Christ follower, Husband to @AmyFenton, proud Dad of 4 amazing adult progeny, Retail Technologist, Nerd of many stripes (especially security), and musician
Franklin, TN
Joined September 2008
- Tweets977
- Following803
- Followers480
- Likes799
Cy Fenton retweeted
If you're a young American, or a Democrat who's a little confused about where all this is going, read this. It's long. It's worth it.
Start with misery.
For almost all of human history, misery wasn't a crisis. It was the default. Your ancestors were born poor, lived poor, buried half their children, and died poor. Around 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 humans lived in what we'd now call extreme poverty. Even kings lived worse than you: no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no light after sunset.
Today it's around 1 in 10.
That didn't happen because someone finally designed the perfect system. It happened because, in a few corners of the world, people were left free enough to trade, try, fail, and try again. Property rights. Prices. Contracts. Rule of law. Boring words. They built everything you have.
Now meet Friedrich Hayek.
An Austrian economist who watched his continent fall to two ideologies that both promised to organize society from the top. In 1944 he wrote The Road to Serfdom. A year later he wrote a short essay that should be required reading in every high school: The Use of Knowledge in Society.
His insight is simple and devastating. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows flour just got expensive, the nurse who knows which shift is understaffed, the farmer who knows his soil. No committee, no ministry, no genius can gather it all. Prices are the miracle that lets all that knowledge talk to itself without anyone being in charge.
When you replace prices with plans, you don't get a smarter economy. You get a blind one.
His friend Karl Popper made the same point about history itself in The Poverty of Historicism, a book dedicated to the countless people who died because someone believed history had a destination and that he alone knew the way.
Then the 20th century ran the experiment. Not once. Everywhere.
The Soviet Union was planned from Moscow. It collapsed in 1991, after famines, gulags, and bread lines in a country with some of the best farmland on earth.
Mao's China gave us the Great Leap Forward and tens of millions dead of hunger. Then Deng opened markets in 1978, and roughly 800 million people escaped extreme poverty. Same people. Same culture. Different rules.
Korea: same peninsula, same language, same ancestors. Look at a satellite photo at night. One half is lit. The other is dark.
Germany: one nation split in two. The side that called itself the workers' paradise had to build a wall to stop its workers from leaving.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people have fled it.
Cambodia lost about a quarter of its population in the name of starting over from year zero.
Every time. Different continents, different cultures, different leaders, same ending. At some point it's not bad luck. It's the design.
"But I mean Denmark." Fair. But Denmark isn't socialist. Its own prime minister told a Harvard audience in 2015 that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordics are free-market countries that chose to fund a big welfare state with the wealth markets created. That's a debate worth having. It's not the same debate.
Now let me tell you about my country.
France is the closest thing the developed world has to a live test of "the state will take care of it." Public spending is around 57% of GDP, among the highest on earth. Public debt is above 110% of GDP. The national education system employs over a million people, one of the biggest employers in the world.
And right now, French high school students are blockading hundreds of schools. Their complaints: not enough teachers, crumbling buildings, overloaded schedules. On October 1st, the entrance hall of a high school in Nantes was destroyed by a deliberate fire during a blockade.
Read that again. In the country that spends more than almost anyone and centralizes more than almost anyone, kids are in the street because the system can't give them a teacher and a building that works.
And the demand you hear most? More funding. More state. More of what built the problem.
I'm French. I get the anger. The anger is legitimate. The diagnosis is backwards.
One ministry in Paris trying to run thousands of schools is Hayek's problem in miniature. The principal knows which teacher is missing. The parents know which roof leaks. The ministry knows a spreadsheet.
So here's what I want to say to every young person, in France or in America, who's tempted by the idea that the system just needs more power to finally get it right:
You're allowed to want it. That's your right. But you don't have to guess. You have something no generation before you had: the full archive. Every experiment has been run, documented, photographed, counted. The famines have numbers. The walls have dates. The boat people have names. The night photo of Korea is one click away.
Your ancestors paid for that knowledge. Some with their savings, some with their freedom, many with their lives. They left you the results.
Respect your ancestors. Read what they left you.
Read Hayek. Read Popper. Read Solzhenitsyn. Read Orwell, who was a socialist and still told the truth about totalitarianism.
And then build. Because the thing that pulled humanity out of misery was never a plan. It was millions of free people trying things.
That's you. That's the job.
Cy Fenton retweeted
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn't just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
The AI didn't just give the students answers. It used strict pedagogical guardrails. It guided. It questioned. It forced the students to do the cognitive work.
