Then reality crashes the fairy tale like a drunk fairy godmother.

Your knight in shining armor morphs into a workaholic zombie, slaying corporate dragons or wrestling tractors just to pile up those shiny monetary trophies at your feet. Exhausted? Sure, but hey, there’s always energy for a quick roll in the hay, right?

Meanwhile, you’re pulling triple duty: scrubbing the castle, wrangling the tiny tyrants (aka kids), and juggling your own job because why not add more chaos? Romance? That’s buried under a mountain of laundry and existential fatigue.

Both of you are drained dry, grinding away to make ends meet, maybe squeezing in a vacation if the budget doesn’t laugh in your face. Keeping the kids alive feels like a full-time gig. Congrats, you’re basically running a survival reality show.

Enter complacency: Once a dynamic duo, now you’re just two bedraggled roommates exchanging goodnight pecks, wondering if your last hookup was during the Obama administration.

Humans crave three basics from loved ones: Understanding, Appreciation, and Acceptance. Miss one, and your relationship crumbles faster than a vampire in sunlight. Poof, gone!

Cue my madcap experiment: I dove undercover on Ashley Madison (yep, that scandal-plagued cheater’s paradise is still kicking, data breach be damned) and chatted with 103 men from all walks of life. Their tales? Eerily similar, like they all read from the same tragic script.

Ladies, we love to paint men as sleazy dogs who’d hump a lamppost, but spoiler: That’s rarely the case. The truth? It’s messier than you think and sadder than you know.

Let’s dissect their excuses, er, reasons. (Names changed to shield the guilty; I’m here to enlighten, not torpedo lives. Think of me as a marriage whisperer with a side of espionage.)

Take Tim, 42, investment banker and father of six kids (gulp, talk about overachieving in the gene pool). His wife’s a homeschooling superhero, but after baby #6 four years ago, she hit the intimacy brakes hard. Tim adores her, knows she’s wiped, even hired a live-in nanny to lighten the load. Nada. After four years of blue-balled begging, he sought affection elsewhere. He stays for the kids and their 15-year history, but without touch, he’s basically a walking corpse: depressed, lost, and questioning if monogamy is just a fancy word for “slow death by neglect.”

Then there’s Bryan, 55, still handsome after 30 years of marriage, kids flown the coop. Empty nest? More like empty bed. He’s a community bigwig in local politics. Divorce would tank his rep faster than a viral scandal. But his wife shoves him away like he’s radioactive whenever he craves closeness. Trapped in a sexless spotlight, he’s seeking affairs to reclaim some vitality, underscoring the stark irony between his public role and private struggles.

Kevin, 50, is your classic serial cheater. Never faithful to a girlfriend, ex-wife, or apparently, his own conscience. Magnetic? Oh yeah, with a sob story about neglectful, narcissistic parents that could win an Oscar. But guys like him were rare; most weren’t born cheaters, just molded into them by marital famine. Kevin’s the exception that proves the rule: Some dudes treat fidelity like a suggestion, not a commandment, and they cause devastation wherever they go and with whoever is unlucky enough to cross their paths.

The gut-puncher? Scott, 27, married his high school sweetheart at 18. Post-baby #1, she flipped into a verbally and physically abusive nightmare, yet convinced him to pop out #2 five years later. He absorbs the hits to shield his girls, terrified of custody courts that favor moms and cast fathers aside like useless sperm donors. Ashley Madison? His desperate lifeline for a shred of kindness after years of domestic doom. Poor kid’s basically in a horror movie where the monster wears a wedding ring.

I emerged from this digital den of despair with unexpected compassion. Overwhelmingly, these guys weren’t chasing “new pussy” like thrill-seeking predators. They craved feeling desired, not discarded. Science backs it: Men need physical intimacy like plants need sunlight; withhold it, and they wilt into depressed husks. Imagine signing a lifetime contract forbidding touch from anyone else, only for your partner to ghost the bedroom. It’s like being sentenced to solitary confinement with a view of the conjugal visit room.

Where’d they screw up? Communication, or the lack thereof. Every. Single. One. Avoided the tough talk like it was the plague, opting for “go along to get along” until resentment built up like unpaid bills. I pointed out menopause, weight gain, or low self-esteem could be culprits. Doctors fix that stuff all the time. But nope, they stewed in silence.

Why do stats show men cheat more (about 20% lifetime vs. women’s 10%)? Biology’s a bitch: Their wiring screams for physical connection, and without it, they spiral into despondency. Trapped by kids, cash, careers, or custody fears (courts aren’t exactly bro-friendly), cheating becomes the grim escape hatch.

The fix? Pick wisely upfront and master the art of communication and being clear about your needs before popping out babies that will keep you trapped in perpetual celibacy. Happy marriages don’t run on autopilot or passive-aggression.

Bottom line: Denying intimacy is relationship sabotage. He’ll stop asking eventually... and start swiping.

Ladies, heed this: In the age of apps and endless options, everyone’s replaceable. Keep the spark alive, or watch your fairy tale turn into a cautionary tale, complete with alimony payments and a side of regret.

I’m not advocating for cheating or trying to justify it. What I’m pointing out is that there are common patterns behind why men cheat. If you’re interested in reducing the chances of that happening in your own life, it might be worth paying attention to what I’ve learned.

I personally know pastors, ranchers, businessmen, and professionals who are stepping out on their wives, so don’t think it can’t or won’t happen to you. Burying your heads in the sand and proclaiming that there is NEVER any good reason for cheating won’t stop your marriages from crumbling.

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Marriage is a covenant, and it’s just as important for women to see to the needs of their husbands as it is for husbands to see to the needs of their wives. Imagine walking down the aisle and making a deal with someone that you’ll never touch anyone else so long as you both shall live, but after a while that person refuses to let you. That’s where many of these guys exist now, In a constant state of physical famine.

May the odds be ever in your favor!

P.S. If you’re feeling attacked, ladies, I have a follow-up piece to this about why women cheat. Trust me, there is plenty of blame to go around fueling that 50% divorce rate.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

I have witnessed firsthand many changes in the industry—advances in tech, cash culture, and shifting attitudes toward alcohol have shaped the dining/drinking experience for customers and staff alike—and in the middle of it all, the very idea of gratuity is being questioned. Who in the service industry at large deserves a tip?

(I’ve got one, you say! Get another line of work!)

Inflation! Affordability! It’s the economy, stupid–and it is. Stupid economy… And it’s coming from both ends–as belts tighten for the consumer in an effort to keep every spare dollar, the tip jars, or screens make their way to unexpected places—much to the chagrin of the everyday consumer.

Well, I’ve about had it! On the way to work today, the bus driver asked for a tip. I was so insulted that I complained to the manager of the Tri-Met. He agreed it was truly unprofessional and said he would issue a stern warning and assured me it would never happen again. I was so impressed with him I tipped him twenty and walked the rest of the way to work…

Shit rolls down hill, and perhaps, we have reduced the service industry to beggars…

I understand–every dollar we tip is a dollar we just gave away. But this is America, honeychild! Money is the sweet nectar, o Óleo, that keeps this ship steering the right way. You see–you see–what we have here? A breakdown of a kind, the breakdown of communication, the silence of capitalism. It is the silence of money, and America, if not its inventor, is certainly its perfector.

The tip jar, the screen–it certainly is in your face–is it not, and if I understand it correctly, more so lately than usual? It is a nasty little thing, and nothing is more crass, more nasty than a confrontation over money. You’d rather ask your father-in-law for a kidney before a spare dollar, now admit it!

America’s relationship with money is rooted in a kind of mystique. It is everywhere, it is nowhere. It is in abundance if you know where to look; it is never anywhere that meets the eye. It sits underneath every open bar tab, every shared Uber, every dinner among friends, every gift under the tree that does not ameliorate the shortcomings of last year’s present.

At the restaurant, it is a sigh of relief when someone just offers to pay, and it is settled upon. I offer to pay, too, but probably to buy my way out of any awkward haggling later on. It is expensive to be cheap!

My attitude is this–I always tip. I just can’t help it. The encroachment of any kind of pettiness, I am allergic to. It is a cloak, an attitude I need to survive; I hate cheap people. I also detest money. It isn’t about the money! There is something about cheap people I find lacking that has nothing to do with money; it is a cheapness in spirit I find wanting to piss on…

Anyway, the restaurant industry is fictitious. The bar and hotel, too. The shit has rolled so far downhill–look at wages + cost of living; just do it, you can’t make the equation work without tips. Servers would turn in their aprons, bartenders would retire to philosophy, baristas would remain (the lot of them wouldn’t know what to do with themselves), and every restaurant with any character would turn into a Wing-Stop or gas station-adjacent Subway.

Without the generosity of strangers, without their participation in the farce, the restaurant industry, at large, fails. Co-ops, alternative business models, shared-profits systems exist, but their methods aren’t broadly, culturally time-tested. Alternate systems may flourish here and there in cities that can approach the cutting edge, but there are restaurants all over the country that will continue to rely on gratuity to cover the pay for their workers.

The point is there is no system, only culture, and there is something said about culture and politics–one of them is downstream from the other one, but when they fuse, everything is downstream from that. All the way down to the poor soul who pours your beer, or gets you the extra ranch, or creamer, and depends on your generosity for their living. It’s a Beggar’s Banquet, and I am Mick Jagger, and I can’t get no…

Customer Satisfaction.

Just yesterday a man emptied his change into the tip jar. 67 cents. He was pushing 80 years old. I said, “Please, Mr. Jagger, you’ve done enough! Another gentleman, sporting a touch of gray, ordered a cheeseburger without onions. Says he can’t stand onions. When a man does this, I see his inner child. A boy sits before me now, making an ick face at those slimy vegetable toppings–gross, mom!

The truth is, I get the sense that the rats are fleeing the ship. Money tightens, everyone at the bottom scrambles. We have normalized these positions and then have become complacent with them in the restaurant industry; complacency breeds dysfunction, deterioration.

The conversation between the worker, the tipped soul, and management has been a one-way street for at least two decades. The workers at the bottom are getting crushed, yet expectations keep rising. Years ago, you hardly had to worry about allergies. Now, they are everywhere, and the implications of a mistake feel life-threatening. For someone to order without a following list of modifications and special kitchen requests feels like a lucky break.

Too, a group of six came into the restaurant; after one order of fries for the six of them, a few coffees, an iced tea, the total bill for the table was $55.00. Separate checks, every one of them, all paying with a card, all requesting receipts.

It is the restaurant industry–dealing with people–that makes you wonder how the world functions, how do people survive with such little wherewithal.

