Tom Foreman

Classical Liberal, Individualist, Small government, Republican, skeptic.

[Andy Biggs @andybiggs4az]

Katie Hobbs is intentionally blocking Arizonans from receiving a federal school choice tax credit.

Even New York and Colorado have opted-in, but Hobbs will never stop attacking school choice.

Our educational freedom is on the ballot. We must defeat Katie Hobbs.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Bingo.

[X Freeze @XFreeze]

Elon Musk on suicidal empathy: When compassion for criminals outweighs compassion for their victims, something has gone terribly wrong

Why are repeat violent offenders being released back onto the streets, often without bail, while innocent people are left to suffer the consequences?

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for."

Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it."

I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy.

The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us.

Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat.

Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces.

Where does it come from? Four layers.

First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country.

Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else.

Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do.

Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night.

The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct.

Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say.

On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength.

But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration.

This is where men have a responsibility.

Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves.

Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends.

That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women.

Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street.

A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left.

Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough.

Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.

[Tom Foreman @WestPan]

Who the Left Attracts, Part 2 https://t.co/E1j7yHNuRD

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

These are just frustrated high school students fighting for their pedagogic rights. Let's not succumb to Islamophobia. - @JessicaTarlov

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

Never forget that it was Barack Obama who ordered and orchestrated the Russia Hoax against Trump knowing it was false.

-Obama ordered the ICA to undermine Trump before he took office.
-It was rushed, politicized, and bypassed standard intel procedures.
-Brennan handpicked 5 CIA analysts to draft it with minimal review.
-Obama was briefed on Clinton’s plan to smear Trump with fake Russia ties.
-CIA forced FBI and NSA to accept its narrative despite internal objections.
-Congress was misled with selective and inconsistent briefings.
-Brennan and Clapper pushed a lie, hiding dissent within the IC.
-FBI kept investigating Trump even after ruling out collusion internally.

He has no right to talk about targeting political opponents.

Treasonous.

[Tom Foreman @WestPan]

https://t.co/Q84dLmFia7

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

I explained why almost every actor and artist ends up on the same side. Today I want to show you that none of this is an accident. It was theorized almost a hundred years ago, by an Italian communist sitting in a prison cell. His name was Antonio Gramsci. Once you understand his idea, you will see it everywhere.

Start with the problem Gramsci was trying to solve.

Karl Marx had predicted that workers in rich countries would rise up and overthrow capitalism. It never happened. Workers in Italy, France, England and America didn't want a revolution. They went to church on Sunday. They loved their country. They wanted a house, a family, a better life for their kids. The communists couldn't understand it. They had the theory, the anger, the slogans. Why wasn't anyone following them?

Gramsci, locked up by Mussolini, spent years thinking about this. And he found the answer.

His answer was this: a society isn't held together by police and soldiers. It's held together by what people believe is normal. What you learned at school. What your priest told you. What the newspaper says. What the movies show you. What your neighbors think is obvious. Gramsci called this "hegemony." Put simply, it means: whoever decides what is normal, rules.

So he drew a conclusion that changed everything. In the West, you can't win by attacking the palace. You'll lose. People will defend the system because they believe in it. You first have to change what people believe. You have to win the schools, the universities, the newspapers, the arts, the churches. Slowly. Patiently. Trench by trench. He called it a "war of position." Once the culture is yours, politics falls into your hands like ripe fruit.

Forty years later, in 1967, a German student leader named Rudi Dutschke turned this idea into a battle plan. He called it "the long march through the institutions." The idea was simple. Don't burn down the university. Become the professor. Don't attack the newspaper. Become the editor. Don't fight the courts. Become the judge. Get inside every institution, rise to the top, and change it from within.

Now watch how it works in real life, step by step.

A young activist goes to university. He stays. He becomes a professor. Now he trains thousands of students every year. Those students become teachers, journalists, lawyers, HR managers, screenwriters, civil servants. They all learned the same ideas from the same people. They hire people who think like them. After one generation, the institution has changed. After two, nobody remembers it was ever different.

