Part 1: Let’s Sort Out the Truths and the Myths of Social Injustice

Did you know that being tall gives you a measurable advantage in life? Tall people are hired and promoted at a higher rate than people of average height because they are perceived as being smarter than average-height people with similar IQs. And if that were not advantage enough, they are often perceived to be more reliable, credible, and confident. (See box below.)

If you are shorter than average, it’s even worse. Studies have shown that short people are perceived as less intelligent, less credible, and less confident than people with similar qualities and capabilities that are of average height.

And here’s a shocker: Did you know that people who are unwashed, shabbily dressed, obese, and malodorous are less likely to get jobs, receive promotions, and even be invited to office parties than clean, well dressed, pleasant-smelling people with average BMIs?

It’s true. And social scientists have discovered the reason for it. It’s because they are unwashed, shabbily dressed, malodorous, and obese!

Some Facts from Nigel 

1. Height Premium on Earnings
A large body of research shows that taller individuals, on average, hold higher-status jobs and earn more than shorter workers. This effect appears consistently across countries and over time.

2. Income Gains per Unit of Height
Some studies estimate that each additional centimeter of adult height is associated with a measurable increase in annual income, even after controlling for factors like gender, age, and education. For example, research suggests an approximate 1.3% income increase per additional centimeter of height.

3. Height and Education/Status
Analyses of large population samples find a strong positive correlation between taller stature and higher levels of education and professional job class. One standard deviation increase in height (about ~6 cm) is linked to higher odds of attaining degrees and working in skilled or professional roles – often leading to higher earnings.

4. Associated Cognitive and Development Factors
Research shows that taller children score higher on cognitive tests from an early age and are more likely to enter higher-paid occupations as adults. This suggests that height differences partly reflect earlier developmental and health advantages that carry forward into socioeconomic success.

Yes, My Little One. Life Is Unfair. 

Okay. I’m having a bit of fun with this. But I’m doing it to make what I think is a very important (however obvious) point: There are such things as physical and social handicaps – personal characteristics that pose obstacles to those that have them. Some of these characteristics are what politically correct public personalities call “immutable,” meaning they are impossible to change.  Other physical and social handicaps can be changed. Obesity, body odor, and bad manners are three examples. There are, of course, many more.

In days of yore, when I was young, open-minded people who believed in equal rights saw a clear-cut distinction between prejudices against handicaps that were immutable and those that were mutable.

We were, therefore, sympathetic to people who were discriminated against because of such things as their skin color, sex, or height. But we had no sympathy for people that felt cheated in life because of any mutable “handicaps” they chose to have.

How Did All This Happen? 

You could track much of the history of the US and other developed countries in the last 200+ years through the lens of changing public sentiments about this binary. Once a society accepts the notion that all men are created equal (and, thus, have equal rights), then no man or group of men should be advantaged or disadvantaged legally because of any immutable personal characteristics.

The abolition of Jim Crow laws, certain Supreme Court decisions (Brown vs. Board of Education), and the Equal Rights Amendment protected Americans from being discriminated against because of their skin color or their sex. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 ensured equal treatment under the law for people with physical handicaps.

As for people with mutable characteristics, the general view was that they should not be protected if they infringed on peace and prosperity, law and order, and the general good of society and its fundamental Judeo-Christian values.

An Important (but Largely Overlooked) Exception 

There was one notable exception, and it took place when the ink was still drying on the Constitution. I’m thinking, of course, of the First Amendment, which, among other prohibitions, proscribed legal discrimination against citizens based on their choice of religion. And one’s religion, in the US, is a characteristic one is permitted to abandon or change. That was, after all, one of the primary reasons for the American Revolution and is still universally viewed as a righteous protection and one that should be preserved.

It might surprise you (it did me) to know that “gay rights” – i.e., the right of homosexuals to be treated equally under the law – have never been concretely and specifically protected. But the concept is generally adhered to in federal and state laws, the most important of which have occurred very recently, beginning with the ruling on same-sex marriage in 2015.

What we’ve had since then in the US and other Western democracies is a concerted effort to give equal legal protection to other “groups” – beginning with people with gender dysphoria and extending to any and every sort of sexual preference, including those who “identify” as “Furries” (animals).

