there is nothing to defend.

No comment to answer.

No apology to draft.

No proving to strangers that you’re a good person.

You already know why you said it. That’s enough.

Lesson 2: Being hated by some means being loved by others

Knowing it’s not about you helps. But sometimes it doesn’t make the hate stop hurting.

We’re social animals. We all want to be liked. Nobody wants to be cast out and alone, and that fear runs deep for a reason.

For most of human history, losing your tribe meant death. The Greeks understood this — exile was a punishment close to execution, because a person alone did not survive. That wiring is still in you. It’s why a wall of hate feels like the end of the world.

But you’re not in a hunter-gatherer band. There are 8 billion people out there. Get cast out by one tribe and another is already forming somewhere, made of the people who needed to hear exactly what got you thrown out.

So when people ask me what to do about the haters, I say the same thing every time: Keep going.

What you’re attracting is simple: the natural polarization that comes from being yourself. Not all atoms are meant to form molecules. Some attract each other, some repel. It’s the same with tribes.

The tribe you gain will fit you better than the one you lost, because it’s a tribe you don’t have to perform for. You get to be yourself and form even stronger bonds with people who like the real you.

Lesson 3: Self-respect is the highest currency

Approval is fickle. It arrives fast and leaves faster, and you can’t take in only the good. Because if you’re attached to the positive, you’ll also be attached to the negative.

And the human brain has a negativity bias, so the insults often cut deeper than the praise heals.

The key is to detach from both the validation and the vitriol.

Most approval isn’t deep anyway.

People like what you said because they agreed with it, because it validated them.

The day you say something that takes that validation away, the same people turn. Easy come, easy go.

There’s a better currency — and it comes from the people who respect you. They won’t always agree, but they see the deeper value in what you’re doing. That’s worth more.

The highest currency is the one nobody can give you or take from you: self-respect. Integrity with yourself. The quiet you feel when you know you were honest.

Think about why lying hurts the liar. Set aside the harm to the other person.

When you lie, you have to hold two stories at once — who you’re pretending to be and who you know you are. That gap is cognitive dissonance, and it’s exhausting.

Honesty creates harmony in the mind.

That’s the most valuable currency — your reputation with yourself.

And it makes you stronger everywhere, not just online, because a person who trusts themselves moves more powerfully.

I learned this lesson firsthand. Earlier this year I put out a fast take on a story everyone was fighting about, and it went viral. Then I realized I’d gotten ahead of myself, so I posted a correction and an apology.

The result?

The side that had approved of me before said I caved.

The side that hated me still hated me. I lost both rooms in a day.

But I got to keep my peace of mind by owning it. And as a bonus — I earned the respect of people who appreciated someone willing to correct himself.

Here’s where I’ll pause.

The full talk is on YouTube, free:

But if you want more than the talk — the extra breakdown and two of the most important lessons — I’ve made that available for paying supporters.

Read more

Maybe there’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding.

Maybe it’s with your daughter. Maybe your closest friend. Maybe the coworkers at lunch who assume everyone at the table agrees.

The topic comes up — immigration, race, capitalism, take your pick — and everyone nods along. Your chest tightens, your jaw clenches — but you say nothing.

And who can blame you? It doesn’t seem worth it.

We’re now at the point where people are ending relationships with people they know over politicians they don’t know.

People get excommunicated from friend groups over this stuff.

Cut off from their families. Called names.

So most people run one of two programs: Stay silent but frustrated. Or blurt it out, watch it go nuclear, and confirm everybody’s suspicion that “we just can’t talk about politics.”

The first costs you your integrity.

The second costs you the relationship.

But there’s a third option.

It takes more skill than the other two, which is why you almost never see it.

I’m going to share my approach for communicating truth effectively without pissing people off more than is necessary. It’s what I employ in my personal life, live debates, and content.

It’s also what I teach members of my community, the Clear Thinker Academy.

By the end, you’ll know how to open the conversation, hold it, land your point, and walk away with the relationship intact.

The Truth Is Not Enough

One premise sits underneath everything that follows.

When it comes to cultivating healthy relationships, the truth is not enough.

