I totally co-sign this. It bears explaining:
There are so many US citizens now with a net worth well past decamillionaire range — for whom spending $50,000 here and there is truly no big deal — who have such wealth because for 250+ years Americans carved out, conquered, settled, and built an astonishing place for businesses and technologies unimaginable in 1607.
But the people and culture did it. It’s why America is what it is for everyone who came after the Civil War in the 1860s, great waves from Europe, then many restrictions, followed a century later in the 1960s with great waves from Latin America — and smatterings, now growing larger, from Asia and the Middle East. These were not like the English settlers and pioneers who arrived early and set up the whole place.
So all “success” such people have had, on individual merits, yes, is laudable.
But as a group? Clearly a result of American cultural and political infrastructure. I went into this in early December of 2024 with @eriktorenberg on the H-1B topic just before the Vivek post heard round the world on the Moment of Zen podcast. (Which had some hard truth to it. We have slipped.)
But fundamentally, Americans are tired of being told it’s their fault they aren’t rich and are struggling by one segment of the country doing enormously well, often through means that amount to incumbent favoritism or special privileges, which also often happens to not be from here ancestrally (including plenty who are White). Who is the country supposed to be for?
So when these super rich people from tech as a class — and there are exceptions — cry about a billionaire tax or high taxes in general after supporting socialists bc of trendy left wing cultural ideas for decades, but even now, never get in the arena and have *zero* cash to spend on right wing activists? It’s totally contemptible.
We need a bit more shame.
People used to avoid certain self-interested behaviors to avoid shame, private and public. Law and customs assumed this.
Now, 38% of Stanford students claim to be disabled. 40% of young women (under 35) claim mental illness, and SSI disability payments have gone up 400% in a single generation.
It isn't good for anyone, least of all people who are actually disabled, when everyone looks the other way as friends and family and peers con the system with a level of shamelessness no architect of our safety net ever imagined could be possible in America. When everyone is disabled, nobody is.
VIDEO: Nick Fuentes Calls Out Tucker Carlson & Alex Jones For Supporting JD Vance!
Jones Responds By Asking Fuentes A Simple Question, "Would You Rather Have The Israel-First Warhawk Marco Rubio As President?"
🚨WATCH/SHARE THE LIVE X STREAM:
https://t.co/M8o19E2wgm
History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.
Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.
And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.
You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.
Hey Jasmine…
Black pilot here.
I think you missed the plot.
Then again, that’s becoming a pattern.
I graduated from West Point.
I went through Army flight school.
I learned to fly the AH-64 Apache.
I deployed to combat and flew 55 combat missions over Baghdad.
Nobody handed me a cockpit because of my skin color.
Nobody lowered the standards for me.
Nobody looked at me and said, “Let’s check a diversity box.”
That’s what people like you don’t seem to understand.
Suggesting that Black pilots, Black engineers, Black doctors, or Black leaders need special preferences to succeed is not empowering, it’s insulting.
I didn’t want a different standard.
I wanted the same standard.
And when you’re flying into combat, the American people don’t care what race the pilot is.
They care whether the pilot is qualified.
Merit isn’t racist.
Excellence isn’t discriminatory.
And reducing every achievement to skin color says far more about your worldview than it does about mine.
Patriots - if you are protesting tonight, in Belfast or elsewhere, do NOT give Starmer what he wants.
Stay calm. Keep your heads. Do NOT attack the police.
The state will show you no mercy.
The dangerous ‘far-right’ will be blamed, and your life will be ruined forever.
It will be that brutal. However angry you are feeling now, it is not worth it.
Protest - but do it loudly, do it peacefully.
If the police are being aggressive, record it. Film it. Do not react. Because you will not be shown the same leniency as the officers. You will be charged, you will be sentenced, you will be imprisoned.
We’re all angry.
But you will achieve far more for our cause and country OUTSIDE of prison.
The rigging of the LA Mayoral primary is obvious. Outrage should be independent of party, and that’s not what I’m seeing. What’s wrong with you Blue Team people? Do you not understand what it means? Snap out of it and stand up for your neighbors, your country and the West!
Rodney King, OJ, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Karmelo Anthony. My entire life I have watched black activists rally around the most dysfunctional, degenerate, morally repugnant parasites imaginable. Celebrating and defending the absolute worst of the worst. People who contribute nothing to society. When’s the last time an actual virtuous and heroic black man won popular support in his own community? It seems that kind of black man is more likely to be shunned than celebrated.
This is the type of shit that needs no words to troll itself.
This is actually real… he’s really posting infomercials plugging this…
Using America’s 250th Anniversary too…
More like… “As my dad tanks the economy as fast as he can, nothing is more patriotic than getting your hands on some Don Jr Gold to celebrate America’s 250th Anniversary in case it’s our last”
This is SNL material or even better #smokefleet material
I’ve taken a lot of hits, and I’ve deserved some of them. I beat myself up over them more than you can imagine.
But the grace people have shown me here is truly humbling.
Some of the kindest words have come from the people you’d least expect.
And for that I am so grateful.
This isn’t about me. It’s about every person in recovery who shows up and tries again.
And to everyone still in the fight tonight: you are not alone, I see you.