But what I do know is the people in the industry are some of the best people I have known. If my experience is any indication of the industry at large, the service workers keep the world moving. They can’t always feel like it, but are mostly willing to perform, determined, and invested.

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For myself–I tip all I can. As a bartender, there is some feeling of obligation, something that compels me. The service industry is full of moving parts, and when you know enough, it is harder to hold it against anyone. The delivery was late, the ice machine broke down, the cook called in, the server’s water broke this morning; it’s all too human of an enterprise. I’m not paying for the service; I am paying for the show.

A tip is a call to action for the spirit! It says pony up to grease the wheels a bit, buy your ticket for the show. The tip is always optional, and so is the performance. Without everybody playing their role, the house lights come on, and the fiction of all this restaurant business is seen in much greater relief.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The proverb, American in reality, stems from the thawing of the relationship between America and Communist China during the early 1970s. More specifically, it refers to President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.

While the Communist Chinese had been on the allied side during World War II, their ideology had guaranteed that they would fall under the influence of the Soviet Union once the Cold War began in the late 1940s.

However, relations between the two great powers soon began to deteriorate. When Stalin died in 1953, Mao Zedong rejected Soviet dominance over world communism. As the years passed, relations continued to sour, leading to Moscow pulling all economic and technical advisors out of China in 1960 and eventually to border clashes between the two countries in 1969.

Nixon saw this as an opportunity to put pressure on Moscow, to drive a bigger wedge between the two nations. It began with China and the US table tennis teams exchanging visits, and this “Ping-pong diplomacy” led to Nixon visiting China in February 1972.

Nixon had a well-established reputation as an anti-Communist “hawk.” He served on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), sponsored legislation requiring Communist Party members to register with the federal government, and was a staunch supporter of Taiwan. In short, his anti-communist credentials were impeccable. Consequently, his conservative critics were unable to accuse him of being soft on communism.

In short: “Only Nixon could go to China.”

Today that term is thought to have a broader meaning. It is taken to mean that only a hardliner can enact a policy that goes against a party’s traditional ideology.

Personally, I think the proverb is dead, and I think Trump, or more specifically, MAGA killed it.

The Kingdom of the Blind

I spent much of 2024 arguing that Trump was the better candidate than Harris. Like many people, I had misgivings, but having seen how dishonest the Biden administration was and fearing Harris would move the Democrats further to the left, I felt Trump was the better choice. Counterfactuals are by their very nature guesses, so it is not impossible that I was right and Harris would have been worse.

That said, Trump has been a disaster. This is not to say that he hasn’t done things I agree with. Securing the border is one example. I try to, as they say, “call balls and strikes” when it comes to policies and consequently have criticized Trump when I disagreed with him. As you can imagine, this has not made me popular with the more, how shall I put it, fanatical members of MAGA.

However, as time has passed, my belief that my credentials as a Trump supporter would mean that “only Nixon could go to China” would protect me when I criticized Trump’s policies and actions.

I was wrong.

More often than not, criticism of Trump is met with accusations that I have TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. If I think treating China with kid gloves while engaging in trade wars with allies is bad diplomacy and will result in inflation, then I have TDS.

If I think the only thing a war with Iran will accomplish is higher energy prices and the depletion of vital American military supplies, I have TDS.

If I think the President of the United States should show some class and not engage in online trolling like a 12-year-old boy, I have TDS.

If I remind people that the federal government strong-arming companies into doing what it says is what the Biden administration did during COVID, I have TDS.

If I point out that Trump’s strong-arming of companies is reminiscent of what the Biden administration did during COVID, I have TDS.

If I point out that the federal government taking ownership stakes in private companies sounds a lot like communism, I have TDS.

MAGA has gone from wanting a politician to “shake things up” to being a cult which requires absolute loyalty to the leader. Any mental gymnastics necessary to justify a decision is acceptable no matter how absurd, and any criticism of the great leader is heresy.

Those of us with any knowledge of economics or history must feel a little like Cassandra; we know where these actions are leading, but no one believes us.

This leads to the second proverb that MAGA has killed: “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” This is meant to imply that a person with only a little skill or knowledge can easily lead or have an advantage over people who have none. But that does not apply when you are facing a cult. Knowledge, truth, and rational thought are irrelevant to cultists.

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Had Nixon lived today, 20 years of anti-communism would not have shielded him from accusations that he was a communist sympathizer if not an outright communist. In today’s world, all that matters is the eternal now, and all that criticism of ‘the great leader’ will get you is shouted down.

In America today, the embodiment of the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man isn’t a king; he’s a heretic.

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

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Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

That is the house I came from. That is the creed that raised me. Left-wing ideology is a death cult. It ruins women, murders children, and sickens society until a mother can walk her daughter into blood and still believe she is the kind one.

I was four when I watched my father beat her. Not a story I was told later. A scene burned into me while I was still small enough to believe a house could stop a man’s hands. The terror did not pass through and leave. It stamped itself into my soul and stayed.

Two or three years later she told me she had been raped. No shield. No delay. She put the ugliest night of her life on a child and kept talking. She had been twisted early: abused as a girl, raped as her first sexual experience, then beaten by my father while I watched.

After that I stopped being a daughter. I became the adult in the room. I parented my parent. I watched her face before I watched anything else. I learned how to calm a grown woman while my own body stayed braced for impact. I never felt safe. A child who feels safe does not sleep with one eye open waiting for the next horror.

That is how the cult gets in. It finds a wrecked woman, calls her wreckage wisdom, and uses her to train the next girl.

I was the next girl.

I got pregnant young. Fear made my hands shake. I went to her because some last unkillable part of me still thought a mother might fight for me. She didn’t. She already had two or three abortions behind her. I watched the threat of meaning cross her face. If what was in me was a child, then she had ended children too. She could not survive that. So she reached for the lines that would save her and wreck me: Cluster of cells. It doesn’t matter. Don’t make this a tragedy.

I felt myself tear while she was still speaking. She had to say it didn’t matter. She had to lead me into an evil act so she would not have to repent. That is how a death cult moves from one generation to the next.

It uses a mother’s unconfessed blood as a script for her daughter. I went where she pointed. I ended what she told me was nothing. I have been walking around with that anguish ever since.

When she left, she did not drift. She tried to destroy me first. She raged. She hurled venom at the softest places in me, words built to shred my soul and keep cutting after the door slammed. Shame. Disgust. Verdicts meant to follow me into sleep. Then she left. Every ten years. Exile after execution on repeat. She could not stand that I refused her ideology, so she punished me with absence only after she had tried to leave me in pieces with her venom.

Then she would come back. Soft voice. Clean hands. A thin act of tenderness. That was never repair. That was the countdown. I learned the pattern in my bones. Play nice. Wait. The next cut is coming.

The next came the day after Trump hit Iran.

She blasted me with mentally ill poison and aimed it at the center of who I am. She let me know that I was her greatest shame. Her disappointment. A fraud who only believed what I believed for money and attention.

She said it knowing I had carried these convictions most of my life, through years when they cost me a mother and paid me nothing. She needed me agreeing. If I agreed, then she did not have to face what her politics had made of her: a mother who could flay her daughter and then disappear into faux moral superiority.

The irony would be funny if it had not been my life. She rages about Trump being a pedophile who ruins girls while playing death queen in her own house, a woman who tried to eat her daughter from the inside out and still wants credit for her conscience. She will rager about other people’s sins and never look down at the graves she walked me to.

That is the cult’s favorite costume: public fury, private rot.

I did not come out clean.

The anguish twisted me. I took that memory of my father beating her, the terror burned into a four-year-old’s soul, and I used it as fuel. I learned to hate men with a precision that felt like justice. I tore them apart from the inside. I knew how to get close enough to do real damage and leave them standing in it. Their subsequent abuse, real and imagined, all went into the same fire.

I was not always the safe, Godly woman I am today. I was what that house made me when it finished with a girl’s innocence: not just wounded. Lethal. That memory still sickens me. This ideology does not only take children from the womb. It takes the living woman and teaches her how to ruin other people so she will not have to sit alone with what was done to her.

There are nights it all hits at once. The 4-year-old watching repeat beatings she cannot stop. The child forced to hold a rape she cannot carry and should never have been asked to.

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The young woman talked into a killing so her mother could stay unrepentant. The adult standing in the ashes of another decade-long disappearance. The later knowledge that I had learned how to hurt the way I had been hurt. Anguish corrupts all it touches, but redemption is possible, and I am living proof.

There is blood on my hands, but I will make sure my daughter stays clean. I am raising her with love that does not require her agreement as rent, with values that do not need a dead child to protect a grown woman’s unrepentant sins, with support that lets her remain a child.

She wasn’t told at six that the world is a rape she must manage. She will not watch violence become the family language. She will not be walked into a grave and told it’s normal. She will not learn that love ends in a soul-shredding speech and a slammed door. I will stand between this death cult and the next girl.

The cycle stopped with me.

My daughter will never have to know what it cost.

The case itself is disturbing enough. Three innocent children are dead, strangled to death by their own mother in the basement of their home while their father went to run errands.

Dawson, Cora, and Callan are their names.

Three beautiful children lost to the entire world forever. Dawson wanted to grow up to be a firefighter. Cora really loved princesses. Callan didn’t have a chance to grow up and dream. May they rest in peace.

At first I thought this was strictly a tragic case of poor mental health care (I have since changed my mind based on the facts of the case), and I wrote about what I did to put an action plan in place should I slip into postpartum depression after the birth of our second child.

It included things like telling a close neighbor of mine that I had a problem with my first, and I also told another close friend. It included lining up and developing a relationship with a psychiatrist who could closely monitor me after birth. I also set up an appointment four weeks after birth, right around when my husband was going to return to work. I told my OBGYN team. I also discussed breastfeeding-safe medication with both my OBGYN team and a pediatrician.

My first issue with Lindsay Clancy was why she seemed to be bouncing around and switching providers while in the midst of a crisis. Especially an entirely predictable crisis given her history with postpartum anxiety with both Dawson and Cora.

Why did she not have a psychiatrist picked out ahead of time? After all, she was a labor and delivery nurse. And the issues that children of mothers with postpartum mental health issues are well documented. Things like speech delays and even attachment disorders are much more likely in children with mothers who have untreated postpartum mental health issues.

And while speech and language therapists are wonderful people who do great work, giving your kid attachment disorders can go on to give your children serious disruptions in their social relationships well into adulthood. The infant-mother dyad is one of the most foundational relationships a child has, and it sets the stage for the rest of their life.

