Any “influencer” or podcaster who is telling you to stay home or vote for Democrats this November is rooting for our country to fail.
Republicans aren’t perfect but communism and Sharia law is way worse.
I encourage everyone to vote Republican this November.
My teenage daughter wanted a pair of “distressed” jeans.
I went into her closet, pulled out a pair of jeans purchased the previous month.
Handed them to her, along with a pair of gloves, pointed her to yard work that need to be done.
I said, “Earn the holes.”
Two months later, the yard looks great, she’s still wearing (and frequently washing) those jeans she stressed herself, now with two holes earned.
I wasn’t in a great mood earlier today. But a simple moment changed that.
I Was at the grocery store this afternoon and an older gentleman parked next to me. We both have Purple Heart plates. He pointed at mine.
“When?” He asked
“Afghanistan 2011,” I replied. “You?”
“Vietnam, 1968.”
Then he shook my hand, and we talked about our service for a little bit.
At the end he gave me a salute and said, “Make sure you have a great life. You’ve earned it.” And then we went about our days.
It completely changed the tone of my day.
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The 9/11 Memorial "Tear Drop" sit's directly across from NYC, in Bayonne New Jersey, just the other side of the Statue of Liberty, yet we hear nothing about it.
This beautiful, 100 ft tall monument was gifted to the people of the United States by the people of Russia in 2006, in memory of all those who lost their lives on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.
The breaking in the cracked façade forms the shape of the two towers.
The giant suspended tear drop signifies the tears of the entire world that day.
Maybe it's something that needs to be known, starting today.
The Trump EPA just launched an exciting, cutting-edge research effort to test for pharmaceuticals, PFAS, and over 1,000 other potential contaminants in drinking water. https://t.co/GIy4lblShf
From Plato to Bernie and AOC – A Brief History of Communism
Twenty-four centuries, one idea. It always starts the same way and always ends the same way.
1. Plato, 380 BC. The world is badly made, the wise should redesign it, and the rulers may lie to the people for their own good – he called it the noble lie. Property abolished among the guardians, the family abolished with it. Everything since is a version of it, with progressively worse writing and progressively higher body counts.
2. The millenarian sects. Property abolished, the chosen in charge, purification required – a thousand years before capitalism existed. The idea needs no economy to appear.
3. Rousseau, 1762. Man is good, institutions corrupt him, so institutions must be remade. The General Will – the collective desire of the people, which the correct leader can identify and implement regardless of what individual people actually want. The philosophical foundation of every subsequent revolution that murdered people in the name of their own liberation. Whoever refuses to obey shall be forced to be free. Rousseau personally abandoned all five of his children to the orphanage. He wrote extensively about the correct upbringing of children. This is a pattern.
4. Kant and Hegel. Kant splits the world as we see it from the world as it is. Hegel adds that history is going somewhere. Together they supply the phrase that ends every argument: the wrong side of history.
5. 1789, French Revolution. The idea gets a country. Virtue is the goal, and virtue turns out to need enforcement. Four years from liberation to the guillotine and the Terror.
6. Marx, 1848. The same idea in a scientific costume – now you weren’t arguing for it, you were reading the future. Written by a man who had never worked in a factory, funded by a man who owned one.
7. Lenin, 1917. The vanguard party: a small group of professionals who know what the workers need better than the workers do. Delivered to Russia in a sealed train by a German general who wanted Russia out of the war. He got that, and more.
8. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. What it looks like when it wins. Terror as government, and a lie so complete that people lost the ability to tell what they thought from what they had to say. Tens of millions dead in China, a quarter of the population in Cambodia. Not a deviation. The same premise, applied with enthusiasm. Collectivization, the gulag, the Great Leap, the killing fields – roughly a hundred million dead in one century. Each time preceded by intellectuals explaining why this time would be different.
9. The Frankfurt School. The workers in the West refused to revolt, so the explanation changed: the problem is cultural, and Western civilization itself is the oppressor and has to be deconstructed. Everything to be criticized, nothing to be built.
10. Gramsci, Spinelli, Dutschke and 1968. Don’t storm the parliament – get a job in the editorial office. Power in the West rests on consent, and consent is made in schools and newspapers – so take those instead. The long march through the institutions. The generation that failed in the streets became the professors, editors and judges. It worked, which is why elections now change the government but not the direction.
1989 – the system collapses, the archives opened, and in the Western universities almost nobody changed their mind. A faith, not a theory.
11. Bernie and AOC. Same idea, new clothes, and nobody left who has read the source material. Free everything, paid for by the billionaires. Honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988 – three years before it collapsed – and came back impressed. Three houses. Net worth in the millions of dollars. Democratic socialists. The reasoning is Plato’s, the aesthetic is TikTok.
From Plato to Bernie and AOC: Even communism isn’t immune to decay…
What follows
12. The lie is not a side effect. It is the system.
13. Where truth is handed out instead of found, anyone who insists on finding it is in the way.
14. It survives because it protects positions, not beliefs. Ask who is best for the job and every protected position is at risk. Ask who belongs in the room and the same people stay in it for life.
15. The managerial class is the nomenklatura. Same selection, same script, same immunity to results. Only the letterhead changed.
16. Where everything needs permission, permission becomes the currency – and whoever knows the apparatus rules, whoever wins the election.
