Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game…

Politicians, government bureaucrats, central bankers, spy agencies, and mainstream news outlets lie to us every day.  

For some people, the previous sentence is patently obvious.  For others, that sentence represents “fringe” thinking.  For certain law enforcement agencies in North America and Europe, that sentence reveals potentially dangerous “extremism.”

“Extremism” is such a morally squishy word.  It means nothing.  It suggests that the average beliefs of the average person in the average part of an average town are, on average, correct.  Should a person’s beliefs move too far away from the “average,” then that person will eventually fall into the “extremist” abyss.  Of course, the average person long believed that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth.  The average person long believed that bloodletting cured disease. The average person long believed in magic.  Relativity, microbiology, atomic physics, and quantum mechanics belonged to the “extremists.”

Defining “extremism” depends upon which populations are included when calculating an “average.”  To the average American, Islamic terrorism is religious extremism.  To the average jihadi in the Middle East, terrorism is part of the Islamic faith.  One man’s “extremist” is another man’s “religious cleric.”  Unsurprisingly, as more jihadists migrate to America, the more supportive of Islamic terrorism the Democrat Party becomes.  We now have several Hamas-supporting members of Congresswho define Americans opposed to Islamic conquest as “extremists.”  For a decade, Americans were told to be on the lookout for Islamic terrorism: “If you see something, say something.”  Now, if you see something and say something, you will most likely be denounced as an “Islamophobic bigot.”  If the definition of “extremism” can shift 180 degrees since the Islamic terror attacks on September 11, 2001, then “extremism” is a nebulous political label.

In the United States, citizens overwhelmingly support federal legislation that would require photo ID, proof of citizenship, and other safeguards to ensure that elections across the country are free, fair, lawful, constitutional, and secure.  

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans in Congress prefer to maintain the current “on your honor” system that can be gamed to permit large-scale vote fraud and rigged elections.  By any polling measure, Congress’s point of view is far from that of the average American.  Members of Congress, in other words, are the extremists!  If you listen to the extremists in Congress, however, our elections have never been more secure.

In fact, when you look at some of the most important policy issues today, it becomes quite clear that Congress is ground zero for extremism.  

Most Americans want Congress to stop spending more money than it receives in taxes; Congress has put us forty trillion dollars in debt.  Most Americans want secure borders and an end to illegal immigration; Congress has enabled an evil human trafficking system to exist for over fifty years that rewards criminals and has flooded the country with somewhere between fifty and a hundred million (nobody knows for sure!) illegal aliens.  Most Americans are concerned about lowering fuel and food prices; Congress has wasted trillions of dollars on “Green New Deal” scams that raise the household costs for fuel and food.  Most Americans believe that college admissions and job hiring should be based on a person’s merit, skill, character, knowledge, and hard work; Congress continues to divide Americans by the color of their skin and their sexual eccentricities.  Most Americans believe that men and women are biologically distinct; Congress pretends that biological sex is an imaginary social construct.  Most Americans believe that a dollar saved today should maintain the same value ten, fifty, or even a hundred years from now; Congress thinks printing and spending dollars, depreciating the U.S. currency, and artificially spiking the dollar-denominated valuation of stocks, homes, and other assets is the best way to fake a constantly “improving” economy.  Most Americans believe that we should refrain from military engagements overseas whenever possible; Congress can’t ever get enough of forever-wars.  Most Americans want their representatives to work for American citizens; Congress believes it should work on behalf of non-Americans all over the world.  Most Americans view their country as a nation; Congress views the United States as both a global empire and a home for every person on the planet.

On the most important issues, Congress is filled to the brim with extremists.  They should be put on official security lists and monitored whenever they travel more than fifty feet from their taxpayer-financed homes.  Instead, in the United States and throughout the West, the extremists run things.

That would explain why Christians are targeted for their beliefs.  That would explain why the governments of Europe and North America have flooded their countries with unassimilable malcontents from the third world.  That would explain why men are allowed into women’s restrooms and why pedophiles are accorded more respect than heterosexual married couples.  That would explain why Western governments have declared war on “climate change” when most people don’t care about elites’ obsession with the weather.  That would explain why so many European and North American politicians are willing to risk a nuclear war with the Russian Federation, while ordinary citizens have never been less willing to fight for the defense of their respective countries.

