Constitutional libertarian promoting constitutional government from first principles.
The West
Joined December 2008
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This is how I’ve voted for judges for decades. It is sound counsel.
Ballot time is coming near and I always get many people asking me-
“How do I know how to vote for judges?”
I have same advice every time:
On retention voting: when in doubt vote them OUT.
The reason you don’t how to vote is because judges hide behind the “nonpartisan” shield.
Just because someone runs in a nonpartisan race doesn’t mean they don’t have to be vetted!!
On contested races: ask the candidates these 3 questions:
1. When applying Supreme Court decisions, if a case is relevant to your issue, how do you decide if you will apply that decision?
- choose the candidate who gets closest to this answer: “first I will make sure that decision is consistent with the Constitution…”
2. When do you not have to apply Supreme Court Precedent?
Answer “when it is not relevant to the issue at hand or it is inconsistent with the Constitution.
3. When do Supreme Court decisions become the law of the land?
It’s a trick question- NEVER.
These are very basic constitutional questions and ought to be easily answered. Unfortunately decades of misinformation and miseducation complicated these questions for the many misinformed.
Any system, institution, or person who seeks “solutions” through concentrating and amassing power is against liberty and its natural byproduct: prosperity.
Support those who wish to dilute and distribute power.
I believe the American Founding Fathers understood something fundamental about human nature: concentrated power inevitably threatens liberty.
They designed the Constitution to prevent tyranny, through the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual freedom.
Today, I believe we’re witnessing a civilizational struggle with two possible outcomes:
The end of the empire of lies and communist-style bureaucratic hegemony. A return to individual liberty, limited government, and the principles on which America was founded.
The rise of an Orwellian system straight out of 1984. A few years of increasingly centralized power, censorship, and bureaucratic control, followed by self-destruction and probably the end of humanity itself.
The irony is that even the bureaucrats running this system have every long-term incentive to see it dismantled.
Yet they’re too blind, too arrogant, and too convinced of their own superiority to realize they’re engineering their own downfall.
Patrick Henry retweeted
If we want the world to get better, we'll have to accept one thing: some people really are exceptional, and they really do create value.
I've explained how the system works. Now I'm going to tell you why Elon Musk is under attack.
It isn't because of his tweets or his positions. It runs deeper than that. Elon Musk is under attack because he exists.
In a world built on egalitarianism, the exceptional individual is an anomaly. Worse, he's a threat. Left free, he creates gaps: he produces more value, he moves faster, he climbs higher. Every gap he creates proves that the egalitarian project rests on a lie, the lie that we're all interchangeable.
Kurt Vonnegut saw it back in 1961 in a chilling short story, Harrison Bergeron. In an America made perfectly equal, the strong are weighed down, the beautiful are masked, and the most intelligent have their thoughts scrambled by piercing noises so that nobody rises above anybody. That isn't some distant dystopia. It's the ultimate logic of this system. If equality of outcome is the goal, then excellence is the enemy.
Here's a truth almost nobody dares to say: humanity moves forward through geniuses.
Look across the centuries. Aristotle founds logic. Gutenberg prints and sets knowledge free. Copernicus and Galileo move the Earth. Descartes and Pascal give reason its method. Newton writes the laws of the universe. Pasteur defeats microbes. Darwin explains life. Turing invents computing. Every time, one mind, a single one, tips history over.
In 1905, special relativity was in the air, and others were getting close. But general relativity, without Einstein, we might still be waiting for. And the digital revolution as we lived it, from the personal computer to a phone in every pocket, wouldn't look the way it does without Steve Jobs.
We almost always admire these geniuses once they're dead. Galileo had to recant on his knees. Semmelweis, who understood that washing hands was enough to save mothers, died in an asylum, mocked by his peers. Turing, who helped win the war, was convicted and then chemically castrated. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime.
And then there's Nikola Tesla. The man who invented the electric world we still live in: the alternating current that powers our homes, the induction motor, the foundations of wireless transmission. He dreamed of sending energy freely across the planet. When J.P. Morgan stopped funding him, his Wardenclyffe tower was abandoned, then demolished. He ended his life alone, buried in debt, in a New York hotel room, feeding pigeons. He was found dead in January 1943, at 86. The man who electrified the world died with almost nothing.
