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Marco and Thumos and the Future
I don’t know if an American federal official has ever given a speech like Secretary Rubio’s recent speech in the face of the setting sun standing in front of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.
What was he doing? He was describing how we Americans got here, what has gone wrong in recent years, and he was creating a vision for the way forward for us here in the greatest nation on Earth.
What shocked me was his use of the Greek word “thumos.” Said he:
The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.
As opposed to the culture of our liberal friends, under whose influence
We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.
Why should I be shocked by thumos — θυμός to you? Because it is very close to Nietzsche and his “self-overcoming.” And you know that Nietzsche was “the Nazis favorite intellectual” according to North London luvvie Helen Lewis. All of which means that Trump and Nietzsche and Rubio are all Literally Hitler!
OK, so I cheated and asked Grok to “discuss nietzsche’s will to power with greek thumos”. You should read the whole thing. But here is the summary at the end.
Thumos wants to be seen as worthy and is injured by contempt.
Will to power wants to become more and is injured by stagnation.
Plato’s project is to yoke spirit to reason for the sake of justice.
Nietzsche’s project is to free spiritedness from the moral interpretation that calls it evil, without returning to mere brutality.
I like it. And I say Go Fritzi and Go Marco!
And Go Elon! Because if you ask me Elon Musk is the model of thumos that we want for the world that is aborning. When he was 18 in South Africa he ordered up immigration papers for Canada, with the intention of ending up in the US. And all his projects are pure Nietzschean self-overcoming, and not the distortion of the Will to Power with which our lefty friends try to misdirect us.
But I want to connect thumos with the AI revolution that is now aborning. Our Democratic friends, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), are trying to bury AI in government regulation. In response, President Trump has just launched AMERICA.GOV, which is an AI portal to the US government and everything about it.
And wouldn’t you know, just today there’s a piece in the NY Post by Fifth Wave chappie and The Revolt of the Public author Martin Gurri.
Gurri’s idea is that the internet has completely changed the world. Up to now, the world was run by bureaucracy. President? Congress? A vast army of bureaucrats and regulators calls the shots. Not any more. Because of the internet web of the Fifth Wave.
The web connects us all. AI connects all human knowledge. The combination is explosive and threatens to blow away the old hierarchies that benefited from parochialism and information monopolies.
The laptop class — the experts and the bureaucrats — can see the edge of the abyss from where they stand, and are in a panic.
They hate the untamed internet and have tried to domesticate it through censorship and the criminalization of speech.
We are reaching the end of the era of bureaucracy and freeing ourselves from what Gurri calls the “monster at the center of a dark and unwholesome labyrinth”. And so:
AI turns on the lights.
The light of AI liberates every young person’s thumos so they can go out into the world and discover their own individual “fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” and create something new in the world. Not as a pompous idiot like Barack Obama, or a political dictator, or a numbskull DSA lookalike, or a devoted activist reciting someone else’s slogans, or as a neo-serf in the neo-feudal welfare state.
And what better place to announce the New Age than right in front of the Parthenon in Athens as the sun sets on the old Age of Bureaucracy.
| Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:35:20 GMT |
The Left Ain’t Stupid
Greg Salsbury, “former president of Western Colorado University”, tells us not to think of the left as “stupid”.
Representative Jim Jordan explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “Just stupid”.
Well, which is it?
So we are told that leftists are shrewd, long-term planners who are simultaneously stupid and crazy. Which is it? The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not.
…
As has often been the case with radical leftist movements in the United States, their stated objective is to dismantle existing American institutions, traditions, and governing structures in favor of a fundamentally different social order.
As Björn Merker says in Perishing Promise, the point of the left is that they are “partisans of overthrow”. So all the crazy stuff has a sensible purpose. To smash up America.
So the point to understand is that, while the agenda of the left seems crazy to us, it’s not crazy if you understand that everything the left does is about destroying America. It’s everything they push,
things like defunding the police, draconian regulations and carbon taxes, mothballing coal and nuclear plants, wide-open borders, turning a blind eye to Medicaid and NGO fraud, supporting genital mutilation of minors, opposing voter ID, massive expansion of entitlement spending, lowering combat readiness standards in the military in the name of gender equality, and support for adversaries like Hamas can be understood not as disconnected examples of incompetence, but as elements of a broader ideological program.
Everything they push destroys America. And that is what they want.
And it doesn’t even have to be part “of a broader ideological program”. If it harms America, then for them, let’s do it.
This is not that hard.
| Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:45:21 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Social justice is not justice, it is vengeance.
There is no one so unjust as the one that fights for justice.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic:
