My Advice to the Young

August 15, 2022

Quite often, I am asked for my opinion. You might think that the topic would be politics, or history, or perhaps business, but usually, it is not. Rather, I am asked how a young man should approach his life, in these days of confusion, of uncertain future, of corrosive liquid modernity. In response, I piecemeal a relatively short answer, tailored to the questioner. After numerous such quick exchanges, I decided to think more deeply on the question, seeking principles of general applicability. So here is my advice to the young, by whom I mean men and women between eighteen and thirty-five, about how to approach their futures.

My advice is more directed at men than at women—but I direct advice to women as well, mostly separate and different advice. I hesitated a little bit to offer advice to women—until I realized my hesitation had been hypnotized into me by decades of feminist propaganda, which falsely claims that men should never instruct women, only the reverse. In truth, any man, and especially a father, should most definitely not just offer advice, but issue directions, to both men and women. The idea that men should not direct women in life choices is a degenerate artefact of modernity; relationships between men and women are partnerships, necessarily involving mutual instruction.

My advice is predicated on my optimistic vision of the future, which I have laid out elsewhere in detail. I assume that the political and social structures of what is now called America will, within no more than a decade, be very different, after some difficulties. If you believe that current American structures will last indefinitely, you should not listen to me. You should either scrabble to join the ever-more-crowded professional-managerial elite, or join the Amish. If you believe that a fracture followed by reworking of our society is coming, then I have something to offer you.

To demonstrate, however, that I am right about the future, let’s have a sidebar on the strength of the regime, by which I mean not only the government, but more broadly the current system of governance by a Left-dominated professional-managerial elite (the “PME”), the end-stage of the managerialism identified most clearly by James Burnham. Some maintain that our American regime is strong and growing stronger. Sure, “President” Biden is senile, but behind him are smart, if evil, people, who are really in charge of the regime, inside and outside government, and are busy creating a digital panopticon backed by force to control us all, which will ensure the continuation of the current system. This claim is gnostic; it requires a belief in hidden knowledge, because the visible facts do not support the theory. And nearly all gnosticism is foolishness.

For example, the regime recently had to pick a new mouthpiece for Biden. This is obviously a crucial role for any President, and ten times as much in the case of Biden, who is unable to speak for himself (and thus cannot credibly correct any undesirable statements made by the mouthpiece), and whose unpopularity and incompetence needs continual alleviation through skilled message manipulation, because of the apocalyptic damage Biden’s presidency is causing all elements of the regime. Yet those making the decision reached into the barrel and picked someone who is plainly the worst spokesman in my lifetime—one Karine Jean-Pierre, a profoundly (and obviously so) stupid and tongue-tied person, whose only qualifications are that she is a black homosexual woman, and appointing her thus fulfils the overriding Left goals of Procrustean equality and supposed emancipation, at the cost of all more immediate concerns and needs crucial to the regime.

You could read this as an esoteric statement of regime strength, I suppose. Or, much more accurately, you could read it as the brain rot of late-stage leftism. Vilfredo Pareto said that a “shrewd” ruling class could keep power for a very long time; our ruling class is the exact opposite of shrewd. Other examples are legion. Sure, the military can’t recruit, and spends its days celebrating trannies while, off camera, fishing planes crashed by women pilots out of the ocean, but really, it’s super competent and will crush any opposition! Or, let’s consider the recent FBI armed raid on Donald Trump’s personal residence. Certainly, this is political violence designed to suppress dissent, but it was very incompetently done, with no forethought by smart people, instead redolent of Henry II’s “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Just like most of the flailing moves of the Left over the past three years, the raid emerged, in a way of its own accord, out of a maelstrom of incompetence. It was not some centrally-planned move in a 4D chess game seeking the destruction of the Right. All the stupidity of our society is going to be squeezed out soon, as reality reasserts itself, and this truth underlies my advice, the core of which is that ascending the cursus honorum of the past several decades, both in career choices and in life choices, is the worst possible decision to make, because it is a road to nowhere.

