Bruce Todd Larsen

Successful brick and mortar entrepreneur on a journey creating balance in spirit, body, and business.

[Jackie Chea ⚖️ @Fair_and_Biased]

One of Candace’s favorite tactics is making totally unfounded sexual allegations.

She called Jeremy Boreing gay.

She called Tyler Bowyer a swinger.

She seems to be calling Graham both (?).

She implied that Erika Kirk was a lesbian groomer sex trafficker who also had too many boyfriends.

And of course she’s built an entire theory around Brigitte Macron being a gay man who transitioned.

It’s a cheap way to discredit someone without making a REAL case.

It’s an instant “below the belt” (no pun intended) way to intimidate opponents into silence and scare others away from challenging her.

[Mosab Hassan Yousef @MosabHasanYOSEF]

When Muhammad was weak, he preached tolerance and ‘no compulsion in religion.’

But when he gained power and an army, he commanded fighting those who don’t believe until they submit and pay the jizya.

Muslims repeated this pattern throughout history.

Today, in the West where they’re a minority, they preach tolerance.

But in every Muslim-majority country, minorities face systemic discrimination and second-class status.

[American Debunk @AmericanDebunk]

The Scott Galloway video is so captivating because it’s one of the rare moments we get to watch a prominent liberal realize the leaders he votes view him as the problem.

We’re witnessing the realization happen in real time.

Scott, just wait until you understand that violence against the Target List is the whole point.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

📹 No, the 4K Footage Was Never the Rooftop Clip

A lot of hay this week was made about "lying" influencers claiming that there was crystal clear footage of Tyler Robinson on the roof. So I dug into the videos to see what these influencers actually said.

The clear footage everyone kept calling "4K" was never of the rooftop. It's the stairwell footage, Robinson walking through the building, close and sharp enough to ID him.

So Candace Owens points at the rooftop shot, says "there's your mythical 4K video, the influencers lied through their teeth," and moves on.

@JackPosobiec was in the courtroom. Here's what he actually said: "It looked like 4K, crystal clear footage to me. It's crystal clear that it's Tyler Robinson walking around in these stairwells."

The clear footage in the stairwell IDs Tyler Robinson; the rooftop clip shows that same figure going over the guardrail.

Candace ID'd the wrong video.

[Music over time🎻 @Peal8888]

"Great song" is an understatement. This is one of the greatest songs ever recorded.

[Normal Gay Psychiatrist @NormalGayPsych]

I’m gay.
I don’t hate Muslims. I don’t want anyone’s rights taken away.
But I’m done pretending.
When surveys show large majorities in many Muslim-majority countries still support the death penalty for homosexuality… that’s not “phobia.” That’s reality.
When progressive activists will cancel a gay person for noticing that, but stay silent about actual theocracies that throw us off roofs… that’s not “allyship.” That’s cowardice.
Woke ideology tells me my sexuality is a political identity first and a personal reality second.
It tells me I must celebrate every culture except the one that produced the liberal societies where I can actually live openly.
I’m not “far-right” for wanting the same freedom in London or Toronto that I already have.
I’m not a bigot for refusing to import the attitudes that would put me in a noose.
Normal gay people exist.
We just want to live our lives without the sermons — from either the mosque or the campus.
Enough.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

The older I get, the more I realize that the happiest people are very difficult to rush.

I recently sat next to a gentleman on a flight who was returning from his 60th high school reunion. We struck up a conversation and ended up chatting for the whole time we were in the air.

When we landed, everyone leapt up to grab their bags as fast as possible. Except for him. He sat there, sipping the plastic cup of wine from the flight.

I asked if I could grab his bag, but he just shook his head. I must have given him a funny look, because he smiled:

"I never understood the rush. We're all going to the same place, after all."

I figured he meant baggage claim, but as I walked out of the airport, I realized my mistake. The same place was more meta than I originally understood.

And he was in no rush to beat everyone there.

The world wants you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines.

In doing so, you slowly relinquish your agency. You give up your claim on your own life. Surrender authorship to a pen that was never even yours.

In a world that wants you to rush, the ultimate act of rebellion is presence.

The happiest people always strike me as very difficult to rush.

They act slowly and deliberately. When they move with urgency, it's because they want to, not because of some arbitrary pressure.