Perhaps the more that ordinary Westerners realize that it is the people running their governments, universities, and bureaucratic institutions who are most extreme, the less willing they become to do what those extremists say.  Six years ago, the extremists locked down the world because of COVID.  They closed churches, bankrupted businesses, disrupted childhood education, prevented family members from being together, and killed a lot of people with fake “vaccines.”  If public health extremists tried to pull another COVID today, would ordinary Westerners do what the politicians and bureaucrats say?  Or would Western citizens conclude that extremist governments endanger both their lives and liberties?

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game.  Two-hundred-fifty years ago, the British Empire believed the patriots of America’s thirteen colonies to be extremists.  The patriots disagreed.  They considered it extreme for members of Parliament to make decisions on their behalf while residing 3,500 miles away.  The two sets of “extremists” fought it out, and we American “extremists” now celebrate July 4 as Independence Day.

My question is this: How much longer can the governments of Europe and North America continue to ignore the wishes of their national populations before we find ourselves in a situation where there is an explosion of public declarations of independence from the political and bureaucratic extremists who have ruined people’s lives?  For, as much as Western governments appear to be betting on mass surveillance, central bank digital currencies, censorship, propaganda, and technocratic oppression as weapons of control to help maintain power well into the future, there’s nothing so unpredictable as a fed-up populace ready for a little revolution.  When enough people recognize themselves as average representatives of the public will and their government officials as extremists representing only their own interests, things get interesting.  Being labeled an “extremist” by government extremists means nothing.

One might even ask: Isn’t globalism tantamount to extremism when a politician puts other nations’ interests ahead of his own?  Surely, when a government official undermines the nation he serves by championing open borders policies or wasting taxpayer dollars on “climate change” boondoggles at the U.N., that official deserves to be labeled an “extremist.”  Globalists certainly don’t represent the average North American or European citizen.  But they do represent the average cosmopolitan bureaucrat who sees no country as home.

In a world of nations whose populations require different things, globalism is extremist.  

In a world of varying cultures and competing beliefs, forced multiculturalism is extremist.  

In a world where some people wish to be free, international government is extremist.

Fighting for liberty is not extremist.  It is government tyranny that is extreme.

Authored by Andrew Korybko,

Lavrov sheepishly said during a roundtable event last week that “I do not even want to suspect that Alaska, like the actions of the Europeans, was designed to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime. I don’t even want to think about it. But in reality, things turned out the way they did.”

This came three and a half years after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted in December 2022 that the Minsk Accords were just a ruse to buy time for Kiev to rearm.

Putin famously responded a month later that “We endured for a long time, tried to reach an agreement for a long time. But, as it turns out now, we were simply led by the nose, deceived. It’s not the first time this has happened.” Given that he cautioned Russia’s strategic forecasters against indulging in “wishful thinking” during a speech at the headquarters of his country’s Foreign Spy Service in summer 2022, it was widely assumed among “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” that he wouldn’t fall for a similar ruse.

Lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened after Trump reneged on the “Spirit of Anchorage”, which an RT contributor described as him having agreed to coerce Zelensky into withdrawing from Donbass in exchange for Putin then declaring a ceasefire. It’s a matter of speculation whether Trump intended to dupe Putin or whether he just caught too caught up in retrospect planning Maduro’s capture and the Third Gulf War. The outcome, nevertheless, is the same since Trump didn’t do what he promised Putin.

Trump is now “escalating to de-escalate” through a “war of attrition” because he senses weakness from Russia due to the new “cordon sanitaire” around it and thus believes that strengthening Ukraine’s strike capabilities, imposing more sanctions, and provoking unrest can coerce energy-related concessions. The Wall Street Journal reported on the aforementioned three-phase strategy last fall so Russia would have presumably been aware of it but still maintained hope that Trump would implement his deal with Putin.

This “wishful thinking” has now been shattered after he signed the G7 joint statement calling for more arms to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, which preceded a report that he told Zelensky to act “more boldly” against Russia after being impressed by its recent US-backed strategic strikes. To be sure, Russia had realized even before this that something was wrong after Putin’s close advisor Yuri Ushakov played dumb about the “Spirit of Anchorage” last month, but now it’s indisputable that it no longer exists.