It is, perhaps not surprisingly, hard to let go of the lure of joining the PME. For decades, joining that class, or staying inside it and advancing further, has been the obvious goal for the majority of young people, at least in the middle and upper-middle classes. It was once mine, and I never gave it a moment’s thought; it seemed obvious and natural (to be fair, it was much more attractive in the 1990s). This, not so much statistics about earning, lies behind the obsessive push to obtain a college degree—without that credential, you cannot join the PME, which offers stability and honors more than money. Even on the Right, this mirage retains a grip on very many people, who usually couch their insistence that the young continue on this path in terms of joining the existing elite in order to be part of a new elite, or to work against the existing elite from within. This is obvious cope from those unable to stomach themselves or their children not being in today’s elite. I am writing a separate piece on class and elites as they relate to the Right, a topic that is receiving increasing interest as the outlines of the coming fracture emerge from the mist, but there is no connection between joining today’s elite and being part of tomorrow’s elite, which will not be derived from today’s elite. There may be a tiny overlap, but probably not. You must choose. Those on the Right who today desperately try to maintain a toehold in today’s elite should be presumed to be unreliable, and their advice on how to order your life should be ignored.

I will divide my advice into several segments. Where I am advising women, rather than men, I make that clear. But one piece of advice applies to everyone, and overarches everything I say. You must avoid nostalgia. Nostalgia is a besetting sin of the Right. I get it—the past, even in living memory, was so much better than today on every axis that “trad” images and thinking are like a warm, comfortable featherbed. But nostalgia enervates, it prevents action, it fosters passivism that leads to destruction. There is no way back; all that can be done is first destroy our enemies utterly, and then build a new thing, founded both on the wisdom of the past and the needs, and limitations, of the present. What you should do now to maximize your personal return in that future is what we are discussing today.

How Should I Educate Myself?

Here I do not mean education as it relates to the goal of supporting yourself and your family; I treat that below. I mean broader education, in the knowledge and skills required to lead the good life. The American ideal has always been for every citizen to be so educated, those of the ruling class as well as those of the yeoman class. This has fallen away, on the one hand by narrowing education to study directly related to employment, and on the other by the capture of education, from nursery school onward, as a tool to inculcate Left ideological poison—while suppressing what was once called “liberal” education, in the real, permanent things, because all of it contradicts the Left project. The result is that very few people today are educated in this broader sense.

That means, unless you are fortunate enough to receive a primary and high school education at a classical academy (which are, no surprise, rapidly growing in popularity), you will most likely have to teach yourself. For some decades, the so-called Great Books, the Western philosophical canon (really, mostly the canon of mid-twentieth-century Western progressives) were regarded as a path for desirable auto-didacticism. But I think that they are of extremely limited value. First, many of them are infected with destructive Enlightenment thought, which has led us to the pass we are in, and while it may be useful as a tertiary matter to know the content of such books, it is far down the list of important matters to the average man. Second, many of those books are not relevant either to our present moment, or, really, to core matters of self-education. Certainly, Aristotle can be valuable, but to the average man today, calm self-introspection and philosophizing is of little value, although there will always be a subset of men interested in philosophy, and their advice to the men who actually rule can be valuable. Nonetheless, knowing yourself is, frankly, not very important. Knowing your duty, and how a society can and should be molded—that is much more crucial.

Therefore, the focus of self-education should be to learn history, not philosophy, and to learn useful skills. For both, the internet is helpful, one of the few areas in which the internet has added, rather than subtracted, value from society. Books (very carefully chosen if written in the past fifty years, and chosen with some caution if written in the past one hundred) are still best for history, but audio books are a reasonable alternative if for you they are easier to consume, and a wide variety of excellent history podcasts (e.g., MartyrMade’s) should be considered as well. And while any skill requires the tacit knowledge that can only be obtained from doing, or in some cases by watching a practitioner, you can ascend the learning curve much more quickly today by watching videos.

Every person will have different likes and needs, as well as gifts. However, when you have free time, not tied to your job or to other worthwhile activities, self-education should be a constant focus.

How Should I Earn My Bread?

That depends on your talents. But work within the PME, to the extent it is chosen so that one may enter and stay in the PME, should be rejected out of hand, and any work chosen should have core characteristics. Your prime goal, to earn bread, is to have a job that offers useful skills in any environment, and that offers you and your family resilience in uncertain times, while also offering a platform for your and your family’s success and happiness on the other side, when stability and opportunity are restored.

The first question is whether you should go to college. College today is mostly a finishing school for feminization, to the extent it is not simply Left indoctrination. Outside of the hard sciences, discussed below, there is little reason for a man to go to college. In the new elite after the coming fracture, those of talent who chose manual work will be the core of the new elite, and anyone who went to college after 2010 or so will be automatically suspect. But if you do not go to college, your choices in today’s structures, with rare exceptions, boil down to manual work of some type (perhaps after skill training at a trade school or community college), or entrepreneurship (though that requires the right psychological makeup). This seems like a limitation now, and it is. However, it will not be in the future, because jobs not involving manual work will be hugely fewer in number—jobs such as “pharmacy benefit manager” will not exist. Then the wisdom of the choice, that gave you useful skills, will be entirely clear.

