C.A.A. on Short Breat

 The C.A.A. will be on a short break starting Monday. Regular posts will resume later in the coming week.

The True Toll of Conspiracy Theories

By Eva Terry

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

It was a sunny September afternoon. I was standing in the crowd at Utah Valley University with my VoiceMemos app rolling when I watched Charlie Kirk’s body jerk backward. He closed his eyes and fell out of his chair.

 

It was the gunshot heard from every phone, viewed by millions almost immediately. I heard it with my own ears. I saw what it did with my own eyes. And I, along with everyone else, want justice for the Turning Point USA founder and slain father of two.

 

Tyler Robinson currently sits in Utah County Jail, facing six felony charges and a Class A misdemeanor. The 22-year-old turned himself in to authorities in Washington County the night after the shooting.

 

Though he has not pleaded one way or the other (and will likely not do so until May at the earliest), the case against him is strong, and empirical evidence points its iron finger at Tyler Robinson.

 

He had a motive, he was seen on camera, the gun’s trigger had his DNA, and he confessed to his parents before turning himself in to the FBI.

 

The bolt-action rifle used in the killing belonged to Robinson’s grandfather. His own family told authorities he had shifted politically to the left; during a family dinner shortly before Kirk was assassinated, Robinson brought up the UVU event and said the 31-year-old was “full of hate and spreading hate.”

 

Yet since Kirk’s death on September 10, there has been a steadily growing, insatiable thirst for conspiracy — and it is not without consequence.

 

The conspiracies germinated immediately following the shooting. In Robinson’s hometown, three days after Charlie Kirk was killed, I interviewed a mother of two young sons. In earnest, she told me it was not Robinson who’d killed Kirk; it was a TPUSA donor with grievances. In our brief conversation, she referenced a plane that took off from the Provo Airport around the time of the shooting and added that she’d seen the video of him being shot, and the bullet path defied logic. “We live in a world where there’s a lot of stuff going on with the government, and I think we just need to take our precautions and do our due diligence as citizens, not jump to conclusions as far as damning him and convicting [Robinson],” the woman told me.

 

About a week later, outside UVU’s student- and community-made vigil, I spoke with a man who told me he’d driven down from Washington State that morning to check out the grounds for himself. As an ex-military guy, he didn’t think Robinson was the culprit either. An inexperienced kid wouldn’t be capable of taking apart the gun that quickly, and his escape route didn’t make sense, he told me. I’m not sure what he discovered when I pointed him in the direction of the amphitheater, but I hope it was worth the twelve-hour drive.

 

Enter Candace Owens.

 

I have neither the word count nor the will to explain the accusations Owens makes across her 40-plus episodes on Charlie’s murder. It suffices to say that in her mind, TPUSA is guilty, his wife Erika is guilty, Jews are guilty, the FBI is guilty, Mormons are guilty, France is guilty, and Egypt is guilty. They’re all in on it; they’re lying to you, she says.

 

Guilty of what? We’re not sure. And guilty why? That, too, we don’t know.

 

The people bearing the deepest grief and trauma from Charlie’s murder — Erika and the staff at Turning Point — have been recast as villains in Owens’s universe. With an audience of millions, she declared, “Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage.” Candace Owens has flipped the truth on its head.

 

TPUSA asked Owens to join a special livestream event on Monday to address her claims against them, but she now says she will instead offer a rebuttal on her own show.

 

Though conspiracy theories are nothing new, they are newly mainstreamed. As journalist Andy Ngo recently reasoned, self-styled journalists like Candace Owens who peddle conspiracy theories as hoaxes and innuendo are not harmless. “News” with no guidelines, no accountability, and no guardrails reduces a situation to fiction.

 

This is not to suggest the traditional press is faultless. The original sin of journalism is that it profits from tragedy, mayhem, and dirty laundry. But in exchange, it offers the simple reward of knowing what’s going on. What happened? Who did it? Why?

 

But Owens and those pushing conspiracy theories around Charlie Kirk’s death are counterfeiting knowledge, jeopardizing the judicial process and skewing public perception.