It's small things that give it away:

• They let people go ahead in traffic
• They greet workers at a coffee shop
• They look up instead of down at their phone

I've started trying to embrace a few tiny acts of slow rebellion per day. And while the rush instinct is still there, every time I resist it, I think of that gentleman on the flight.

Smiling, sipping his airplane red wine, in no rush to beat anyone to the place we're all headed.

[Douglas A. Boneparth @dougboneparth]

I used to sneak out of my house to go to parties. Now I sneak out of parties to go to my house.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Major cheat code for life: Always assume things will work out, then do the work to make it true. It’s a mindset of active optimism. Earned faith. It creates a quiet confidence that allows you to tolerate the uncertainty of life better than anything else.

[Bruce Todd Larsen @AskYourCountry]

@AndrewKolvet Bravo 👏

[Dr Charlie Ward @DrcharlieWardQ]

BREAKING 🚨 Bill Maher: “I live here in Hollywood. I have to live amongst people, most of whom think it's cool to wear the Kufiya to the Oscars and to say, ‘Free Palestine.’ As if Palestine would be liberated by living under Hamas. By the way, Israel—geniuses educated on TikTok—was liberated in 2005 by Israel. Israel gave it back and said, ‘Here you have your land again. You do something with it.’ And this is what they did with it... It could have been Dubai.”

[Jarrad Grigg @jarradgrigg]

This is what entrepreneurialism feels like.

[Lee Kuan Yimby @LeeKuanYimby]

The Party warning us about Fascism, just had one of their leaders go on live TV and say their goal is to overthrow our democracy and implement total control, starting by abolishing The US Senate...

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith @LGMicahBeckwith]

I've received multiple media requests today asking for comment on my recent call to ban mosques in America from blaring the Muslim call to prayer through loudspeakers 5 times a day across our cities.

Just to save time, here's my official response:

Yes, I 100% want to ban mosques in America from blaring the Muslim call to prayer through loudspeakers 5 times a day across our cities.

Hope this clarifies everything and have a great weekend!

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just said the one thing about America they made sure you’d never learn.

The one thing that should’ve made you proud, not ashamed.

Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”

One nation held a weapon no civilization had ever possessed.

Total monopoly on destruction. No rival. No consequence. No limit.

Every empire in history that held that kind of power did the only thing empires know how to do.

They took until there was nothing left to take.

America had a greater advantage than all of them combined.

And rebuilt the nations it just defeated.

Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”

Not almost unprecedented.

It had never happened. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded civilization.

The nation with the power to take everything chose to rebuild instead.

Enemies became allies. Rubble became economies. Surrender became partnership.

Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a single generation.

Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.

Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.

Into the capital of the country that just tried to end the free world.

That decision reshaped every economy, every alliance, and every trade route on the planet.

Billions of people lifted out of poverty over the next half century trace back to one moment. One nation choosing restraint over domination.

No other country in history can make that claim. Not one.

Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”

Every nation on earth has blood in its history.

But the measure of a nation was never its worst chapter.

It’s what it does when nobody can stop it.

When nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.

You’re being told every day that this country is something to be ashamed of.

By people who have no idea what the world looks like without it.

Every free market. Every open border for trade. Every democracy that took root outside Europe stands in the shadow of that single decision.

The values that built this country didn’t just shape America.

They shaped the modern world.

AI is about to hand a small number of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look primitive.

1945 was the first test.

AI is the last.

That power is going to exist. The only question left is who holds it.

The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.

It was having the power to take everything and choosing not to.

The people trying hardest to tear that story down have never built a single thing worth defending.

[Joe Rogan Podcast News @joeroganhq]

Elon Musk: "This is strictly my opinion, the goal of Hamas was to provoke an overreaction from Israel. They didn’t expect a military victory – they wanted to commit the worst atrocities possible to trigger the most aggressive response."

[Bruce Todd Larsen @AskYourCountry]

@spencerpratt They are all so miserable looking

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

To the Americans:

I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States.

And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness:

You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.

This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.

Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.

This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.

But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.

This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.

And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America:

Thank God for the United States.

Thank God for the wisdom of its founders.
Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man.
Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners.

Long may your admirable country dominate the world.

Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.

May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning.

Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill.

Thank God for the USA.

Happy 250th.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson