Christopher Chantrill
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CBS & Cummings and LKY and Boyd

All the world is shocked, shocked that 60 Minutes veteran Scott Pelley is beside himself that his new boss Bari Weiss is throwing out all the dyed-in-the-wool liberal narrative reciters.

And I was talking to someone commenting on how all the kidz of Wall Street chappies are signing on in Private Wealth Management. Like they know anything likely to help their clients beat the conventional wisdom.

It’s the same thing in the Liberal Band as Democratic politicians are trying their best to keep the liberal road trip going, even though they can’t fill the theaters any more and tough nuts like Nick Shirley are exposing their scams, as Sen. Schumer might say, six ways from Sunday.

OK. All these regime go-alongs don’t have a clue. But the rest of us would like to hope that we, the ordinary folks below the Cool Club, can navigate the inevitable shape-shift without joining our betters as they do the lemming thing.

Actually, it wasn’t lemmings that went over the cliff. It was buffalos chased over the cliff by brave First Nation warriors back in the day before the Europeans decided that it was better “to rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticise after dinner.” Leave those poor buffalo alone, killer man.

But what should the shape-shift look like, how do we find leaders to lead the shape-shift, and how do we educate ourselves to understand what is needed?

A good place to start is a recent Substack piece by Brit rebel Dominic Cummings. Cummings ran the campaign in Britain to Vote Leave the EEC. He recommends listening to Bismarck of Germany and Lee Kwan Yew (LKY) of Singapore. Cummings starts with a quote from LKY:

We noted by the 1970s [in western Europe] that when governments undertook primary responsibility for the basic duties of the head of the family, the drive in people weakened. Welfare undermined self-reliance. People did not have to work for their families’ well-being. A handout became a way of life. The downward spiral was relentless as motivation and productivity went down. People lost the drive to achieve because they paid too much in taxes. They became dependent on the state for their basic needs… We thought it best to reinforce the Confucian tradition that a man is responsible for his family.

As Charles Murray wrote in Coming Apart, in the lower classes in the US the men don’t work much and the women don’t marry much.

What to do? We should copy LKY and:

recruit talent, huge focus on infrastructure and skills, huge focus on attracting global investment, personal accounts for health/welfare that can be passed on with zero inheritance tax, stop all boats with the navy as LKY did etc.

Hey, there’s a concept: personal accounts for retirement/health/welfare “that can be passed on with zero inheritance tax.” Notice how this is just about the opposite of the current Democrat mania for an unrealized capital gains tax. Instead LKW wants to empower families to look after themselves from this generation to the next.

Cummings also recommends that the upcoming dissident elites grow a pair and stop being afraid of being called fascists (or racists, etc.).

Name-calling is not as bad as most of you fear and life is much easier in many ways once you realise it doesn’t matter if irrelevant NPCs call you names[.]

But dissident leaders “must have iron in [them].” They don’t have to be super-intelligent but they do need to have super-courage.

You must really truly be on the side of the people, going to [Washington] to champion the best of the nation against those who came to dominate [Washington].

Hmm. Let’s see: seems like we have seen this happen here in these United States already. And that “dissident leader” seems too be eager to pitch out the RINOs that don’t have iron in them.

Cummings quotes Col. John Boyd, he of the OODA loop, saying that you have

To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do. Which way will you go?

You can see that while Dominic Cummings is still waiting for someone consequential to turn up in the UK, we already have someone trying to implement the Cummings agenda in the US. His name is President Donald Trump.

Does he have enough character? Has he found good enough talent to make a difference? Do his people have enough good ideas, and good ideas that work? Do his people have enough iron in them to do rather than to be, and advance against the status quo?

All we can say is: Stay Tuned. And get out and vote.

| Wed, 03 Jun 2026 04:24:25 GMT |


The Problem Isn't Chromebooks

Chromebooks have been a Thing in the classroom, starting in about 2010. ‘Cos Google pushed them and because they are cheap.

Google AI says that they are great because they are cheap and the data on the cloud follows students from school to school.

But Brittany Calavitta, a home-schooler, says they are ruining education. A schoolteacher friend told her that

the overuse of screens in the classroom is changing the way our children learn. It is stripping them of their innate creativity and causing fractured focus. At the same time, schools have become reliant on them.

What is needed? “I think that physical interaction with the real world matters much more than we know.” At her homeschool,

Every morning, we slowly saunter toward our dining room table, but the feast we await sits just beyond our bacon. We find it in the study of fractions in the kitchen and the careful examination of ant colonies in our backyard. It is in the gold rush stories that flutter between our fingertips and then settle beneath our feet on the dusty soil of our local ghost towns. It is in learning about supply and demand at the gas pump and skip-counting apples in the grocery store.

But I think that the problem is not Chromebooks but the very nature of the classroom, which strips children of “their innate creativity” and causes “fractured focus.” Or no focus at all, as children sit in classrooms passively listening to teachers lecturing them and boring them to death.

And yet education is clearly beneficial.

Why learn to read? Because, for a kid, you get access to wonderful stories — and humans are the animal species that tells itself stories. And then you can use your reading skills to acquire knowledge.

Why learn arithmetic? Because we use numbers with money, and money is the foundation of the social culture of the market economy. To function in the market economy you must know a bit more than counting on your fingers.

Why learn to write? Because writing has revolutionized human society, and if you want to communicate to other people it really helps to be able to write.

Apart from that, young people should get to work, doing things in the real world. Of course, Chromebooks are really useful when you need to search for knowledge about doing things in the real world.

And by the way, why do we send kids to school?

  • To teach them things?

  • To keep them busy?

  • To indoctrinate them in regime propaganda?

  • To prevent them from competing for jobs with adults?

  • To bore them to death?

  • To turn them into mind-numbed robots?

I wonder how much education is shaped by the needs of elite children. Elite children cannot be slotted into elite jobs: military, religious, business. Not yet. They need to grow up first and develop leadership credibility.

But does that apply to non-elite children? I don’t think so. At what age can a child help stack shelves in a market? At what age can a child help out on the farm? At what age can a child help out in a factory? At what age can a child help out in a restaurant?

Fact is that children are naturally curious, and naturally able to learn things on the job.

I say that if a child can learn to ride a balance bike at age two, and a real bike soon after, then maybe children have the ability to learn all kinds of economically useful skills, and not wait till their mid teens before getting a job.

After all, what is play but Nature’s way of learning to do things and developing useful and enjoyable mental and physical skills that are needed in the world of humans?

| Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:46:00 GMT |


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Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) is a writer and conservative.

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.


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A Commoner Manifesto

Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
TODAY’S MAXIMS:

In 1900 poor women worked and rich women were supported by Daddy or Hubby. In 2020 rich women work and poor women are supported by gubmint checks.

Ruling Class gotta have a war.

all maxims...

BIG IDEAS:

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”.

IN BRIEF:
ABC of PoliticsActivism Culture“Anatomy of Revolution”AllyismCritical TheoryDownstream-ismDutch FinanceGerman TurnGood LifeGreat ReactionLittle DarlingsPerfect PlanWomen in the Public SquareRuling ClassThree LayersThree PeoplesThree Peoples ReligionTribalismTwo CulturesWrong Turn
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