Anyone who has ever been in a healthy relationship already knows this.

Honesty is necessary. But delivery decides whether that honesty strengthens or erodes the relationship.

It’s easy to say “the truth is the truth, deal with it” — but the truth is we all get emotional when the right thing is said the wrong way.

We are all human. Everyone has sensitivities.

This is not a guide to avoiding the truth because of those feelings, but to communicating in a way that is most likely to actually be received by the other person, despite their feelings.

As with everything in life except death and taxes, there are no guarantees of an outcome here.

You can’t control people. You can only control what you say.

But you can say things skillfully — in a way that’s truthful, relationship-preserving, and, paradoxically, most likely to actually change someone’s mind.

Step 1: Don’t Try to “Win”

This is the hardest step, because it’s not about the other person — it’s about you.

Most political conversations are destined to fail before they even start because the conversants aren’t trying to have a conversation — they are trying to “win.”

A great conversation is a mutual exchange of ideas where each person is willing to consider those ideas and change their mind.

Where there’s a chance the rarest sentence in the English language — “You know what, I hadn’t thought of it that way, you changed my mind” — can be uttered.

But that’s not how most of us approach political conversations.

We want to dominate the other person. We want to feel right. We are committed to a crusade, not a conversation.

It’s a natural instinct — I have it too.

But that instinct, when unchecked, can lead to a debate that no one wanted, no one was ready for, and everyone resents being forced into.

To check this instinct, it’s helpful to zoom out and answer this question: What does “winning” actually look like?

Is it changing their mind? Because people rarely want their minds changed, and resent being pressured to.

Here is my definition of winning: Did I express myself clearly, honestly, and compassionately?

Think of yourself as a lighthouse.

A lighthouse shines whether or not any ships are in range. The ships that are ready to navigate by it will find it. The ships too far out will miss it, and the lighthouse keeps shining anyway. Your job is to be the light beam. Not to get the other person to agree. Not for them to tell you you’re right.

This reframe matters because it separates speaking for your ego from speaking for your integrity.

“You’re right” might be the two most delicious words in the English language. Chase them and you will poison the conversation.

Release them and, strangely, you will hear them more often — usually days later, once the person has had time to think.

Step 2: The 60-Second Setup

Nobody likes being ambushed. Think about how most political fights start:

Someone drops a take in conversation (”Can you believe what Trump did? Can you believe what’s happening in Mamdani’s New York?”)

Someone else takes the bait and a fight ensues.

Or: The people who agree with the take speak up, the people who disagree keep quiet, and an echo chamber forms.

The solution to this: Before you talk about the thing, talk about the fact that you are going to talk about the thing.

It sounds like this:

“Hey, I’ve noticed you brought up [insert political topic]. Is that something you actually want to talk about? Because if you are, I’m open to it.”

If they say yes, reinforce that the relationship is the priority:

“Cool. Before we do — I really value our friendship, and I’d hate for politics to ever get in the way of it. So can we agree the friendship outranks the politics? And if either of us hits a point where we’re done talking about it, we just say so, and that’s totally okay?”

Sixty seconds. You have just done something almost nobody does: established why you are talking, what the rules are, and where the exits are, before anyone is upset.

Imagine if that’s how political conversations were introduced, rather than mid-Thanksgiving dinner.

Taking that 60 seconds can make the 60 minutes afterward dramatically more productive and less painful.

It also allows you to do two things:

Pick the terrain. The conversation does not have to happen right now, in public, at the group dinner. “I do want to talk about this — want to grab coffee at my place this weekend?”

You are allowed to choose the time and the setting, rather than getting pushed off a cliff before you’re ready.

Show your cards. If this is hard for you, say so: “I’m honestly trying to get better at conversations like this, and I feel kind of uncomfortable because I don’t want this to turn into a fight.”

Vulnerability disarms people. It is very hard to steamroll someone who just told you they are learning, or scared.

Step 3: Steelman

You might already know what a strawman is: restating someone’s position in its weakest, dumbest form and attacking that.

You know it because it has been done to you — you say something, they repeat it back sounding nothing like what you said, then attack the version they invented. Short of name-calling, there is perhaps no faster way to end a conversation.