 

When I asked a friend what he’d heard about Robinson recently, he said he’d seen that he was at Burger King when Kirk was shot. He added, “Didn’t Tyler plead not guilty in court or something?” Both claims are easy to verify as false.

 

The Manhattan Institute recently published a study that found a disturbing positive correlation between believing in conspiracy theories and justifying political violence. And it makes sense: If you believe your government conspires against its own citizens and shoots the people who defend it, there is fertile ground for disobeying its laws against killing, looting, and burning. The left has discredited the U.S. government for decades, saying it’s built on slavery, racism, sexism, and colonialism. And perhaps this indictment provides solid justification for Antifa to act the way it does.

 

When institutional distrust and paranoid ideologies breed, their offspring is ugly. It has been ugly for the left; it is starting to look ugly for the right.

 

What do conspiracy theories do on a human level? A few days ago, Erika Kirk re-entered the national spotlight, and in an interview with Fox News, she said the conspiracy theories about herself and TPUSA are a “mind virus.” “Just know that your words are very powerful,” she said. “We have more death threats on our team and our side than I have ever seen. We have kidnapping threats — you name it, we have it. And my poor team is exhausted.”

 

But conspiracy theories wound more than their targets. They take a toll on the believer; they exacerbate helplessness and make it difficult to forgive.

 

I was surprised at Owens’s reaction on her own podcast to Erika Kirk’s interview with Jesse Watters last month. With an earnestness reserved only for the widow of a murdered husband, Erika said she has never been angry with God for her new reality. “I know that He uses everything, even what the enemy meant for evil,” she said.

 

But Owens disagreed. In what she called a “hypercritical” self-assessment, she said she cannot forgive Robinson, “because I cannot forgive until I know what happened.” Then she resumed untangling her cold spaghetti slop of who conspired to kill Charlie.

 

But perfect knowledge is not a prerequisite for forgiveness, or it would be an impossible task. In fact, the Creator of the human experience proclaimed on the cross at Calvary, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

 

It’s natural to want the complicated universe to make sense. It’s what drives scientific discovery, honest journalism, and a thorough judicial system. But truth cannot be reliably discovered on a podcast-a-day schedule, especially when the shows are incentivized to shock and awe. Fortunately, while the wheels of justice turn slowly, they do turn — and despite the distractions from Owens and her fellow conspiracy theorists, justice will ultimately be served for Charlie Kirk.

What the Hell Is Wrong with a Country That Makes a Widow Defend Herself for Living?

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Thursday, December 11, 2025

 

“I’ve had paper cuts that took longer to heal than Erika Kirk.”

 

You may have seen this comment on X in recent days. And yes, by the author of a book titled, If God Is Love, Don’t be a Jerk. I’ve also read that she’s “hawking her dead husband’s book.” And that’s far from the worst of what’s out there.

 

Erika is doing publicity for Charlie Kirk’s final book, on keeping the sabbath, because he can’t do it himself because he was murdered before its publication date.

 

You may have seen what she felt the need to say to Harris Faulkner on Fox News Channel Wednesday while talking about Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life:

 

 

What the hell is wrong with us?

 

Okay, so you don’t like Erika Kirk’s rings.

 

(God bless her sense of humor. She did a mock “conspiracy rings” infomercial in the Fox interview with Faulkner.)

 

Or her makeup.

 

Or her clothes.

 

Or the fact she has been seen smiling on occasions in the last few months. Or, as now CEO of the organization her husband founded, she would dare to raise money as all eyes are on her as she’s in a new position of leadership at the darkest moment (please, God) of her life.

 

Or that she let the vice president of the United States — whose wife she has obviously spent some intimate time with at the most harrowing time of her life — hug her. (JD Vance and his wife, Usha, escorted Erika with her husband’s dead body from Utah home to Arizona.)

 

Am I missing anything? I know there are many opinions.

 

A seemingly sick woman whom Erika’s husband was kind to is obsessed with the idea that Erika, her friends, her colleagues, and the government somehow plotted her husband’s murder. And, as Erika pointed out, that same woman is making serious money every time she furthers the madness.

 

But you don’t have to click on Candace Owens to see a rot among us.

