Followed by @RealJamesWoods yet blocked by @therealroseanne .... and how can this be?? The world will be exactly what we make of it. @DataRepublican watches.
TN
Joined January 2012
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Fun fact:
The word democracy does not appear even once in the US Constitution (for VERY real reasons) . . .
but it does in the Communist Manifesto.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
Le mensonge de l’ONU vient de s’effondrer en une semaine sur Haïti.
Pendant 30 ans, l’ONU et la « communauté internationale » ont multiplié les résolutions, les missions (MINUSTAH, MSS, GSF), les rapports, les expertises et les mandats limités.
Résultat : les gangs contrôlent 80-90 % de Port-au-Prince, des milliers de morts par an, plus d’un million de déplacés, un État fantôme. La Force de Suppression des Gangs, autorisée par le Conseil de sécurité, a mis plus d’un an à déployer environ 1 500 hommes avec un impact dérisoire. Les gangs ont même réussi à tendre une embuscade à des techniciens salvadoriens sous mandat ONU.
Bukele arrive. En une dizaine de jours, il déploie plus de 2 000 soldats salvadoriens davantage que toute la force ONU, hors du carcan bureaucratique et des chaînes de commandement multilatérales. Pas de six mois de négociations, pas de rapports de 200 pages, pas de « respect des droits des gangs ». Juste des soldats, des blindés, des hélicoptères, et une volonté claire.
Et soudain, les gangs se cachent. Les habitants sortent dans la rue, crient, célèbrent. Le mot d’ordre est simple : « Se débloque le pays ». Les chefs de gangs appellent l’ONU pour « dialoguer » et demander la médiation. La panique s’installe chez ceux qui terrorisaient le pays depuis des années.
Ce n’est pas un miracle. C’est la démonstration que le problème n’a jamais été « trop complexe pour être résolu ». Le problème, c’était le dogme : que seule l’approche multilatérale molle, procédurale, obsédée par les « droits humains » des criminels, pouvait être légitime. Que la souveraineté, la force décisive et les résultats concrets étaient suspects.
Bukele a déjà prouvé chez lui qu’on pouvait casser les gangs. Il vient de le montrer en Haïti en une semaine, pendant que l’ONU en parlait depuis trois décennies. Les Haïtiens dans la rue l’ont compris plus vite que les experts de New York et de Genève.
La question n’est plus « comment faire ? ».
Elle est : combien de temps encore allons-nous prétendre que les processus internationaux qui perpétuent le chaos sont la seule solution possible ?
A bon entendeur.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
Tu t'appelles Charlotte. 23 ans. Tu étudies à Sciences Po Paris. Tu milites à La France insoumise et tu vas à la techno-parade contre la vie chère ce weekend.
Ton père, Philippe, est ingénieur chez Total, à côté de Bizanos.
Il travaille depuis 36 ans dans l'énergie, a commencé foreur et dirige maintenant le projet "Exploration puits 2035" avant de partir à la retraite.
Philippe te fait un virement tous les mois pour financer ton 2 pièces à 1350€ dans le quartier latin et tes cours de pilates reformer.
Tu as un tote bag « taxez les riches », un iPhone 17 Pro et un abonnement à Mediapart.
Tu considères que les grandes entreprises sont "une catastrophe sociale et écologique". Tu as d'ailleurs écrit un mémoire de 42 pages sur les violences symboliques du capitalisme.
Philippe qui se lève à 6h depuis 1987, te paye tes études grâce ses à anciennes stocks-options chez Shell.
À Sciences Po, tu as enfin rencontré des jeunes qui partagent tes convictions. Leurs parents sont avocats, médecins, hauts fonctionnaires ou dirigeants.
Vous avez fondé un collectif de "house music" en résistance au néolibéralisme.
Vous vous réunissez chaque jeudi dans un café du 11e pour discuter de la lutte des classes autour d'une bouteille de vin naturel orange à 38€.
Tu n'as jamais travaillé dans une usine, mais tu connais parfaitement les conditions de vie du prolétariat grâce à tes stages à l'ONU et au PNUD trouvés par les contacts de ta mère Christine à L'Oréal.
Tu expliques à ton père que les grandes entreprises exploitent les travailleurs.