Seeing as how there’s no longer any credible hope that Trump will coerce Zelensky into withdrawing from Donbass by cutting off arms, funds, and intel to Ukraine, not even in exchange for a resource-centric strategic partnership with Russia, only three options remain for Russia.

1. It can either decisively “escalate to de-escalate” in its own right to swiftly end the conflict on as many of its terms as possible,

2. carry on as usual amidst this new “war of attrition” at tremendous risk to itself,

3. or freeze the conflict.

Unless he’s bluffing about “escalating to de-escalate” and abruptly implements his half of the “Spirit of Anchorage”, which is unlikely after all that’s recently happened, then it would mean that the past year since their meeting achieved nothing at all other than getting Russia’s guard down. Even if they agreed on that quid pro quo, however, Russia would have probably kept the same tempo. Now that its “spirit” is discredited, Russia has the pretext for ramping everything up, but it’s still unclear whether Putin will.

Median household income differs significantly across racial and ethnic groups in the United States, with one group sitting well above the rest.

In 2024, Asian households reported a median income of $121,700, nearly $30,000 higher than White alone, non-Hispanic households and more than double the median income of Black households.

These differences reflect a mix of factors, including education, geography, occupation, household composition, immigration patterns, and historical inequalities.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, ranks median household income by race and Hispanic origin in 2024, using inflation-adjusted dollars.

The data for this visualization comes from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Asian Households Lead by a Wide Margin

Asian households had the highest median income in 2024, at $121,700. This was well above every other group shown in the Census dataset.

White alone, non-Hispanic households ranked second, with a median income of $92,530. Hispanic households followed at $70,950.

American Indian and Alaska Native households had a median income of $59,050, while Black households had the lowest among the listed groups at $56,020.

Asian households had a median income that was $29,170 higher than White alone, non-Hispanic households in 2024.

This group has ranked at the top of the dataset for every year shown, from 2002 to 2024.

It is important to note that these are median household figures, not individual earnings. Household income can be affected by the number of earners in a household, local cost of living, age distribution, educational attainment, and where people live and work.

A Persistent Income Gap

The gap between the highest and lowest median household incomes was $65,680 in 2024.

That difference compares Asian households at $121,700 with Black households at $56,020. In practical terms, the top group’s median income was more than double the lowest group’s.

The long-term trend also shows that these gaps have persisted across multiple economic cycles. While incomes have generally risen since 2002 in inflation-adjusted terms, the distance between the highest- and lowest-income groups remains substantial.

Hispanic Household Income Continued to Rise

Hispanic households had a median income of $70,950 in 2024.

That was up from $67,240 in 2023, and well above the 2002 level of $54,670 in 2024 dollars.

The Census Bureau defines Hispanic as people of Hispanic or Latino origin, regardless of race. This means Hispanic households can include people who identify with any racial group.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Number of Indian Tribes in the US on Voronoi.

The Trump administration is taking another step to strengthen the nation’s critical minerals supply chain, announcing plans to build a series of mineral processing facilities on U.S. military bases through partnerships with private industry, according to Bloomberg.

The initiative marks the first time commercial mineral processing operations will be located on Army installations.

The U.S. Army said it has reached preliminary agreements with REalloys, Titan Mining, EnergyX, and Australia’s ioneer to develop facilities that will process rare earth elements, graphite, lithium, and boron. REalloys is slated to build a rare earth separation plant at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah, while Titan Mining will establish a graphite purification facility at either Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas or Anniston Army Depot in Alabama. EnergyX will develop a lithium processing facility, and ioneer will construct a boron plant.

Bloomberg writes that the projects are part of a broader push by President Donald Trump to rebuild America’s domestic critical minerals industry and reduce reliance on overseas suppliers, particularly China, which dominates much of the global processing market. Critical minerals are essential for military equipment, electric vehicles, semiconductors, renewable energy systems, and a wide range of consumer electronics.

Unlike traditional government subsidy programs, the Army said these agreements require the companies to pay for and carry out infrastructure improvements at the military bases in exchange for operating rights. The Pentagon expects the facilities to provide the military with more reliable access to strategically important materials while expanding U.S. processing capacity. Construction could begin as early as 2027, with production expected to come online in 2028.

