and this was an remains the essence of the american dream.

work hard, get ahead, and make a better life for yourselves and your children.

there were never any promises on this dream save one: you will have the freedom to pursue it. https://twitter.com/melissakchan/status/1318269145524408320

lots of americans seem to have mistaken "borrow tons of government money to get a degree in the semiotics of intersectional grievance studies" for "work hard" and presumed that doing so would entitle them to a piece of the pie.

but this was never true nor sensible.

it's a trap.

it's debt, encouraged and provided mostly by the state without regard to ability to pay.

borrowing $100-400k and spending it on something that is non-productive (like a useless degree) is malinvestment.

it makes you intersectionally "educated, angry, and unemployable".

it teaches you that it's not you or your choices, it's vast forces arrayed against you, so if you do not achieve your dream, you must blame others instead of taking responsibility.

it weaponizes non-achievement.

worse, it convinces you that achievement is not possible.

being indoctrinated with low expectations is a cruel and inescapable prison.

it's mental poison that teaches people not to strive and then to blame others for it.

it does not make you "woke" it makes you "stunted."

it's how societies rot from the inside out.

that's not the american dream. that's the opposite of the american dream. it's a cargo cult that mistook the signifiers of upper middle class and upper class people in the 70's and 80's for the cause.

if i owned a house, if i had a diploma..

those are things, not virtues.

it's like looking at a major league pitcher and assuming that it's the hat and the cleats that make him so good, not the decades of practice and hard work

(and if you doubt that people do this, check out how many $15k bikes are being peddled around by $5 legs in marin some time)

this jumps out at me every time i speak with first generation immigrants. i seem to gravitate to them. i like them. most seem like truer americans than most americans i know.

they came here to take their shot. they did not want handouts or legs up.

they just wanted a chance

and the number of these immigrants who work hard and seem to find a way is striking.

i just met two polish architects who fled the warsaw pact in 1980. their story is inspirational.

and their fear of what is happening in the US is palpable.

they've seen this movie before.

vilifying success using zero sum ideologies to claim that if bezos is so rich he must have gotten so by oppressing you are how societies die.

jeff got rich by offering you a wide variety of goods at low prices and high convenience

he did not take from you. he grew the pie.

wealth generation is positive sum and it comes from hope, not grievance

disrupt it, and it goes away

it's fascinating how many of the oppression/grievance brigade are really quite privileged and how many poor immigrants see right through that tissue of lies and go on to succeed

i suspect it's because the whole grievance-industrial-academic complex is a self defeating ideology.

it teaches dependence and despair and crushes self sufficiency and striving.

the only ones who win are tweedy, tenured professors, safe in their ivory towers.

intersectional/critical theory is a grossly cynical and astonishingly harmful set of weaponized dogma.

it seeks to deny and subvert the american dream.

but it's really just a trap to destroy and demean the lives of the unwary.

don't let it touch yours.