Il te propose de venir rencontrer les techniciens de son usine pendant les vacances. Tu peux pas car t'as anniversaire de Julie à Santorin.
À Noël, tu rentres au "pays".
Ton père vient te chercher à la gare de Dax avec sa nouvelle Tesla.
Pendant le trajet, tu lui expliques que les cadres supérieurs sont complètement déconnectés des réalités populaires et que Elon Musk est la lie de l'humanité.
Philippe sourit nerveusement.
De retour dans ta maisonnée de famille, Philippe demande si ta recherche de stage en cinéma militant avance en te proposant du foie gras et du serrano-manchego.
Tu lui dis que tu es vegan depuis cette année et qu'il est insensible à la cruauté animale.
Philippe se sert un verre de Jurançon, s'asseoit sur son fauteuil Roche Bobois et te demande si tu es pour la taxation de l'héritage à 100%.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
Josip Broz Tito built Yugoslavia's socialist economy on a supposedly clever premise: worker self-management. Factories would be run by elected workers' councils rather than central planners in Belgrade. Western intellectuals practically wept with admiration. Here, finally, was socialism with a human face.
But the math never worked.
Worker-managed firms systematically chose higher wages over capital reinvestment, because workers capturing today's income had no personal stake in machinery that would outlast their tenure. The incentive to maintain and expand productive capital simply vanished.
Yugoslav firms borrowed heavily from state banks to cover the gap, and those banks lent freely because the political cost of bankruptcy was too high for any official to absorb. Inflation ran at 30% annually through most of the 1980s, eventually hitting 2,665% in 1989. You didn't need to theorize about the collapse; you could read it on the price tags.
Tito papered over the structural rot with Western loans. Yugoslavia accumulated $20 billion in foreign debt by his death in 1980. That borrowing bought political legitimacy, but not productive capacity. When global interest rates spiked under Volcker's Fed, the debt service alone crushed the economy.
The decentralization of Tito's model also contained a fatal political logic. Each of Yugoslavia's six republics developed its own economic fiefdom, protecting regional industries from competition with other regions. Six separate planning bureaucracies fought over the same shrinking pie. Slovenia and Croatia, the most productive republics, grew resentful of transfers flowing south and west.
Property rights remained collectivized throughout. No worker actually owned his share of the firm, which meant he couldn't sell it, pledge it, or use it to signal genuine economic preferences. Prices carried noise instead of information. Capital flowed toward political favor rather than toward producers with better ideas.
Socialism doesn't work, whether it's centralized or decentralized.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
My party got crushed last night and you know what? I’m not threatening to flee to Canada or trashing my country, because unlike the left, I see my country as more than a vehicle to political power.
This is my home. And I’ll never stop fighting for it.
This is EXACTLY how we got Nazis, Maoists, Stalinists - and how we are very likely to lose Western society if we don't stand up.
Working at Oculus would have been an utter waste of my time except for one thing.
While I was there, I realized what's wrong with leftists.
Not that they have been programmed, that's obvious. Not why they have been programmed. For power, that's obvious, too.
But how they have been programmed.
The exact method that their moral compass has been destroyed works like this:
Target a bunch of people with very few deeds and accomplishments, such as young people or incompetent people, or incompetent young people.
Create for them an environment where they are rewarded with moral approval, not for what they do, but for believing certain ideas.
The ideas don't have to be outrageous, or absurd, or have anything to do with what you actually need them to believe. In fact, it's better to start with something innocuous.
Why? Because the goal isn't to install those beliefs at all. The goal is to repeat this process until you create a person who measures his moral worth by what he believes, not what he does.
Keep at this until you have created a mass of people who not only reward themselves with a feeling of moral superiority for believing the right things, but who will reward each other for believing orthodox things, and who will compete with each other, not to do the most good, but to have the most orthodox beliefs.
Now, change one of the propositions you have programmed them with to a slightly more radical version of itself, and hold this up as a more correct version of the old belief, which has been newly discovered by scholarly investigations into culture and moral philosophy.
Sit back, watch, and give them a few weeks to compete with each other to adopt the new belief, and to condemn the "evil" of anyone who believes the old belief, the very thing they believed last month.
