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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.

You’re right about this, but the problem is that the great man won’t look like democracy. Many “human rights” will be crushed out of existence on the way to resolving America’s fiscal problems.

This is, I think, the currently insurmountable mountain facing America. In order to resolve its problems, the great man will have to take the nation in hand, ignore a large proportion of the populace entirely, and take our present “leadership” behind the woodshed for a long time. That’s not happening anytime soon, because who’s going to be that great man?

Musk? Thiel? It won’t be a general or admiral, they’re all politicized non-entities these days. Maybe Hegseth, if he could be SecDef for 8 years and spend all that time ruthlessly purging the Pentagon until he had stacked the ranks with loyalists or ideological fellow travelers.

It’s sad, but I suspect America is on its way to experiencing its own Crisis of the Third Century, and someone with the vision and will to power of Diocletian is at least a couple of generations away.