It offered perfect, one-to-one tutoring, personalized to the exact moment a student misunderstood a concept.
That level of attention is mathematically impossible to scale in a physical lecture hall.
For a thousand years, the university was the only place to get a premium education.
Now, it’s the bottleneck.
If AI can double your learning speed for a fraction of the cost, what exactly are students taking on decades of debt to pay for?
I've been a customer in this house since 1999 and was literally one of the first beta customers in the Green Hills area when Comcast internet first came to Nashville. I don't do this lightly, but the utter lack of communication has pushed me over the edge.
ALL of the other services in my home that also experienced the same weather-related events gave timely service updates over the last few days. I've been thinking about leaving Comcast/Xfinity for a number of months as the fees for my service have been increasing uncomfortably.
All of their customer service mechanisms fail to provide any human response during an outage, and they all say the same thing: 'We are working on it and will restore ASAP.' While weather related outages are perfectly understandable, the utter lack of communication is not.
Cy Fenton retweeted
After a week in DC meeting Trump appointees across every level, not just the Pentagon, I’m stunned by how few truly understand the sheer size and weight of the steamroller that’s coming if we lose the midterms.
Like nothing else matters. Not even shipbuilding.
Cy Fenton retweeted
Like so many modern American federal agencies and policies, the United States Agency for International Development ("USAID") was born amidst America's existential struggle of the Cold War against Communism.
USAID'S founding principles were solid: use America's economic might to provide targeted foreign aid that promoted American values and opposed global Communism.
That worked fine when global Communism really was an existential threat of annihilation AND "American values" were coherently understood and held by the great majority of Americans.
But somewhere along the way the global Communist threat evaporated, and unelected American bureaucrats decided for themselves that "American values" consisted of promoting childhood gender "reassignment" and a host of other neo-Marxist ideals that are antithetical to the values held by the vast majority of Americans.
USAID became a tool of the very forces it was created to fight.
Now, in 2025, one of the best things we can do for America, for Americans, and for global freedom is to terminate this Cold War relic that has become a tool of our enemies.
Abolish USAID.
Cy Fenton retweeted
I've continued to think about these wise words from Paul Washer for days now. They counter a common cultural vision of spousal union--let's call it Transactional Marriage, where the biblical ideal is Self-Sacrificing Marriage. Buckle up as we sketch the contrast between these two models of marriage.
A Transactional Marriage is one where we simply exchange goods and services with our spouse. It's not so much a loving union as it is an ongoing social partnership in which we each get what we want from the other. You see this all over the place--he plays golf and provides, she spends time with the kids, and their lives overlap but there isn't much genuine love and unity. They're independent contractors who are partnering together to get what they want and need. When they don't get what they want and need, they alternately get mad, get distant, and perhaps go outside the marriage to lay hold of what their heart desires.
Suffice it to say that this is not what Scripture holds out as the ideal! Not by a long shot. As made clear in the Bible, God wants us to have Self-Sacrificing Marriages filled with great delight, unity, growth, pleasure, transformation, and love above all. (This is what Christ has with his bride, after all!) It is of course true that in biblical marriage, you get a nice portion of what you want and need as a man or a woman. But you will never--and I do mean never--get *all* you want and need. Your spouse is not Jesus. Your marriage is not being conducted in the heavenly realm. You're a sinner, your spouse is a sinner, and the creation still groans under Adam's curse.
It is good and right to pray for joy and happiness in your marriage. You'd be crazy not to! Along these lines, we should all work very hard to learn what makes our spouse feel loved. For husbands, for example, this is part of living with our wives in an understanding way (1 Peter 3:7). We want to be men who "nourish and cherish" our wife (Ephesians 5:29). That takes a lot of work, a lot of attention, a lot of planning and learning and humbling ourselves, a lot of apologizing when we get things wrong and just plain fail to live up to the holy standard of Christ, and most of all, a heaping ton of heavenly grace.
So too for wives. A godly wife not only grits her teeth and submits to her husband (Eph. 5:22-24); a godly wife seeks to know her husband well, honor her husband, speak well of her husband, and learn what her husband enjoys and loves. The goal for a godly wife isn't to follow her man mutely, embracing the mere form of submission; the goal is to treasure her husband, and honor his headship in a holistic way. This takes a lot of effort, a lot of humility, a lot of death to self, and above all, a lot of leaning squarely upon God.