The announcement follows a series of recent moves by the administration to boost domestic mineral production through loans, investments, and strategic partnerships. Those efforts have accelerated as geopolitical tensions with China continue to reshape global supply chains, with both countries taking steps to secure access to the raw materials increasingly viewed as essential to national security and advanced manufacturing.

During the COVID-era flood of free money, from stimulus checks to the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest-rate policy, luxury watch prices skyrocketed to the moon. But once that liquidity boom faded and interest rates were pushed sharply higher to rein in the inflation monster fueled by helicopter money, the secondary luxury market slid into a multi-year correction.

Over the last year and a half, however, that downturn appears to have bottomed out (see here and here), with prices continuing to rebound.

The Bloomberg Subdial Watch Index, which tracks prices for the 50 most-traded watches by value on the secondary market, bottomed in January 2025, about 1.5 years ago, and has been tracking higher ever since.

• Subdial’s used Rolex index bottomed around $11,000 in January 2025 and has since rebounded to nearly $12,000.
• And used Audemars Piguet watch prices.

A more granular look at the used Rolex watch index shows the Rolex Submariner Date …

… bottomed in the summer of 2025 at around $9,800 and has marginally increased to about $10,200 this month – still far from the $13,500 COVID-era highs.

However, price action across the luxury watch market has not been uniform and largely depends on shifting consumer tastes and the interest rate environment. 

Great reads:

• The Watches Of Operation Epic Fury
• The Real Watches Of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro

Industry insights: 

• Did Gen-Z Just Get A Taste For Fancy Used-Watches
• “Winner Takes All”: UBS Speaks With Swiss Watch Industry Insider On “Stabilizing Market”

In recent weeks, Audemars Piguet and Swatch launched an affordable $400 pocket watch that generated massive consumer demand – mostly because of the price point.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Alan Greenspan, Fed chair from 1987 to 2006, embodies a striking ideological shift from gold-standard advocate to architect of the modern easy-money, debt-fueled financial system. He has now died at the age of 100, and this marks a good time to assess his legacy and explain why it matters.

In the 1960s, as a young economist influenced by Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Greenspan strongly supported the gold standard. In his 1966 essay “Gold and Economic Freedom,” he argued that gold-backed money was essential for laissez-faire capitalism. It restrained governments from inflating the currency to fund welfare states or deficits, preventing the erosion of savings and the boom-bust cycles caused by fiat money manipulation. He viewed central banking and unbacked currency as tools for hidden wealth confiscation through inflation.

This essay is what endeared him to Rand personally. He became a valued member of her inner circle at a time when such circles of influence dominated the Manhattan scene. He won her confidence while his consulting firm was growing in influence. His clients were among the biggest players on Wall Street. His closeness to Rand and her circle contributed to the sense that they had at the time that Rand’s ideas were in ascendance, as her book sales only grew.

Once in power, however, Greenspan operated within the fiat system that he once criticized. He became known for discretionary, flexible monetary policy that prioritized short-term economic stability and growth over rigid rules.

Key elements included the “Greenspan Put.”

Markets came to expect the Fed to cut interest rates and inject liquidity during crises to cushion asset price declines. This started with the 1987 stock market crash (Black Monday), during which Greenspan quickly affirmed the Fed’s readiness to provide liquidity.

This was the beginning of what later became known as Quantitative Easing, or money printing, as the method to deal with market upheavals. It represented a wholesale repudiation of the policies of Paul Volcker from 1979 to 1982, the last time this country permitted an economic downturn to take its normal course rather than use artificial methods of stimulating demand. It was a test of the theory of the Austrian School, which argued that recessions serve a purpose of cleaning out malinvestments to prepare the ground for new prosperity.

The test worked to create the conditions of the 1980s boom. And yet at the same time, we saw measures of finance and banking deregulation that would empower new forms of credit finance that blurred the old distinctions between savings and checkable (liquid) deposits. It was this change that would end up fundamentally changing the operations of capitalism.

With sound money and a free market, the interest rate was a reflection of the savings rate. Investors would only borrow what was available, while savers were rewarded for their thrift with high interest rates. The rate of return for financial capital would tend toward an equilibrium identical to industrial output levels. That means that you are always better off saving than taking risks unless you have an eye toward entrepreneurial speculation. That was the balance: save, invest, grow.