Thanks to the First Amendment, there was a legal method to this madness – a precedent for protecting mutable characteristics. And yet, oddly, in retrospect, those who so strongly advocated for gay rights over the last 50 years and trans rights and other LGBTQ+ rights over the last 15 years, have done so not by arguing that some mutable characteristics should be protected, but rather that these sexual preferences and psychological dispositions were worthy of protection because they were actually immutable – i.e., already formed at birth and impossible to change.

(I’m not thinking here about the contention that a transwoman is a real woman. That idea, as brightly as it burned for 10 years, has been finally, and I hope permanently, extinguished by a happy surge of common sense.)

Here’s How We Can Fix It 

In my mind, this gets us back to the important distinction between mutable and immutable personal characteristics.

My thesis that people with immutable characteristics such as sex and skin color are correctly provided with legal protection against discrimination in the US and in all other developed Western Democracies. But in saying that, we must also acknowledge that there is a constitutionally defined protection for one very mutable characteristic: one’s choice of religion.

And if that is the case, it seems reasonable to believe that the US and other countries can provide legal protection against discrimination to people with other mutable characteristics. In fact, most of the groups I’m thinking of already have such protections in the form of human rights, which were established by the Bill of Rights and have been strengthened in dozens of Supreme Court rulings since then.

What we should not do is accept as justification for special protection either of two absurd arguments that have been part of the discussion in the past 10 years: That (1) people have the right to choose any personal identity they want, including those that are immutable, or (2) the rest of us are required to accept their chosen identities, just because the individuals who claim them might feel emotionally injured if we don’t.

I promised myself I’d keep my essays down to about 1,200 words from now on, so I’m going to stop here. But this is only Part 1. In the second half of this essay, I’m going to argue a point that many will find more difficult to accept: that even if discrimination against skin color or sex (or any other immutable characteristic) exists at a sub-legal level in a business or social group or any other environment where individuals compete against one another for recognition and advancement, there is little or nothing to be gained by trying to “fix it.” The smart move is to ignore it and, nevertheless, succeed.

Today, I take a crack at answering two somewhat related questions: (1) Will New York City survive Mamdani’s plans to make housing “more affordable”? (2) Is there really a difference between Socialism and Communism?

One of my favorite longtime friends is a New York City denizen. She loves the Big Apple and is a staunch proponent of its many virtues. She and her husband (also a good friend from long ago) spent a week in and around Delray Beach last week.

We had several great and fun conversations, but we did not dive into a conversation about their recently elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani. She once told me how much she admired him, and that she voted for him knowing he was both a Socialist and an anti-Zionist Muslim. We have too many miles of good memories between us, so I thought discretion in this case would be to keep my mouth shut.

That’s not true. The truth is that I was dying to bring up the topic in a teasing way, but K cautioned me not to do it. I didn’t want to argue because I’ve never won an argument with K. Even scarier: I was afraid I’d discover that she, too, is a Mamdani fan!

So, rather than risk those very real and present dangers, I stayed mute and used the stored energy to write a piece on him for today.

Or Has It Already Become the Walking Dead? 

Mainstream media has been in a downward slide that began soon after Trump’s first term in office (2016), and the numbers have been getting worse with every passing year.

* Industry tracking shows US traditional pay TV subscriptions roughly halved over the last 11 years.

* Pew’s analysis shows cable news saw “meaningful declines” in key periods since 2016, with the steepest drops happening in CNN and MSNBC.

* Trade coverage ratings showed the same thing, with especially deep declines for MSNBC and CNN in key demographics in 2025.

* The Wall Street Journal reported CNN’s prime-time audience dropped 74% since its 2020 high, alongside layoffs and a digital pivot – useful to argue that whatever the Trump-era “attention boom” was, it did not translate into durable linear-TV strength.

* And the S&P Global Market Intelligence says only about half of US homes are expected to have pay TV by end of 2025. That’s down almost 90% since 2010.

The same thing has been going on with mainstream newspapers. A US Congressional Research Service report notes print advertising revenue for newspapers fell 92% from 2000 to 2023 (to about $6B in 2023), and total inflation-adjusted industry revenues fell about 80% from the 2000 peak. While that’s longer-run, it’s a strong backdrop for “demise” framing.

Meanwhile…

There has been an equally astounding rate of growth among the alternative media – bloggers, podcasters, and digital journalists and analysts, to whom the American public has turned for their daily consumption of political, social, economic, and even financial news and analysis.

* YouTube – while not exclusive to podcasts – reports over one billion monthly viewers for podcast content, underscoring how alternative audio/video journalism is reaching massive audiences beyond traditional platforms.

* Megyn Kelly’s independent media venture, The Megyn Kelly Show on YouTube, drew 116.8 million views in July 2023, surpassing major broadcasters like NBC and CBS during the same period. Her channel now has over 4 million subscribers and ranks among the top podcasts in the US.

* Piers Morgan Uncensored, launched outside traditional TV in 2022 and fully on YouTube in 2024, has reached 4 million YouTube subscribers with over 1 billion views since inception, showing how digital talk/news formats scale massively online.

* Substack reached 5 million paid subscriptions as of March 2025, up from about 3 million the year before. Today, Substack supports over 50,000 paid creators, with top earners collectively generating over $40 million annually.

What Happened?

It seems to me that there are four reasons for this.

First, Trump’s election in 2016 divided the country into two roughly equal-sized political groups: those that loved Trump (MAGA) and those that hated him (people with Trump Derangement Syndrome). Fox News was the only news channel that supported some of Trump’s policies (though not all of them), but the rest of mainstream TV took opposition to everything he said or did.

That created hundreds – even thousands – of opportunities for anyone with ambition and a social media account to develop an online presence by being forcefully with Trump or against him.

Second, as some of these social media producers developed large, even massive, followings, money started inserting itself into the equation, which made the idea of making good money from the basement or in a bar feel like a realistic way to grow wealth.

Third, social media algorithms developed the ability to shape the political and social opinions of millions of people, which prompted social media developers to make the technology of the algorithms increasingly more profitable. And that led to the development of digital tribal groups whose inclinations and prejudices were being amplified every day through the manipulation of these algorithms.

And fourth, with the availability of hard-core news and views on every political, social, and cultural topic ubiquitous, mainstream media began to feel – for most Americans on either side of the aisle – stale, dubious, and inauthentic.

That takes us where we are today, with practically 90% of the news and views being consumed by Americans being provided by independent journalists.

And some of them are changing the world.

Take Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old vlogger who, on December 26, posted a 42-minute video in which he approaches day care centers in Minneapolis and attempts to get information about what they do, only to discover that the centers are devoid of caretakers and children. In his initial report, he identifies over a million dollars in day care fraud. Within seven days, with the help of dozens of other citizen reporters who rushed in after him, the total estimated fraud was believed to be between $9 billion and $19 billion.

And then last week, citizen journalists traveled to LA, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York, only to discover that the Minneapolis day care scheme was well entrenched in all these cities, as well as other kinds of fraud related to elder care and various government boondoggles.

This turns out to be the biggest scam on US taxpayers in US history. And it was uncovered by the courageous work of a single, independent, digital journalist. The mainstream media knew about it for years, but decided it was not a story they wanted to tell.

I can’t see mainstream media coming back from this, do you? The heart may still be beating feebly, but the brain has long been dead.

* Our Taxes Support Somalian Scams?
This woman is making a point that has been coming up since Musk tried to get government waste under control with DOGE, but has accelerated since the Somali scams in Minnesota have become national news. Some Americans are wondering whether they should stop paying taxes and start scamming for a living, like the Somalis do.

* The Unholy Marriage of Big Insurance and Big Medicine
Josh Hawley is looking into a national scam that is probably more than 10 times what is being perpetrated by the Somali community in Minnesota.

* Piers Morgan Talks About Tommy Robinson with Jordan Peterson

This is a very good depiction of the embarrassment one must feel watching a pretentious public nitwit discussing a nuanced topic with a genuine intellectual. (Notice how kindly Peterson treats Morgan here.)

Today, It’s a Hugely Expensive and Demonstrably Provable Failure 

The idea that education in America is bad and/or broken is not new. More than 100 years ago, theorists were criticizing the system for abandoning the classical emphasis on reason, rhetoric, and character in favor of catering to the exploding demand for unskilled, semi-skilled, and clerically skilled workers as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

This may have been good for the temporary needs of the economy, these critics argued, but it was making the population as a whole less educated in the ideas that matter (i.e., the great ideas of the past) and more comfortable with the mostly thoughtless and mind-numbingly repetitive jobs that would be dominant in the first half of the 20th century.

And while this was going on with traditionalist, conservative critics, a separate criticism was being developed in Europe by what are called “post-modern” thinkers – mostly from Europe – who were arguing against the traditional notions of objective truth and even science in favor of relativism, intersectionality, intertextuality, gender theory, critical race theory, and the idea that all perspectives, and indeed all cultures, are equal in terms of their value. All truth, they believe, is merely the preferred perspectives of those in power.

By the time I was attending high school and college (in the late 1960s and early 1970s), the worst of these “revolutionary” ideas had resulted in a widespread conviction that the purpose of education was no longer to produce graduates useful to the greater economy, but to produce graduates who could “think creatively” and “come to their own conclusions” about truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and bad.

That was certainly my experience, and it was an education that I felt was good for me. I had developed three or four skills that I now believe were essential to the success I had after college. First and foremost, I had become pretty good at critical analysis. I could look at a big, complex problem, identify its parts, and then figure out a way to solve it. I had also learned the art of rhetoric – how to research and assemble a persuasive argument (a skill that I’d go on to use profitably on a nearly daily basis for the next 50 years). And finally, I had learned – from several of the teachers I befriended – the importance of loyalty and gratitude, and how necessary those characteristics are for moving up in a competitive world.

But when I got into the investment newsletter business in the mid-1980s, I was surprised to discover that some of the best thinkers in that industry – including many economists and highly successful investment analysts – didn’t share my positive view of US education. In particular, I remember listening to bestselling author Doug Casey denounce American education and predict that it would likely get much worse in the future.

He was right. By every perspective I can think of, US college education is worse today than it was when I was a student. With a few exceptions, colleges are producing graduates who have very strong views on social and political issues, but little to no ability to articulate them.

In the 1950s, many of the good colleges still had Latin or Greek requirements. Today, almost every one of them is introducing remedial English and language arts classes for incoming freshmen who did not learn the basics in high school.

In the 1950s, the normal high school graduate could parse a sentence. Today’s average college English major would be hard-pressed to identify a gerund or participle.

But it’s actually worse than that.

Take a look at this.

And this.

I’ve seen so many videos like these in the past six months that I’m fully convinced that what you see here – the amazing level of ignorance of basic facts among college students – is the rule, not the exception.

And from the perspective of the investment made – tens of thousands of dollars times four years – the value of a college degree is diminishing fast. According to Labor Department statistics, college costs have risen 188% since 1998, while real hourly wages for grads have increased by only 26%.

In this video, Shane Hummus, who got himself a doctorate degree, identifies seven college majors – very popular majors – that lead to careers that, from an economic and job-satisfaction perspective, are not worth the money they cost to acquire.

But from at least one point of view – dollars in vs. dollars out – a college degree is still a decent investment. The median bachelor’s degree offers a net ROI of approximately $306,000. The median annual return on investment (internal rate of return) for a college degree is about 12.5%, outperforming the historical returns of traditional stock and bond investments.

All of which brings me to the two “Worth Reading” recommendations I have for you today – two ways to approach America’s higher education problem.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is one of the I-don’t-want-to-say-how-many book titles that are on my “read soon” list. I keep it on my list because Haidt blames smartphones for the dramatic increase in mental health problems in very young people, and I have grandchildren growing up in a world where children are given access to tablets and smartphones starting when they are toddlers.

Haidt’s theory is that the kids, themselves, feel tyrannized by their phones. And after reading his book, journalist Decca Aitkenhead decided to see what would happen if she forced her teenage sons and their friends to go on an unsupervised camping trip without their phones.

