Drew Harper

Is there life on Mars?

Background: US-UK, UX, Code, Rugby, Cricket, Football.

[Drew Harper @druharper]

Our spectrum is vertical: Up vs. Down. At the top is Anglo-Founding Fathers liberalism — maximum individual freedom under sound law and minimal government. At the bottom is tyranny.

The competing horizontal spectrum is Big Government neo-feudalism: international communism/socialism on the Left, national socialism/fascism on the Right. The Left is trapped inside this spectrum. They literally cannot conceive of freedom without a massive, all-powerful state to enforce it. To them, true liberty can only be delivered from above by concentrating enormous power in government hands — the very mistake that has always led to corruption and tyranny.

That’s why today’s Democrats and the Left call anyone not on their side “far right,” “fascist,” or “Nazi.” But here’s the thing… They don’t actually care about freedom, they care about equity. Freedom is not the aim. There should never be poor people while rich ones exist; to them, that is a moral crime. They’ve simply replaced “lords and peasants” with “rich and poor.” Freedom never enters their calculation — only forced equity.

As Thomas Sowell sagely observed, “Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” The quest for perfect equity is an impossibility. We are not interchangeable cogs in a machine; we are unique individuals. But that doesn’t stop the collectivists. Utopia always sounds noble — until you have to crush freedom to achieve it. And the fact that it perfectly serves the interests of the powerful and corrupt doesn’t bother them. All they have to do is promise to punish the rich and uplift the poor, and they win votes. The fact that more poor are created doesn't matter, they just have to say they care. It’s a grift wrapped in a holy mission. The average true believer may be sincere, but the result is the same: the Left smears Liberals and Conservatives with the very collectivist tyrannies they crave.

American conservatism sits within the broader umbrella of classical liberalism. It simply rejects the bloody excesses of French Jacobin radicalism and the bloody Reign of Terror. The Founders, shaped by England’s long, bumpy constitutional evolution — Magna Carta, the Putney Debates during the Civil War, regicide, ‘Cromwell’s tyranny’, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, and the English Bill of Rights — staged a relatively conservative revolution at the Enlightenment’s peak: replace the king, but never again concentrate that much power. Separation of powers isn’t a bug — it’s the feature most of the world still doesn’t understand, because freedom is not the aim, equity is the aim.

The French, by contrast, went straight from the absolute Sun King Louis XIV to radical Jacobin madness and the bloody Reign of Terror, then straight into Napoleon’s dictatorship. France is now on its fourth… or fifth Republic… I’ve lost count. They never developed the long series of hard-earned restraints on power that the English did. They simply swapped one form of tyranny for another. All the Tricolor states screwed it up.

We proved the point in the 20th century. America helped crush the Nazis — even arming Stalin’s Soviet Union with Lend-Lease machines, as Stalin himself admitted: “Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.” But once the Nazis were beaten, the communists pursued global domination. Freedom-loving nations had to fight the new totalitarian threat.

We fought ugly hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, taking the fight to the communists on their ground and held them to a standstill. We won the Cold War. Freedom defeated the Soviet slave empire. Look at the results: thriving Western Europe versus the wreckage of the East; South Korea versus North Korea. Hundreds of millions were freed from totalitarianism. Few things in history can rival that achievement.

So I ask today’s Democrats, ie Leftists: Was it wrong to fight socialism and communism? Wrong to win the Cold War? Have we learned nothing? Why would we want to reintroduce slavish totalitarianism after fighting it for fifty years?

A century of government expansion — from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson through FDR and LBJ — has pulled us down the vertical axis toward Big Government and small individuals. We need to climb back up: smaller government, freer people. Most American “poor” already live better than Europe’s middle class — yes, you read that right. Not Norway, not the highly homogenous, high-trust, oil-rich Norway, but most of Europe. Argument over.