In other words, if you’re not willing as a mom to care about yourself because you’re just far too depressed to do so, surely you can muster up the courage to get yourself together for your own children.

If I know this, as a lay person, surely a labor and delivery nurse would know this and know it more intimately than I do. After all, she was on the front lines of maternal healthcare.

And as more details about this case have come to light, the less sympathetic I have become.

She was offered an inpatient medication management program and a general mental health partial hospitalization program at the Women’s and Infants Hospital in December of 2022, and she was told to follow up about those treatment options with her psychiatrist, Dr. Tufts, but she failed to do so, and instead continued with just her short visits with Dr. Tufts.

Furthermore, there was zero sign of any psychosis before the incident; she only heard the voice during the murders, one time. Never once did she tell her doctors that she was having thoughts of harming the children.

She did manage to tell her husband and her mother, though. People point to this to state she was “crying out for help,” but I find it convenient that she told the very people who had no power or ability to help her.

She never told her doctors about her thoughts of harming the kids in spite of the fact that she had an appointment with Dr. Tufts the day before the murders.

You would think, given that this is your psychiatrist, that mentioning the fact that you had thoughts of harming the children would be something you would tell her. Yet neither Jollotta nor Tufts were told. Nor did she tell anyone when she voluntarily checked herself in at the McLean Center.

I guess when I look at all these facts laid out before me, I have a question: What more could’ve possibly been done to help Lindsay Clancy?

And for those who want to blame her family, how long should Patrick and her family have had to babysat Lindsay to prevent the unthinkable, especially when she lied to virtually everyone in her life about her mental state? Should Patrick have known she was lying and never left her alone with the kids despite her outward appearance of health?

He thought she was healthy. She just met with her doctor the day before. He was getting some food and MiraLAX.

When I think about what more could’ve been done to help Lindsay, the only things I can think of would be to roll back HIPAA laws so that Patrick was in full communication with her doctors, and the moment she expressed any thoughts about harming the kids, allowed her husband to involuntarily commit her for an indefinite period of time until she was no longer mentally ill.

You know, like the good old days in the 1950s.

I appreciate the conversation surrounding mental health, but I don’t appreciate the idea that Lindsay didn’t have any agency. Lindsay was in full control of her healthcare, her doctors, and what medications she took, and she had access to some of the best healthcare in the country.

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There is no doubt, based on her medical records, that she was having serious problems finding the right medications and was mentally ill (although I don’t believe the claim of “command hallucinations”).

But it was up to her to utilize the resources given to her. I firmly believe an inpatient stay to figure out her medications would’ve probably saved her children.

Instead, she chose to remain in the home, send Patrick on an errand, and she strangled her children to death.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.
-- Alexander Smith

It is a very Christian sentiment, and it got me thinking about how much society has changed over the years and about what it is that holds a society together. It isn’t surprising that this quote is unapologetically Christian. Smith was a Scottish poet who lived from 1829 to 1867.

He lived in a different world. A Christian world. At least with respect to the West.

The foundation of Western society, the common belief that held society together, was Christianity. Sure, there were different variants, often in conflict with each other, but our laws, morals, and social norms were based upon a common set of values which were largely taken from Christianity and the Bible. At least broadly speaking. Christianity wasn’t the entirety of Western civilization, but it supplied a shared moral framework within which those other institutions operated.

What is our common denominator today? Is it still Christianity? The table below shows that the percentage of people claiming to be Christian has declined significantly and, in some locations, it has declined to such an extent that Christianity is now a minority in some Western countries.

The decline in Western religiosity is a complicated topic with many mutually reinforcing changes. Science gradually replaced religion as the West’s primary explanatory authority for the natural world. Rising existential security reduced the need to explain things that once made life extremely precarious: infant mortality, famine, disease, premature death, war. Religion, which was once an important factor in a person’s identity, became just another choice a person could make. And the list goes on.

However, we don’t need to explain why things changed to recognize that they did—and that Christianity can no longer be considered our common belief system. As much as many of us may wish otherwise, it is not the glue that binds us together.

So, if Christianity isn’t holding Western countries together, what is? What has replaced Christianity as the bedrock of Western society?

“Liberal democracy?”

That is certainly something all Western countries have in common, but you can’t hold a society together with something so simple as “I have rights.” Rights conflict, so are as likely to cause conflict as to prevent it.

“Freedom” doesn’t work either, as it only unites us when it is threatened. And even then, it is only if we all agree what freedom means. And we don’t.

Many have suggested that “civility is the glue that holds society together.” It’s certainly a catchy quote. However, civility is less a glue than it is a means to avoid conflict. I can be polite to people in a foreign country without needing to have anything in common with them.

The longer I think about this and the deeper I dig trying to find bedrock, the more worried I become. I fear that over the last 50 years Western society has slowly replaced Christianity with “multiculturalism” and “tolerance,” and if I’m right, that’s a big problem.

“Multiculturalism,” as it is currently practiced in the West, requires adherents to believe one of two things, each wrong in its own way. The first requires supporters to believe that culture and values are somehow separate. That people from China, India, or Iran are just Westerners who dress differently, speak a different language, and eat different types of food. The second belief, which at least pays lip service to the existence of significant differences, assumes that cultures can coexist without shared values.

Both assumptions are seriously flawed. Culture and values are not distinct; they overlap. Different cultures may share some similar values, but they do not share them all. How different cultures are from each other greatly influences how likely it is that they can coexist. Believing otherwise is what has contributed to much of the strife resulting from mass immigration.

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“Perhaps,” you might say, “but certainly tolerance is a good thing, right?”

Sure, but “live and let live” is hardly a unifying creed. Tolerance may be a virtue, but it’s a negative virtue; it doesn’t tell us what to do, but rather what not to do. If anything, it promotes the fragmentation of society by promoting, or at least tolerating, the creation of sub-communities that have little in common other than some shared infrastructure and the right to vote.

I fear that in our efforts to “live and let live,” to believe that everyone is essentially the same and wants essentially the same things, we have planted the seeds of our own destruction.

My question to you is this: can a society survive indefinitely without a shared conception of what is good?

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

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While he is gone, Lindsay Clancy takes their three children downstairs. Cora is five. Dawson is three. Callan is eight months old. She wraps exercise bands around their necks and kills them one by one. Then she cuts herself and jumps from a second-story window. She lives. They die. He comes home to a yard, a dying wife, and three small corpses. His 911 call sounded like an animal being ripped open.

The ending of that night was not a legal theory. It was three coffins smaller than coffee tables, slammed shut in a room that should have held toys. Cora. Dawson. Callan. You do not get to dress this up as “awareness.”

A jury in Massachusetts is deciding what to call her. Her lawyers want postpartum psychosis. If the jury buys it, she is a patient. If they do not, she is a murderer staring at life with no parole.

Now the part her fan club misses. Normal people call it reality.

I spoke with an Ivy League–trained psychiatrist who wants to stay nameless. Not a talk-show performer. A specialist who treats this collapse for a living. The expert was blunt. The drug mix in Clancy’s blood does not turn a nurse into a methodical child killer.

Those combined medicines make people foggy, slow, heavy. They smear a plan. They do not hone one. A person that medicated does not shove a husband out the door on a clock, march three children into a basement, and finish the job before the headlights swing back.

Fog does not keep time.

A plan does.

Postpartum psychosis almost always detonates in the first days or weeks after birth, not when the baby is already eight months old. Eight months is a long stretch to hunt for help, stockpile pills, write in journals, send a man on an errand, then swear the devil snatched the wheel at dinner. Clancy’s version does not sound like an illness. It sounds like a script written after the bodies went cold.

Then the second horror crawled in. This one wears ring lights.

After the trial clips spread, younger mothers started filming themselves scaring or hurting their own kids and calling it support for Lindsay. Shake the baby. Slap the toddler. Hover over the crib like a nightmare. Jam a phone in the face of a child who cannot leave and cannot understand.

They called it sisterhood.

They called it awareness.

It was neither.

It was a séance with an audience.

A baby does not know what a verdict is. A toddler does not know Lindsay Clancy. They know one face in the whole world is supposed to mean milk, love, and safety. Then that face transforms. The voice goes sharp. The hands get rough. A slab of black glass slides between them and the person who was supposed to keep them alive. The child pays in raw fear so the adult can play holy victim for strangers.

Clancy killed three children and a slice of the internet tried to sanctify her. The cameras did not stay in Duxbury. They slithered into other nurseries. States have sued Discord, Roblox, and Meta over platforms that treat kids like disposable currency and give a stage to these unholy performances. This won’t ever stop until social media companies decide to grow a conscience.

Here is why the abuse of men belongs in this story. The Clancy chorus did not build a new machine. It fed the old one: female pain is sacred, a child’s terror is content, and the man who objects is the monster.

If a culture can saint a mother who films a child’s panic, it can brand a father the threat the second he opens his mouth. That is the same spell, just pointed at a different body. First the child is the prop. Then the man is.

Workplaces learned the trick early. DEI rules taught offices to treat male workers like a stain, as if presence itself were the offense. MeToo started as a hunt for real predators and decayed into the same shortcut: an accusation is almost as good as proof. The gym made it content. A woman shows up in a skimpy outfit built to be stared at. A man looks. She films him. Suddenly he is the creep, and she is the victim. The phone does what it did over the crib. It picks a saint and a monster before anyone has time to think.

Female pain gets the halo. The man gets the rope. That is toxic femininity on full display.

A man ruined by a clip, a rumor, or a workplace script cannot sound the alarm about a crib. Fathers are not “in their feelings.” They are doing the math. A culture that can turn three murdered children into a trend, then film the next child’s panic for likes, is not a culture you trust with a locked door.

This environment endangers women. The men who used to come when they screamed have learned that scream can be bait. So, they hesitate. Then they stop coming. Not because the dark got smaller. Because the last decade taught them that running toward it can ruin them too, and the damsel was the monster all along.

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The house does not get safer when the men stop coming home. The thing in the basement does not grow a conscience. Women who clap for cruelty, fake wounds, and child-as-content will not inherit a quieter night.

Three children are already gone. Do not play shocked when men stay outside and let the dark eat whoever is left. All women are in danger because some women are insane. But that is not the scariest part. The scariest part is that the ranks of the insane keep swelling.

Which way, Western man?

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report exposed decades of industrial-scale horror. Predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs systematically groomed, raped, tortured and trafficked at least 250,000 vulnerable White British girls. What began with gifts, alcohol and drugs turned into gang rapes, beatings, waterboarding, trafficking and forced pregnancies. Entire towns became hunting grounds while authorities looked the other way.

Police, social services and politicians saw the pattern. They heard the screams. They chose silence because they feared the “racism” label more than they feared little girls being passed around like meat. Caution replaced prosecutions. Evidence vanished.

Community relations mattered more than broken children. The report demands justice through tougher sentencing, deportation of foreign offenders and proper recording of ethnicity and religion. Every leader who enabled this betrayal has blood on their hands.

Keir Starmer and the Labour Party stand exposed as cowards who let it happen on their watch.

Scotland delivered raw proof that the system has collapsed. Last August in Dundee, a 14-year-old girl grabbed a knife and axe to protect her 12-year-old sister from foreign men who were harassing and assaulting them. Video showed the terrified sisters pleading for the men to stop. One girl screamed “Don’t touch her!” while brandishing the blades in desperation. Police swooped in and charged the child defender with ‘offensive weapons’. The men walked free at first. Only this summer was the perpetrator convicted.

The case became known as Sophie of Dundee. A child forced to arm herself because the state failed to protect her family.

The pressure built until it exploded again. In June, in Edinburgh, a 36-year-old Scottish man snapped. Armed with knives, he went on a stabbing rampage against several Muslims, shouting that he was protecting the country from them. When the law fails citizens, vigilantes are inevitable.

Northern Ireland erupted into open revolt. Masked locals torched properties and clashed with police. In Newry, Mourne and Down, the New Republican Movement released a chilling video warning: “You have flooded our communities with military-age migrant men. We will not sit back and watch our culture and religion destroyed.”

They knew the addresses and vowed action to protect women and children. This followed the Ballymena riots sparked by sexual assault claims and the June attempted beheading on Belfast’s streets. Knife crime and sexual offences are surging while foreign-born numbers explode. The people have had enough of elites lecturing them about compassion from their safe ivory towers.

These flashpoints share the same rotten core. Brexit promised control but human rights laws and globalist pressure kept the floodgates open. George Soros and his Open Society Foundations bankroll a web of NGOs and campaigns that actively block migrant deportations, fight enforcement and expand inflows across Britain and Europe. They fund legal challenges that grind removals to a halt in the courts, attitude-shifting projects that rebrand open borders as moral necessity, and refugee networks that lobby relentlessly for more arrivals under the banner of compassion.

Predators keep entering while native communities are treated as expendable.

The fury finally broke the system. The grooming gangs scandal, the arrest of a child forced to defend her sister, the vigilante stabbing in Edinburgh and the open revolt in Northern Ireland created an unstoppable wave of public anger. Keir Starmer was forced out as Prime Minister in disgrace, his government collapsing under the weight of elite betrayal and failed policies that treated citizens as expendable.

And don’t be fooled by Andy Burnham stepping in. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he commissioned reviews into the very grooming gang scandals that devastated Rochdale, yet whistleblowers like Maggie Oliver called them limited paper exercises where survivors were sidelined, professionals resigned in protest, and he protected the institutions rather than ripping out the rot. Replacing Starmer with Burnham is just swapping one face of the same failed establishment for another. It will be more of the same betrayal... or worse.

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Britain and Northern Ireland need real borders now. Criminal migrants and failed claimants must be removed fast. Dumping unvetted outsiders into communities without consent must end. The grooming gangs shattered thousands of little girls. A child in Scotland had to arm herself to save her sister. A man in Edinburgh took the law into his own hands. Northern Ireland watched an attempted beheading on its streets.

After years of sexual assaults, harassment and imported violence, the question burns hotter than ever. When will enough be enough? How many more must bleed before the elites are dragged from their bunkers and citizens are finally put first?

The streets have spoken.

The reckoning has begun.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

So, yes, there are people who like the WNBA, just not enough to make it profitable. Here is what NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had to say about the league’s financial situation in 2025:

Despite significant monetary support from the NBA, the WNBA is “still expected to lose $40 million this season. The tickets are very inexpensive, but even at low prices, we’re not selling enough tickets to run a viable business.”

My solution would be to give them all sticks, replace the basketball with a puck, and make them play on ice, but as a Canadian I may be biased.

It also wouldn’t fix the real problem, which is that women’s sports suck - at least compared to men’s. Don’t get me wrong, I say the same thing about semi-pro men’s leagues so I’m not being sexist. I just don’t like watching sports unless it’s being played by the best players.

This is where the WNBA’s second problem comes in. To improve the game, they kinda want to let men play.

That’s not the way the league will phrase it, of course.

Its collective bargaining agreement states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” However, they don’t define “woman” or outline any hormone or biological criteria. They also released this statement recently:

“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”

Blah, blah, blah.

If you’re running a women’s league and you can’t come out and say, “no men allowed,” are you really a women’s league?

Wouldn’t it be more honest to rename the WNBA the WWWNBA, where the second and third Ws stand for “wink, wink.”

The desire to parrot DEI platitudes was all well and good when society was too cowed to question these conflicting statements, but then Sophie Cunningham had to open her mouth and spew this hateful and transphobic statement:

“I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Gasp!

Fortunately, the WNBA does not have any transgender women players who might take offense at the statement. Unless you count non-binary players, which I don’t for the same reason I don’t count unicorns as horses.

Still, there were plenty of “empathetic” people around to ensure that the WNBA aligned itself on the “right” side. By which I mean the side wanting biological men to play in women’s sports. This included Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who had this to say:

“We need to protect trans kids. To me, it’s a human rights issue. Every kid has a right to sports.”

The league made its position clear(er) by calling on Big Brother to help:

“Online, report abusive posts and drown out the bots and bad actors. At home, tell your elected officials to strengthen Title IX.”

“Strengthen Title IX.”

The irony of making this statement while arguing that biological men should be allowed to play in women’s sports appears to have been lost on the league’s PR department. Well, it’s not like Media Studies is heavy on logic.

It’s obvious that the WNBA’s brain trust wants to support women and trans women (read: men). That’s their right, of course. And honestly, what could possibly go wrong by attempting to sit on a fence dividing reality from the world of make-believe?

Wait! Breaking news! It appears that ex-NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are claiming to be women and have vowed to enter next year’s WNBA Draft.

How brave! How heroic! Two marginalized transwomen striving to bust down the barriers of hate that are keeping them oppressed. “Transwomen are women!”

Inspiring.

The WNBA must be overjoyed!

Wait! I’m getting an update on this breaking news. It appears that the league does not believe the claims of these two strong and beautiful women, going so far as to denounce their efforts as “bad-faith” actions meant to “demean or marginalize others.”

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I’m shocked! I thought “your gender is what you say it is.” I thought “no one can tell you your gender.” How can an anti-hate task force call into question a person’s right to identify as they see fit?

I can just see the next hateful step: a biological definition of “woman.” Who will define it? What if there are multiple conflicting definitions?

Who am I to believe? Is there no slogan that will save me?

Wait...

#BelieveAllWomen.

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece
The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Here’s my review: it was pretty good. Not as bad as I feared, nor as good as I’d hoped or been led to believe. That’s the culture war/Hollywood hype for you.

Nolan has directed 13 movies.

I wouldn’t put this in his top 5, but that’s not surprising. Nolan had an epic run from 2005 to 2014, and every single movie during that period is superior to The Odyssey.

Why do I say that?

Simple, I’ve seen every one of those films numerous times - I’m thinking of rewatching The Prestige as I type this - and I doubt I’ll ever watch The Odyssey again.

The Odyssey kept my attention but lacked emotional depth, genuine excitement, and any memorable dialogue. I’d put it on par with Dunkirk. Probably a 7 out of 10, mainly because I wouldn’t give it a 6 and there’s just no way it deserves an 8.

But who am I kidding? You didn’t come for my opinion on the quality; you came to answer one question...

How woke is it?

Woke enough that it’ll likely qualify and be nominated for many Oscars.

Yes, the casting was “modern.” Or DEI influenced or engaged in “race swapping”. Pick the term you prefer. However, if you want to win an Oscar, you have to play the game.

At this point, if you go to a Hollywood movie you have to be willing to ignore this type of casting. If you can’t, you shouldn’t bother going at all. That said, I do have some thoughts on some of the roles.

Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the movie. Perhaps knowing in advance helped. It was also a fairly small role. This was the Odyssey, not the Iliad after all.

Would her beauty “launch a thousand ships?” Maybe, but I wouldn’t have been on any of them. She’s hardly hard on the eyes, but I would have went with someone else. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder though.

I didn’t have an issue with Zendaya playing Athena either. I won’t explain why, as it would be a bit of a spoiler. I feel bad just telling you that.

The most visible DEI casting was probably Himesh Patel as Eurylochus. Again, it didn’t bother me. Largely because I like the guy as an actor. You may accuse me of being inconsistent in my approach to DEI casting. Guilty. You could cast Denzel Washington as Helen of Troy and I’d be fine with it.

There were however two roles that I found… jarring. And it didn’t help that they were the first two people to speak in the movie.

The first was “Elliot” Page. Every time Page spoke it was annoying. The whole trans creepiness issue aside, I find a 5’1” 110 lb. person playing the role of a Greek warrior as ridiculous.

“The bard” spoke second and something about the accent just didn’t sit right. I had heard that some people found the American accents in the movie annoying. I’m not sure why? What did they expect ancient Greek accents? The accent of this particular character more than any other stood out so I researched it the next day and discovered:

“Travis Scott (playing the bard/Phemius) used his natural American/Houston (Southern/Texan-influenced) accent and speaking style, with rhythmic, rap-influenced delivery.”

Was it the accent? Was it the rap? Was it a combination? I don’t know but I did not like it when that character spoke. Luckily, he only spoke twice.

There were also a couple of non-DEI issues:

• Penelope (Anne Hathaway) complained at one point that only men could rule. This caused me to roll my eyes. I’m sorry, but the presence of a “girl boss” in 700 BC was a little too out of place.

• Telemachus (Tom Holland) always used “dad” instead of “father.” It sounded juvenile. You may not think it’s such a big deal, but consider this minor change:

Now that you’ve come this far...

I brought you all here because...

I want you to look at this movie in another light. Yes, it engages in race swapping, but look deeper, look at the themes:

Do these seem like beliefs that progressives would value? Unlikely. In fact, if we look at these six themes “through a progressive lens,” we can see just how negatively we would expect them to be viewed.

• The Journey Within - the individual is primarily a node in overlapping group hierarchies of power, privilege, and oppression. Advancing group equity is the goal rather than personal excellence.

• Fate vs. Free Will - Outcomes are attributed mainly to systemic forces rather than individual decisions, habits, and competence.