Greenspan’s efforts turned the table over. The Fed embarked on a new experiment that would reward debt more than saving through one simple trick. He would push down rates to the point that saving paid less than investing in stocks, such that anyone could go into serviceable debt and invest and make more money with financial markets. Thus began what is called financialization. It overthrew the traditional workings of capitalism for a new calculation that stopped rewarding thrift and started rewarding leverage above all else.

Quite the achievement for a man who decades earlier had condemned this very system!

This strategy was repeated with responses to the 1998 LTCM/Russia crisis, the dot-com bust (2000–2001), and post-9/11. Investors priced in this implicit downside protection—like a put option—encouraging greater risk-taking, leverage, debt service, and wild speculation.

After the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11, the Fed under Greenspan cut the federal funds rate to a then-record low of roughly 1 percent in 2003–2004 and held it there. This created very cheap credit, fueling borrowing, leverage, and rising asset prices (especially housing). This directly inflated the mid-2000s housing bubble by making mortgages extraordinarily affordable and encouraging subprime lending.

The result was moral hazard and a wild culture of risk-taking at the expense of financial prudence. The combination of bailouts for markets (not necessarily individual firms) and low rates fostered the belief that the Fed would always “clean up” after bubbles.

This reduced the perceived downside of speculation, leading to higher leverage in finance, exotic mortgages, and a broader “debt finance” era in which credit expansion outpaced productive growth. Greenspan himself spoke of “irrational exuberance” in 1996 but didn’t act decisively to prick bubbles.

Greenspan’s tenure coincided with (and helped enable) a structural shift toward higher public–private debt levels, financialization of the economy, and repeated asset bubbles. The housing bubble and 2008 crisis are the clearest examples—easy money post-dot-com contributed to over-leveraged households and banks. While he defended his actions (arguing that bubbles are hard to identify in real time and that low rates didn’t solely cause the housing issues), his policies masked rising systemic risks and set the United States on the course toward disaster.

In later years, Greenspan reflected on gold favorably (e.g., calling it the premier global currency and admitting in conversations with Ron Paul that the Fed tried to mimic gold-standard signals). He acknowledged the welfare state’s incompatibility with hard money but pragmatically worked within the system.

Fine talk, but look at how he walked. Greenspan’s successors at the Fed only intensified his apostasy, especially Ben Bernanke, who went one better and slammed rates to zero while protecting against inflationary consequences by filling up bank vaults with fake money. This created innumerable zombie institutions, even as the Fed held the overvalued fake assets on its books. It still does.

Bernanke was succeeded by Janet Yellen, who sought to dampen inflation worries in early 2021, just before depreciation sliced off one-third of the dollar’s purchasing power. This is not a stellar record for which Greenspan set the precedent.

The young Greenspan saw gold as a check on government and banker overreach. The elder Greenspan, wielding immense power at the Fed, used that power to smooth cycles, successfully for a while (low inflation, steady growth in the 1990s)—but at the cost of building a more fragile, debt-dependent financial architecture.

This “Greenspan era” mindset of activist central banking influenced successors like Bernanke (QE) and continues to shape today’s environment of high debt and low rates (until recently) and expectations of Fed rescues. It marked a decisive move away from sound-money principles toward managed fiat credit cycles.

We are still paying a huge price for this mismanagement. Greenspan is the perfect embodiment of the principle that your talk and your walk need to match, lest you become an instrument of hypocrisy and eventual disaster that undermines every intellectual conviction you once embraced.

Authored by George Brooks via AmericanThinker.com,

Every civilization develops a moral language – a set of virtues that it celebrates and vices that it condemns. For much of human history, societies lauded courage, resilience, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, and perseverance. The individual who overcame adversity was admired. The citizen who contributed more than he consumed was esteemed. To endure hardship without surrendering one’s dignity was considered noble.

Increasingly, however, modern Western society appears to have inverted this hierarchy.

Today, victimhood often functions as a form of social capital.

To claim injury is to acquire moral authority.

To assert oppression is frequently to gain status. Public discourse, particularly within academia, media, politics, and social media, often rewards not those who demonstrate resilience, but those who can most persuasively locate themselves within narratives of historical or contemporary disadvantage.