I have recently written a long article on manual work, which I will not repeat here, but I will note that manual work can also be psychically very fulfilling, because a natural tendency of men is their desire to create, and to be fulfilled by creating, lasting objects to be productively used, to create functional solutions to problems in the real world, and to offer those solutions to others. The biggest immediate cost to choosing manual work is that because you are, by definition, for now excluded from the elites, you will not be honored in today’s society, but denigrated and spat upon by our rulers (although, to be sure, if you are a white man, you will also be denigrated and spat upon at nearly any college). And, a real cost, you will likely have more trouble finding a wife, because the common feminine desire to “marry up” means you will be excluded from consideration by many women, who are trapped in a PME mindset. On the other hand, you should not want to marry a woman whose heart is set on a position in the PME, or, even worse, on a PME career of her own. And on the plus side, manual work will most definitely make you more masculine, and therefore more desirable to the kind of woman you should want, in comparison to the legions of effete betas who typify young men today.

Yet some of you will go to college; manual work for pay is not for every man, and college is, in practice, necessary for the hard sciences. (It is also helpful, perhaps, for many jobs in technology. In the future, technology will still be around. But technology jobs will be fewer, because the stupidity and wasteful existence of companies such as Uber, Tik Tok, Door Dash, Tinder, Groupon, Google, and many other such will have been squeezed out of the system, by natural processes or by armed force). As long as you do not incur massive debt, it may not be the end of the world if you go to college—although it may ruin you psychically, may saddle you with heavy baggage such as the wrong wife, and as I say will, to some extent, be held as a black mark against you in the future.

But if you go to college, you should almost never go to graduate school. Nobody, nobody at all, should become a lawyer (and, contrary to myth, the only thing you can really do with a law degree is be a lawyer). Nobody should go to business school—you learn nothing about business at business school, or rather most of what you learn is false. Its main point is to offer an expensive credential, and (very secondarily) to introduce you to others who may help you in the future. The credential is only useful for joining today’s PME, and will be a second black mark against you. And those contacts are, for the most part, exaggerated as to their usefulness, and only useful for progressing within the PME. Business school does not teach you anything about entrepreneurship, and even if it did, or if you met others with whom you might start a real business, the costs, both out-of-pocket and opportunity, greatly outweigh any such potential benefits. (Taking some classes in accounting at a local school, though, is a good idea.) And obviously, nobody should get a graduate degree in the humanities, or, God forbid, in a fake discipline such as sociology. (I’ll ignore worse possibilities; nobody reading this would, I hope, even consider for a second a degree in a filthy destructive clownshow such as “Gender & Sexuality Studies,” a real major to which I saw a reference yesterday. )

The sole exception to the rule of no graduate degrees is the hard sciences, and medicine. As to the former, hard sciences, if you have the talent and the interest, are very much worth studying to prepare for the future. When conducting your studies, you increasingly have to avoid the talons of the Left, but it can be done. (Your bigger problem will be being surrounded by legions of Chinese nationals, who dominate the hard sciences because they pay top dollar to learn matters of value from what are still the best research institutions in the world. They are culturally incompatible with Americans, are mostly here to steal what they can to benefit themselves and their home country, and they devote much of their time and effort to cheating, as I know personally from teaching at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management.) And medicine, although the Left has greatly corrupted it, has the potential to be extremely useful to you, your family, and your larger community when the fracture comes, if you can choke down the garbage force-fed to you by Left commissars, and maintain self-respect as your fellow doctors who are in far over their heads due to affirmative action kill patients without consequences.

What if you already did go to college, or graduate school, or are already in the PME, or far down the track of joining the PME? Your best bet is to edge out of the PME—to harden yourself and your skills against the future collapse of the PME, within the limitations you have now, such as having to service existing debt. This involves acquiring useful skills that are separate from your current career, moving out of Left areas, and making contacts with networks that can help you move away from your PME career. This will likely involve sacrifice and disruption; there is no help for that. You can chance it, not take action and hope to take action later, but that’s very risky, and as a hidden rightist in the PME, you and your family will keep bearing all the costs I identify in this article.