 

Who are any of us to have an opinion on this widow and how she grieves? (Or anyone, at any time.) Okay, you don’t look up to Heaven when you pray or think of your deceased loved ones, fine. I close my eyes when I pray. If you were watching me grieve my husband’s murder on television, I’m sure plenty would hate the way I was doing it, too. Every human is unique. And while there is nothing new under the sun, every grief is unique. People die every day. People are even murdered daily. But there was one Charlie Kirk, and his murder was widely seen. If you weren’t there, if you did not watch it, you may have accidentally wound up clicking on it. It was everywhere in that first day, during the first hours. That’s a trauma on everyone who was impacted by it, even in small ways.

 

Erika Kirk is not just grieving the extremely public murder of her husband for herself and their children, but for all of the young people who were invested in his life and hurt by his death. She clearly feels a sense of responsibility to not just his audience — his “fans” for lack of a better way to put it — but to the people who hate him and his legacy or what they think he and his legacy stand for.

 

Even if some of the out-of-context statements I’ve seen were masking a darker vision (which I haven’t been convinced of the more I’ve listened), you have to wonder if you’re ever murdered, will anyone who disagreed with you on something political decide that while that wouldn’t make your murder acceptable, it does come with the territory of having not held the most conventionally sophisticated views. And then there is the question of: Who among us wants to be remembered for the worst we’ve done, or even things we wish we said differently?

 

What I find remarkable, in hindsight, since his murder got me to sit down and watch more than I did when he was alive, is how many videos there are of Charlie Kirk being compassionate and considerate and discerning with his words. Especially when someone was in front of him and obviously hurting. I say obviously. But the human reflex and the American incentives are to go and eviscerate and win the argument. But those encounters on college campuses were not about winning debates for Charlie Kirk so much as opening doors to Christ. I confess, I did not fully appreciate that when he was alive. I regret that. And I pray we learn from the example — especially in hostile situations.

 

Erika Kirk gave a remarkable Christian witness and a gift to every human being alive when she forgave the man who murdered her husband. She could be bitter. She could be spewing hate. She could be thirsty for blood revenge. Instead, she remembers that it is precisely the kind of lost young man who killed her husband that her husband was trying to reach with reason and the grace of God.

 

 

Consider that the grace of God is amazing. And has nothing to do with the pantsuit that isn’t black or the jewelry you wouldn’t wear, or whatever nonsense thing people are criticizing Erika Kirk for today. Ask God for His mercy and His grace and consider Charlie Kirk on his best days is a good role model for young men, in a particular way.

 

God doesn’t let anything go to waste and if young men lives are impacted for good in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, that seems to be his widow’s prayer.

 

God bless her.

 

And consider Erika Kirk, too, is a gift for the young women of our day. A college-educated woman who chose young marriage and children in faith. And as the target of some of the most heinous hate, she gives God room to let love prevail even when she’s on Fox News or talking with the New York Times.

 

No small miracles.

What a Bodega Taught the Socialist

By Tim Chapman

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

New York City’s socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani walked into a Queens bodega recently and stumbled his way into Milton Friedman–style conservativism. This sentence would shock most people, but it happened. In one of his latest small-business campaign videos, the world’s newest socialist darling unintentionally promoted beating back burdensome government through deregulation.

 

Mugged by the reality of running a bodega, Mamdani now wants to cut fines and fees by 50 percent, expedite permitting, and cut the bureaucratic red tape that slows new businesses from opening their doors. Blissfully unaware, he lamented: “You shouldn’t have to fill out 24 forms and go through seven agencies to start a barbershop.” Then, he channeled his inner Elon Musk and announced a new “mom-and-pop czar” who will coordinate city agencies to improve turnaround times and help businesses navigate the cumbersome regulatory system. A little New York City DOGE?

 

This is a surprising rhetorical change for someone who campaigned on a full-scale socialist takeover of the world’s financial capital. Throughout the race, Mamdani argued that more government would make New York more affordable. His Election Night declaration that “there is no problem too large for government to solve” made it clear for all.

 

Yet only weeks before officially being sworn in — and confronted with the daunting realities of governing a complex economy — he unwittingly conceded that rather than solve “large problems,” big government’s numerous rules and regulations actually drive up costs and make life unaffordable.