But we have to be careful as well. Even as pursue these roles to the glory of God, and much as we strive by gospel grace to do our part to infuse our home with joy and happiness, we can easily slip into the patterns of a Transactional Marriage. For example, if our spouse doesn't love us just the way we would prefer, we've got to remember the spiritual focus of Scripture that Washer captured in his quotation. Sure, maybe at some point we should talk honestly and calmly with our spouse about ways we can each grow. It's really good to do that when you're in a good frame of mind! But the other side is true as well: we're not married so we get everything we want. We're married for God's glory, and a serious part of such a union is dying to ourselves.
This has real cash value. It will mean that there are hard elements of your marriage. This will mean dissatisfaction. This will mean annoyance and frustration. This will mean the possibility of hopelessness on the one hand or bitterness on the other. This will mean that, if you're not vigilant, you'll only find it harder and harder to communicate well, and work out what every couple needs to work out until death parts them.
Be careful, friends, about falling prey to the expectations of the Transactional Marriage. Remember that marriage gives great joy (when working well), but is also designed--as all the Christian life is--for our growth in godliness. The areas of imperfection in our unions are meant to drive us to God, to show us how good God is, and to pursue growth by the power of God's grace. There is something greater than our needs and wants being immediately met. It is being conformed to the image of Christ, which is happening for every believer, married or single (1 Cor. 15:49). But we cannot miss how sanctifying marriage is for married people.
This goes against the common cultural vision of marriage I've sketched out, where you get married in order to get what you want. If that's what drives your home, I fear that your marriage may not endure. While communicating well, and striving to love our spouse in a way that blesses them greatly, we must also remember that God hasn't brought us together primarily to work on the other person. God has brought us together, quite simply, to work on us.
God does SO VERY MUCH in us through marriage. He does so over the long haul, with many fits and starts and failures on our part, and always against the backdrop of his steadfast love (Exodus 34:6). God wants us to learn to love when we feel hurt, to learn to forgive when we feel aggrieved, to keep serving when we feel underappreciated, to seek healing when we feel distant, to stay committed when we feel like breaking apart, to keep showing up when we feel tempted to drift and break away. God, we remember, never drifts and never breaks away from us (Hebrews 13:5).
Wherever you are in your marriage, friends, the point is this: keep going. Keep praying. Keep showing up. Keep living by grace and mercy. Keep loving extravagantly. Keep forgiving generously. Keep serving sacrificially. Keep listening humbly. Keep communicating openly. Keep repenting regularly. Keep dying to self. Keep putting on the new man by the power of the resurrection (Eph. 4:24).
And fight against discouragement--Satan's own precision-targeting weapon--by remembering that the work God is doing in you and your spouse is not short term work organized to meet your short term desires. It is LONG TERM WORK. It is not accomplished in a day; it is work that cuts deep, that sometimes hurts, but is designed by an exorbitantly loving heavenly Father to produce in you character that bears the mark of God's Spirit, and that produces an estimable weight of glory for the renown of Jesus, on the last day.
Cy Fenton retweeted
The “Elon did a Nazi salute” story is the first of many misrepresentations we’re going to see by individual content creators and social media over the next 4 years.
Here’s a video to help people see how the manipulation works.
And how you can help them see.
Cy Fenton retweeted
People never give MacArthur credit for how funny he is. I often lol while listening to his sermons. Here, you have a pastor who has consistently, over decades, warned against putting hope in politics. Yet he could not be further from Moore, French, et al
Cy Fenton retweeted
A number of my good friends and family have been surprised about my decision to support @realDonaldTrump for president. They have been surprised because my political giving history has been mostly to Democrats, my voting registration has typically been Democrat (in NY, you must be registered to the party in order to vote in the primary, and usually the Republican candidate has no chance to win), and many of our philanthropic initiatives have supported issues that are consistent with Democratic priorities.
All of the above said, I have always considered myself to be a centrist and/or moderate, and I have voted for the candidate and supported the issues and policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country. Some have accused me of supporting Trump because doing so will somehow benefit me financially. Fortunately, I do not need any financial benefits as I and my family have well more than we need. I have also committed to give away the substantial majority of my resources at or by the time I am no longer, so I don't consider personal financial benefits in the determination of whom I support for office.
Some have suggested that I am supporting Trump because I am seeking a position in his administration. To be clear, I haven't been offered one and I wouldn't take a job in the administration (I love my job and it is the wrong time in my life to work in an administration). I will, however, do everything else I can to help the president succeed in helping our country and its citizens.
All of the above said, I am an investor who manages funds that own some of the best, principally American, businesses in the world. In a better governed and managed America, these business will do better and increase in value faster. One might therefore argue that being 'long' America is somehow a conflict, so I thought to disclose this potential 'conflict' here.