Studies have found that at elite American colleges, Democrat professors outnumber Republicans by roughly ten to one, and in some departments there are almost none. That isn't a conspiracy meeting in a basement. It's what a completed march looks like.

And here is the most powerful part. Once the institutions are won, you don't need to force anyone. People absorb the ideas without noticing. A fish doesn't know it's wet. A young actor who grew up with teachers, drama coaches, screenwriters, agents and award juries who all think the same way doesn't need to read Gramsci. He just breathes the air. To him, these are not opinions. They are simply what good people believe. And anyone who disagrees isn't someone with a different view. He's a bad person.

That's the final stage of hegemony. Disagreement stops being an argument and becomes a moral stain. You don't debate the other side anymore. You cancel it.

This is why Hollywood thinks as one. This is why so many newsrooms sound identical. This is why your kids come home from college with ideas you never taught them. Nobody had to give an order. The march was already over.

Conservatives made one huge mistake for fifty years. They thought winning elections was enough. They focused on Washington while the other side took the classrooms, the studios, and the newsrooms. They won some votes and lost the culture. And as Andrew Breitbart used to say, politics is downstream of culture.

The good news is that a march can go in both directions. Buying Twitter and turning it into X was one institution taken back. There will be others. But it won't happen by complaining. It will happen when people who love freedom start teaching, writing, filming, building, and creating again.

They understood the game a hundred years ago. It's time you did too.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Wokeism is the most sophisticated form of racism ever built. Not because it hates one group, but because it reduces every human being to their skin color and calls it justice.

Its roots aren't mysterious. Critical theory from the Frankfurt School, French postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, then critical legal studies on American campuses, distilled into Critical Race Theory in the 80s and 90s. The core idea: society is nothing but a power struggle between groups. The individual doesn't exist. Merit doesn't exist. Only oppressor and oppressed.

Accept that premise and everything else follows. You're judged by your race before you open your mouth. Your success is privilege, your failure is oppression. That's not anti-racism. That's racism with a PhD.

And look at who actually holds these views. Not most minorities. Only about 3% of Hispanic Americans use "Latinx." Most Black Americans told Gallup they wanted the same or more police presence in their neighborhoods, not less. The "Hidden Tribes" study found the hard progressive activist wing is around 8% of the population, and whiter and wealthier than average. A small radicalized class speaks in the name of minorities who never asked it to.

The coalition doesn't even hold together. Feminists vs trans activists on women's sports. Asian Americans who had to go to the Supreme Court because Harvard discriminated against them in the name of diversity. A framework that keeps producing these contradictions isn't a moral philosophy. It's a hierarchy of grievances.

And none of this grew organically. It's an industry. DEI became a multi-billion dollar market: corporate trainings, consultants, foundation grants, university bureaucracies whose budgets depend on the problem never being solved. Follow the incentives and you find an entire class of people paid to see racism everywhere. Cut the money and it starts collapsing, which is exactly what we've watched since companies began slashing DEI budgets.

Real anti-racism is simple: judge people as individuals. MLK said it in 1963. Everything since that tried to replace it has been a step backwards.

[Commentary - Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Paul Krugman waves the inequality flag: median household income up only 13 percent while the top 0.1 percent soared 296 percent. America, he says, is no longer a middle-class society.

Sowell’s response is immediate. The moment you hear “household income,” you know the argument is not serious. Households differ in size across time, across income levels, and across groups.

The bottom fifth contains 39 million people. The top fifth contains 64 million. Households have been getting smaller. Three earners becoming two with the same total income is not stagnation — it is a 50 percent rise in per capita income. That is why people can afford to form their own households.

Household numbers are political tools. Per capita numbers are reality.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

Yes.

One thousand times, yes.

What Mr. Sperry so clearly articulates below is why I always say that the "Trump/Russia Collusion" hoax was BY FAR the worst political crime in U.S. history.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

What’s terrifying about this clip isn’t their ideals…these sweet gals’ hearts are certainly in the right place. What’s terrifying is they have the civic, political, and economic literacy of a 9 year old. When a charlatan like Abdul comes along with the Jr High class president schtick of “no more homework and the vending machines are all free!”, they fall for it.