She wrote about the results of her experiment in this article for The Times.

Is This How We Baby Boomers Want to Be Remembered? 

Some say it was the largest public political event ever staged in the USA. With more than 2,700 demonstrations occurring simultaneously all over the country and an estimated total participation of 7 million, I have no reason to think that’s not true.

The question is whether it was a political protest or some other thing. If there were political issues at stake, it wasn’t well promoted because none of the dozens of marchers I saw interviewed by either the Legacy or the Conservative Media had answers to the question, “What policies, exactly, are you protesting against?”

It was, to be fair, a trick question. The event was titled “No Kings Day,” which sounds like a good-natured spoof of the idea that Donald Trump wants to become king.

And that, I think, is exactly what it was. It was not about the federal budget deficit. It was not about tariffs and the trade war. It was not about inflation or immigration or the increasing possibility of a nuclear war. I’m sure the marchers would have been prepared to talk about those issues had the protest organizers decided to make the event policy-oriented. But as one of the organizers proudly explained after being congratulated for getting so many people all over the country out there to protest, they decided that the best course of action would be to limit the protest to the common bond that tied all of the marchers together: their deeply seated hatred of Donald Trump.

That was interesting. What was equally interesting was the demeanor of the marchers. The organizers encouraged the marchers to come for the fun and bring along their synthetic animal buddies and furry friends – and while they were at it, why not take back the red-white-and-blue?

After all, almost everyone, including many Liberals and a few Leftists, had grown weary of defending “Men can have babies” and “All Whites are racist” and “Jews are the new Nazis” and “It’s okay to assassinate public figures if someone tells you they are nasty and mean.”

Not to mention the growing embarrassment of even the Mainstream Media admitting, in bits and pieces (so it can be missed or intentionally ignored), that the COVID virus was a product of biowarfare – US-funded biowarfare experiments that blew up into a massive, worldwide pandemic of anti-scientific hysteria, which damaged the global economy by tens of trillions of dollars, destroyed tens of millions of businesses, and needlessly caused the deaths of countless millions of people.

Or the embarrassment of discovering that ending the “border crisis” wasn’t complicated at all – that the US could go from allowing two to three million people to cross the border illegally to virtually nothing in less than six months.

I could go on…

My point is that, however much they surely wished it wasn’t true, the No King’s Day organizers realized that, as the polls have been increasingly showing, America’s great flirtation with Woke ideology has run its course as the attitudes of millions of moderate Democrats and Republicans, as well as Black and Brown Americans and almost all of the working class, have reverted back to common sense.

You could see all of this playing out in the way so many of the marchers behaved in front of the cameras. They looked cheerful, sometimes ebullient. When responding to questions, they spoke with conviction and even pride.

But when asked the trick question of what exactly they were protesting, they were taken aback. Most of them answered, “What do you mean?”

If the question was asked again, many of them became visibly suspicious of the reporter asking the question and agitated because, I think, they genuinely didn’t know what to say.

Something had happened between the halcyon days of the BLM protests and No Kings Day. That something, I believe, is that, for the first time in a long time (about 10 years), the protesters didn’t have a quick answer to the question of what they were doing that felt good to them. They didn’t have a bullet point that would make their point cleanly and clearly and justify their stance. Something had happened in the last two years, and increasingly since January. It was as if, while the Legacy Media was flooding them with daily accounts of Trump’s fascist pronouncements and tyrannical decisions, the reasons why those pronouncements and decisions were fascist and tyrannical were no longer being explained.

And they weren’t being explained for two reasons:

1. Some of them were working. In his first nine months in office this time, Trump has accomplished a list of major achievements which the Left, when he announced them, predicted would be ruinous to the country.

2. The Legacy Media was losing audience by promoting the anti-Trump message, and many of their corporate advertisers had decided to get off the Woke train.

This was not a conspiracy or a coordinated effort. It was the result of inevitable, natural fatigue. It happened quite publicly with Bud Light and Target and Disney. But it happened also when the corporate leaders of social media and the Legacy Media, including the NYT, the Washington Post, ABC, CNBC, Facebook, and so many others could no longer tolerate the constant downsizing of their markets and mounting losses as the majority of US consumers moved to digital media as their source of information and news.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m seeing it already in the content and the reporting from mainstream TV. The Legacy Media is no longer trying to make liberal and leftist politicians and influencers look good.