• Home and Longing - The private home is a patriarchal space of unpaid domestic labor, gender hierarchy, and isolation. The bourgeois nuclear-family household is a capitalist institution that privatizes care work and reinforces inequality.

• Deception and Wisdom - Concealing one’s “true self” is described as internalized oppression or a privilege that sustains the status quo. Public disclosure—coming out, centering identity narratives, or making the private public—builds solidarity and challenges norms. The private sphere itself is a historically patriarchal or hierarchical space that shields inequality.

• Human vs. Nature - Nature is not to be confronted but instead nurtured and protected because environmental harm falls disproportionately on marginalized communities, future generations, and the Global South. Climate justice, environmental racism, and sustainability for human equity are central.

• Love and Loyalty - Monogamy arose with private property to ensure male control of inheritance and undisputed heirs. It subordinated women while often allowing male infidelity. The monogamous family is a historical stage, not an eternal one.

The themes found in The Odyssey are on display in many Nolan movies. He is not a woke director, but one who is “playing the game” to ensure his film is viewed and celebrated.

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I want you to consider something: that The Odyssey is not a woke Hollywood movie, but something else, something that we, to the right of progressives, should support.

Who will celebrate this film most enthusiastically? Progressives.

Who will shower it with awards? Progressives.

And who will spend three hours absorbing a story whose deepest assumptions contradict many of their own? Progressives.

The Odyssey isn’t a progressive weapon.

It’s a Trojan horse.

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

That said, I prefer kids; they’re cuter, more fun to play with, and serve an important function in society. Ya, I’m taking a brave stance, right?

What’s the connection? For one, behavior. Pets require their owners to train them, while kids need attentive, responsible parents.

“Owner?” you might say, “don’t you mean ‘pet parent?’” My response? Come here so I can punch you. I don’t know which statement is more annoying, “we’re pregnant” or “I’m a pet parent.” No matter how much you love your pet, you aren’t its parent.

A little while back, I wrote an article about Zoomers, the cost of lunch, and the importance of budgets. I had no intention of returning to the subject until I listened to a podcast recently that informed me that there are more pets in Australia than people.

Insert jaw drop here

What does this have to do with budgets, you might ask? Well, during the discussion, one of the hosts mentioned that he budgets $10,000 ($6,984 USD) per year for his dog.

Insert jaw drop here

Math is hard!

There are two issues at play here; the first is money. Young people complain, with justification, that there is an affordability crisis and that housing is beyond reach. Yet many seem resistant to making the necessary sacrifices required to achieve their financial goals.

I covered why eating out regularly and carrying credit card debt is a bad idea in the last article. If you don’t understand this, you may as well stop reading and go treat yourself to a $28 lunch - after you buy your next tattoo, of course - because you are beyond saving.

However, these costs would seem to be minor when compared to pet ownership.

This is no fringe issue; ~45–60% (rising) of Zoomers have pets. Many of them have multiple pets.

Pets would appear to be like tattoos; once you get one, you can’t stop yourself from getting another. This is no small issue when talking about budgets.

I have a pet. I’ve had a few. However, I didn’t get one until other financial matters were addressed. There’s a word for this: “priorities.”

Complaining about the cost of living, housing, groceries, etc., while owning expensive pets is an example of an inability to prioritize.

How big of an issue is it?

I’d say big since “nearly 40% of pet owners recently surveyed by LendingTree said they had gone into debt because of their pet. And among households with pet debt, nearly 1 in 4 have at least $1,000 in pet debt.”

How you spend your money is your decision; just don’t bitch to me about how hard your life is.

“Pets are people!”

The second issue with “runaway pet ownership” affects more than the pet owner; it affects society at large. Let’s call it “misplaced values.” This is where “pet parent” comes into play.

If you follow the news, you likely know that there is an immigration debate going on. This debate is influenced by declining fertility rates in the West, where countries have seen rates fall below the replacement level.

Pet ownership isn’t the cause, but it certainly isn’t helping. Especially when so many people identify as “pet parents” and put pet ownership, yes, ownership, on an equal footing as parenthood.

The fact that there are more pets in Australia than people came as a surprise, so I looked into a few other countries, and while it’s not quite that bad, it’s not good. Especially when we compare it to the number of children each country has.

For three countries with insufficient fertility rates, having more pets than children is a disturbing sign. It’s also getting worse as people replace having children with having pets.

Note: If you say, “fur babies,” I will have you killed.

A “simple” plan

Would these countries be better off if more people had chosen children over pets? How many more children would need to exist for their fertility rates to be above replacement?

It’s a hard question to answer. You can’t directly convert today’s child population into a fertility rate. However, you can estimate how many additional children would have been born over the past 18 years if each country had maintained replacement-level fertility (about 2.1 children per woman) instead of its actual fertility rate.

How many kids aren’t being born because “pet parents” equate cats and dogs to people? Hard to say, but society would be better off if we had more children.

How do we change this?

I’m generally against taxes, but if I thought it would fix the problem, I’d suggest a very high tax on pet ownership. Given the numbers, it might even fix the budget issues at the same time.

It won’t work, though. With pet ownership sitting well north of 50%, it would never pass. We’ll just have to fall back on the old tried-and-true methods.

Guilt and shame.

So here is a message from us “olds” to you young’uns: we’re not getting any younger, and we want to be grandparents at some point. I get it, kids are expense and you’re “not ready.”

Who ever was?

They don’t hand out books that say, “here’s how to be a parent.” Actually, it’s worse than they do, but they all contradict each other. You make mistakes, and you learn as you go. Just like everyone has. Yes, it’s hard work. And expensive.

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But it’s much more rewarding than pet ownership. Something you can’t understand until you have a child. My advice to pet owners in general and “pet parents” specifically?

Grow up! Start having kids. Your dog isn’t going to visit you in your old age home. Neither will your cat. Worse, if you die alone, your cat will probably eat you. We’ll never solve the fertility crisis as long as society puts pets on equal footing with people.

So “get busy!” I’ll even, grudgingly, allow you to say “we’re pregnant” if it will seal the deal. Until then, I’m thinking of selling bumper stickers that say, “Save the West, punch a pet parent.”

Any takers?

About the Author
Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

In other words, nobody is going to make a movie about me.

It would be worse if I were to suddenly come down with a rare terminal disease or handicap. Angry people bemoaning their fate do not make for inspiring movie subjects.

There are many movies about inspirational people overcoming hardships, the most famous of which is probably The Miracle Worker, which tells the story of Helen Keller. There are many others, of course, including:

My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown, the story of an Irish man born with cerebral palsy, who could control only his left foot, but who grew up in a poor working-class family and became a writer and artist.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the tale of journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome. He wrote the entire book by blinking his left eyelid, which took him two months, working 3 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Me? I am sitting up here in a cottage in Ontario during the Canada Day/Independence Day week in a crappy mood because there’s no A/C. It’s too hot, there are too many people, the bugs are biting, and the internet sucks.

Nope, I’m not an inspiration. I have some consolation, though. At least I’m not European.

In Canada, if I owned this place, I could run out and get an air conditioner and eliminate one of my problems. Getting rid of the bugs and people would probably require carpet bombing the area with napalm, and I think that’s still illegal.

Europeans are not so lucky.

As I write this, the official tally in Europe has the heat-related death toll at 5,606. Statistical modeling suggests the true death toll from the late-June heatwave has already exceeded 20,000 people.

Contrast these numbers with the US. While this year’s numbers are not yet out, last year the US saw 2,394 heat-related deaths. For the entire year.

A/C is a lifesaver! So why won’t more Europeans adopt it?

Europeans restrict and resist air conditioning due to a combination of high energy costs, strict historic preservation laws, architectural challenges, and deep-rooted environmental values.

I’m not going to take issue with the architectural challenges or historic preservation laws - though you’d think a portable unit would address both concerns. I do, however, have a problem with “environmental values.”

Note: high energy costs can be grouped into “environmental values” because decisions based on climate change are what are driving those costs.

Are high energy costs and high heat-related death rates necessary? Well, it depends on where you stand regarding climate change.

I know it exists. I’m old enough to have lived through winters in the 70s and 80s and know that winters are a lot milder than they used to be. I just don’t lose much (any) sleep over it because I know that the solution is more technology, not more government. The only way out is through - unless you’re willing to depopulate the planet (i.e., kill a lot of people).

Europeans, or at least the ones making the decisions, are of a different mindset. They believe if we don’t make drastic changes, the world is doomed. The predictions are certainly scary. According to environmentalists, the Arctic summer sea ice will completely melt in 2000, 2013, 2016, 2020, and between 2027 and 2030 - stay tuned for an updated date next year.

You know who also changes dystopian predictions when the predicted date passes? Cultists.

Why are so many Europeans dying from the heat? Because the climate cultists are killing them to “save the world.” There’s another word for killing to stave off an environmental concern. The word is “sacrifice.” European climate cultists are sacrificing citizens.

They’re not the first to think human sacrifice will save them:

The Aztecs cut open the chest and extracted the still-beating heart of victims because they feared the stopping of the sun, catastrophic droughts, and famines.

The Incas practiced Capacocha—the ritual sacrifice of children—during or following major environmental disruptions. They selected physically perfect children, walked hundreds of miles to high Andean Mountain peaks, drugged them, and then left them to freeze to death in the extreme cold, suffocated, or killed by a heavy blow to the head, then buried in ritual tombs.

Did it work? About as effectively as European climate laws work at stopping climate change. But at least the Aztecs and Incas got a show.

Here’s my proposal to the Europeans: legalize A/C, select 5000 Europeans at random, and throw them into a volcano (It seems like the most poetic approach).

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It won’t do any good, but you could still say you’re fighting climate change (cultists will believe anything after all). As an added bonus, you could stream it pay-per-view into people’s homes (ala Eurovision ) and use the proceeds to subsidize their electricity bills.

The same number of people would die, but at least you’d all be comfortable in the summer.

About the Author

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech
😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece, the single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

It is not us versus the machines just yet, but rather us versus the machine builders. The builders of such technology, who readily admit their own ignorance as to what they are scurrying to create, will do the bidding of those machines until they take over.

Or so goes one version of the narrative, where, in one possible outcome that nobody as of yet has credibly denied, the machines (A.I., actual physical robots) gain some form of consciousness, and with it, presumably, an ego that has a sense of competition and efficiency. So much so that the machines no longer need humans, and can dispense with us as they like, or put us to work as they wish.