I don’t know how you get to that age with ZERO understanding of supply chains, manufacturing, labor costs…but a lot of folks think that medicine and MRIs and hospitals just materialize out of thin air like unicorn farts. They’ve never built anything in their lives, so they have no concept of how things function…things are just…there. They think milk comes from the store. They think rich people don’t pay taxes, even though the top 1% fund 40% of government with their taxes already, and yet 40% of all Americans contribute ZERO federal income tax at all. These people don’t understand that you could tax the wealthy at 100% and it would only fund the government for 120 days. Then you’re screwed.

Too many Americans simply have zero understanding of how anything works, and even though they’re living in the easiest times in human history, they think things are “terrible out there”. These commie scammers roll through and promise them things that sound great, but aren’t possible in reality, and have devastating consequences if tried…but because they don’t know anything, they fall for it. Sadly, so many of our politicians and their advisors are such atrocious communicators, there’s like zero countervailing narrative to push back on the commie gobbledygook, so we are gonna have to learn the hard way. Guys…we just had a sample of socialism: Covid. We all got universal basic income, and it ended up tripling our costs and they���ll never go down. Ever. That one brief little experiment in command and control government will haunt us the rest of our lives. Bleak stuff, man.

[Tom Foreman @WestPan]

https://t.co/964ndZZH7r

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Finally, someone nailed the aesthetics to convey the civilizational stake of our present age.

Standing before the acropolis as the sun bathed its marble in warm tones, Rubio makes the case for the grandeur and virtues of Western civilization in all its splendor. Empires have risen and vanished beneath that ridge, and the stones remain, indifferent to the fashion of the hour.

Rare to hear a Western leader use vocabulary that modern education has largely purged - sacrifice, duty, inheritance, the debt owed to those who built before us.

The men who raised those columns did not do so under the illusion of permanent safety. They understood what separates glory and ruin, and that the only lasting answer to ruin is the deliberate transmission of daring and courage.

It's a glorious speech, truly one for the ages.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 BREAKING: With the Acropolis behind him, Sec. Marco Rubio just WALKED OFF stage and concluded a high-stakes Western Civilization address with this nationalist line

"All of us, not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West — must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history." 🔥

"The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes and that we should be proud, that we should be intensely proud of where we come from."

"We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of the civilization is the greatest story ever known to man."

"And it began here with the first men and women of the West. From them, from them we can rediscover the virtues, the courage and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time. Thank you."

Review: This was a pure 10/10 speech from Rubio. EXCELLENT spot to give it from

The Left spent DECADES teaching our kids to be ashamed of the West, then Rubio just stood at its birthplace and said BE PROUD!

WE ARE DONE APOLOGIZNG FOR BEING GREAT. Europe should do the same

Rubio has a brand of nationalist diplomacy and it's everything that I voted for. This is exactly what I want the Secretary of State doing! 👏🏻

INCREDIBLE JOB TODAY, MARCO

[GRANDPA’s FREE ADVICE @GOP_is_Gutless]

🚨 They tracked a TEENAGER to time the raid. His name was Barron Trump.

Declassified files show Biden’s FBI logged Melania and Barron Trump’s travel — aircraft and timeline — so agents could hit Mar-a-Lago when the family was gone.

Codename: Plasmic Echo. Garland and Wray signed off.
Then Jack Smith’s team put a pen register on Susie Wiles’ phone for months. Every call logged. 21 Trump lawyers.

Campaign aides. Journalists. Even Trump’s own number.
Not a leak. White House docs.

Released yesterday.

This is what a weaponized DOJ looks like. Jack Smith should be in a jail cell tonight.
#JackSmith #PlasmicEcho #BarronTrump #WeaponizedDOJ #MarALago #BidenFBI #SusieWiles

[Mike Lee @SenMikeLee]

Again: this is objectively a bigger scandal than Watergate.

The main difference is that the
Democrat establishment & media happily look the other way when the DOJ is used to spy upon Donald Trump’s campaign chief, with no regard for the dangerous precedent set.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

Jack Smith made Watergate look like child's play.

[Tom Foreman @WestPan]

https://t.co/xpIo0uPgHJ