How about the military? While some argue that entering the military provides valuable training for future use, and for undermining the regime from within at the appropriate time, I can’t recommend the military (although I have no inside knowledge, not having served in the military myself). Even in the past two years, the military has become far more hostile to white men, and far more useless as an institution (it seems obvious we’d quickly lose a war to China, and probably to Russia too). Moreover, you don’t really want to be in today’s military when the balloon goes up, and some butch lesbian “general” orders you to go drone children because their parents like Donald Trump, or to bomb a church in Texas because the congregation consists of cis-het white people; you’re then faced with the choice of participating in the regime’s evil or deserting (or going out in a blaze of glory). Along similar lines, I would certainly never allow my children to be conscripted by today’s regime, and I have negative loyalty to the military and to every other structure of today’s federal government, which is wholly illegitimate, both procedurally and substantively. If you do join the military, you aren’t going to get to exemplify heroic virtue, or be a bronze-age warrior. True, in certain future circumstances, military training and contacts will prove useful. But I expect that organic substitutes will spring up upon need (especially as weapon availability will never be a problem in what was the United States).

Most of my advice seems, and it is, directed at those for whom a PME career is a possibility. What if you are of average, or below-average, intelligence, or don’t have a decent primary education, so in these days of elite over-production, that path is functionally shut to you? Or what if, like J. D. Vance, you had no knowledge of how one can enter the PME, so you ignore it as a possibility until it is too late? (This is more common than one might think. It was only when I was in law school that I learned there was something called an “investment banker” and what such men did. If you are not exposed to a possibility, it is not available to you.) Mostly, this is a feature, not a bug. You’ll likely end up in the more desirable place, off the cursus honorum, with less agonizing.

Don’t worry if you don’t have high intelligence, something that has no doubt often been thrown in your face if you’re white, to suggest you are worthless and should just, in the infamous words of the fat grifter Kevin Williamson and the tiny mincing goblin Bill Kristol, be replaced. Certainly, intelligence dictates the ability to participate in some professions—the hard sciences and medicine are probably out. And general intelligence is strongly correlated with success in many areas, probably largely because of its strong association with desirable traits such as low time preference. But the vast majority of jobs can be done well by anyone of reasonable intelligence. This is especially true of worthwhile jobs—most paper-pushing jobs are BS jobs and require little intelligence; most jobs that are worthwhile, that are useful and resilient, require competence and hard work, not intelligence as such.

As to jobs for women, in a healthy, well-run society, in which the vast majority of men and women marry, and which forbids most divorce, women would not need the ability to support themselves with work outside the home. In such a society, women would go to college not to acquire skills for the job market, but to be educated in the liberal arts and to find a husband (what was, until very recently, the normal path for women who went to college). We don’t live in that healthy society, however, and it’s a big risk for a woman to not be able to support herself if she cannot find a decent husband among today’s ubiquitous beta males. On the other hand, most women who work today are not actually supporting themselves; they are working BS jobs, in effect created by the state, which will disappear soon enough. The logical answer is for a woman to acquire skills that can be used for jobs that should be generally reserved to women, because they fit women’s natures. This includes obvious ones such as teaching and nursing of various types. It also includes all types of work that sustain the web of life, especially those that require organizing and working together in a cooperative, rather than competitive, manner, notably charitable work. Acquiring these skills means both the ability to earn a living now and having appropriate training for a remade society, such that if by that time you are unlikely to marry due to age, you can avoid being dependent.

Should I Move?

Nobody should ignore his natural obligations, to his parents and larger family, and there is a great deal good to be said for staying in the place in which one has roots. Atomization, the breaking of attachment to things one naturally should and does love, is one of the great evils inherent in the Left project, and geographic separation from one’s roots in place and people is a key driver of atomization. (It is worth reading J. D. Vance’s famous Hillbilly Elegy for a good exposition of why people stay where they are, even when there is no opportunity to have a decent life, much less to better it. Chris Arnade’s Dignity is also an excellent read tied to this topic.) Those outside the PME have long been propagandized that their goal should be to flee their birthplace to become a drone in Capitol City or one of its satellites, to join the leftist hive mind, to sink into debt and consumerism, and to lead an empty, childless life. You should purge this propaganda from your mind.

Yet I still conclude you should very much consider moving, if you are in a state or area dominated by the Left. Living under Left oppression today means helot status for a man of the Right. You may not speak your mind, your employment is contingent on burning incense to evil spirits, anti-white hatred is rewarded and self-defense against it is punished, you are forbidden ownership of weapons of war, and your children are sexually propagandized (or, worse, groomed and molested) and turned against you. Moreover, the evils forcibly imposed by the Left upon decent people in areas they control are expanding quickly. These evils likely outweigh any good reasons to stay; few choices are ever perfect, and any man of the Right wanting to improve his, and his family’s, situation will likely be unable to do so under Left subjugation, and he risks total destruction of both himself and his family.