 

Mamdani’s sudden embrace of deregulation, however, should not be mistaken for a broader change of heart. Nothing else in his agenda suggests one.

 

Mamdani is still the same man who campaigned, and won, on Communist Manifesto–inspired policies that would smother any remaining chance of economic revival in New York and, in turn, make the city even more expensive. Let’s not forget that he endorsed “seizing the means of production” and promised rent freezes and government-run grocery stores and child care and free public transport, then proposed race-based tax hikes on “richer and whiter neighborhoods” to pay for it all.

 

These proposals are the core of his platform. And they rest on the same flawed assumption that has guided socialist command economics for a century: that affordability is created when government consolidates more control. In fact, the opposite is true.

 

Mamdani’s bodega deregulation moment shines a light on his silver-spoon socialist ignorance. It is his proposed policies and that very ideology that create bureaucratic encumbrances and make everything more expensive. The same red tape that Mamdani now concedes is suffocating bodegas is driving up the price of almost everything New Yorkers buy, build, or try to open.

 

New York City has some of the most complex and lengthy permitting timelines of any major city, a barrier that continues to worsen its housing shortage and undermine business competitiveness. The city is also known for its “complex regulatory environment,” with more than 6,000 rules and roughly 250 business-related licenses and permits, each accompanied by its own compliance process. New York City is still missing 30,000 small-business jobs that never came back after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous mismanagement during the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, NYC’s overall cost of living is 130 percent above the national average.

 

Working families live in this reality every day through higher grocery bills, higher rent, and fewer neighborhood stores. Investors and entrepreneurs are jetting off to states such as Florida and Texas because taxes are too high, compliance is too expensive, and the regulatory environment is nearly impossible to navigate. Why bother?

 

The cost of living in NYC keeps climbing because the cost of doing business has been ratcheted up to the moon by a city government that inserts itself into nearly every step of the economic process.

 

New York is not expensive because the private sector is failing. It is expensive because the private sector is handcuffed to a New York City bureaucrat at every turn.

 

Small government has always offered the opposite. Fewer, consistently applied rules give businesses the ability to plan, invest, and open their doors without procedural bottlenecks. Lower taxes keep capital circulating in neighborhoods rather than siphoning it off into the government’s treasury. A restrained regulatory posture gives today’s entrepreneurs the freedom to solve the problems of today without the bureaucrats of the past holding them back. These are the basic economic realities that make goods affordable, support job creation, and keep cities livable.

 

Mamdani’s bodega epiphany points toward this reality, even if unintentionally. His interest in reducing fines, accelerating permitting, and simplifying basic processes is an acknowledgment that government restraint is not an ideological preference but a prerequisite for affordability.

 

If Mamdani extended this logic beyond bodegas, he might actually deliver the affordability he campaigned on. He has already taken one small step. The city would benefit from several more.

‘Rich’ Ain’t What It Used to Be

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 12, 2025

 

A couple weeks ago a huge fight broke out over the claim floated by Michael Green, a Wall Street guy, that the real poverty line for an American family of four is—or should be—$140,000 a year.

 

Green got clobbered from critics across the ideological spectrum. It was like America’s leading economic commentators were a 1990s Los Angeles street gang, and the only way to leave the gang was to be punched and kicked by each member on your way out.

 

Our own indispensable Scott Lincicome wrote a fantastic roundup of the pile-on. But he went further, which is why he titled his piece, “The $140,000 ‘Poverty Line’ Is Laughably Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?”

 

I think Scott is asking the right question, and I think all of his answers have merit. But I think he’s missing one, admittedly partial, explanation for why people feel poor and are pissed off about it.

 

Let’s revisit the concept of positional goods. Simply put, a positional good is a zero-sum good. If I have it, by definition you can’t. It gets more complicated than that, but that’s sort of the way to think about it for now. If you’re elected prom king, no one else is prom king.

 

There’s another kind of good that is similar to a positional good and can sometimes also be one. These are Veblen goods (the concept was popularized by economist Thorstein Veblen). Part of the attraction of having a fancy car is the “signal” it sends that you can afford a fancy car. That’s a Veblen good. (In the 1990s, a good friend of mine had a used Honda Civic. We called it the “stealth mobile” because it rendered its passengers invisible to girls.)