Repeat this process until they are used to rapidly changing their entire belief system in response to an external cue.
Congratulations, you have a population of entirely programmable people whose moral compass is not just broken, but entirely non-existent.
They don't care what any person in front of them actually does. Only that he believe the orthodox thing, which they just learned about in last week's memo.
They are willing to do anything, so long as it is done in support of their current belief system, which can be replaced whenever it's convenient to do so.
They are willing to burn down an entire city with no qualms whatsoever if they are doing it in support of the idea that black lives matter.
They are willing to murder a man in front of his children, and it doesn't matter if his actions were entirely peaceful and good, because all that matters to them is whether he believes the correct things or not.
And a man who builds cheap spaceflight for the human race, develops viable electric cars to save the environment, restores voices to the voiceless, and plans, for his next trick, to heal the blind... well, all those are deeds, so none of them matter. The only thing that matters is that he told people to vote republican once, which is wrongthink.
So what you have a horde of communist zombies, who can be steered to shuffle in any direction and attack the living, eat their brains, and turn them into more zombies.
Once someone becomes one of the zombies, you can't cure him, because a moral compass can only be repaired by understanding the consequences of actions in a new way... and they don't care about actions or consequences. They only care about beliefs, and not about consequences at all.
Their moral compasses aren't just broken. They are absent. There's nothing to repair.
You have to understand that the zombies are zombies now.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
Amazing how quickly “I’m With Her” goes out the window the minute the woman has her own opinion
Demonic glee this girl has.
Godspeed, Christian.
At @UTSA for Pick Up the Mic, a student read a poem celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk with such glee, then told me I was brave to be out here without my neck covered.
I told her I’d pray for her.
This is the climate. We pick up the mic anyway.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
In 1835, a Young French Aristocrat Predicted the Exact Bureaucratic Trap Threatening the West Today
Before the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville ever set foot in America, radical tyranny had already scarred his family. During the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, left-wing Jacobin zealots guillotined his great-grandfather and threw his newlywed parents into a Paris dungeon. Waiting daily for the executioner's blade, his father’s hair turned snow-white at the age of twenty-one. Only the sudden fall of Robespierre spared his parents' lives by a matter of hours, allowing Alexis to be born a decade later.
Raised in the shadow of state terror, Tocqueville became obsessed with a single question: why did the French pursuit of utopian equality end in a bloodbath, while the American Revolution produced the freest, most prosperous republic on earth? In 1831, at just twenty-five years old, he convinced the French government to send him to the United States under the mundane bureaucratic cover of inspecting American prisons. Once he arrived, he spent nine months traveling seven thousand miles by stagecoach, steamboat, and horseback to study the soul of the American citizen.
His observations became Democracy in America, one of the most brilliant political analyses ever written. Tocqueville realized that American greatness rested on three pillars: fierce individual self-reliance, decentralized local communities, and a strong foundation of religious morality. Whenever Americans saw a problem, they formed a local group and fixed it themselves rather than begging a distant politician for help.
Yet as he studied the young republic, Tocqueville foresaw a chilling vulnerability. He realized that a proud, armed citizenry would always fight back against an obvious military dictator. Therefore, future tyrants would abandon whips and chains in favor of welfare, cradle-to-grave safety, and endless administrative rules. They would conquer free citizens by offering to manage their lives in the name of compassion.
Describing this future nanny state in 1840, Tocqueville wrote a passage that reads like a headline from today:
"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate... It seeks to keep them in perpetual childhood. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd... till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Tocqueville called this system "soft despotism." Nearly two centuries ago, he understood that when citizens trade personal responsibility for government security, the state gladly reduces them to dependent children. Every bloated regulatory agency, speech code, and entitlement program today operates on the exact blueprint he exposed. Liberty rarely perishes overnight in a violent coup; it erodes quietly when a free people allow bureaucrats to become their shepherds.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
Francisco d'Anconia's speech on money in Atlas Shrugged is the most economically literate passage in twentieth-century fiction.
The speech runs about 2,000 words in the novel. Francisco delivers it at a party, surrounded by parasites who just declared money the root of all evil. He corrects them with surgical precision. Money is not the root of evil. It is the tool that makes voluntary exchange possible, the ledger of honest production, the only mechanism by which you trade your mind's output for someone else's.