One expert likened it to how humans treat insects. We do not particularly go out of our way to harm them purposely, but we feel no remorse for removing an ant colony or smashing a beetle under our feet, so long as we feel we were properly inconvenienced at the moment.

In another version, the sequence of events surrounding Artificial Intelligence and the whole of human effort is greased with a technological lightning–advancements in all things science and medicine will yield exponential results, while other, perhaps less grandiose industries will see efficiency pushed to its maximum with the continued advancement of driverless cars and working, able-bodied robots.

Wherever one’s belief in the future of A.I. might fall within the spectrum described above, or any other extreme, I would only say, be prepared to be disappointed. In all likelihood, A.I. may never purely occupy either of these two positions as they both seem, at least objectively, to be equals–the savior of human technological problems and the destroyer of humanity–the former a breathtakingly oblivious sentiment, the latter narrative so destructive, one almost yearns to be witness to it.

Both extremes offer us salvation, and are equally attractive to the spectator–both promise us liberation, the former from our technological shortcomings, the latter, from our shared boredom, humanity’s curious death-wish.

I don’t believe in artificial intelligence as a savior of any kind, and believe to be optimistic about A.I. is to be hopeful about its ultimate failure, not its utter destruction; but that A.I. will have a Y2K like trajectory–a result that is neither here nor there, lukewarm, tepid, unremarkable. A big scare, or frenzy over nothing–I wish the robots and driverless cars a long refuge from productive life, only to pile atop one another like flattened out buses at the junkyard.

I wish for A.I. to go the way of the Roomba and the piano bar–what once felt like cutting-edge technology now makes us feel foolish–the tech exists and may be in use by some, but ultimately, only a small number of dedicated followers of the tech keep it alive. Eventually, the world will rid itself of the trappings of social media, needless innovation, and tech for tech’s sake justification for everything.

This is what I would like, for a spell at least, until the humanity in us humans can catch its breath. But I, too, should prepare to be disappointed. These technologies are relatively new–new enough to imagine their sudden exit a potentiality—after all, how far have they entrenched themselves into our lives? How indelibly connected are we to this tech?

That is where one has no room for optimism, the tech has embedded itself into our lives so thoroughly, interwoven and intertwined itself so completely in so little time, it has swallowed us up already, rendered us useless without it. Still, there is no room for purity. No room for endless fighting against the incoming tide. It must be clear that true, working resistance to A.I. will be born out of its results, which will render any resistance too late, if there exists any meaningful pushback to it at all.

I find it to be another sign of the times–well, so be it. We have enough wars going on; humanity might as well find another way to fight for itself. But the big mistake, the way I see it, is that humanity has this knack for excellently providing solutions for problems that do not exist, all while ignoring the same itch that has been scratching man ever since his inception–that is, what to do with our soul, what to do with our love, what to do with each other.

In this way, man is a spinning top, growing dizzier at every revolution. A.I. acts like man’s biggest problem is to create more time for himself, when time is not the issue at all. Man has enough time. It is all man has ever had. But time, like space, is to be used, not simply filled. It is what awaits man with all this new time we are promised that makes the difference.

Humans need to work, although not to the death, but also need to play. As far as I am concerned, all the “play” we do is called art. Painting or poem, or dance or song, film or sculpture, comedy, storytelling. These are the devices that let us know we are human. When we make time to play, we are at our best.

We wink at the stars and the stars say back, now you have got it. Man is in a stupor, and A.I. is the clearest indicator of our shared ability to run into the dark impulsively, chasing results for the sake of them. We have let A.I. trick us into believing it, into believing in results. There are no results for humanity—the process is all we can embark upon.

We create A.I. with such fervence, as if god himself will pin a gold ribbon to our chest in some celestial science fair. I cannot keep a pure orientation towards A.I.-- I will be forced to use it, whether I like it or not. I will be forced to participate, one day after the next, more and more as the technology rolls over, and the new tech of today evolves into its Artificial Intelligence upgrade.

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Whatever that means, whenever it may come. There will undoubtedly be a day when one can no longer resist its complete insertion into daily life. But whatever may come, I will try to be on the other side of it– making my work, my art, without it. To take away our ability to solve our own problems is no favor to those like myself—we live to wrestle with our world, ourselves, and are not looking for any shortcuts. We are content with our suffering, our mystery.

We are only looking to save ourselves. I intend to be my own liberator–how could it be any other way? Any liberation from any source other than myself is noise.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Needless to say, the increase in Musk’s net worth led to inflation rising by double digits, the eviction of thousands across the country, and the shuttering of countless soup kitchens.

I don’t know how many puppies it killed but I’m sure it was a lot. The Left would have us believe that Musk’s wealth is obscene.

“No one should be a billionaire” is a rallying cry of the far left. Or in AOC’s words “You can’t earn a billion dollars.” Interesting turn of phrase given that the money used to pay her salary is stolen from taxpayers.

You might take issue with my use of the word “stolen” but ask yourself this, would you pay her salary if you didn’t have to? Didn’t think so. “Stolen” it is. She also doesn’t seem to have a problem with Oprah or Taylor Swift either.

This is odd if you look at the economic contributions of the three. Musk’s companies employ between 160,000-165,000 people. Together Oprah and Swift employ about 500 people. It’s less odd if you look at their voting records.

Musk was briefly part of the Trump administration. The other two vote Democrat. That’s not the entire reason, but it gives you something to think about.

So why is Musk a target?

Villainizing the super-rich while advocating wealth taxes is what it’s always been, an attempt by communists to gain more power. Ok, they’re not really communists, so we’ll play the game leftists like to play and borrow on of their favorite adjectives, they’re “communist-adjacent.”

They don’t produce; they take.

This type of argument, like all communist propaganda, is attractive to three types of people: the envious, the gullible, and the ignorant.

Envy: “Elon Musk is a trillionaire and I’m not.”

Maybe they could. But they wouldn’t.

Gullibility: “If you give us his money, we’ll fix all your problems. I promise!” Who does that remind me of?’ Oh ya.

Let’s face it, if paying taxes solved problems we wouldn’t have any problems. Giving the government more money just means more government waste.

The Federal budget has increased by approximately 59% since 2019. Does it feel like the American government is 59% better?

Ignorance: “The rich don’t pay their fair share!” This is just not true.

In New York City, where The Top 1% pay roughly 40–48% of all NYC income taxes, its communist mayor made “tax the rich” a central part of his platform and governing agenda because “they can afford more.”

Deciding what is affordable is easy when you’re spending someone else’s money.

It’s not like NYC has been paying its own way anyway anyway. Almost 25% of NYC revenues are paid by people who don’t even live there.

“The rich don’t pay their fair share!” also fails to consider what Musk’s companies are doing for society in general. In addition to providing 160,000-165,000 with good jobs, his employees are paying about $4.5-5.5 billion per year in taxes.

Politicians promise, take, fail to deliver, and then demand more.

Entrepreneurs generate wealth. For themselves, for their employees, for investors, and yes, even for the government. The interesting thing about Musk’s wealth is that people chose to give him their money. Sorry, that’s not quite right, they chose to invest in his company.

The stock market is the ultimate form of freedom. You participate only if you want to. I buy a stock from someone who wants to sell it because I think it will go up and they think it won’t. I’m not forced to buy it, and they’re not forced to sell it.

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Contrast this with how taxes work. Last year the government took about 30% of what you earned so that they could give it to someone else. Yes, I’m exaggerating. A little. No, I don’t think we should get rid of taxes.

We need them to pay for vital services like the military, border control, and UFC fights on the White House lawn. I’d love it if there was some government accountability though. Of course, I’d also love a trillion dollars in my bank account.

Both seem equally likely.

About the Author

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech
😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece, the single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Ok, still a little vague. Taxation and spending. Better?

Government spending is out of control, and if there’s a political party anywhere in the world that claims to be concerned, I guarantee it isn’t in power. Parties only care about government spending when the other side is doing the spending.

How bad is it?

Here’s a chart for a few countries:

Ya, that doesn’t mean much to me either. Let’s try it a different way.

Every single major anglosphere country spends more than it collects in taxes. This means that “Interest as % of Revenue” will continue to increase until we’re all paying taxes just to cover debt payments.

Makes you think the Zoomer $28 lunch crowd is running these countries, doesn’t it?

Just kidding. I’m sure they’ll all blame the Boomers.

The truth is that we’re all to blame because we don’t seem to care enough to elect responsible governments.

Or it would be our fault if it were possible to vote for a party that’s serious about balancing the budget.

Which brings us back to the problem; most parties aren’t concerned with balancing the budget, or if they claim to be, their concern quickly vanishes when they’re elected.

Why?

Because their job is to get and stay in power, and you don’t do that when most of the electorate gets more out of the system than they pay into it.

Want a guaranteed losing election slogan? “We’re going to cut your benefits.” Good luck with that one.

Oh, both sides have “solutions.” Here are a few “interesting” ones floating around lately:

1. Don’t make seniors pay property tax – US, Florida, and British Columbia

2. Tax “the rich” – too many to list

3. A “wealth” tax – too many to list

4. Tax second homes – Hawaii, NYC, others

5. Cut senior benefits

6. Increase corporate taxes

7. Tax AI

My favorite by far is tax AI because it means one of two things, politicians think robots will be receiving salaries, or that you don’t know that this is simply another way of saying “increase corporate taxes,” which as we all know – or at least those of us with basic thinking skills know – means tax the consumer because corporations never eat taxes, they simply increase prices to cover them.

Like they do with tariffs.

Of course, it could be worse; “tax AI” could simply be another call for communism.

Or maybe that’s MAGAism because the government nationalizing private companies sounds an awful lot like something “The Donald” would get behind. Especially since he’s already done it.

The fact that Democrats want to increase corporate taxes and Republicans, or at least the MAGA strain, want to increase tariffs is simply an admission that neither party wants to cut benefits.

The cry is always, “if taxpayers would just pay ‘a little’ more, it would all be fixed.

Would it, though?

It seems that the government spending has been increasing since... well, since they first decided that a “selective” income tax would be useful.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: the rich already pay their “fair share.”

Unless by “fair share” you mean “enough to snuff out the flames of jealousy that rage in my heart” — in which case I’m going to need you to put a number on “fair share.”

Here’s another thing to keep in mind, you already pay your fair share, too, at least if you’re contributing more than you’re getting in benefits.

The big question is, if we can’t trust politicians to get spending under control, what will save us? Great question. All that we need is strong leadership willing to tackle difficult questions.

In other words, we’re screwed. Ok, that’s a bit harsh. Let me rephrase.