Immigrants can and do succeed here, proving the system works. But we must protect the unique heritage that created it. Mass low-skilled inflows create enclaves that import the problems they fled. Europe’s results are warning enough. An immigration moratorium makes sense — admit only the very best. Most Muslims are decent people, but a large enough minority poses dangers that warrant keeping them out of non-Muslim countries.

The chart shows exactly what’s happening: the two spectrums are running on completely different axes, and the vertical freedom spectrum has been steadily chipped away for over a century. Small government liberalism has been redefined as gigantic government, massive welfare experiments, progressive taxation, and redistribution — and they dare call that “liberalism.” I call bullshit. That’s the opposite of liberalism.

The Left doesn’t want freedom from government. It wants government to have the freedom to do whatever it pleases with the rest of us. We need to climb back up the vertical spectrum to real liberalism — freedom from overweening government — not slide back down into the medieval Mordor we escaped.

[Drew Harper @druharper]

@AndrewGold_ok No accountability.

[Kaybeem566 @Musakay56]

Why most of women are like that?🤔🤦

[Randall Briggs @randallmbriggs]

What an excellent way to use AI!

We forget that before Henry Ford brought the Model T to market in 1908 well over 500 car companies had sprung up in America alone, making somewhere in the range of 2000 to 3000 distinct models of vehicles. It was the Wild West days of the automotive industry and it was anyone's guess who would come out on top.

It's exactly the same today in robotics. Seemingly every day a new robotics company is announced with a promise or with a prototype. The variety is huge and the field is wide open. I believe that the Steel Bot robot has just the right mix of features and performance specifications to be widely useful and to dominate in the market.

I'm working with all my being to bring it to fruition.

[JP Sears @AwakenWithJP]

White man prepares for the WNBA. Very inspiring to women.

[AuthentiKate ☂️🪔🍒 @kateiswell]

I’m so, SO, SO tired of the narrative that having children is the worst thing that ever happened to women.

Let’s flood this thread with something different.

Post a photo or short video of a mom genuinely enjoying her children. A baby being adored. A toddler making her laugh. A mom soaking up an ordinary, beautiful moment with her kids.

Let’s show what loving motherhood looks like. ❤️

(I love that dad’s in the reflection on the fridge, too.)

[Out of Context Human Race @NoContextHumans]

I’ve never seen anything more accurate in my life

[Drew Harper @druharper]

@BGatesIsaPyscho @JohnCleese Bezmenov Art movement

[Living Tricks @LivingTricks_]

The Evolution of Men’s Fashion in Paris

[Drew Harper @druharper]

@patsmithcomedy “Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases:
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, regulate it.
And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
- Ronald Reagan

[Pat Smith @patsmithcomedy]

Congrats buddy

[Libertarian Party @LPNational]

California politicians wanted to make sure fast-food employees earned their “fair share”—and that’s when 557,000 workers across 30,000 restaurants got an economic reality check.

[Miranda Devine @mirandadevine]

This is the way to combat the false lure of socialism to young women. With real stories. Great campaign from @IWV

[Alixa Pizza 🍕🇵🇦 @alixatovio]

“Don’t look back in anger” goes to the 70s 🎸🪩🕺🏽💃🏽🕺🏽🪩

[InfantryDort @infantrydort]

A taste of Infantry.

[Drew Harper @druharper]

@RbtGil @visegrad24 Everything the Left touches it destroys.

[Drew Harper @druharper]

@visegrad24 Everything the Left touches it destroys.

[Drew Harper @druharper]

@DanielJHannan Twee describes much of England's upper classes.

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

In 2004, the BBC warned the Maldives were "soon to be uninhabitable," claiming sea levels were rising 0.9 cm per year and that 80% of the islands could vanish within a century.

More than two decades later, though, reality says otherwise. The Maldives haven't sunk, they've exploded with growth: 12 new airports, expanded international terminals, record tourism of over 2 million visitors a year, and more than 170 resorts.

Instead of drowning, this so-called "paradise in peril" has shown no statistically significant sea level rise since the 1980s, according to satellite data.

Here we have another climate catastrophe headline completely undone by time.