The core claim is this: money requires production. You cannot print your way to wealth any more than you can vote yourself a harvest. Every dollar bill in your wallet represents a claim on someone's actual labor, actual material, actual time. The moment a government prints currency without corresponding production, it dilutes every existing claim. It robs you quietly, without a gun visible in the room.
Francisco puts it cleanly: "Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them." That sentence alone dismantles three centuries of mercantilist confusion. Wealth is production. Currency is merely the signal that coordinates its exchange.
The speech also destroys the "love of money is greed" cliché. Francisco distinguishes between those who earn money through trade and those who acquire it through force or fraud. A man who builds a railroad and charges willing passengers operates on an entirely different moral plane from a lobbyist who gets a competitor regulated out of existence. Rand drew that line in 1957. Washington D.C. has spent the intervening 69 years blurring it.
What the speech predicts is decay. When a society starts treating producers as servants of non-producers, capital goes quiet. Factories don't get built. Entrepreneurs stop announcing their plans. You see this in every hyperinflationary episode, from Weimar Germany in 1923 to Zimbabwe in 2008 to Argentina today, still fighting inflation. Production retreats when the rewards of production get expropriated.
Read the speech slowly. Exchange requires two parties who each gain something. Force produces one winner and one loser, and eventually the loser stops playing. The whole global economic order rests on which model you choose to enforce.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
In 1952, an English teacher named Cecil Dormand secretly paid for a dirt-poor 11-year-old to take a drama course.
He never told him and the boy didn’t find out until decades later.
By then, he was a knight, that little boy’s name was Patrick Stewart.
He was born into a poor family in Mirfield, a small mill town in Yorkshire and his father came home from World War II a violent man, and he was violent toward Patrick’s mother.
Young Patrick learned exactly when to step between his father’s fist and his mother.
An English teacher put a copy of Shakespeare in his hand and told him to get up and perform.
He never stopped and left school at 15.
By 19 he was completely bald... most agencies told him he'd never make it because of that.
In 1987, the LA Times called him an “unknown British Shakespearean actor” when he was cast as Captain Picard.
Then he became one of the most famous faces on Earth.
You’ve probably heard that part.
Here’s the part you haven’t:
He spent decades as a patron of Refuge, sheltering women and children from domestic violence.
But he never stopped trying to understand his father.
He dug up a 1940 newspaper clipping that said his dad had come home with severe shell shock.
He went to France and walked the ground where his father’s unit was pinned down under bombing for hours.
He learned his father had PTSD, and nobody ever helped him.
So Patrick became an ambassador for Combat Stress, a charity that helps veterans.
In 2013, a young woman at a Texas convention told him she was a survivor of domestic violence.
He asked, “My dear, are you okay?”
Then he hopped off the stage, held her, and told her: “You never have to go through that again, you’re safe now.”
At Dragon Con, a Make-A-Wish girl dressed as Spock came to meet him.
2,000 people were waiting for him to speak... he sat down and talked with her for 15 minutes, making all of them wait.
He told her that since they were friends now, whenever she saw him on screen she could wave and say, “Hello Patrick.”
After 9/11, he felt helpless, so he brought his one-man A Christmas Carol back to Broadway for a full week of charity shows.
He played every character himself and donated every cent.
In 2019 he did it again, and every dollar went to feeding hungry New Yorkers.
In 2017, he fostered a pit bull named Ginger, who had been rescued from a dogfighting ring.
She was his first dog in more than 50 years.
He couldn’t bring her home to England, so he found her a family.
Then he kept fostering more.
When he said he was done with Star Trek so many people told him the show had gotten them through the hardest times of their lives.
So he wanted to see if Picard could do it one more time.
Rest in Peace, Sir Patrick 🖖
Michael McCroskey retweeted
Tim Burchett would make a great U.S. Senator out of Tennessee.
I support this.
Y'all come back now, ya hear?
My coworker spent one year in Tennessee.
He came back to Tokyo two months ago.
He is not the same man.
He says "y'all" in meetings. To our boss.
He holds the door for the entire floor. Twelve people. Every morning.