This is not to suggest that oppression does not exist. It plainly does. Human beings have always oppressed one another. History is replete with examples of slavery, discrimination, persecution, exploitation, and injustice. Serious societies acknowledge these realities honestly.

Yet acknowledging injustice and organizing one’s entire social order around grievance are two very different enterprises.

The modern culture of grievance is distinguished not merely by its concern for injustice, but by its tendency to elevate grievance itself into an identity.

In such a framework, suffering confers legitimacy. Personal agency is often deemphasized in favor of structural explanations. Individual responsibility, once considered indispensable to human flourishing, is increasingly treated as secondary to historical narratives of power and oppression.

Why?

Part of the answer lies in incentives.

Human beings respond to incentives whether they exist in economics, politics, or culture. If a society rewards certain forms of behavior with status, attention, influence, institutional support, or financial gain, those behaviors predictably proliferate.

Social media has accelerated this process dramatically.

Platforms built upon visibility and engagement naturally privilege outrage, conflict, and emotional intensity. Claims of victimization generate attention. Attention generates followers. Followers generate influence. Influence often generates money, prestige, and institutional power.

Grievance, in the digital age, has become monetizable.

The entrepreneur of outrage need not solve problems; indeed, solving problems may threaten his relevance. A permanent sense of crisis sustains audiences, donations, speaking engagements, media appearances, and political mobilization. The incentive, therefore, is often not reconciliation but perpetuation.

A grievance resolved is a constituency diminished.

This dynamic extends beyond social media influencers. Entire political movements, activist organizations, and institutional bureaucracies can become dependent upon the continued existence—or perceived existence—of oppression. The maintenance of moral urgency becomes essential to organizational survival.

Consequently, there exists a temptation to expand definitions continually, to discover ever more subtle forms of harm, and to reinterpret ordinary human conflicts through increasingly elaborate frameworks of oppression.

Disagreement becomes violence.

Words become trauma.

Discomfort becomes harm.

Failure becomes victimization.

Ordinary interpersonal conflict becomes evidence of systemic injustice.

The danger is not merely conceptual confusion. The danger is cultural infantilization.

Human flourishing requires the cultivation of resilience. Every person encounters disappointment, rejection, unfairness, betrayal, and suffering. These experiences, while painful, are intrinsic to the human condition. A society that teaches individuals to interpret every adversity primarily through the lens of oppression risks producing citizens less capable of confronting life’s inevitable hardships.

Stoic philosophers understood this long ago. We possess limited control over external events but considerable influence over our responses to them. While circumstances matter, human beings are not merely passive products of circumstance.

Agency matters.

Responsibility matters.

Character matters.

Indeed, one of the greatest achievements of liberal democracy has been its insistence that individuals cannot be reduced solely to categories of race, sex, class, religion, or ancestry. The individual person possesses moral dignity independent of group identity.

Identity politics, by contrast, often risks reversing this principle. Individuals increasingly come to be understood primarily as representatives of groups rather than as unique persons. Social and political questions are filtered through collective identities, historical grievances, and competing claims of disadvantage.

Such a framework can foster tribalism rather than solidarity.

Citizens cease to view one another primarily as neighbors, fellow countrymen, or participants in a shared civic enterprise. Instead, society fragments into competing constituencies, each seeking recognition, resources, status, or moral legitimacy.

The social fabric frays.

This does not mean historical injustices should be ignored. Quite the contrary. Mature societies remember their histories precisely so they may avoid repeating them. But memory should serve wisdom, not resentment. Justice should seek restoration where possible, not the perpetual cultivation of grievance.

A healthy society balances compassion with responsibility.

It extends assistance to those genuinely in need while simultaneously affirming human agency. It recognizes injustice without encouraging dependency upon victimhood as an identity. It acknowledges suffering while celebrating resilience.

Most importantly, it teaches that adversity, though often unfair, need not define a life.

The culture of grievance offers a seductive promise: that our struggles can be explained entirely by external forces and that moral virtue inheres in suffering itself. But this promise ultimately diminishes human beings. It encourages people to locate power everywhere except within themselves.

Civilizations do not thrive when victimhood becomes aspirational.

They thrive when individuals are encouraged to confront hardship with courage, responsibility, discipline, and hope.

The task of a free society is not to deny suffering.

It is to produce citizens capable of transcending it.