September 12, 2023

I’m a pretty average guy. My SAT was 1010, and I earned a 2.7 GPA as an undergraduate and a 3.0 for my MBA. Since college, I’ve launched half a dozen startups, none of which, made it very far… An objective assessment might suggest my intelligence is slightly above average and my entrepreneurial capabilities below. When all is said and done, I probably balance out as basically average.

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That’s troubled me for years…but probably not in the way you think. I’m not troubled that I’m basically average; I’m troubled by what I must be getting wrong vis-à-vis the world around me. I say wrong because there’s an entire universe out there of people who are, by every objective measure, exponentially smarter than I am, but who think exactly the opposite of the way I do on practically every single issue. Guys like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Craig Newmark and so many more.

These guys have more money than God. They all probably scored perfect or close to it on the SATs. They’ve created companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people and generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. They’re showcased in magazines like Forbes and Fortune, lionized on TV, and are the subjects of books and movies and, of course, success memes.

But somehow, these guys, and most like them, are generally hardcore leftists. They’re animated by and put their money behind things like “Climate Change,” “DEI,” and open borders. Most supported the BLM scam, and many of their companies regularly censor conservative speech. They support things like the Paris Climate Accords, the WHO, and were largely all in on the COVID scam. Most of all, they support Democrats who push for higher taxes, defunding the police, and more government regulations, particularly on businesses.

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This is where the trouble comes in. These guys are really smart. They’ve succeeded in ways few human beings ever have. They’ve become rich and powerful beyond belief. And they all did it in the United States…yet they support policies that are not only antithetical to traditional American values, but they also actively subvert the framework that allowed them to succeed in the first place.

King Zuckerberg by Andrea Widburg

America may be a flawed place, but it is the place where Microsoft, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, eBay, Craigslist, and countless others were founded and found success. Interestingly, most of them employ large numbers of immigrants, despite their success being rooted in America, not in India, China, or Europe.

Their success was not because of government programs, regulations, or largesse. They succeeded in America because government regulation was relatively low for startups. They succeeded in America because that’s where capital came to find attractive returns. They succeeded in America because of well-trained STEM graduates who brought them a unique set of skills and experiences they couldn’t find elsewhere because our market is the most dynamic on the planet and the most open to new ideas. And perhaps most of all, they succeeded in America because of our fundamental constitutional rights protecting private property—including intellectual property—and free speech, which foster the exchange of ideas, and because of our fundamental notion of entrepreneurship, where anyone can start a business and succeed by creating something sufficiently compelling to entice consumers to freely pay for it.

These factors don’t exist anywhere else in the world and, as a result, for 100 years, America has created more prosperity and increased the worldwide standard of living more than any nation in all of human history…and it’s not even close. And these mavens all pretend to support increasing prosperity and decreasing poverty.

However, now that they’ve found success beyond imagination thanks to the American system, they’ve decided that the fundamental rules that allowed them to prosper should no longer apply. So-called emergencies like “Climate Change,” “Institutional Racism,” “Gender Equity,” and “Global Inequality” supersede the 18th-century anachronisms of the American Constitution and individual rights.

No longer can Americans be allowed to decide how to heat their homes, fuel their cars, or protect their property. No longer can they be allowed to enjoy an American-centric foreign policy or manage America’s economy in a way that empowers Americans. No longer will common miscreants be held responsible for their actions, even as those who challenge mandates are crushed. No longer will students learn objective facts or study the Western canon, but they’ll be taught to change their gender on a whim.