He asked the convenience store clerk how her day was going. She had to sit down.
He calls every man "bud." Including the CEO.
He refuses to describe anything under three hours away as "far."
He waves at drivers who let him cross. One driver waved back and almost hit a pole.
Last week, he told a junior employee, "I'm proud of you."
She went to the restroom and cried for ten minutes.
We thought it would wear off.
It didn't. It's spreading.
Three people in accounting now say "y'all."
The junior employee holds the door.
The convenience store clerk asks HIM how his day is going.
Tennessee, I don't know what you did to him.
Please do it to the rest of us.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
I love how Ilhan Omar married her brother, Elissa Slotkin is calling for the imprisonment of Trump admin officials, and Deep State bureaucrats are planning a coup, and all the Democrats can respond with is “Lindsey Graham was gay.”
Michael McCroskey retweeted
🚨🚨 THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK / THE DEMOCRACY FILES: A PRIMER 🚨
I will be using this thread to track all drops, so bookmark it.
I spent most of yesterday backing everything (now 312 gigabytes) up in various sources and getting the materials out to others. I also produced an AI video (below) to explain the whole thing to others are not on 𝕏 - feel free to distribute.
Here's the primer:
USAID, the foreign aid agency, had a democracy office. Inside the agency, it was called DRG.
Officially, DRG administered "democracy assistance." They'd go inside countries they thought were sliding into authoritarianism and help the opposition there. That assistance included election monitoring, judicary support, independent media, and civil society building.
You may have heard the term "color revolution." The model comes from Serbia in 2000, where trained student activists brought down Milosevic with the help of Western governments, after sustained protests. With the help of USAID's democracy office, this model was implemented in many other countries to topple governments: Georgia's "Rose Revolution" in 2003, Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" in 2004, and many more.
Then last year, DOGE shut down USAID. But the USAID democracy office didn't stop. They formed a group called the Democracy Renewal Group, the same initials as their office (USAID Democracy, Human Rights, Governance). Their goal: apply their own playbook to the United States itself.
This goal became a plan, called Renew American Democracy (RAD). It invoked the "4 B's" framework. Block - use lawfare and protests to make life harder for the Trump administration. Bridge & Belong - control dialogue and win people over. The final and most important B is Build. Build means redesigning the American government itself, and the crisis is the opening.
In their own words:
"We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment." - Danielle Reiff, DRG lead.
Calls show DRG working alongside DSA on ideas of creating a different government, one that does away with the Constitution itself.
DRG does not run the Block operations. They hand it to UDA, the United Democracy Alliance. One organizer calls it a "huge galaxy": lawsuits, street protests, non-cooperation. They list No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, and many other mega-activist NGOs among their members.
Another organizer calls UDA Erica Chenoweth's project. Chenoweth is the Harvard professor behind the three-and-half-percent rule of regime change: get that share of a country's populace onto the streets, and historically, the movement wins.
The UDA is very "hush-hush." They have no website, no roster, no filings.
Then come the red lines: things the Trump administration could do, such as calling the Insurrection Act on protesters, that would mean that the federal government, in their words, "crosses the threshold into illegitimacy." Nobody voted on those lines. There was no public debate. These red lines were developed within secretive working groups, and in a paper addressed to governors and staff.
In the words of Reiff/DRG:
"So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a Constitutional crisis, like everyone's already pre-organized. And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after tomorrow plan."
Cross a line, and the paper's options include states refusing to lend their resources to federal officials, and governors convening what it calls a "Third Continential Congress."
Running the UDA's Insurrection Act working group: Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET) of National Security Leaders of America (NSL4A). NSL4A is also credited with operationalizing UDA, the blocking operations. NSL4A consists of about 1,600 ex-officers, spies, diplomats. They're turning red lines into indicators and running a situation room to monitor them throughout the midterms and beyond.
The NSL4A's lawyers told them to stop recording meetings in case of subpoenas. But the rest of the network continued to record. DRG works in conjunction with Renew to Thrive (R2T), which ended up accidentally publishing 400+ calls and thousands of documents. These calls and documents were never meant for our eyes, but it's them, on tape.
