Andrew J Haskell

Catholic, father, banking & cap markets data & analytics leader & strategist. CASA (court appointed special advocate) for foster kids.

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

You have faith and I have works. Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works. You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble.” (James 2:18-19)

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

The United States of America is built on the primacy of the individual over the collective.

It is a concept that permeates literally ever aspect of our founding documents, and to this day anyone who seeks to politically promote the collective over the individual is acting in a manner contrary to the very reason for our nation's existence.

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

The Key to Happiness Is Self-Forgetfulness https://t.co/WkvZ0y0QK8

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.

I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:

• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.

• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.

• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)

• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.

• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.

• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.

• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.

• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.

• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.

• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.

• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.

That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it.

What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

https://t.co/bmVi9beS0g

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

Both Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer reveal that they have no idea how to read the Bible.

First, they fail to make the elementary distinction that Biblical theologian William Placher insisted upon, namely, that not everything that is in the Bible is what the Bible teaches ...

It is a commonplace of Biblical interpretation that there are elements in Scripture that reflect cultural practices of the time but are not the stuff of revelation.

Secondly, they neglect the fundamental moral framework that emerges from attending, not to features of particular narratives taken out of context, but rather to the overarching patterns, themes, and trajectories of the Bible as a whole.

Who can seriously doubt that the exhortations to worship God, to respect parents and authorities, not to kill, steal, or commit adultery, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, to care for the weakest and most forgotten, to sympathize with the victim, to turn the other cheek, to respect the dignity and freedom of the individual, etc., have been bequeathed to us from the Bible?

It is simply the case that we cannot understand Western morality apart from the Scriptures.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

"[I]n early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.”

[Tracy Shuchart (𝒞𝒽𝒾 ) @chigrl]

Socialism is a gateway drug to communism. Once a country ventures into communism it takes generations to recover, and the bodies stack up before the lesson sinks in.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Le progressisme est le pire cancer des 50 dernières années.

Pas parce qu'il est "de gauche".

Parce qu'il a volé un mot — progrès — pour vendre exactement son contraire.

C'est la thèse de Thiel. Une fois que tu la vois, tu ne peux plus la dé-voir.

Dans les années 60, l'Occident construisait. On allait sur la Lune. On bâtissait des centrales nucléaires, des avions supersoniques, on parlait sérieusement de coloniser Mars et de vaincre le cancer en dix ans. Le progrès, c'était des atomes : de l'énergie moins chère, des transports plus rapides, des vies plus longues.

Puis quelque chose s'est cassé autour de 1971.

L'innovation dans le monde physique s'est arrêtée net. Le Concorde a été retiré — on vole moins vite aujourd'hui qu'il y a 50 ans. Le nucléaire a été tué par la peur. Le salaire réel médian a stagné pendant un demi-siècle. "On nous avait promis des voitures volantes, on a eu 140 caractères."

Mais l'humain a besoin de croire qu'il avance. Alors le progressisme a fait une chose géniale et terrifiante : il a déplacé le mot "progrès" du monde des atomes vers le monde des symboles.

Puisqu'on ne savait plus agrandir le gâteau, on a décrété que le seul combat qui compte était de le redécouper. Plus de croissance à promettre ? On promet de la redistribution, de la repentance, des comités, des labels, des normes. La machine à créer a été remplacée par la machine à gérer le déclin — et on a appelé ça "le bon côté de l'Histoire".

C'est là que Girard rejoint Thiel. Le progressisme n'est pas une politique, c'est une religion sécularisée. Il a gardé tous les rouages du christianisme — le péché, la culpabilité, la confession, le bouc émissaire à sacrifier — mais il a jeté la rédemption et la transcendance. Résultat : une religion qui ne sait que désigner des coupables. Jamais pardonner. Jamais construire.

Et les coupables désignés, ce sont toujours les mêmes : ceux qui bâtissent. L'entrepreneur, l'ingénieur, le fondateur, celui qui prend des risques et crée quelque chose à partir de rien. Pendant ce temps on érige en héros le commentateur, le régulateur, le consultant — celui qui ne produit rien mais qui distribue les bons points moraux.

Voilà pourquoi c'est un cancer, au sens propre. Une cellule cancéreuse n'est pas un envahisseur extérieur. C'est une cellule de ton propre corps qui oublie sa fonction, refuse de mourir, et se met à grossir sans rien produire d'utile — jusqu'à étouffer les organes qui font vivre l'ensemble. Le progressisme, c'est exactement ça : une partie de la société qui a cessé de créer de la valeur, qui se nourrit de celle des autres, et qui appelle ça de la vertu.

La bonne nouvelle, c'est qu'un cancer, ça se soigne. Le remède n'est pas la nostalgie. C'est de rendre au mot "progrès" son sens originel : construire des choses réelles. De l'énergie abondante. Des frontières nouvelles. Des fondateurs qu'on célèbre au lieu de les juger.

Le futur n'appartient pas à ceux qui redécoupent le gâteau. Il appartient à ceux qui en font un plus grand.

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

I'm old enough to remember when we conservatives were up in arms over Biden family deals with Burisma and the Chicoms.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

If you would like to get me a nice birthday present when that special day arrives, or just a nice gift for any reason, please print out this tweet, have it framed in an ornate but tasteful trim, and then send.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

https://t.co/ZWHOMP2IqB

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

Martin Luther, I am told, frustrated with Ulrich Zwingli's anti-sacramentalism, took a knife out of his pocket and carved the words Hoc est corpus meum[this is my body] on the table they were sitting at, asking "Which of these words do you not understand?" https://t.co/CxjppKyvno

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.

https://t.co/3YJSstB7d4

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

What actually happened over the last five years, just looking at the Covid caper alone? It goes something like this:
in 2019 or before, a US-funded biolab in Wuhan, China, one of some 120 in 30 counties, made a virus and inoculation based on an American recipe that leaked and spread, causing worry that US officials would be blamed but they had a fallback: lie about the lab origins and prepare the population for the fix based on a new gene-editing technology that otherwise would never have been approved on grounds that it was too dangerous and not effective. That required buying time while preserving pre-leak immunity profiles via lockdowns for all of 2020 until the injection was available, during which time there had to be mass censorship, deep trauma, manufactured panic, school closures, a removal of other therapeutic options, and millions of business failures, not to mention a shut down of the arts and a printing/spending binge that would hack off a third of the value of the dollar, leaving vast carnage but permitting an indemnified pharmaceutical experiment, meaning that mass injury has no recourse. With low uptake of the supposed inoculation, millions were forced to accept it on pain of losing their jobs. No one has been punished for any of it, and the mainstream media has no interest.
Did I get this mostly correct? @grok will correct this post with all the usual orthodoxies you are supposed to believe.

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

Well, Carl Trueman is right, as he almost always is.
https://t.co/SvZDcLSli9

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

@roddreher Boomer bishops 👎

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

@MebFaber List is incomplete without a book from Howard Marks.

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

@roddreher Formation is continuous, so true. Takes a”village” or Benedict Option, as the case may be😉

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

I cannot say enough good things about the deep, practical wisdom in this post by Orthodox Christian Martin Myers, on the subject of Orthodox convert burnouts. Good stuff here both for converts, and for churches welcoming them.
https://t.co/zfYRP25Zib

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

@JackFarley96 @maxwiethe “Sell Mortimer, SELL!

[Andrew J Haskell @ahaskell001]

@JackFarley96 @maxwiethe I’ve heard bond guys are smarter than equity guys, but the smartest guys in the room are the commodity guys.