A steelman is the opposite: stating their argument as well as they can, or better.

It looks like this:

“So what I’m hearing is [their actual argument]. And it sounds like what you care most about here is [the emotional core]. Do I have that right? Is there anything I’m missing?”

This accomplishes two things: trust and clarity.

Trust: It establishes that you care about their opinion and that you’re making a sincere effort to understand what they say, irrespective of whether you agree with it.

Most bad conversations are just two people waiting to talk rather than being present and listening.

This makes it far less likely that they blow up on you — because at least they feel like you understand them.

It also gives you more license to disagree with them later, because you’ve demonstrated that you value their opinion — you just disagree with it.

Clarity: Asking “Do I have that right” or “Do I understand that correctly” creates space in the conversation to make sure you’re not just talking past each other.

It’s like building a foundation for a skyscraper — you don’t want to get to the 10th floor of a conversation and realize you’re not even in the same building, when you could have addressed that in the lobby.

Here is what happens when you do this well: for a lot of people, it will be the first time in their life anyone has ever done it.

Seriously — try it and watch their whole demeanor change.

And understand what you are buying: reciprocity.

Human beings are wired for fairness. Listen well, and they’ll be more likely to do the same.

Ideally we’d all just do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But in reality, often we do unto others as they do unto us.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The exact phrasing to find immediate common ground with someone you completely disagree with, without compromising your values.

• Three questions that force people to discover their own logical blind spots without feeling attacked.

• The exact script to deploy when you are completely outgunned by someone with a “fact cannon.”

• A full, 70-minute video breakdown of these tactics running in the wild, including a breakdown of my live debate on Piers Morgan and real-world small group coaching roleplays.

Read more

Last week, Gavin Newsom posted a video about billionaires.

In his own words:

“It’s time for a national billionaires tax and a new social contract. 10% of Americans own two-thirds of the wealth. Wages have stagnated. The cost of living has skyrocketed. The system is fundamentally broken. The federal tax code, a corporate code, and an inheritance code were written for a different set of Americans. It’s time for an economic reset.”

The facts he cited are true.

10% of Americans do own two-thirds of the wealth.

Wages have stagnated. The cost of living has skyrocketed.

The American dream feels out of reach for tens of millions of people, especially Gen Z.

But none of those problems exist because the government doesn’t have enough money.

And none of them get fixed by taxing the rich.

The problem isn’t that Gavin said something false.

It’s that the problems he’s naming have almost nothing to do with the solution he’s selling.

Now, Gavin is right that the tax system needs an overhaul.

It’s so complex that “tax specialist” is a career.

With due respect to tax specialists: if a system for paying taxes is so complicated you need expertise to navigate it, something is wrong with the system.

America was founded without an income tax.

The government ran on tariffs and excise taxes.

Simple systems that were easy to follow.

The income tax started as a temporary measure to fund the Civil War, and was repealed a few years after it ended.

It came back for good in 1913, with the 16th Amendment.

And when it did, it was sold as a tax on the rich. Fewer than 1% of Americans earned enough to pay it.

Then it grew.

War expanded it.

The government never gave it back.

And the thing that started as a tax on the wealthy became the code every working American files under today.

Now it’s so complicated that it’s become a game.

A game the rich pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to specialists to win.

In theory, anyone can invest hundreds of hours or pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to win the game. In that sense, it’s “fair.”

But it shouldn’t be a game anyone has to play.

And it’s a valid source of resentment for the average person.

But there’s a second game going on here. And it’s as old as politics.

Using the anger of the public to sell a solution that feels good but doesn’t fix what they’re angry about.

That’s what Gavin Newsom is doing.

The Fairness Problem

Before talking about Gavin, I want to address the reaction from some of the right.

You’ll hear some people on the right say the rich already pay most of the taxes in America.

That’s true.

But it misses the point.

The average person pays close to the full rate — because they don’t have the funds or expertise to win the tax game.

The rich pay less — because they do.

And to be clear, none of this is cheating.

The rich follow the same tax rules as everyone else.

They’ve just engineered their rate down further than you reasonably can — because they can afford the experts who know how.