Thousands of NGOs and billions of dollars are involved in this endeavor. Most of them believe they're saving democracy. The problem is that people who spent their careers deciding when other countries' governments had lost their legitimacy wrote that test for ours, in private, and planned for what comes after.
Who decides when your government is legitimate?
Michael McCroskey retweeted
The Useful Idiot: A Natural History
Specimen: Western, educated, well-meaning.
Habitat: universities, NGOs, quality newspapers, dinner parties where the wine is good and the opinions are better.
Status: abundant.
The useful idiot is not exactly stupid. This is the first and most important thing to understand. Stupidity would be a defense. The more precise diagnosis is what we in Poland call pół-inteligent – the half-wit. Not the bottom of the intelligence distribution, which is too obviously lost to be useful. Not the genuine top, which tends to develop the inconvenient habit of following arguments wherever they actually lead. The sweet spot: smart enough to absorb a complex ideological framework, to deploy its vocabulary with confidence, to feel the social rewards of appearing sophisticated – but not quite sharp enough to interrogate the framework itself. Enough horsepower to run the program. Not enough to question who wrote it. The pół-inteligent is the useful idiot’s technical specification. And the specimen is typically convinced – this is crucial – that it is among the most independent thinkers in the room. The delusion is important. Remove it and the whole architecture collapses.
The species emerges in conditions of comfort and safety, which is why it proliferates in precisely the societies it works to undermine. It requires a baseline of security – enough that the consequences of being wrong about power remain abstract, theoretical, someone else’s problem. Eastern Europeans, who paid in flesh and decades for the privilege of understanding what the useful idiot enables, are able to see this as naivety so profound it becomes a moral failure. Not innocence. Culpable ignorance dressed as virtue.
Observe the specimen in its natural habitat. It discovers The Cause sometime between the ages of 18 and 24, usually at an institution of higher education, usually through social contagion rather than solitary reasoning. The Cause varies by generation – Soviet sympathies, third-worldism, postcolonial theory, current-year identity grievance – but the structure is invariant: a clean division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, a designated villain class, and a role for the specimen as enlightened ally. The emotional reward is immediate and substantial. Belonging. The claim of moral clarity. The warm superiority of the awake among the sleeping.
What the specimen does not perceive – what it is structurally prevented from perceiving – is that it is being used. Lenin coined the phrase, and he meant it with cold precision. The useful idiot is not a partner in the project. It is infrastructure. It provides legitimacy laundering: translating raw power-seeking into the language of justice, making the predatory appear compassionate, and doing so with enough genuine conviction to be convincing. The cynics who run the operation cannot do this themselves – cynicism is legible. True believers are required. The useful idiot’s sincerity is its primary value to those who deploy them. And so Lenin used them – and so does Islam now.
The specimen’s lifecycle has a melancholy third act that it rarely anticipates. When the project advances far enough – when the institutions are captured, when the Overton window has moved sufficiently – the useful idiot becomes inconvenient. It knows too much about the earlier, more honest phase. It has friendships across the new fault lines. It retains, sometimes, inconvenient principles from when principles were the point. The revolution, as it industrializes, prefers newer models: fully formed apparatchiks with no memory of idealism to complicate their loyalty. The useful idiot is retired, marginalized, occasionally denounced by the very movement it spent decades building. It dies puzzled. It never quite understands what happened.
We've all seen the very surprised lady in Paris...
History is littered with these figures. Western intellectuals who defended the Soviet project through the show trials, the Holodomor, the Gulag – and who spent the rest of their lives in various stages of retrospective rationalization. Fellow travelers who called Solidarity troublemakers, who thought the dissidents were exaggerating, who trusted the official version over the testimony of people who had lived it. Their names are recorded. Their counterparts today are producing content, signing letters, and occupying endowed chairs.
The useful idiot is not the enemy. It is the weapon. Understanding the difference matters – because the weapon can, in principle, be disarmed. It requires only one thing: contact with reality at sufficient intensity and duration to override the social rewards of the delusion. This happens. Some recover. Eastern European experience – the unignorable, undeniable, lived reality of what the project actually produces – has cured more than a few.