The irony of history: his name is now written on millions of cars, the cars of the company Elon Musk took to the top. As if history wanted to pay its debt.
The system has always hated those who surpassed it, and it only celebrates them once they can no longer bother it.
It's hard to accept, but it's reality. It doesn't mean geniuses have more rights than anyone else. Before the law, before justice, and in their dignity, all people are equal, and they must stay that way. It means that some individuals, through their talent, their courage, and their risk-taking, create a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more value than ordinary people. And they don't keep that value for themselves. All of humanity benefits from it.
Elon Musk is one of those men.
He revived space exploration when governments had turned away from it. He forced the entire auto industry into a new century. With Starlink, he brought the internet to the most isolated corners of the planet. Every time, he was told it was impossible. Every time, he risked everything, and every time, he won.
He is the first person in history to cross a trillion dollars. People want him to apologize for it. I say the opposite: he deserves it, and he deserves much more. The value he's creating for humanity, with reusable rockets, the electrification of the world, and the road to Mars, is beyond any comparison with what he owns.
His fortune wasn't taken from anyone. It was created where there was nothing.
That's exactly what the system can't forgive him for.
In their worldview, nobody should be above anybody. Success is suspect, wealth is theft, excellence is an injustice to be corrected. Elon Musk is living, dazzling, unbearable proof that their model is wrong: a free man with talent and courage can create more value than all their administrations combined. As long as he exists, their story doesn't hold. So he has to be destroyed. The lawsuits, the investigations, the press campaigns, and the regulatory threats all come from there.
But here's what makes me deeply optimistic.
The system is cracking. It bet that people would end up preferring equality in mediocrity to freedom in excellence, and it lost. People saw the rockets come back and land. They saw what a single man could accomplish when nobody stopped him from acting. And they understood they had been lied to.
What's coming is a new world, built on real meritocracy. Not a world where the same people inherit the same seats, but a world where everyone gets to play. The child of a factory worker, a farmer, or an immigrant can get in the game, and if he's good, he rises fast. Very fast. As high as his talent takes him.
The equality worth defending is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. The first sets geniuses free. The second smothers them.
We think it's normal for a soccer player to earn a fortune because he's exceptional with a ball. We think it's suspicious for an engineer to get rich by bringing rockets back from space. The world will be better the day kids have Elon Musk posters on their bedroom walls, the way they have posters of Messi and Ronaldo.
Humanity never moved forward thanks to people who wanted nobody to stand out. It moved forward thanks to those who dared to outrun everyone.
Elon Musk is one of them. And this time, history won't wait until he's dead to recognize it.
🤖 Made with AI
Patrick Henry retweeted
Once you see the world through this lens, a lot of things that looked random suddenly make sense.
You understand why Macron recognized a Palestinian state at the UN. Not a state with borders it controls, a single government, or elections. A symbol. A gesture for domestic consumption, performed on the world stage. That's the politics of posture over reality, the obłuda I described earlier: what matters isn't what is true on the ground, it's the narrative you get to emit.
You understand why Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France's hard left and a man trained in Trotskyist organizations in his youth, made Gaza the center of his politics and refused for months to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Look at the mechanism. He doesn't address French Muslims as individuals with their own jobs, families, ambitions and disagreements. He addresses them as a bloc. A mass to be mobilized. That's the collectivist reflex in its purest form: you don't speak to people, you herd categories. Yesterday the proletariat, today identity blocs. The individual disappears every time.
You understand why Zohran Mamdani built his rise on the Democratic Socialists of America. The mayor of New York isn't just a progressive Democrat. He's a DSA member, and DSA doesn't hide what it is: an organization that openly calls itself socialist and treats the Democratic Party as a vehicle. His campaign promised a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses. Every one of those ideas has the same shape: the individual steps back, the city steps in. The price is set by the planner, the store is run by the planner, and voters are addressed as categories, tenants, riders, communities, rather than as free people who can build something of their own.