17. Silence is not ignorance. It is knowledge plus a calculation: speaking costs everything, silence is free.
18. Underneath, it runs on two fuels: envy and fear. Envy supplies the motive – someone else has what you don’t, and the system promises to take it. Fear supplies the compliance – everyone can see what happens to those who say the wrong thing. Neither has anything to do with justice, and neither ever built anything.
19. The idea never learns, because the error is not in the implementation. It is in the premise: that the "wise" can plan the lives of the many better than the many can plan their own.
20. The answer is not a better plan for society. It is refusing to let anyone hold the pen.
Reality is not negotiable. Say so out loud, build things that work, and hand them to your children.
Tell the truth. Have courage. And build.
Just finished the @Hillsdale course "Understanding Capitalism" with my homeschooled boys.
12 yo: "What's the difference between socialism and communism?"
Me: "They have a course on that."
Shout out to @hillsdaleonline for making exceptional content. I'm learning as much as my boys are! 🙌
Courses we've completed:
- The Great American Story: A Land of Hope
- Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (our favorite)
- The Genesis Story
- Athens and Sparta
- Understanding Capitalism
Next up:
- Marxism, Socialism, and Communism
- The Iliad
- The Odyssey
- Mathematics and Logic
- Constitution 101
If you homeschool and haven't looked into Hillsdale's online courses yet, check them out. If you're grown and want to keep learning, check them out.
Hillsdale has created an outstanding resource for students young and old. 🎓
I’m a physics teacher, and quite a few stories have stayed with me throughout my career.
In my class, there’s an unwritten rule: For every final research project, students must submit a lab notebook recording all raw measurement data. Missing data or fabricated results mean an automatic F, in science there’s simply no room for dishonesty.
At the end of the term that year, a girl came to turn in her reversible pendulum project which was meant to measure the acceleration due to gravity. The data in her notebook was all over the place, and her graph was wildly off from the theoretical value of 9.8 m/s².
"My results are... completely ruined," she said. "Everyone else got nice numbers close to 9.8. I guess I'm getting an F".
I looked at her densely packed notebook, filled with meticulous notes: measurements taken at 2:00 AM, the humidity in her bedroom, even the exact times the string snapped and had to be retied. Having taught for over a decade, I can easily tell who fakes their numbers to match the textbook and who stays up all night putting in the real work.
"Why didn't you just tweak the numbers a bit to get closer to 9.8, like the others?" I asked.
She looked up, her eyes rimmed with red, but her voice was steady: "Because the data is what it is. You taught us that a scientist never lies about their data."
I silently flipped to the next page and marked a big red A.
She was stunned. "Wait... but my experiment completely failed?"
"Your experiment didn't fail. It just proved that your pendulum had air drag and a wobbly pivot" I said. "Science isn't about manufactured perfection, it's about the pursuit of truth. You stood up for the truth, and that's the true mark of a researcher."
Starting that semester, I created a small award in the corner of the lab: "The Best Failed Lab Report", given to the experiment with the most skewed results, but the most honest logs and thorough error analysis.
I want these kids to understand that having the courage to acknowledge mistakes and confront reality matters far more than faking a perfect score just to please someone else.
🏀I WENT BACK AND CHARTED THE FILM. NOW I HAVE A SERIOUS QUESTION FOR THE WNBA.
I didn’t want opinions. I didn’t want narratives. I wanted to see it possession by possession.
So I rewatched Indiana vs. New York and charted the contact on Caitlin Clark myself.
And I DIDN’T EVEN FINISH THE 4TH QUARTER.
My film chart:
63% of the possessions I tracked with Clark handling the basketball featured what I graded as a hand-check, grab, pull or bump.
54% featured contact I graded as a defensive foul.
I counted 82+ separate instances of illegal contact.
On ONE POSSESSION, I counted 11 separate contacts that could’ve been whistled.
Now here’s the punchline:
Caitlin Clark officially went to the free-throw line FOUR TIMES.
FOUR. 🤣
So somebody at @WNBA needs to explain something to me.
Either New York suddenly assembled the greatest collection of perimeter defenders basketball has ever witnessed…
OR CAITLIN CLARK IS BEING OFFICIATED UNDER A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STANDARD.
Because you cannot pick somebody up 94 feet, face-guard her, chase her through screens, hand-check her, grab her hip, redirect her movement and bump her off her path possession after possession and convince me that almost all of it is legal defense.
At some point, when the SAME PLAYER repeatedly receives this kind of physical treatment without a proportional whistle, people are going to start asking whether this is incompetence…
OR AN AGENDA.
And THAT is the conversation the national media seems terrified to have.
@espn@espnW@WNBA — ROLL THE FILM.
Don’t show me Clark complaining afterward.
Don’t show me her facial expressions.
Don’t debate whether she needs to “control her emotions.”
SHOW WHAT HAPPENED TO HER BEFORE SHE REACTED.
Because after charting this game possession by possession, I’m convinced the biggest Caitlin Clark officiating controversy isn’t the fouls they call.
IT’S THE ABSURD NUMBER THEY DON’T.
🎥 WATCH THE CONTACT. COUNT IT YOURSELF. THEN TELL ME I’M WRONG.
@IndianaFever #feverrising
Earlier this year, my husband Abraham was diagnosed with a very rare bone cancer. This has been a challenging time for us and is hard to talk about. But so many of you have reached out asking how he’s doing, and sharing your prayers and well wishes with us. We made this video to share a little about what this journey has been like, and to update you on his recovery. Mahalo for all of the love and support 🙏🏽