The cure is not pleasant. It requires admitting that one’s most cherished moral identity was constructed by people who found it useful. That the independence one prided oneself on was curated. That the dinner party consensus was not wisdom but a lie. Most cannot make this admission. The identity investment is too great. They double down instead – find new framings, new rationalisations, new ways to explain why this time is different, why the critics are the real problem.
They remain, to the end, useful.
The look of someone discovering reality.
This young woman stood in front of a smashed shop window in Paris last night and said the smashing and looting are not what the cause is about. She still believes the people who broke the glass share her cause. They don’t. They have their own.
This is not how she imagined it. It has a name: cognitive dissonance – the pain of watching reality contradict what you were told to believe.
She learned it last night, in pain. Millions of others will learn it in the coming months – the same way. Because reality doesn’t need the media. It comes through the window.
We were right all along.👇🏻
And they were wrong.
So will they admit it now, and let go of their delusions? Or will they double down?
In 1954, an American psychologist infiltrated a small cult that had predicted the end of the world on a precise date. The date came. Nothing happened. Did the believers give up? The most committed did the opposite: they started preaching harder than ever.
That is what most true believers will do. Admitting the error would cost them their friends, their careers and their image of themselves. So they will blame the police, the "far right," the economy, the weather – anything but the idea.
For them to change their minds, their whole system will have to collapse – the salaries, the institutions, the friends who all think alike. Belief survives as long as the group survives. We have seen it before: in 1989, when the system fell, Poland’s communists woke up one morning as social democrats – and a good number of them as businessmen.
But the believers are not the audience. The people watching are. Reality rarely converts the priests. It converts the congregation – one broken window at a time.
And yesterday was much more than a broken window. A day like that must have opened the eyes of millions. Events like that change history.
The priests will keep preaching. The congregation has already started to leave.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
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.
She voted for it.
She welcomed them.
Faced with the encore, she begs them to stop. In her heart she knows they will not.
Everything she believed. That they were French like her, fighting for the same cause. That the ones who warned her were full of hate. That she would be safe.
It all falls apart in this moment. She is terrified of what comes next. In her heart she knows.
Only remigration can save her.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
This video is currently all over social media. Many are expressing sorrow for this woman and sadness at her outrage. My take on it is different. The look you see on her face is not outrage…it’s realisation. It is the look of a white, liberal lefty woman suddenly realising that her entire worldview is/was totally wrong. That what she had spent her life arrogantly portraying as her higher morality and understanding was in fact “suicidal empathy” as described by @GadSaad and that empathy was going to destroy her entire society.
Michael McCroskey retweeted
RE: The Prosecution of Ilhan Omar
There are two competing storylines regarding the prosecution of Ilhan Omar. One such storyline is being peddled by the Democrat/Media Complex. The other storyline is one that same media will never report. I’ll let you decide which storyline is which.
Storyline #1: An inspiring immigrant woman escaped from poverty, genocide and Communist rule in the poorest nation on Earth, made her own way in the United States and rose to national prominence as a Congresswoman. However, because she is a vocal supporter for social justice, an evil Republican President/fascist dictator has targeted her for abusive prosecution on trumped-up, nonexistent charges. Now she stands for oppressed Americans everywhere as she fights the power.
Storyline #2: The wealthy, privileged daughter of a genocidal, Communist Somali army colonel who had been trained in the Soviet Union fled to America with her father so the two could escape torture, imprisonment and execution after the father’s genocidal, Communist regime leader was overthrown. Upon arrival in America, the father and the daughter both committed immigration fraud and illegally obtained U.S. citizenship (or never obtained U.S. citizenship, the story is unclear). The daughter then rose to prominence with the backing of George Soros and his massive network of NGOs and PACs, was elected to Congress, was controlled by Soros and other Neo-Marxist groups who may well have held her illegal alien status over her head to manipulate her, while she maintained close contact with organized crime lords inside Minnesota’s Somali community. The bottom line is that it seems an illegal alien with genocidal Communist roots was illegally elected to Congress where she has spent years promoting Communism, organized crime and destruction of our Constitution and our national institutions. This reads like a Tom Clancy novel, but it’s all true and is one of the worst scandal in U.S. history. Now, finally, a President with iron will is holding her and her network of Communist thieves to account for their crimes.
You decide which storyline is true and which is false.