 

The Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut Coupé” is the rarest car in the world, with only two ever made. Not long ago, one sold for $140 million. That purchase is not only a classic example of conspicuous consumption (a Veblen good), but it’s also a positional good. Since the other one wasn’t for sale, buying it meant that nobody else in the world could have it.

 

Veblen goods are always about wealth but can sometimes be about status, too. Positional goods—at least in the way I am using the term—are always about status, but can also be about wealth. If the richest kid in the senior class is a paste-eating loser who constantly smells like old socks, he’s not going to get elected prom king. But the funniest, handsomest, most athletic kid, or simply the most popular—regardless of how much money his parents have—is an odds-on favorite for the title.

 

Both goods involve scarcity to one extent or another.

 

Now, obviously, the two overlap and can be conflated to the point of being indistinguishable from afar. That’s because you can buy a lot of status if you have enough money, and you can make a lot of money if you have enough status. Membership in an elite country club is both a positional good and a Veblen good.

 

Supermodels and movie stars don’t get to skip the line at clubs because they’re rich. The bouncer lifts the red rope because they’re famous, and fame is definitely a form of elite status in today’s culture. I know some very rich people who’ve literally waited decades to become members of the hoighty-toighty and mysterious Bohemian Club, while many prominent writers and artists can get admitted almost immediately.

 

In the real world, rich people tend to have very high status simply because they’re rich. Other people only get rich because they have very high status. It’s sort of like one of my peeves about the term “oligarchy.” Contrary to Bernie Sanders et al., oligarchy doesn’t mean rule of the rich. It means rule of the few. But, for kind of obvious reasons, rulers in oligarchical states find it very easy to make themselves rich. Vladimir Putin may be one of the richest men in the world, but he didn’t get that way via his KGB pension, his presidential salary, or a side gig as a chinchilla rancher.

 

Metaphorically, and in some ways literally, there are two ways to fly first class. You can simply buy a full-fare ticket, Veblen style. Or you can have sufficient “status” with the airline that you get to sit up front on points.

 

 Okay, so I took way too long explaining that. But I think it’s useful and important. The economist Fred Hirsch coined the term positional good and wrote a book called The Social Limits to Growth, in which he argued that rising prosperity—not widening inequality or deepening poverty—was putting the American Dream out of reach. Economic growth makes nonpositional goods—food, basic housing, a serviceable car, common electronics—more available. A century ago a car was a luxury, and 150 years ago having indoor plumbing marked you as well-off. Now these are the basics. But economic growth makes positional goods more scarce, i.e. more expensive. As Hirsch puts it, if everyone at a parade stands on their tiptoes, the advantage of being on your tiptoes disappears.

 

So as society gets richer, more and more people get “taller.” This leads to what Hirsch called “congestion.” When only the rich had cars, there was very little traffic. When more than 100 million people have at least one car  (and there are nearly 300 million in total), you have lots of traffic. When only the well-off can enjoy a nice house in the suburbs, the suburbs aren’t crowded. And so on. When societies get rich, positional goods become more valuable because once you’ve checked the material boxes, you care more about status and less about putting food on the table.

 

So let’s briefly talk about status. For deep evolutionary reasons, humans crave status. We crave it as individuals and as groups. We want to be respected, personally and collectively. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this craving, and there’s even much that is noble and valuable to it. Professional ambition, the pursuit of greatness and glory, the desire to be remembered by history or to make a difference, stem from this desire. But this desire can be corrupted, channeled toward selfish ends. “Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold,” Aristotle tells us.

 

That humans—and especially the males (sorry ladies)—hunger to have status in the form of honor or fame is one of the most commented-on sociological and psychological observations in history: from Tacitus (“Even for the wise, the desire for glory is the last of all passions to be laid aside”) to Hume’s “love of fame” to Rousseau’s amour-propre, the form of self-love that can only be realized through the esteem of others, to virtually the whole of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, to the writings of a slew of sociologists starting with Max Weber.

