Davos is once again upon us as the little gods of this world confab over how to manage us wayward peasants. For decades the men and women who gather annually at Davos have presented themselves as the stewards of progress. They speak the language of the future: innovation, disruption, optimization, resilience, while casting their vision...
Category: Philosophy
If Liberty Matters, Then Culture Matters As Well.
Modern liberal societies often comfort themselves with a simple proposition: that neutral laws, applied equally, are sufficient to preserve liberty regardless of cultural change. Yet recent controversies surrounding speech policing in England, particularly in cases involving religious offense, suggest this confidence may be misplaced. When laws apply equally in theory but are enforced unevenly in...
Crass Words, Uncomfortable Truths: Culture, Gratitude, and the Moral Preconditions of America
In 2019, then–President Donald Trump made a remark that quickly became infamous. Responding to criticism from several progressive lawmakers, he suggested they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The comment was widely condemned as racist. It was crude, imprecise, and rhetorically abrasive, flattening individual...
Nobody Likes A Know-It-All
Nobody likes a know-it-all. That alone should probably tell us something. And yet, the know-it-all persists. Not because he’s especially wise, but because he wants something - admiration if possible, domination if necessary. The point isn’t understanding; it’s authority. The goal isn’t learning; it’s winning. Ideas become trophies. Conversations become competitions. Humility becomes optional. This...
Managed Reality – Prophetic Warnings from 1999
Cinema occasionally functions not merely as entertainment, but as a kind of cultural semaphore, a coded alert transmitted to the collective psyche when certain truths cannot yet be confessed openly. Between 1998 and 1999, three films emerged in uncanny proximity: Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and The Matrix. Each examined a world in which human...
If I Were An Honorable Man
If I were an honorable man, I suppose I might say a few things I’m apparently no longer qualified to say. I might say that grown adults shouldn’t speak to one another like feral children playing dominance games on the schoolyard. I might say that public power, the kind held in trust, not seized for...
Hope In A Failing Age
I'm not sure how many out there are like me, someone who's stepped back from the noise. I appreciate all the folks I see on here who try to enlighten and elevate others. I appreciate those who simply create and think. In a crumbling world, I see hope in individuals. On the other hand, I’ve...
Dependency is not Prosperity
The biggest danger of a prolonged government shutdown is the mirage of a prosperous nation being shattered. What if the shutdown went on long enough for people to realize that they live not in a prosperous nation, but in a nation of federal dependency? By most outward measures, the United States appears wealthy beyond precedent....
The Myth–Not-Myth of “They”
Every movement needs an adversary. Every cause, a culprit. So the activist, the partisan, the reformer all invoke a shadowy pronoun: they. They are the elites. They are the corrupt. They are the problem. The word absolves the speaker. It is cleansing, surgical. By naming them, we declare ourselves innocent. Yet this linguistic division conceals...
Restoring the Republic: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Revolutionary Networks
I left politics December of last year, and at that time I felt like one of the few fights that really mattered for the new administration was pushing back the coup d’état that had captured America. I still believe that. For decades, America has faced not an open invasion, but a slow, creeping capture of...