Violence, Censorship, Celebrity Worship
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my conversation with Winston Marshall on The Winston Marshall Show:
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Los Angeles Event:
You are invited to attend my live event with author Abigail Shrier in Los Angeles. October 16 at 6pm.
Details and registration here.
City Journal:
Here’s my latest in City Journal, reviewing Ed Latimore’s superb memoir Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business
Excerpt:
I first encountered Latimore in 2019 through his posts on Twitter (now X), where he had carved out a niche as an astute observer of struggle, discipline, and self-mastery. His writing was unusually sharp, and when I learned about his background—an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh’s public housing projects, battles with addiction, a professional boxing career, service in the Army National Guard, and eventual graduation from college—his insights clicked into place.
My own life bears some resemblance to his: I grew up in foster homes, joined the military at 17, struggled with alcohol, didn’t begin college until my mid-twenties, and also wrote a memoir at a relatively young age. Meeting Latimore and finding another person who had made it out gave me a kind of reassurance that is hard to articulate. This personal connection is one reason I find his book so compelling, though readers with different biographies will still find plenty to admire.
[…]
Eventually, he tested into a gifted program that showed him what school could be. Once a week, a bus took him across town to a place where students cared about learning and didn’t have to worry about disruption or violence. No fights broke out. No one vandalized or stole his belongings. For the first time, he could raise his hand in class without worrying about retaliation. “I just wanted to learn and not be hassled,” he writes.
Those hours in the library and the gifted program planted a seed: where you start does not have to be where you end up.
Latimore is clear-eyed about his other possible path. The book offers a rare glimpse into the mindset required to succeed at crime, relating his encounters with drug dealers and hustlers. “I’ve met dealers of all different substances,” he writes. “My general experience has been that the harder the drug, the worse the human being is that deals it . . . Harder drugs are worth more money so the competition is tougher, and that requires a more dangerous person to succeed.” These observations are valuable because they demystify the criminal underworld without glamorizing it.
You can read the whole thing here.
The Only Reading App I Use:
I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:
These screenshots come from my Readwise app.
Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.
Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.
Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use this link → https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).
I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.
Links and recommendations:
My Two Cents on the Killing of Charlie Kirk by Roy Baumeister
Some thoughts on violence by Joseph Heath
Bullets and Ballots: The Legacy of Charlie Kirk by Tanner Greer
College students increasingly believe violence is justifiable to stop speech by Angel Eduardo
Censorship is Primarily a Problem of Culture by Musa al-Gharbi
Max Raskin interviewed me. Maybe the most unusual interview questions I've ever received, including my favorite cut of steak, whether I play video games, and what TV shows I'm watching.
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Eighty-eight percent of college students say they pretended to be more progressive than they are to succeed academically or socially. Eighty percent of students say they submitted class work that misrepresented their real views to conform to the progressive views of the professor. (source).
2. Intelligence is inversely correlated with pathological attitudes toward celebrities. In other words, people with lower IQ scores believe that if they meet their favorite celebrities, these celebrities would enjoy speaking with them, and that they'd have deep hidden connections. (source).
3. Women who self-identify as “feminists” exhibit much stronger preferences for premium beauty products as compared with non-feminist women. The practical purpose and effect of these investments is to help elite women stand out relative to female rivals. (source: We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
As always enjoy your links.
Reflecting on the Musa al-Gharbi article, it was always clear to me that woke-ism was a mass phenomenon, not one built upon intense text scrutiny. Ideas of oppressor-oppressed or intersectionality function because of the simplicity they can be reduced to. They still have intellectual roots though, and on-line movement leaders may have done more readings than the average college student.
Also clear that the movement did not rely on natural in- or into-group selection alone. As an example consider this from FIRE, addressing the following mandate to teachers within California’s community college system:
Professors were required to acknowledge that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic and other minoritized (sic) groups face” Professors were informed that "persons that think they are not racists are in denial" and that the drive towards color blindness in society "perpetuates existing racial inequalities". They were warned not to “weaponize academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students” (FIRE Quarterly, Fall 2023)
FIRE successfully sued for this. They stated: "These regulations are a totalitarian triple whammy. The government is forcing professors to teach and preach politicized viewpoints they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary indiscernible line."
Not just censorship, but the impulse to mandate speech not generally accepted, that is the core of cancel culture.
The primary force that has led to the profound political division of America has been the political left noting that their ideas were not resonating, that they had honestly been mistakes that had resulted in terrible long-term consequences of socioeconomic decline and decay, and that the people were waking up to this and thus the left was seeing the risks for terrible political outcomes going forward. The left combined with the Professional Managerial Class with a shared goal to prevent the disruption of their trajectory for the Liberal Global New World Order that Obama had let slip as "the only way forward". This is the movement of the elites throughout the Western world.
Because of Brexit and then Trump, this cohort of strange bedfellows, the radical left and the monied corporatists, aligned with the Democrats and began a new strategy that required them to exploit their ownership of the media and tech to propagandize and negative brand the opposition to this Liberal Global New World Order... the one that started as the post WWII Bretton Woods Act to bring 44 nations under the US protection and global market, but had been corrupted since as a Wall Street dream for corporate primacy and profit maximization... but that gutted the working class and middle class from the economic returns and opportunities except for cheap Chinese goods at Walmart.
#MeToo, COVID era authoritarianism, Woke, DEI... these are all tail-end constructs of their programs and movements to foment chaos and disruption into society so that the people stop their attention on the decades of failed leftist policies and instead fight each other. Coastal and big educated city blue-haired cat lady girlbosses and their low-T male lapdogs, young campus brainwashed underemployed malcontent masked thugs, minorities enraged with a destructive victim mentality. All irrationally directed to destroy the working middle class as their enemy.
It was this move to go negative. To negative brand. To character assassinate. To label political opponents with the vilest names. To foment hatred and fear into the electorate.
This is the left.
The left are enemies of good. They are a threat to liberalism around the globe. They are the new axis of power attempting to take over the world and subjugate the masses into controlled government-dependent powerless people.
They are more dangerous today because they are losing. It is evident in the fact that they have started assassinating political opponents and celebrating it.
I think we need to consider that we need to accept some extreme measures to stop them. Just like in all civilization wars, what is moral and legal needs a temporary Overton Window move to defeat the enemy and get back to peace and freedom.