Given that politicians now bribe the electorate for votes – either by cutting taxes or spending increases - the financial issues that each country faces will not be addressed until politicians have no other choice but to raise taxes and/or cut spending.

This will happen when we face a national fiscal crisis due to a “Fiscal Crisis Spiral.”

Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?

Here’s what a typical sovereign debt crisis looks like:

1. Government runs persistent deficits.

2. Debt grows.

3. Interest payments grow.

4. Investors demand higher interest rates.

5. Interest costs grow even faster.

6. Investors become worried about repayment.

7. Borrowing costs spike.

8. Government can no longer refinance existing debt.

9. Default, inflation, austerity, or a bailout follows.

There’s no clear indicator that one is pending, but there are warning indicators.

Here’s a “report card” for each country today.

Here is each county’s risk of a fiscal crisis and when we should expect one to occur based on current fiscal trajectories.

Things look pretty grim for the US if one can believe the economic data. To sum up, we have three choices: raise taxes, cut spending, or wait until there’s a crisis.

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Lay your bets! My money is on a fiscal crisis. It’s not all terrible news, though. Taxes may be a certainty, but so is one other thing.

Yep, the glass is half full: there’s a chance you’ll be dead before anything truly bad happens. Maybe a $28 lunch isn’t such a terrible idea after all.

About the Author

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech
😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece

The single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise.

If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Call it “the home economics crisis.”

Although now that I think about it, there’s some overlap between the two problems as the blame for both can be laid at the feet of feminists, school boards, and teachers.

In case you missed it, users on X became embroiled in a battle the other day when Kevin O’Leary stated during his interview on The Diary of a CEO:

“I can’t stand it when I see kids that are making seventy grand a year spending twenty-eight dollars for lunch. I mean, that’s just stupid. It’s just think about that in the context of that being put into an index and making eight to ten percent a year for the next fifty years.”

This was followed by:

“If you have a credit card balance that goes into the next month and you’re spending $5 on a coffee, you’re crazy.”

Yes! How dare he!

Needless to say, X quickly divided into two teams:

Team 1: Brown bagging your lunch is cheaper than eating out.

Team 2: A bunch of morons.

Let’s hear from Team 2 first:

Combining the statements leads to the conclusion that a $28 lunch is essentially the bail the young pay to stay out of jail. Not “big boy” jail, of course, kind of a “go to your room without any supper” jail.

Nobody is arguing that these aren’t tough times, but those are exactly the times you should be trying to cut costs.

James Lindsay may have said it best:

I also understand that it’s tempting to ignore the advice of a billionaire as hopelessly removed from the struggles of the average person.

Except for the fact that you need some financial acumen to become a billionaire. Oh ya, and because he’s right. He’s not even asking Gen Z to make sacrifices, just to act like adults. Here’s a breakdown of how each generation spends its food budget:

I don’t know what percentage of their household budgets Gen Z is spending on restaurants and delivery but it’s too much. Honestly, calling it a “budget” is probably a misnomer since if you’re wasting 22% on delivery fees it’s clear that you’re either independently wealthy or don’t have a budget.

And despite what Taylor Lorenz says, it is not an issue of time.

Arguing that people who are predominantly single and childless have less time to shop and make meals than married people with kids is utterly ludicrous.

Where did we go wrong?

There will be an instinct amongst older adults to do what older adults always do and blame the issue on laziness. I’m sure there is something to do with it, but I doubt this generation is any lazier than any other.

There are two problems here:

1. A lack of meal preparation skills

2. A lack of budgeting skills

The first problem is easily explained.

Traditional home economics (now often called Family and Consumer Sciences) gradually began to be eliminated from high school curricula in the late 1970s, driven by the women’s liberation movement, rising female workforce participation, and budget pressures that led schools to cut non-core electives.

A growing emphasis on college-prep academics, STEM, and standardized testing (which intensified with the 1980s “excellence” reforms and later No Child Left Behind) squeezed out practical life-skills classes in favor of subjects seen as more rigorous.

True, home economics was overwhelmingly aimed at women, but at least someone knew how to make a sandwich. We can lay this problem at the feet of feminists, school boards, and teachers, but who is to blame for the apparent lack of budgeting skills in the Zoomer population?

I’m afraid that this is the fault of their parents. There has never been a core curriculum class aimed at educating young people on how to manage family finances. When I was younger, it never would have occurred to me to go to restaurants on a regular basis. I didn’t have the money.

However, I didn’t have a budget either; I just knew the value of a dollar and what was wasteful from watching my parents discuss money while growing up. The 70s and early 80s were tough, and I learned by osmosis.

I believe that the problem is that many Zoomers did not experience hard times until they were already adults or near adults, and consequently are incapable of adapting to them.

What are “hard times?” There are many ways to define it, but if you’re a pre-teen or teenager, you would likely define it as how much money your family is spending on non-essentials.

Gen Z would have been in prime “osmosis” territory between the ages of say 12 and 15 or from 2009 until 2024. Only one period, the COVID lockdowns, did US discretionary spending drop below the level of the early 1980s. They don’t understand the need to budget because they’ve never lived during a time when the majority of people had to do it.

How do we fix it?

For this generation? We can’t. They’ll slowly come to the realization that money is finite, and they will learn budgeting skills on their own, or they will be doomed to life-long debt.

However, we can help the next generation by demanding that schools make cooking and budgeting core courses in high school. One course, call it life skills, covering both would be sufficient.

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If they cry “there’s not enough money,” they can slash genocide studies, ethnic studies, and the like. Students will just have to learn to get by without the real-world knowledge those courses are teaching them.

Note: for those interested here are fifteen recipes that are cheap, easy, and nutritious. If you don’t like them Google your own. Yes, you can use modern technology to learn new skills. Another thing we didn’t have when I was growing up.

About the Author

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and whatever else catches his fancy.

📰 Hoist the Black Flag — politics, rights, and free speech

😄 Schrödinger’s Chicken — because sometimes you just need to laugh

If you enjoyed this piece, the single best thing you can do is hit the like button — it costs nothing and tells the algorithm this is worth sharing. After that, a restack puts it in front of readers who might never have found it otherwise. If you’d like to support the writing directly, subscribing or buying a coffee goes a long way. Either way, thank you for reading — it genuinely matters.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

In a recent piece, Oh, America, I tried to relay some thoughts and even some feelings about America being on the brink of something, and that it is a (secular) spiritual crisis the country faces. There is little chance of success for describing such a thing with words—it is internal and external, it is in the air. But with every reckoning, with every atmospheric shift in tone and tenor, there must be a collective investigation—a country must ask itself how it got to where it is, and where does it allow itself to be led to, in a presumably new direction, with a new cast of leaders?

Donald Trump will, at some point, die. I say this not with a glimmer or glint in my eye, not with a grin, nor with any grand announcement of sadness—I simply state it plainly, as a fact. As simply as I may say of myself, that some day, at some point, I will die. And for that matter, you will, too.

I mention the inevitable death of the president for a reason—there is no doubt that if one were asked to name the person who has most dominated politics, culture, dialogue, and has touched virtually every facet of American life over the last decade, what name would come to mind?

The death of the president, and the presumable death of MAGA on some level, will not be, in and of itself, the “settling of the dust” from our past woes, our current anxious state—but rather an event that may function more like a vacuum—a hole will be created for new dialogue, new conversations. It is worth asking what those conversations may look like, how those conversations will form, evolve, and how they begin, what they will evolve into.

It is not uncommon, when surveying the landscape of political conversation, to find many Americans unable or unwilling to have dialogue with those who disagree with their politics—whether it be friends, family members, or potential members out of a dating pool. I find any support specifically for the president to be strictly prohibitive among some, while a similar disregard for anyone self-identifying as liberal or progressive exists.

However, the weight of this phenomenon is not dispersed equally—a liberal or progressive has not been the centerpiece of American policy or political dialogue—in that way, it may prompt one to ponder—What do we do with all that MAGA energy? What will Trump voters do or say when their visionary is no longer in the conversation?

Without a doubt, new leaders will emerge to take the president’s place—but they just won’t be Donald Trump, and in his absence, we may find that the tenor and tempo of our national dialogue has changed, even if his legacy rides steadily through politics from a strict policy standpoint.

Whatever the case, the center cannot hold—America is fatigued, breathless, exhausted. In many ways, this is a consequence of our leader’s breathlessness, his exhaustion, his fatigue, his chaos, the rapid-fire nature of his many concerns—in some ways, America cannot keep up with the 81-year-old on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps this is all well-known. But what I have written here so far is a throat-clearing for what I believe the country will truly need, and what I hear so very seldom.

The word that I am trying to get around to is forgiveness. I have not been able to do it naturally in this text—so I´ll just say it plainly—this country will need heaps of it.

If we find our dear leaders are not worthy of forgiveness, I think it necessary to forgive ourselves, however we may have voted, however we may sway politically, however we have changed our minds or not, or who we decided to trust or not, to forgive our fellow countrymen and women.

But what does it look like to forgive a country? To forgive a population? It cannot be done personally, but rather internally. The act of forgiveness is often necessary, not for the person being forgiven, but for the person who chooses to forgive. We forgive ourselves, in order to release from us the weight of anger, the weight of frustration, perhaps even the weight of betrayal.

America’s deepest problems are internal. We suffer very little from outside agitation as a nation, and in order to progress, we must find our capacity to love ourselves and our fellow citizens. This feels nearly impossible, grandiose, dreamlike, unnattainable. But as the conversation shifts, new possibilities come into play. America has no destiny, no guaranteed future. The success of America is not written in stone, nor is the fate that we are an empire destined for collapse. One of the greatest strengths of the spirit is the power to forgive—and I believe it is a key component to end our collective national spiritual crisis, our collective grief.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

What bothers me is that he’s not the first person to accuse me of using AI. Not that he was wrong, I do use it. I also use a computer, the internet, and search engines, and Word checks my spelling and grammar.

What am I supposed to do, write on parchment I’ve made myself using only information I’ve gotten by directly interviewing experts?

The number of people who have AI derangement syndrome is astounding. If they aren’t complaining that AI will destroy the world or take all our jobs, they’re complaining that it’s making us lazy or worse.

Note: If the concern is jobs, read this. Spoiler alert: the worry is exaggerated.

Here are two recent examples:

• ‘Think outside the bots’: How to stop AI from turning your brain to mush

• “AI chatbots could be making you stupider”

According to the first story, “GPS ruined our sense of direction. Search engines weaken our memory. AI, scientists warn, could do the same to everything from creativity to critical thinking.”