 

Weber is particularly interesting because his observation about America reveals something important. “Very frequently the striving for power is also conditioned by the social ‘honor’ it entails,” Weber writes. But he goes on: “Not all power, however, entails social honor: The typical American Boss, as well as the typical big speculator, deliberately relinquishes social honor.”

 

I’m not sure that was true then, but I’m sure it’s not true now. I think the American Boss—he meant a successful businessman, not a Boss Tweed type—has a lot of social honor, as do speculators. But the point Weber reveals is that what confers honor or prestige or status in one era or culture may not in another. Well into the 19^th century in Europe and to a lesser extent America, actresses were seen as profoundly low class and essentially glorified prostitutes. Today, they are people to be celebrated, i.e. celebrities.

 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the left has spent the last decade or two complaining about “privilege.” I’m not a big fan of identity politics, but I think it’s irrefutable that being a minority gives one an extra insight and sensitivity to social privileges and status rankings that are largely invisible to the majority culture. Christians say harmless things that catch the ears of Jews, Muslims, and atheists. The same happens with whites and nonwhites, men and women, rich people and poor people. The rich kid who talks about just getting a new pair of sneakers may not intend to offend his poorer friend, but the poor friend is offended all the same. This is the stuff of life.

 

 I could go on (and on). I think there’s much to say about this subject. But I should get to this $140,000 poverty line thing. Again, I agree with the critics. It’s nonsense.

 

But.

 

We are a very rich country, with an enormous number of elites. Indeed, in the economic sense, we have a massive elite surplus compared to other countries. There are just shy of 1,000 billionaires in America, just more than 10,000 centimillionaires, and 24 million millionaires. By one estimate, America created 1,000 new millionaires every single day in 2024 alone. And they tend to cluster in certain regions.

 

With so many rich people, there’s a lot of congestion.

 

More importantly, we live in a culture in which nearly every kid is told they are special, exceptional even. A lot of them believe it. But they hunger for evidence of their specialness, particularly evidence that is recognized by others. And that evidence can be hard to come by.

 

An enormous amount of our politics has less to do with issues, including economics, than it does about status and status anxiety. Economic growth increases happiness to a point, and then sort of stalls out (this is called the “Easterlin paradox”). In the 2016 election, according to some studies, “status threat” played a bigger role than economic hardship in driving the results. The boats in the Trump boat parades in 2020 were not captained by sans culottes. The loudest and most passionate voices fighting both for DEI and against it are driven by fears of losing status relative to other groups. Rob Henderson’s work on “luxury beliefs” is a perfect illustration of the point. Being able to speak fluent intersectionality is simultaneously a Veblen good and a positional good. Like speaking French in the old courts of Europe, it is—or at least was—an extended linguistic shibboleth of your status. I thought it was embarrassing that so many right-wingers whined so much about Hillary Clinton calling them “deplorables.” But, in their partial defense, they were venting legitimate frustration about the scorn certain elites had for people like them.

 

Add in the fact that we’ve taught two generations of Americans that being a victim confers status, it should not surprise anyone that so much of our politics is a thinly veiled argument over who gets to claim cultural victim status. That’s what a lot of right-wing identity politics is now: an attempt to “elevate” white men and Christians as “the real victims.”

 

The rise in the attention economy is a profound real-world experiment about the most coveted positional good of our age: the attention of others. It is valuable because attention spans are finite. It is also valuable because in a very rich country, fame is becoming more desirable than wealth. Few people want to be very poor but famous. But many people, having attained sufficient wealth, would rather be famous than merely more wealthy, which is why so many rich people run for office and why some famous people will debase themselves just to stay famous.

 

The passion the left brings to the issue of economic inequality isn’t about economics so much as it is about resentment and envy. But couching such resentment in the language of economics is socially acceptable. So it is framed in economic terms.

 

I’m not crying for billionaires. There will never be a society where people don’t envy the superrich. I just don’t support bad economic policies aimed at scapegoating or eliminating them. (Zohran Mamdani is just one of a long line of lefties who think we shouldn’t have billionaires.)