Here’s a personal example.

A friend of mine recently paid his tax guy around $20,000 to set up a special kind of trust that shrinks his tax bill.

Most people don’t know that option exists — and definitely don’t have $20,000 lying around to use it.

The tax system is a game most people can’t afford to win.

We can recognize this without hating the players — but we should all hate the game.

We should fix that by making the tax system simple, intuitive, and fair — not a game.

But the reason to fix it is social cohesion — not because the government needs more money.

Fix it because nothing poisons a society faster than class hostility and a sense of unfairness.

It creates an environment of suspicion and the perception of bad faith.

The average person stops trusting elites.

Elites wall themselves off.

Everyone loses.

It gets so toxic that even generosity gets rejected.

When Mark Zuckerberg gave $75 million to a public hospital in San Francisco — the largest private gift any public hospital had gotten — activists spent years trying to scrub his name off the building.

That’s where class hostility leads.

But the Government Doesn’t Need More Money

Let’s separate the two things Gavin has bundled together.

1. The tax code is unfair.

2. Fixing it, or taxing billionaires, will bring down your cost of living.

Two doesn’t follow from one.

That becomes obvious when you consider two questions:

Do you think the reason your rent is high is that the government doesn’t have enough money?

Do you think your wage is flat because the government is short on cash?

Because that’s the actual claim hiding under “tax the billionaires.”

That the government needs more money, and that once it gets more money, your life gets cheaper and your paycheck gets bigger.

Say it plainly and it falls apart. If we wired the federal government another trillion dollars tomorrow, walk me through what happens to the price of a house in your city. What happens to your wage. Trace the steps. There aren’t any. The trillion dollars doesn’t pour a foundation, frame a wall, or train a nurse. It never touches the thing making your life expensive.

And we don’t have to guess about this, because we can look at exactly where the cost of living exploded and where it didn’t.

Over the last 25 years, some things got dramatically cheaper. TVs fell roughly 97%. Toys, software, and cell phone service got cut in half or more. Clothing, furniture, and cars stayed roughly flat while everything else inflated.

And some things went vertical. Hospital services more than tripled. College tuition more than doubled. Childcare, healthcare, housing — all climbing far faster than wages.

Now put the two lists side by side. The things that got cheaper are made in competitive markets, open to global competition, with relatively little government in the mix. The things that got more expensive are the most subsidized, most regulated, most supply-constrained sectors we have.

Healthcare. Education. Housing. Childcare.

The pattern is so clean that economists have a nickname for the chart that shows it.

They call it the chart of the century.

The sectors crushing the middle class are not the ones we starved of public money.

They’re the ones we flooded with it.

Pouring more government money in has not made these things cheaper.

Often it’s done the reverse, because when you subsidize demand for something whose supply is capped, you don’t lower the price. You raise it.

So why did they get so expensive?

Take the two that hit people hardest.

Housing and healthcare.

Start with housing.

Housing isn’t expensive because we underfunded it.

It’s expensive because we made it almost impossible to build.

And for evidence of that, just look at the state Gavin governs: California.

Zoning laws say you can’t build. Permitting takes years. Environmental reviews and lawsuits pile on cost before a shovel touches dirt.

California spent decades letting anyone with a lawyer freeze a project under “environmental review” that had nothing to do with the environment.

Make supply that hard, and prices go up.

A billionaire tax builds zero homes.

Letting people build, builds homes.

Healthcare doesn’t suffer for a lack of money either.

Same story, different costume.

It’s not starved of money — we spend more on it than almost anyone on earth.

It’s expensive because it barely works as a market at all.

Look at your medicine. Between you and the pill sits a middleman called a pharmacy benefit manager.

Three of them control about 80% of all prescriptions. And they’re owned by the same giants that own your insurer and your pharmacy.

So the company deciding which drug you get, the company insuring you, and the pharmacy filling it are often the same company.

They mark the price up, pocket the difference, and steer you to themselves.

And for about 20 years, it was effectively illegal for Medicare — the biggest drug buyer in the country — to negotiate prices at all.

These things didn’t get expensive because the government spent too little.

They got expensive because the market got rigged, capped, or blocked — and the government either did the rigging or let it happen.

So the answer isn’t for the government to replace the market.

It’s for the government to protect the market.

Keep it fair. Keep it open. Strip out the rules that exist to block competition instead of protect people.

That’s the fix. Not a bigger check to Washington.

Wages? Nobody Fully Knows. But Not This.

What about wages?

Gavin’s right that they’ve lagged what workers produce. Ask the economists why, and you get a stack of answers — globalization, automation, the decline of unions, health insurance eating raises.

You know what you won’t get from a single serious labor economist, even the most pro-worker ones?

“Wages stalled because we didn’t tax billionaires enough.”

I won’t pretend I’ve cracked why pay split off from productivity. It’s one of the hardest questions in economics.

But I don’t need to crack it to spot the hole in Gavin’s pitch.

If your fix for stagnant wages is a billionaire tax, you have to show how one causes the other.

He didn’t. Because there’s no line connecting them.

This Is the Oldest Trick in Politics

I want to be clear about something: I’m not here to hand you a new enemy.

Not politicians as a group.

Not Gavin Newsom as an individual — despite my frustration with the state of California.

I’m tired of that. I’m tired of every problem in this country getting pinned on some group or person.

Black vs. white.

Rich vs. poor.

Immigrant vs. native.

Pick a villain, aim the anger, feel righteous, fix nothing.

It’s great for winning elections. But it never fixes the thing people are actually angry about.

I don’t believe billionaires are evil, nor do I think politicians are evil.

But frankly, I think the discussion itself is a waste of time, because no one will ever agree on what good or evil even is.

And even if we could — who on earth is so holy that they get to decide how good or evil someone else is?

What we do know is that billionaires are people.

They do what every single person does — act in their self-interest.

From the person scraping by on minimum wage to the richest man alive, everybody looks out for themselves.

That’s simply the human condition.

I’d pay hundreds of thousands to win the tax game if I could.

I’m guessing you would too.

So if we don’t like how people’s incentives interact with the system, change the system.

It’s the same with politicians.

They simply follow incentives — Gavin included.

His incentive is to get elected.

And the fastest way to get elected is to give people someone to be angry at.

He’s following the same incentives anyone in his chair would.

I’m not writing this because I think Gavin Newsom is evil.

I’m writing it because I think he’s wrong.

And although I get the pain of those who want a billionaire tax, I think this manifestation of it is wrong.

We already covered that there’s no revenue problem.

So a national billionaire tax wouldn’t fund anything that makes your life cheaper.

It would just take wealth, because taking it feels like justice.

These people minimize taxes by winning a game that shouldn’t be a game.

Going looking for new ways to seize what the winners legally earned is a different thing entirely, and a worse one.

That instinct — find the wealth, take the wealth — is just another war on the most successful people we have.

And it’s a war nobody wins.

It will just build more resentment, running in both directions.

The Social Contract

Gavin talked about needing a new social contract. I agree.

The one between the rich and the rest has broken down.

But a contract is voluntary, not forced. And it only holds if both sides keep their end.

Right now, both sides are breaking the deal.

Aristos is ancient Greek for “best,” or “noblest.” It’s where we get the word aristocracy.

And the idea baked into it was this: whoever was given the most, owed the most back.

Status came with a debt to society.

And both ends of that deal have broken.

From below, resentful voices sell the myth that the successful are villains — that billionaires are evil and shouldn’t even exist.

But the dividing line between good and evil is not at the third comma.

It’s between the angels and demons on each of our shoulders.

From above, too many who did well stopped paying the debt back — leaning on the parts of the system tilted in their favor instead of giving through it.

Both ends have to show up.

It’s in the rich’s own interest to serve. Joy comes from a community that loves you, and no amount of wealth will protect you from a society that hates you.

And it’s in everyone’s interest to honor the people who build and give — because a society that spits on its builders ends up with fewer of them.

So call out problems. But shame actions, not groups.

Because if the successful are damned whether they give or not, then most of them… won’t.

And you can’t fund hospitals with resentment.

Stop Looking for Enemies

There is no uniquely evil group of Americans. There’s no secret villain behind your rent.

There’s just people — all of us, all humans with hopes, dreams, and needs that add up to what we call self-interest — and a set of systems that decide how all that self-interest gets balanced.

Some of those systems are dumb. Some of them let a handful of people’s interests drown out everyone else’s.

That’s the problem. Not a person. A system.

We are on the same team here.

The goal is not to find a better enemy. It’s to build a better system.

So if it’s not the billionaires, and it’s not the government’s empty wallet — what is the actual problem? And what do we do about it?

Below, I’ll show you exactly what’s broken, why “tax the rich” leaves it completely untouched, and the one reform that would actually fix it.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The mechanism showing how enormous campaign spending dilutes your vote, and why a billionaire tax completely leaves this system untouched.

• A breakdown of how a $100M corporate lobbying budget legally killed a free, simple government filing program that would have saved American taxpayers $23 billion.

• The precise, unglamorous campaign finance and market-protection reforms required to force down the costs of housing and healthcare without relying on political scapegoats.

The Actual Problem: Billions Louder Than Millions

Gavin was right that we have a money problem.

But it’s not that the government doesn’t have enough money.

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Warning: contains a graphic description.

I was born in the Bronx, New York, on October 16, 1990.

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This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted this:

In May, he posted something similar, and said of the achievement, “Call it Democratic Socialism.”

There’s only one problem.

Socialism delivered very little of this win.

Much more of it was capitalism, and taking money from future taxpayers and people outside of New York City.

Now, before we get into that, I want to make it clear why I’m writing this piece.

I’m not interested in demonizing Zohran. I’m not here to expose him as a nefarious liar.

I know that some believe him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing: a secret jihadi communist with a TikTok-ready smile who hates America and is using taqiyya to intentionally lie about his true intentions as he seeks to usher in Sharia law.

I am not one of those people.

If you are, I’m not going to spend this piece convincing you otherwise.

I’m just telling you where I stand for transparency’s sake.

Either way, positive or negative claims about what’s going on inside his brain are subjective, impossible to prove, and a waste of time to debate.

So I’d rather focus on what we can be objective about, which is policy.

In fact, I like the guy.

I think he’s cool.

As someone who resonates with clear communication, I respect his competency in that domain.

Politics aside, I think we could even be friends.

And from the looks of it, I’m not the only one who feels that way.

I’ve also listened to long-form interviews with him. He has a strong understanding of the problems New Yorkers face, and it’s obvious why they elected him.

Similar to Trump, he is in touch with the pain of the people, and knows how to speak to that.

I don’t think he’s bad.

I think socialism is.

So that’s the spirit in which I’m writing this piece. To resist bad ideas.

I’ve written several pieces about the rise of socialism in America.

There are also serious problems that we need to address in our current version of capitalism.

There’s too much money in politics.

Too much corporate influence over policy.

Billions of dollars are speaking louder than millions of people.

But I’m of the belief that socialism is not the solution.

And I don’t want to see socialists ride the coattails of capitalism and call the wins socialism.

That’s what Zohran is doing. And that’s why I’m writing this piece.

Socialism Is the Last Reason the Budget Was Balanced

Zohran Mamdani inherited a budget crisis not of his making.

$12 billion is a lot of money for a city budget deficit.

It’s larger than the gap New York faced during the Great Recession.

He closed it without raising property taxes, without cutting services, without draining the city’s reserves.

That’s a genuinely difficult political and technical achievement.

And it was not an achievement that came primarily from socialism.

In fact, socialism is last on the list of reasons for that achievement.

Here’s how he actually balanced the budget.

Most of the money, 53%, comes from two moves:

• A bailout from New York State to New York City. The majority of that money is from taxpayers who don’t live in New York City, bailing out those who do.

• Future taxpayers paying more for pensions, in exchange for present taxpayers paying less. This is money moved from one group of working-class people to another group of working-class people.

The second biggest pot of money, 35%, comes from projecting that in 2027, Wall Street will continue to have strong economic growth.

Ironically, he is projecting that Trump, the man he has vehemently opposed, is going to continue to oversee a booming stock market that helps balance his budget.