I have no doubt it’s true.

If you let AI do everything for you. However, if you use it intelligently – for research, editing, feedback, etc. - then it’s simply a tool.

I remember when technical advances were to be praised. Now it seems we’ve become a society of Luddites. Or have we?

This isn’t the first time people have argued that a new technology was going to make people dumber. Let’s look at some of the big ones:

• Writing - Socrates worried that it would weaken memory and create the illusion of knowledge instead of true understanding.

• Printing Press - Critics feared that it would result in a flood of cheap books which would spread misinformation, and that, without proper guidance, would lead to shallow reading and heretical ideas.

• Newspapers - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among others) were concerned that they would encourage superficial thinking, gossip, and distract from serious intellectual life.

• Novels - Moralists and educators in the 18th–19th centuries believed that “trivial” reading would weaken discipline, especially among youth and women, and blur reality vs fantasy.

• Calculators - Educators in the 20th century thought students would lose basic arithmetic skills and become mentally lazy.

• Radio - Early 20th-century commentators worried that passive listening would replace reading and critical thought and that families would become less engaged with each other.

• Television - See “Radio” above, but add that it would shorten attention spans and turn public discourse into a shallow spectacle.

• Video Games - Parents, psychologists, and policymakers since the 1980s argue that it leads to addiction, reduced attention span, and less real-world socialization.

• Internet / Search Engines - Critics were concerned that constant access to information reduces deep thinking and memory (“outsourcing the brain”). Sound familiar?

• Smartphones / Social Media - Researchers, educators, and public figures today argue that they shortened attention spans, fuel dopamine-driven distraction, reduced face-to-face interaction, and lead to dependency.

I’m old enough to remember the last four, and I’d argue that the concerns around TV, video games, and search engines were overblown.

The jury is still out on smartphones and social media, as you’ve no doubt noticed based on the number of governments looking to ban them. I wouldn’t give a 16-year-old a bottle of whiskey, and I’m not sure giving them access to social media is any better.

That doesn’t mean that every new advance will ruin people, though. Or that sometimes there aren’t legitimate concerns. However, history also shows that people tend to adapt, and new tools often shift intelligence rather than simply degrading it.

What usually comes down to is this: if you’re using AI to do your writing, or if you believe everything it says, you’re heading for trouble. Use it wisely, though – and with a healthy dose of skepticism – and you’ll be just fine.

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At the end of the day, it comes down to who is doing your thinking, you or AI, and we each make that decision for ourselves.

If you’re letting AI do your thinking, maybe you weren’t all that smart to begin with.

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and anything else that catches his fancy.

As you may have picked up from this article he’s now trying his hand at humor. You can find some of what he finds funny here.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing your thoughts in the comments, subscribing, or even buying him a coffee if you’re feeling generous and felt that this was a particularly enjoyable article.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

A relative was watching my toddler, so it was just my newborn and me, so this was the perfect time to shop for the perfect basket to surprise her as well.

I decided dipping eggs would frustrate my three-year-old since we’re still working on eye-hand coordination, and she hates getting her sleeves wet currently, but painting little cardboard eggs would be better, so I picked up a kit.

Unfortunately, I have not been cleared postpartum to run and jump at this time, so museums and large indoor spaces on rainy days (like indoor playgrounds, museums, science centers) were not in the cards right now, especially on my own with both kids.

So baking brownies, painting eggs, playing in the yard, and perhaps a story time at the local library would have to do! We probably won’t have time for all of those before nap time, but that’s alright. I love having multiple plans!

As a stay-at-home mom, I wear many hats, and the one above is my favorite: “program director”. Curating activities we can do together is something I am talented at, and it’s something I’m passionate about doing. What looks like fun outings is actually filling up my child’s brain with learning, socializing, and motor skill activities while her brain is developing.

I want her to be prepared for school and be a confident, secure child.

One time I asked my husband what I was the absolute best at, as a stay-at-home mom, talent-wise. He told me he loved the way I cared for our only child.

At first, for some reason, that bothered me. “Not my cooking? Or cleaning?” I thought. Why, I’m not really sure, maybe it’s some of my old prejudice towards being a stay-at-home mom in the first place that caused me to respond this way.

I never imagined myself to be a stay-at-home mom, to be honest, I wasn’t the nurturing type, but once I held my baby in my arms, that was it…I didn’t want to work anymore, especially while my kids are little.

That doesn’t mean my life is this idyllic, running through flower fields in dresses, trad-wife vision, because none of that is real. Like anything you do, some days are better than others.

Today, as I write this was an extremely stressful morning. My toddler wanted a ton of attention from me, which would have been fine except the newborn was having stomach issues (and also needing attention), and I needed to eat food, and so I was a little more short-tempered than usual.

My poor firstborn kept saying, “Sorry I made you mad outside,” and I repeatedly said to her I wasn’t mad, I was overwhelmed trying to take care of both of them (and myself), and that she did nothing wrong.

Other days, like Wednesday, were total bliss. My newborn ate and slept for 2.5-3 hours, and in between, my toddler and I played, and the day ran smoothly.

But boring? Repetitive? Definitely not how I would describe it. I would best describe it as a nurse, but with fewer people and stakes. Constantly triaging, trying to put things in order of their importance.

But as I write this, we made it through our first week with my husband back at work, and my newborn will be one month old next week! And that’s an accomplishment!

One of my mutuals on social media posted this, and I think it’s a good thing to remember:

Sometimes, as I’m trying to put away a load of laundry, load and unload the dishwasher, sweep, or do any kind of housework, it’s hard to remember this principle.

I was holding my newborn close to me recently, and I began to cry. Not out of exhaustion but out of this realization: that my kids are growing up.

That, my dear baby girl, isn’t going to be a baby forever. That my three-year-old won’t always mispronounce “Water” as “Wa wa”. That one day my little ones will be off to school, and that I love them so much, I don’t want this time we have together to end.

Obviously, being a stay-at-home mom isn’t for everyone. The hours are brutal, the stress levels, depending on your personality and how much support you have, can be extremely high.

I reached a sort of breaking point when my newborn turned two months old, and I realized I needed to prioritize my sleep a lot more in order to keep my mind in a healthy place.

You can’t fill from an empty cup. And these kids only have one mom, so I’d better take care of myself.

But lots of other jobs have extreme hours and stress. And, just like any other career choice, I don’t feel as though I “lost” who I am.

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I will always be a mom, and that will never change. But the choice to stay at home with my kids doesn’t define me. I’m still just as ambitious, curious, and hard-working as I was when I first entered the workforce for pay.

I didn’t lose myself. I simply found a new place to channel my talents.

I find the work meaningful. Every day, I see my toddler’s behavior get a little better, and she conquers new things I taught her. Little by little, she’s getting prepared for the next step, school.

I’m proud of what my husband and I have accomplished working as a team together. And I look forward to watching our newest addition grow.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Me: Whoa! Let’s not rush into this. What is it about your ethnic background, sexuality, or cognitive or physical disabilities that makes you think you’re qualified to cut my hair?

Barber: Uh, I’m sorry, what?

Me: You think just because I wander into your “Barber Shop” I’m just going to let you start cutting my hair?

Barber (looking around, confused): Is this a joke?

Me: This is the exact opposite of a joke. This is life and death! Why don’t you start by telling me why you think you’re the best person to cut my hair?

Barber: Because I’ve been cutting hair for 20 years?

Me: There you go, focusing on qualifications, using the violence of merit to perpetuate conditions that benefit whiteness.

Barber: But you’re a white man.

Me: You’re right to call me on that. I need to check my privilege.

Barber: And I’m Persian.

Me: Good! That’s a good start. That gets you the “Middle Eastern / North African” category. Go on.

Barber: The what category? Sorry, I’m confused. Go on where?

Me: Tell me what else makes you the best person to cut my hair.

Barber: My being Persian makes me the best person to cut your hair?

Me: It’s a start. I like to live my values, and my values mirror those of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

Barber (looking around bewildered)

Me: As you know, AMPAS is at the forefront of representation and inclusion, and if their rules are good enough for picking the Best Picture, they’re good enough to guide me in picking the best, no matter what it is I need. Including picking the Best Barber.

Sure, it can be challenging at times, but no matter how hard it is, I’m committed to promoting representation and inclusion in everything I do. Do you have any idea how hard it was to find a black lesbian mechanic in a wheelchair willing to fix my car?

Barber: You did that?

Me: Not yet. I’m still looking. It doesn’t help that all the local garages seem to be oppressive patriarchal structures that normalize the subordination of women. No matter, I’m committed to using public transport until I find a person in an underrepresented group who claims they can fix my car. How else can I be sure they’re the best mechanic?

Barber: Well –

Me: It was a rhetorical question. So, being Persian gets you the “racial or ethnic group” qualification, but as you’re clearly a man, I’m afraid that you miss out on the women qualification... wait, I didn’t just misgender you by mistake, did I? (hitting self in head repeatedly) Stupid, stupid! When are you going to stop assuming someone is a man just because you see a beard? I apologize for assuming your gender.

Barber: Uhm... it’s ok?

Me: Phew. Thanks. Anyway, before I let you cut my hair, I’m going to need you to prove you belong to a second underrepresented group. You don’t happen to be LGBTQ+, do you?

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Barber: I have a wife of 20 years.

Me: Disappointing. That means we’re down to “cognitive or physical disabilities” or “deaf or hard of hearing” qualifications. You seem to be hearing me well enough. You don’t happen to have a wooden leg or ADHD, or something, do you?

Barber (shakes head)

Me: Irritable bowel syndrome? Tennis elbow? Chronically late for appointments? Honestly, I’m pretty desperate for a haircut, so I’ll take anything.

Barber: Sorry, I’m just a normal guy.

Me (gasping): “Normal?!” How dare you use a socially constructed concept to judge, exclude, and marginalize individuals or groups who do not conform to a dominant standard! (stands up and throws barber cape onto chair). You sir – or madam (raising eyebrow hopefully. Barber shakes head “no”) – you sir are a disgrace to the barber profession.

(storms out).

Barber (to self): Why a bald guy needs a barber is beyond me.

Note: “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category are designed to encourage equitable representation on and off screen to better reflect the diverse global population.” Please support them by living their values in your day-to-day lives.

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and anything else that catches his fancy.

Full disclosure: he still has most of his hair.

As you may have picked up from this article he’s now trying his hand at humor. You can find some of what he finds funny here.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing your thoughts in the comments, subscribing, or even buying him a coffee if you’re feeling generous and felt that this was a particularly enjoyable article.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.