And Mamdani didn't come out of nowhere. The same movement helped send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Bernie Sanders spent decades making the word "socialist" respectable in American politics. Different faces, same software. The lie isn't that they hide their ideology. It's the promise attached to it: that you can freeze prices without killing supply, that the state can run what entrepreneurs run, that someone else will always pay. That promise has been tested on every continent. It has never been kept.
And you understand the most important thing: collectivists need chaos.
This isn't a metaphor. It's their own doctrine. Lenin's strategy in 1914 was to turn the war between nations into a civil war inside them. The Soviet Union spent decades arming and funding movements across the Middle East and pushed through the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The KGB had an entire doctrine, "active measures," dedicated to amplifying every division inside Western societies. A stable, prosperous, confident society is the collectivist's worst enemy. Chaos is his natural habitat.
Why? Because chaos is the perfect justification. It justifies emergency powers. It justifies more state. It turns citizens into frightened masses looking for a shepherd. It replaces individual judgment with tribal loyalty. A society at peace with itself asks the planner: what do we need you for?
Look at the two great conflicts of our time through this lens.
Russia's war in Ukraine was launched by a former KGB officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the century. A man formed in the exact school that treated chaos as a weapon. He doesn't just wage war on Ukraine. He wages it on Western cohesion, feeding every division he can find in our elections, our streets, our feeds.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the perfect fuel for Western politics. It splits every campus, every party, every city. It lets politicians like Mélenchon build an electoral base on permanent outrage. And for everyone who lives off that outrage, a real peace would be a disaster. Ask yourself honestly: who in our political class actually has an interest in this conflict ending?
That's the pattern. The people who live off chaos never solve it. They manage it, they feed it, they posture around it. Because a solved problem is a lost lever.
Freedom produces order from the bottom up: people who own things, build things, trade with each other and have something to lose. Collectivism produces disorder from the bottom up and then sells you order from the top down.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
A lot of people are trying to explain the Epstein affair through antisemitism. They're looking at the wrong axis.
Bill Gates isn't Jewish. He met Epstein several times, years after Epstein's conviction. If your theory is ethnic, it collapses on the very first name.
I read the Epstein affair through a different lens: the oldest war in human history. The individual versus the mass. Private property, freedom to build, freedom to grow, versus the mind that looks at humanity and sees livestock to be managed.
Look at what Epstein actually believed. He told scientists he wanted to "seed the human race with his DNA" by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch. In emails released this year, he argued that racial gaps in test scores were genetic and pushed genetic editing as the answer. He mused to an AI researcher that "maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation."
Notice what's missing from all of it: the individual. Only populations, stocks, gene pools, numbers to optimize. Humans as raw material for a design drawn up by someone who considers himself above them.
That's not a Jewish trait. It's not even a left or right trait in the electoral sense. It's the mental structure at the core of Marxism: the conviction that an enlightened few have the right to engineer humanity from above, and that individuals are just inputs. Marx wanted to remake man through the economy. The eugenicists wanted to remake him through breeding. The transhumanists want to remake him through technology. Same posture. The planner and the herd.
Communism never died. It changed vocabulary. From the Politburo to the Davos panel. From the five-year plan to the global roadmap. From "the new Soviet man" to "optimizing the species." And the people who hold this view don't need to be cynical. They sincerely believe they're the shepherds.
Which brings us to the AI era. Bill Gates said on national TV that within a decade humans won't be needed "for most things." Think about what that sentence assumes. That a human being's value is their output. That once a machine can produce it, you're surplus. That someone, somewhere, will decide what you're still allowed to do.
That's the real fault line of this century. Not Jews versus non-Jews. Not even left versus right. Collectivists versus free people. Those who see humanity as a mass to be managed, and those who see each human being as sovereign: owner of their body, their work, their property, their future.
AI can go two ways. It can be the greatest tool of individual empowerment ever built, letting one person do what used to take an entire company. Or it can be the ultimate instrument of the planner, the dream every central committee ever had, finally within reach.
