Forming Minds. Rebuilding the West.
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Here’s how books, and learning about the great men of history, guided Napoleon’s every move…
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Someone please financially DDOS me I’m begging you
🚨 #BREAKING: More & more 𝕏 users report unsolicited money — thousands of dollars — being sent to them via 𝕏 money, with some calling it "financial DDOSing"
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Getting ready to print test copies.
2026 on the spine because there will only ever be one printing.
THIS YEAR
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If anyone wants to create a coin to preserve western civilization, go for it 😁
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AI needs to be unapologetically pro Western civilization. It’s the only way
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A month ago I got my son super excited to get soft serve from McDonald’s. I hadn’t been in ages. We rode the bike over on a hot day, walk in and see a deserted restaurant. I walk up to the counter and see nobody. Confused I say “hello” out loud. The two men come up clearly bothered i interrupted their conversation asking what I wanted.
I asked if I could order from them. The one guy points to the screen behind me. I turn around and start going through the menu. I look for ice cream. I try clicking on it, it won’t work.
I once again flag the guy down and he simply says “ice cream machine is broken.” I then ask how long it’ll be (assuming it’s short term). He responds, “it’s been broken a long time.” At this point my 4 yr old is begging me for the ice cream.
It was in that moment I got super sad. I grew up going to McDonald’s. As a kid of the 90s it was our Saturday hangout. It was the place we got ice cream after t-ball games. It was the place we stopped in on early morning road trips for egg McMuffins.
Was it the best food? To a 8 yr old whose taste buds were still forming, hell yes.
My son is almost 5 and been to McDonald’s maybe twice in his life. He will never have the nostalgia for that brand simply because McDonald’s failed to realize what they had when they had it and stripped it all down.
It’s too pricey, sterile, and at this point full of disappointment. This tweet below says it so well.
@McDonalds you need to stop listening to shareholders and start listening to parents.
McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion dollars to find out why families stopped coming.
I can save them the 8.5 billion.
They took out the playground.
The plan, announced Wednesday at investor day. Better food, faster service, new equipment, AI tools, hospitality training, and a bigger push into chicken and beverages. They call it Next. The goal, they say, is making customers feel more comfortable.
Wall Street loved it so much the stock fell 5 percent to its lowest since 2022.
Over five years McDonald's shares are down 3 percent. Burger King's parent is up 14. The owner of Taco Bell and KFC is up 13.
This is not a hamburger problem. This is a McDonald's problem.
So let us talk about who used to eat there.
Parents. That was the whole business. Parents at 5:40 on a Tuesday with three kids in the back and nothing thawed at home.
You did not go for the burger. You went because your kids could run screaming through a plastic tube for 40 minutes while you sat with a coffee and experienced silence.
That was the product. The food was the cover charge.
The first PlayPlace opened in 1971 in Birmingham, Alabama, and for fifty years it did one job. It made small children demand to go to McDonald's.
Then 2020 arrived, every play area in the country closed, and a great many never came back. The equipment came out during a remodeling program named Experience of the Future.
The Experience of the Future turned out to be a touchscreen.
Their own chief executive said he did not know if ball pits were in their future.
Sir, you were not selling ball pits. You were selling forty minutes.
So now there is no counter, no playground, and no reason for a seven year old to want to go. A screen, a window, and a bag.
And for that we pay prices that require a moment of reflection in the parking lot.
For thin, overcooked, oddly uniform pucks that taste like a memory of beef.
I did not love them because they were good. I loved them because I was eight and there was a slide.
And have you seen the new buildings.
The old ones were unmistakable. Red roof, yellow arches, legible from a highway at 70 to a child who could not yet read.
The new ones are a flat gray box with a small logo and a drive through wrapped around it. A regional claims office with a fryer.
They removed the color, the characters, the counter, and the playground, and then hired consultants to find out why it no longer feels like anywhere.
Which is why, when I have to eat fast food, I go to Chick-fil-A.
Not for the politics. For the competence.
They have led the customer satisfaction index for fast food eleven years running, and average 8.5 million dollars per location against McDonald's 4 million.
More than double, while closed on Sundays. Fifty two days a year with the lights off, and still double.
A seventeen year old hands you a bag and says my pleasure and means it about 70 percent, which is 70 percent more than a touchscreen has managed.
McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion on hospitality training.
Chick-fil-A earns 8.5 million per restaurant by just having some.
So here is my consulting proposal, free of charge, on behalf of mothers everywhere.
Put the playgrounds back.
Not a nostalgia campaign. Not a retro cup. The structure. Tubes, slides, a door the kids cannot open from the inside, and a bench where a tired woman can sit.
And understand what you are buying, because it is not lunch.
A six year old does not know your food is bad. He has no basis for comparison and no functioning palate. He thinks the burger is incredible because he is standing in a castle made of tubes.
That is the window. That is the only window you get.
You catch them before the taste buds arrive, and thirty years later they drive past your sign, feel something they cannot explain, and pull in anyway.
That is not a menu strategy. That is imprinting, and you shut it down in 2020 to save on cleaning.
Eight and a half billion dollars for AI tools and hospitality training.
Or a slide.
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It's important to pause every once in a while to contemplate the higher things in life. It's easy to get caught in the day to day grind without ever asking why we do it in the first place.
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Tons of wisdom here 👇
7. Have more children.
Have four to six of them. So that you have them to spend most of your life transmitting to. A little tribe – so they can stick together, a small society of civilizational resistance and development. They can build together. They can give each other courage. They can transmit to each other what you transmitted to them. Maybe even a dynasty.
The civilization that stops having children has already decided, at the most fundamental level, that the future is not worth bringing people into. Reverse this – not as a policy but as a personal civilizational act. The family is the smallest and most durable counter-institution available. It is where the first transmission happens – the values, the stories, the sense of what is worth admiring and fighting for. Every child born into a family that knows what it is and says so is a link in the chain the long march is trying to break.
The large family is not a lifestyle choice. It is a civilizational statement. And possibly the most radical one available.
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