 

The real danger in a democracy isn’t about envy of the very rich. The real danger is envy of your fellow citizens when they have slightly more status than you. Economic prosperity and political equality are breeding grounds for such envy. And this has always been the case. Alexis De Tocqueville noted this in Democracy in America:

 

It cannot be denied that democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to everyone the means of rising to the same level with others as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment when they think they have grasped it, and “flies,” as Pascal says, “with an eternal flight”; the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown or sufficiently near to be enjoyed. The lower orders are agitated by the chance of success, they are irritated by its uncertainty; and they pass from the enthusiasm of pursuit to the exhaustion of ill success, and lastly to the acrimony of disappointment. Whatever transcends their own limitations appears to be an obstacle to their desires, and there is no superiority, however legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight.

 

Households that make $140,000 a year are not “poor.” But it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that they feel poor. And in some cities, as a cultural and psychological matter, I think they are poor in significant ways. But the reason—or one of the reasons—Green’s claim went viral is that an enormous number of people feel poor in terms of status and express that feeling in the form of economic resentment.

 

There are many economic policies that would help—fixing the congestion-fueled problems of housing, is an obvious one. But I think the more important fixes are cultural. We need more avenues for people to feel honored and respected other than fame and money. In short, we need a culture that creates opportunities for “earned success” at the ground level. A society that heaps praise and honor on being a good parent, teacher, nurse, friend, priest, etc., creates honeycombs of success and status. A culture that heaps praise and honor on people like Andrew Tate creates young men who are neither praiseworthy nor honorable. You can tell me that Tate is not being praised or honored by decent people, and with the exception of confused young men I’d agree with you.

 

But the tragic fact is that our culture today confuses fame for honor and attention for praise. Integrity is seen by too many as a waste of time at best, weakness at worst, while “success” is defined as gratifying your desires on your own terms. Envy, which is one of the deadliest of sins, is just another feeling, and feelings are granted an authority independent from, and oblivious to, the very concept of sin. 

Hanukkah Massacre in Australia Leaves More Jews Dead

By Philip Klein

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

Terrorists opened fire on over a thousand Jews marking the opening night of Hanukkah on Australia’s Bondi Beach in Sydney, killing at least eleven people.

 

Chabad of Bondi had organized a event called “Chanukah by the Sea” that had been a tradition for decades. It had been going on for a little over an hour when two gunmen opened fire, causing the crowd to scatter. According to the local Chabad, there was a long police response time, so long that the terrorists had sufficient time to reload and keep shooting. Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was assistant rabbi at the Chabad, was among those killed.

 

There were two gunman, including one who was heroically discharged by a bystander who was shown in a video sneaking up from behind him, jumping on his back, and ripping a long gun out of his hands.

 

One suspect was eventually killed by police, and another arrested.

 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared the event an act of terrorism and acknowledged it was “a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first night of Hanukkah.”

 

Like many Jewish communities in the world, Australia has been under constant threat, with synagogues being burnt and Jewish homes being vandalized. The event itself was an act of defiance by Australian Jews, a demonstration that they would not let fear deter them from practicing their faith, which was a message of Rabbi Schlanger, who was among those killed.

It’s the Incentives, Stupid

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, December 11, 2025

 

In August 2011, near the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol, congressional candidate Kelda Roys stood atop a flatbed truck and addressed the attendees at a gay pride parade. Roys, now a state senator and candidate for Wisconsin governor, pressed the need for marriage equality and told the onlookers that because of Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex weddings, she herself had to flee to the gay-marriage-friendly state of Iowa to marry her “partner.”

 

Roys never mentioned that her “partner” was, in fact, a man, whom she had married in 2010. But she was running for Congress against Mark Pocan, an openly gay man, who succeeded Tammy Baldwin, an openly gay woman. In the heavily progressive Madison-area congressional district, being gay wasn’t something to hide; it was a résumé-builder. And Roys clearly found her résumé lacking.

 

“She was clearly trying to represent herself as a member of the LGBT community,” Katie Belanger, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, the state’s most visible LGBT rights organization, told me at the time. “That’s what happens when you start making a political calculation in order to help yourself instead of working for the common good,” said Belanger.

 

But Roys took this ill-conceived gamble because she had an incentive to do so. When benefits are handed down based on immutable characteristics, like sexual orientation, you’re going to find more people claiming to have those characteristics.