Epstein is not an anomaly. He's a symptom. The question isn't who he was connected to by blood. The question is who shares his view of humanity.
Choose your side.
Patrick Henry 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?
Every historic building of note in Europe should be carefully photographed and 3D scanned as soon as possible.
They may not get rebuilt, but we’ll at least preserve them in some form for posterity.
The TL;DR (but you really should read it):
Just because something needs doing doesn’t mean the government should be doing or paying for it.
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.
But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
One of the foundational challenges of our day is a lack of agreement about the purposes of our federal government and that it’s ok for it to expand its powers the Constitution be damned.
Patrick Henry retweeted
I really need people who are considering sitting out this election remembering what was going on during the Biden Admin and realizing that going back isn't an option.
I call myself a “constitutional libertarian”. This definition means an originalist interpretation of the constitution which includes a very limited federal government.
From this foundation, the Republican platform is problematic. Enough so, that, from the safety of living in a red state, I rarely vote for the Republican. I find the candidate who most closely aligns with my views and vote for him/her knowing that they have no chance of being elected.
I’ve also evaluated the Democratic Party platform. It is fundamentally anti-constitutional. A candidate that supports the Democratic platform will never get my vote. The Democrats not distancing themselves from the DSA makes them complicit with communists.
If you live in a deep red district, vote 3rd party. Everyone else, vote Republican because the alternative are the communists.
Those are your choices. The Stupid Party or communists.
Important reading for everyone.
At least the Right is being honest with themselves about the problem with Woke Right. The Left is still embracing totalitarianism.
The observation that NatCon is starting to look more like a Groyper conference is correct, and in more ways than one.
The Groypers, Fuentes, Sneako, the Isker/Torba set, and the rest of that circuit are not going to turn up at NatCon, and that is by strategic design. That faction is built as an influencer operation aimed at frustrated young men.
NatCon is built for a different room: policymakers, intellectuals, diplomats, and academics, the blazer-and-Brooks-Brothers crowd. A different aesthetic and "voice" but the same underlying program.
What unites them is the diagnosis and the prescription:
-America is already over.
-The Constitution is just a piece of paper.
-Multipolarity is inevitable.
-The U.S. needs a divorce.
-Authoritarianism is not such a bad thing once you stop being sentimental about liberalism.
-A monarchical episcopate looks attractive.
-Franco was awesome.
-Russia and China, whatever their faults, seem to have figured out something the liberal West refused to see.
Then, add the post-work, distributive economics and you have the same postliberal package, just tailored to two audiences: one crass and online, one respectable and institutional.
Every once in a while you will have a few figures that float in-between Groyper CN world and NatCon: Auron MacIntyre (not his real name), William Wolfe, and various Blaze commentators.
The Woke Right does not require everyone to sound like Nick Fuentes. It only requires the same operating system: liberalism is the problem, some alien force has already ruined the country, and enforced adherence to a replacement order is the remedy. NatCon runs the polite version. The Groyper circuit runs the vulgar one.
The messaging is the same.
And yes, you have seen this before on the Left.
@ConceptualJames, @CodyLibolt , @DefiyantlyFree , @SethDillon , @ClassicLibera12 , @billroach_ , @PhilWMagness, @jasonahart have been warning you for years that this simulation of conservatism was here to lead America down a destabilizing path. Maybe now is the time to start taking this seriously.
It’s too late for this years US primaries, but that’s where the change happens. There needs to a Soros counterbalance at the local level. DAs, school boards, auditors, every elected office.
A hundred thousand followers on an account posting long essays about culture, history, philosophy, communism and civilizations.
That is not nothing. That is a civilizational army – potentially…
The number of genuinely active people in the Soros networks is probably smaller than that. And they rule over the Western world.
The difference is one word: ACTIVE.
They are not cleverer. Nothing about them is exceptional. They are organized – and organization beats numbers, beats talent, beats being right, every time it is allowed to run unopposed. That is how a few thousand people hold culture, media, education, academia, the judiciary and eventually politics.