Some of my friends and family who support @KamalaHarris are ok with my supporting Trump, but don't want me to attempt to convince others to support him. Because I strongly believe that a Trump administration will be better for the country and the world than a Harris administration, I think it is important to share my thinking to the extent it helps others come to the right conclusion.
Three months ago, when I endorsed Trump on the day of the first assassination attempt, I promised to share my thinking about why I came to this conclusion in a future more detailed post. I intend to do so in possibly more than one post, with the first, this one, explaining the actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for my losing total confidence in the administration and the Party.
To be clear, my decision to vote for Trump is not an endorsement of everything he has done or will do because he is an imperfect man. Unlike a marriage or a business partnership where there are effectively unlimited alternatives, in this election, we have only two viable choices. Of the two, I believe that Trump is by far the superior candidate despite his flaws and mistakes he has made in the past.
As always, I welcome your feedback on how I could be wrong and on how the below actions and policies I outline below might actually have been good for America. I have always believed that the best way to get to the truth is to hear the best arguments on all sides of an issue.
While the 33 actions I describe below are those of the Democratic Party and the Biden/Harris administration, they are also the actions and policies that unfortunately our most aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within, and had the ability to take control of our leadership.
These are the 33:
(1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents,
(2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt,
(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
(4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interfere with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects,
(5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail,
(6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense,
(7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and LNG so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence,
(8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world,
(9) educate our elementary children that gender is fluid, something to be chosen by a child, and promote hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries to our youth without regard to the longer-term consequences to their mental and physical health, and allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women's sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities that they would have rightly earned otherwise,
(10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings,
(11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies,
(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,
(13) mandate vaccines that have not been adequately tested nor have their risks been properly considered compared with the potential benefits adjusted for the age and health of the individual, censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world,
(14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives,
(15) use the U.S., state, and local legal systems to attack and attempt to jail, take off the campaign trail, and/or massively fine candidates for the presidency without regard to the merits or precedential issues of the case,
(16) seek to defund the police and promote anti-police rhetoric causing a loss of confidence in those who are charged with protecting us,
(17) use government funds to subsidize auto companies and internet providers with vastly more expensive, dated and/or lower-quality technology when greatly superior and cheaper alternatives are available from companies that are owned and/or managed by individuals not favored by the current administration,
(18) mandate in legislation and otherwise government solutions to problems when the private sector can do a vastly better, faster, and cheaper job,
(19) seek to ban gas-powered cars and stoves without regard to the economic and practical consequences of doing so,
(20) take no serious actions when 45 American citizens are killed by terrorists and 12 are taken hostage,
(21) hold back armaments and weaponry from our most important ally in the Middle East in the midst of their hostage negotiations, hostages who include American citizens who have now been held for more than one year,
(22) eliminate sanctions on one of our most dangerous enemies enabling them to generate $150 billion+ of cash reserves from oil sales, which they can then use to fund terrorist proxy organizations who attack us and our allies. Exchange five American hostages held by Iran for five Iranians plus $6 billion of cash in the worst hostage negotiation in history setting a disastrous and dangerous precedent,
(23) remove known terrorist organizations from the terrorist list so we can provide aid to their people, and allow them to shoot rockets at U.S. assets and military bases with little if any military response from us,
(24) lie to the American people about the cognitive health of the president and accuse those who provide video evidence of his decline of sharing doctored videos and being right wing conspirators,
(25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens,
(26) do nothing about the proliferation of new vaccines that are not properly analyzed for their risk versus the potential benefit for healthy children who are mandated to receive them,
(27) do nothing about the continued exemption from liability for the pharma industry that has led to a proliferation of mandatory vaccines for children without considering the potential cumulative effects of the now mandated 72-shot regime,
(28) convince our minority youth that they are victims of a rigged system and that the American dream is not available to them,
(29) fail to provide adequate Secret Service protection for alternative presidential candidates,
(30) litigate to prevent alternative candidates from getting on the ballot, and take other anti-competitive steps including threatening political consultants who wish to work for alternative candidates for the presidency, and limit the potential media access for other candidates by threatening the networks' future access to the administration and access to 'scoops' if they platform an alternative candidate,
(31) select the Democratic nominee for president in a backroom process by undisclosed party leaders without allowing Americans to choose between candidates in an open primary,
(32) choose an inferior candidate for the presidency when other much more qualified candidates are available and interested to serve,
(33) litigate to make it illegal for states to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and/or residence in order to vote at a time when many Americans have lost confidence in the accuracy and trustworthiness of our voting system.
I welcome your thoughts.