Even if you do not live in an area dominated by the Left, if you live in a “purple” area or an area dominated by the Right, it may still be necessary to consider moving. It depends on your role in the community. Are you interested in a simple, happy life? Then if you have a community, you should stay, and help heal its wounds, and fight for it in the wars to come. Are you interested in building the new age, hopefully that of Foundationalism? Then you may need to move to be closer to others working on the same task. True, technology allows remote contributions, but nothing will ever really be the same as physical presence, especially in a counter-cultural movement. This is not flight, but it does prepare you better to fight, which is necessary preparation whether you stay or go.

Neither city nor country is necessarily better, though leaning toward the latter is most likely preferable. Where each person lives is in part idiosyncratic, part dictated by chance, and part dictated by how you earn a living. Yes, the ability to grow at least some of your own food is very valuable, but this is less crucial if you live in an area dominated by the Right. And most rural areas are no longer havens of virtue, and face variations on the same struggles urban dwellers face, notably drugs and alienation. Thus, this choice should be a personal one.

Whether you stay or go, a prime goal should be to link up with, and to form community with, others who share your view of the world, and are willing to work to achieve it and take risks. This is not necessarily easy; most people will have to work hard to reverse the effects of Left atomization on their own lives. The prime aid to winning in future years will be such networks, and they offer innumerable benefits along the way—both material and spiritual, and not least, a good chance of finding the right spouse, if you’re not already married. As you no doubt know, I favor more robust, prickly networks than “Benedict Option” type networks, but you have to start somewhere.

If the calculus dictates a move, where? The obvious place to move is Texas, probably the Dallas area. That’s where many of the cutting-edge, but normal, people on the Right are heading (with a few to Tennessee and such places). Texas is where New Founding, the most prominent exponent of building new business structures on the Right, is headquartered. I have never lived in Texas myself, to be sure. I live in Indiana, but that is not something I can recommend for young men without any existing connection to the state. There is little real Right here, though the catamite Right is very well represented in the state’s political rulers. If the United States fractures, as seems likely, there will be no doubt of the political direction of Texas; if you choose a less-certain state, you risk ruin and exile in future civil conflict. Florida is another possible choice—right now, it seems like Florida might be the most likely to refuse federal tyranny, and to thereby get the party started. That offers both opportunity and risk. Florida seems more variegated, however, along many different axes, and that is not good for building community in uncertain times. You will have to decide what makes the most sense for you.

For married women, there is likely to be less choice as to where to live, because a woman follows her husband, who should be the breadwinner, and whose work outside the home is necessarily primary. If a married woman, before she has children or after they leave the house, is trained in or working in an appropriate type of outside-the-home work, transferring those skills to wherever the family moves is easy. An unmarried woman, depending on the community in which she finds herself, should consider moving to Texas, or some other place containing desirable men (and a major focus of communities in those places should be setting up structures to encourage meeting and marriage of young people, something at which the Right has miserably failed). I ignore, of course, the possibility that a woman is independently pursuing a career in the PME; that choice is even worse for women than for men, and typically leads to becoming a sad wine aunt, or if lucky, a sad divorcee, and the only correct action is to get off that track immediately.

What Assets Should I Strive to Acquire?

You may not have the ability to buy many assets—the BS jobs offered by the PME offer a good deal of fake money, which can still be used to purchase real assets, and if you are not in the PME money may be harder to come by (although many manual work jobs do pay well). Yet assets, whether a few or many, mean options and power, and the inability of your enemies to have a hold over you. Therefore, you should acquire whatever hard assets you can, and sacrifice ephemeral consumption as necessary to make this possible. Tools, land, gold, and guns should be your focus. Acquire some catastrophe, prepper-type materials. Ideally, hard assets can be shared among an extended family or local community, rather than each person having to independently acquire all useful assets. Don’t buy financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. Whatever you do, you should avoid debt. This is most true of debt that does not have an offsetting sellable asset, but all debt should be avoided if at all possible.

When Should I Marry?

You should marry as early as possible, within the limitations of finding the right person and, for a man, having the ability to support a wife and children. This is, of course, another reason to avoid college, because spending four years that way delays the date when you can become independent. Early to mid-20s is probably ideal for marriage. You should then immediately start having children, with the goal of having at least three, preferably more. There will never be the “right” time to have children; you can always tell yourself that later you’ll have more stability, or more money, or some other thing that seems desirable, and you convince yourself is necessary. On the contrary: right now is the right time, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, and probably a Commie, but certainly a weak and stupid person, no doubt full of regrets or resentment for his (or more likely her) own life.