 

Consider reporter Rose Horowitch’s stunning story at The Atlantic last week, in which she noted the high number of students at prestigious universities today who seek to be considered “disabled” so they can obtain “accommodations” in the classroom. Horowitch notes that 20 percent of the students at both Brown and Harvard are deemed disabled.

 

Clearly, this cohort of kids and their parents have figured out how to game the system to receive advantages such as flexible deadlines for turning in work, missing classes without penalty, and being given extra time to take exams. Claim you have some sort of learning disability, and the school will typically grant you an exception rather than fight your parents over the special treatment. (For one kid at a California school, that accommodation meant bringing the student’s mother to class.)

 

Some argue that the increase in mental-health-related diagnoses — ADHD, anxiety, depression — is a step forward, as health experts are more accurately diagnosing problems that previous generations had to struggle with on their own. If this were the case, though, we would expect to see similar disability rates among students at two-year colleges. Yet, as Horowitch notes, only 3 to 4 percent of students at two-year colleges receive accommodations, and over half of four-year students magically develop these learning disabilities after they arrive at school. (In reality, students who attend two-year schools are much more likely to have learning disabilities, which keeps many of them from getting the grades necessary to attend a four-year college.)

 

Few people would disagree that students with legitimate disabilities deserve special accommodations to complete their school work. But again, the stigma of being labeled “disabled” pales against the desire to have a special advantage in the classroom.

 

Once again, the incentive is backward.

 

As Milton Friedman famously said, the greatest mistake we can make is to judge policies and programs “by their intentions rather than their results.” And yet, more often than not, our lawmakers celebrate inputs and ignore potential outputs. They imagine citizens not as dynamic individuals who will change their behavior in response to changes in the law but as cardboard cutouts who will dutifully act without considering their own self-interest.

 

And those self-interests are determined by the incentives given to people to pursue them. When university professors know they can move up more quickly in their profession by claiming to be members of minority groups, you get Elizabeth Warren pitching her family recipe for “pow wow chow.” When progressives promote homeownership by supercharging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, people with poor credit are incentivized to buy homes that are well beyond their means, collapsing the economy. When “wealth taxes” are implemented, wealthy (and thus more mobile) taxpayers simply move their assets to lower-taxed areas.

 

“Unintended” consequences are only unintended for lawmakers with a lack of imagination.

 

Yet it seems to shock everyone when citizens react to a new government program in a way that is entirely predictable. Americans recently learned that a band of Minnesota-based Somali immigrants had raided a government fund meant to feed hungry children during the Covid-19 pandemic. These criminal pockets made off with more than a billion dollars to pay for luxurious homes and travel, yet it went on for years under the blind eye of Governor Tim Walz.

 

The Somali racket is a case of double incentives at work; when governments set up giant programs with little oversight, they effectively set up a bank with a “Rob Us, No Weapons Needed” sign out front. When the government distributes money to feed students, it is remarkable how many fictitious hungry students suddenly appear.

 

There were incentives at work on the part of Minnesota state investigators as well. Much of the fraud took place after the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd at the hands of police, so state agents were afraid to target the predominantly black Somali community, lest they receive blowback for racial insensitivity.

 

So when criminals are incentivized to steal, and law enforcement is incentivized to look the other way, taxpayers are left to watch a billion dollars of their money walk out the door.

 

Nobody wants to think their personal behavior can be reduced to a menu of incentives, but acting in our own self-interest is how we survive. Of course, people often act outside of their own interests, but that is because feeling good about helping others or giving to charity is an incentive in itself.

 

Whether it is society granting benefits to people with certain characteristics or governments granting benefits to preferred groups, it would help to game things out. Subsidizing an activity only creates more of it, just as making it more expensive guarantees less of it.

 

Policymakers can give as many speeches as they want about fairness and justice. Still, until they start crafting laws that account for human nature rather than ignore it, we’ll keep getting more of exactly what we’re paying for. And if history is any guide, the only incentive Washington ever seems to understand is the one that involves a camera pointed at them — which is why, when it comes to unintended consequences, Congress remains our most reliable repeat customer. After all, if the incentives weren’t broken, they’d have fixed them already . . . and then what would they campaign on?