A hundred thousand readers who agree is an audience. A hundred thousand who act is a civilization defending itself.
So you know what to do. Organize. Be active. Take the position, hire the right person, start the school, fund the prize, say the true thing out loud with your name on it.
Tell the truth. Have courage. And build.
“Trading” on Polymarket, Kalasi, and others is gambling. It’s not “trading” anything except an opportunity to lose money.
Follow the money and you’ll find @JunkScience is right.
The AI Lie: Top AI leaders are not worried that AI is "advancing too fast." They are worried that AI is so wide-open that start-up AI firms will eat their lunch. Existing, large AI firms are trying to scare the public about an existential threat from AI so that they get regulation that suppresses start-ups. Monopoly guaranteed by law and regulation is a standard anti-competitive move by big business. You heard it here first.
washingtonpost.com/technolog…
Patrick Henry retweeted
Six months after September 11, while the recovery workers were still digging, two columns of light rose four miles into the sky over Ground Zero.
They were made of 88 light bulbs.
Eighty-eight was not a design choice. It was every bulb of that type that existed in the world.
In the days after the attack, with the fires still burning, two young artists named Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda had the same thought independently, and so did an architect named Richard Nash Gould, and so did two designers named John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi.
Put the towers back. In light.
Nobody was ready to talk about what should be built on the site. The site was still a grave. But everyone in the city was looking at the same thing every night: the hole in the skyline where the towers had been. Two empty rectangles of sky.
The artists wanted to fill them, temporarily, with light. Not a building. A ghost of one. Something you could see from anywhere in the city and know exactly what it meant.
The Municipal Art Society brought the five of them together. Con Edison helped power it. The technical problem was enormous. To throw a visible column of light four miles into the sky, you need the most powerful lamps on earth. Seven-thousand-watt xenon searchlights, each bulb the size of a refrigerator, hand-blown glass, the kind used to light up stadiums and film sets.
They went looking for every one they could find.
They found 88.
Forty-four for each tower, arranged in two 48-foot squares on a vacant lot on West Street, directly across from the pile, matching the footprints and orientation of the buildings that had stood there.
At first they were going to call it Towers in Light.
Then the families said something. They said, we do not want a memorial to buildings. We want a memorial to our people.
So it became Tribute in Light.
On the night of March 11, 2002, the six-month anniversary, they switched it on.
The two beams went up four miles. Past the clouds. Into the stratosphere. At the time it was the most powerful shaft of light ever projected from the surface of the earth into the night sky.
You could see it from 60 miles away. From New Jersey. From Connecticut. From Long Island. From the suburbs where so many of the dead had lived, where so many widows and children were sitting in kitchens that night, and looked out the window, and saw two towers standing in the sky where two towers should have been.
The recovery workers on the pile, six months in, still digging, looked up at it too.
It was meant to be temporary. Thirty-two nights, then it would go dark.
It never really went dark.
The city asked for it again on the first anniversary. Then the second. Then every year. It has been lit every September 11 since, from sunset on the 11th until dawn on the 12th.
Here is what it takes.
Ten days before the anniversary, a crew of about thirty electricians and stagehands begins assembling the 88 lamps on the roof of a parking garage six blocks south of the site. Each lamp weighs hundreds of pounds. Each one has to be focused and leveled by hand, because if a single beam is a fraction of a degree off, the column of light breaks and the tower is ruined.
A technician named Massimo Moratti has been up on that roof aiming the lights since the very first year. His son works beside him now.
The bulbs are hand-blown glass and last about five years. Each year, a few are replaced. When one fails, it takes two people fifteen minutes to unscrew the old one and seat the new one.
The artists have said they were in denial when they made it. They could not accept what had happened. So they put the towers back the only way they could.
Every September 11, at sunset, in the loudest city on earth, two columns of light go up, and the city goes quiet, and looks.
Two towers. Four miles high. Made of 88 bulbs.
Every bulb that existed.
Not one to spare. 🇺🇸
Krzysztof should be quoted and requoted.
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.
For those of you on the right supporting the stay-at-home subsidy - the law of unintended consequences will come into play.