What Should I Do For Recreation?

You should do anything you enjoy that is real and not pernicious, though it’s always a bonus when what you do for fun benefits you in some more permanent way. Thus, the classic “sun and steel” approach of outdoor activity and bodybuilding not only is healthy and fights anomie and depression (common problems among today’s young), but it makes you more attractive to women. Shooting and hunting provide useful skills, as do martial arts. And so forth.

You should go to church. This both strengthens you spiritually and increases your contact with like-minded people, if you are attending the right church. It also increases your chances of finding a wife (although a great many churches either do not make any or enough efforts to match up young people, or are run in a feminized fashion that exalts women over men, demanding much of men and requiring nothing of women, rather celebrating “strong independent women,” thereby driving men and women apart, and men away).

You should not do things that contribute to a lush fantasy life or to celebrating the accomplishments of others. Thus, you should limit video games—preferably to zero, and you should spend as little time as possible watching or following sportsball. You should not argue on the internet—but you should seek to improve your rhetoric and logic through traditional methods. You should not watch porn. You should eat healthy (and not eat the bugs). You know all this—you don’t need me to expand on it, because all of this is obvious. It merely requires discipline, which only you can find within yourself.

What Personal Attributes Should I Strive to Acquire?

As with recreation, you already know the answer. Within the constraints of your personality, you should seek to embody what until very recently were universally seen as the moral virtues of an honorable man. Bravery, above all. Honesty. Competence. Self-control. Self-sacrifice. You need to push back against living in the pod—you need to carry yourself in a self-confident way, and seek out other self-confident men to be your friends. When you acquire some of these characteristics, it makes it easier to acquire others. Work in this area becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Should I Involve Myself in Politics?

Generally not. Life is full of opportunity costs, and in the current environment, your time is much better spent on self-education and other forms of self-improvement, or on getting married and building a family. Certainly, working in national politics is a total waste of your time.

Maybe there is some benefit to working in politics on a local level, such as school board elections, currently a hot topic on the Right. But winning school board elections no longer actually accomplishes anything, because the regime will not permit any rollback of their victories, until their power is wholly broken. If you win a school board election today, unless you run an aggressive and exhaustive equivalent of denazification to root out and terminate the employment of any Left teacher, the “education professionals” in your system will simply continue corrupting children, even if you putatively control the levers of power. Meanwhile, the federal government will try to put you in jail, and otherwise harass you, while a campaign of violent hatred is waged against you by local leftists. Thus, there’s really little benefit to even local elections, if the goal is actually exercising power.

On the other hand, there is one benefit to local organizing for political office. You can learn who are allies and potential allies, and you can learn their strengths and weaknesses. And there may be some circumstances, especially in areas that are already largely or totally Right, where control of a city or county government, or an existing good relationship with the county sheriff, might become extremely useful. Nonetheless, in all of these cases, for a young person there are almost always going to be far better ways to spend your time.

You should spend zero time engaging the Left in discussion. Forcing their poison entirely out of our society should be our only political goal, and to achieve that end, there is no political solution. Most people on the Left today have long since passed into epistemic closure; they live in a fantasy world, from which they never need emerge and in which they are rarely, if ever, exposed to any thinking that is not confirmatory of their beliefs. (This is, paradoxically, an advantage of the Right, that we are continually bombarded with Left beliefs, because it prevents intellectual shriveling, and makes our intellectual powers sharper.) There is no point in engaging with people who, for example, believe that the recent assault by the regime’s secret police on Trump’s home is an example of the rule of law in action—and they really do believe that, as bizarre as that is. There is no hope for such people, or at least for their leaders and enforcers (most people who skew Left today, as I have said before, will quickly change their tune when the winds of power blow from a different direction). If closed-minded people of the Left are your friends (although such people, who as the Left always does insist on total politicization of all areas of life, have widely shed any friends who refuse to share their hive mind), or family, you should just avoid talking about politics, and ponder whether exile or lustration is their future, or whether they will be part of the larger group that can be permitted to live with us after the fracture, when they adopt new healthy opinions and wholesome practices.

Conclusion

That’s it. There is nothing more to say. Yes, nearly everything I say in this article has exceptions or obscure counter-examples, and your mileage may vary, for time and chance happeneth to us all. This does not affect the analysis in the least. You’re welcome.