Perhaps even more ironically, Mamdani made a more optimistic projection of Wall Street’s growth in February than his predecessor, Eric Adams, did in November.

Capitalists are creating the growth, while socialists call the benefit of that growth socialism.

The third pot, 25%, comes from government efficiency.

Great job, Mamdani.

We should all celebrate that, regardless of whether it came from left or right, capitalist or socialist.

And finally, weighing in at 5%, is the savings from socialism: taxing the rich.

So 35% of this gap was closed by capitalism, and 5% by socialism.

Much of the 53% came from moving the burden onto taxpayers outside New York City, and taxpayers who haven’t been born yet.

(These pieces add up to a bit more than the $12 billion, because the city reached zero through a mix of overlapping measures rather than one clean stack. The proportions tell the story.)

He said, “We didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people.”

But state taxpayers are working people.

Future taxpayers are working people.

He didn’t take the gap off the backs of working people.

He moved it onto different backs.

Does this sound like a win for socialism to you?

Now, to some, this might seem like nitpicking. So let’s zoom out and discuss why it’s important.

The issue is not that socialists and communists are bad at describing problems. On the contrary, they are some of the best.

They truly attract gifted communicators who move the masses.

The problem is they don’t solve those problems.

There is not a single socialist country on planet Earth that the average American would want to live in.

No, Nordic countries are not socialist. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, and as the former Danish Prime Minister has said, they have capitalist economies with strong social safety nets.

No, not even China is socialist. Its model is characterized as “state capitalism” or “authoritarian capitalism.”

Socialism requires state ownership of the means of production.

The countries where that is actually the case, not in name but in practice, are North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.

The problem with socialism has never been that it can’t identify problems. It’s that it can’t implement solutions.

And here’s the deeper issue. The worldview isn’t responsive to reality. It’s unfalsifiable. Every time it fails, the failure gets explained away.

“It wasn’t real socialism.”

“The timing was wrong.”

“We just haven’t tried the enlightened version yet, the one no civilization before us was virtuous enough to pull off.”

The solution is always kept one more try out of reach, so the ideology never has to account for its own track record.

The concerns it raises are often real.

Wealth is concentrating.

Politics is captured.

Working people are hurting.

Those are true things worth taking seriously.

But the framework built on top of them — the language of power structures and class abstractions, so boundless and poorly defined that it’s easy to sound intelligent without demonstrating results — keeps the actual solution perpetually out of reach.

It’s been said that the mark of intelligence is speaking simply. Socialism doesn’t speak simply. It uses a bunch of terms that mean something different to everyone, and creates the appearance of clarity.

It is not a constructive ideology that values the growth and abundance that capitalism creates.

It doesn’t value capitalism, warts and all.

It says capitalism is all warts.

We’ve scaled humanity to over 8 billion people not through redistribution, but through growth, innovation, technology, and markets.

Every single human being alive today lives in more abundance than their ancestors did 100 years ago.

For the first time in human history, more people are dying from too much food than too little.

To be clear, we have serious problems. Many of them come from the corruption of markets, and the concentration of wealth that follows when business and politics commingle.

That is something we need to solve.

But we should not overcorrect from a flawed but working model to a model that has never worked at all.

We have real problems to address as a civilization.

And the best contribution of the socialists is that they’ve held all our feet to the fire so that we look at them.

But socialism isn’t the solution.

Better capitalism is.

But there’s a reason why socialism is so appealing. And no, it’s not because people are lazy and want free stuff.

In the next section, I’ll show you what the Socialist Messaging Strategy is, and why it’s so effective.

From here, you’ll learn:

• The pyramid model that explains how modern political messaging captures the top floors while destroying the foundation.

• A close look at the test to analyze what happens to safe streets and local jobs when a city honors labels over public service results.

• The playbook behind disordered priorities and how to quickly spot when an ideology is coasting on growth it didn’t create.

The Socialist Messaging Strategy

The socialist messaging strategy is incredibly effective at focusing on things that are genuinely important — racial equality, class exploitation, concentration of power — without putting them in proper relation to other priorities like economic growth and safety.

Here’s the way to understand it.

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