Have you noticed how, in the last several months, and especially in the last 30 days, reporters and influencers from the Legacy Media have started to ask liberal politicians like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and AOC tough questions? Did you see the interview of California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter by a CBS News reporter? Porter scolded the interviewer for asking “follow-up questions” and stormed off the set – and the video went viral.

Why has the conversation on the left turned away from the racism of closing the borders to the racism of forcibly returning illegal immigrants from whence they came?

Have you heard of Black Fatigue? It’s an idea many conservative African American bloggers and influencers are talking about. They say they are tired of all the identity politics, including systemic racism, White privilege, and other doctrines asserting that Blacks are effectively helpless victims in US culture, which is structured to keep the Black man down.

And while I’m on it, why is it that despite the massive success of this Boomer festival of self-love and self-righteousness, Trump’s overall popularity ratings went up?

Many, if not most, of the old White people participating in the No Kings rallies and marches don’t see things this way. They still believe that all Black and Brown people are victims and all White people (mostly men) are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Hitler-loving fascists. Worse, they still seem to think that in marching, they were once again reprising the courage they displayed 60 years ago when they protested the war in Vietnam.

To be fair, there was a smattering of young White Liberals, including a significant contingency of younger women with oddly colored hair. But in the footage I saw, the only Black people marching were within camera shot of White Liberal politicians who arrived at the destinations with cameras and security people on hand. And if there was a substantial number of
Brown people there, I didn’t see them.

So, what does this all amount to? What does it all mean? What can we say about this record-breaking, last-ditch, Baby Boomer protest against… well, against Donald Trump?

And furthermore, what if, left without talking points to argue their case, all these millions of leftist Boomers cannot dethrone Donald Trump and restore Woke culture as the moral standard of the USA?

Is there still a chance that they will able to influence our government to return to funding and arming the Ukrainians against Russia in the belief that, despite the fact that he has shown no evidence of it whatsoever, Putin will back down and give back his newly acquired territory?

I don’t think so.

Will we once again demonstrate our sympathy for the Palestinian people and respect for international law by withdrawing our support from Israel’s genocidal regime and supporting a two-state solution where Hamas and Hezbollah are once again free to pursue their God-given right and purpose of murdering Jews?

I don’t think so.

Will we reverse the discriminatory policies of Trump’s getting rid of DEI and reinstate the right of less-qualified people to take the positions of more-qualified people because of the color of their skin?

I don’t think so.

Will we end the unconstitutional and totally fascist policy of Trump to move into Blue cities with the National Guard and unilaterally end 20-plus years of massive Black-on-Black murders without even asking the liberal mayors and DAs who spent all that time passing laws and policies that got their cities to the top of the charts?

I don’t think so.

This is a tough time for Leftists and Liberals. Especially those that are paying critical attention to the news and watching the polls.

It’s not by any means a certainty at this time, but I have a feeling that the American political zeitgeist is changing and fast approaching a turning point where the love affair the Liberals and Leftists had with identity politics and Woke irrationality is over. And will probably be over for at least another generation.

And what makes this change especially difficult for the left side of the Baby Boomer generation is that the No Kings protest was almost certainly the last great, politically virtuous battle they will fight after having been unforgivably abandoned by the very groups they had been so long supporting – Big Food, Big Drugs, and Big War.

But 95% of the people that attended the protests don’t see it this way. As Baby Boomers, they have grown up thinking they (we) were – and still are – the generation that went to Woodstock to advocate for peace and love and all those good things. And as far as they can understand, that’s exactly what we were and still are.

Woodstock was a once-in-a-generation social movement that, despite the complete naïveté and self-centeredness of its participants, was also a once-in-a-lifetime party that young Leftists today secretly wish they had attended. But when they had their chance, they apparently didn’t see it as something serious and useful – just a massive celebration of themselves and their high opinion of themselves.

And now – in the last inning of their lives – they were able to do it again