Bad grandfather



It wasa one of the formative experiences of my childhood. My grandfather was a stubborn, combative Midwestern WASP who helped start the Chicago options exchange. He had been a ball turret gunner in WWII, nicknamed “Sharpie" because he was always ready with a quick-witted barb, always a little edgier than his milieu of dedicatedly bland, upstanding citizens from the distant Chicago suburb of Geneva, Illinois.

My parents knew the request would be a point of conflict. In fact, it was a test, probably encouraged by my mother.

His cohort were well-to-do lifelong Democrats, library Anglos, historical society supporters, staunchly moral and naturally drawn to the task of building community and tribal memory, and thus deeply repelled by the slightest whiff of political selfishness.

He was no different. He died years before the 2016 election, but he would have hated Trump, just as my grandmother did, due to his bombast and bad manners.

But he did something once that upset everyone in the family, something that clearly presaged the Trump era.

A Christmas tradition

Every Christmas, my archetypal Boomer artist parents (so archetypal, in fact, that they were a Jewish/Protestant couple not just in academia but theater academia) would linger around waiting for my grandfather to cut them a check. Which he always did, begrudgingly, his “Sharpie” flak ever increasing as he got older.

Despite this family tradition, one year I found myself appealing to my grandfather's largesse on a different holiday: Easter.

I was about to undertake a 30-mile bike ride to raise money for multiple sclerosis; my parents thought I should ask my grandfather to "sponsor" me.

These days, there is a growing consciousness that the money contributed to these sorts of events — e.g. Susan Komen “pinkwashing” — tends to vanish into the void, becoming the currency of patronage farms for self-dealing parasites and other creepy NGO swindle machines. But at the time, everyone, even antisocial leftists, participated in these events with gusto and pride.

So I was induced to approach my grandfather at the right time and ask him, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, for a large donation for my arduous MS ride.

Competitive empathy-signaling

I must have been around 12 or 13 years old, and I didn’t really understand what I was asking for. Why would someone give you money to do a bike ride? And once you got that money, why didn't you keep it, instead of sending it to people you'd never met and never would: an abstract population suffering from an abstract disease? It didn’t make any sense.

My parents knew the request would be a point of conflict. In fact, it was a test, probably encouraged by my mother.

Like many lapsed Jews, she had made a religion of competitive empathy-signaling. Her main rivals were her in-laws — supposedly "good" Christians who nonetheless exhibited moral deficiencies that were glaringly obvious to any member of the perennially oppressed Jewish people.

They shuffled me forward, and I made my pitch.

My grandfather became cross and silent in that atmosphere-disturbing way that only fathers and grandfathers can pull off. The air disappeared from the room.

“No,” he said.

A shocking refusal

It completely shocked me. I had been conditioned to believe that charity bicycle rides were the very definition of goodness. Anyone who would refuse charity, no less charity related to a healthy fitness activity, on behalf of his own grandchild was comically evil. Darth Vader-grade evil. Evil just for the sake of it. The type of person who would gladly torture animals and leave grocery carts willy-nilly in the parking lot. The absolute opposite of a responsible Christian grandfather. How could this be happening?

I choked up with bewilderment and forced out a “why?” with tears dripping down my face.

“Because I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” he responded.

My parents scrabbled around like spooked hyenas, but that was the end of it. There would be no more discussion. My grandfather sipped his bourbon and sat in his chair and read something, probably the New Yorker, and tuned out the awkwardness.

Later we probably searched for Easter eggs in the garden. I still remember the feel and the smell of the tomatoes in that garden, those little orange follicles that stick to your fingertips and, later, when you wash your hands, release their scent of pure summer.

The confidence of conviction

For years afterward, my grandfather's refusal was constantly referred to with great pain, one of those colossal betrayals that haunts families for decades and never gets resolved, even after the offender is dead. I am particularly susceptible to such resentments — I stopped speaking to my maternal grandparents for other betrayals and never went back.

Not with this grandfather. Even back then, I can remember my own pain over his blunt refusal dissolving even as my parents’ festered and grew. There was just something about it, something brave, that I couldn’t help but admire. The totally brazen refusal to play along — the confidence in one’s own convictions even when everyone else believes you’re stone-cold evil, the “against us” in the mind of our collective BPD.

And not just the conviction not to bend, but the open disgust about being asked to bend in the first place. There’s divinity in anti-collectivism — an irrational self-sacrifice just for the sake of it — that I think reaches up toward God.

And, of course, he ended up being entirely correct.

Societal cancer

These nonprofit rackets are in fact societal cancers corroding the fabric of beautiful, historic, human-centric places like Geneva, Illinois. Public-private corruption systems, probably propped up by USAID or the equivalent, feeding off the gentle goodness of the native Midwesterner in order to generate instability, profit, and global grayness for the benefit of definitely not religious Christians.

I remember once walking down the street on a beautiful fall Sunday in Geneva and being shocked by how many healthy, beautiful, shining, hand-holding families were out strolling under the fiery leaves — as if transported back to a time before cars and phones and crime, when everyone was just out and connected and together in the town square.

You could almost see the connection between them in the air. It was so thick as to become a substance, the natural state of what humanity can be when not interfered with.

I haven’t been back in a while, but I can promise you that connectedness is a lot less thick in Geneva today. And there are a lot more charities and a lot more charity rides.

I never got to know my grandfather well, probably in part because he was meant to serve as a Grinch figure. He had four handsome, smart, white suburban sons, but among them, they had only had two grandchildren, my cousin Louise and me.

I couldn’t tell you why that happened, besides to say that it is certainly a very Boomer phenomenon and thus almost certainly related to the sterilizing self-hatred that crept into the white American population around that time, a self-hatred that would go basically unacknowledged until Trump.

Pale blue eyes

He died when I was 15. I remember him crumpled up in the hospital bed, barely able to speak or move, but his eyes were glued on me. Fixed. His pale blue eyes, very pale, almost white, this very prototypical Midwestern WASP sort of eye blue paleness. His eyes always had a deeply piercing quality, like they were looking through you, or more like you were looking through him. And I remember him staring at me and not looking away.

Saying nothing, just staring — like an inanimate bump on a log with two pale blue portals to the afterlife. It became awkward for everyone else because he was staring so hard and unblinkingly, but he didn’t seem to care what anyone thought. I flittered around uncomfortably and ultimately left the room (one of my biggest regrets to this day). But I remember interpreting it as a sign, as a statement: “It’s on you now, Sharpie."

Luigi Mangione and 'magic bullet' medicine



Why did Luigi Mangione allegedly target UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson?

The original consensus was something like: He had chronic back pain that surgery didn’t help (or even made worse) and that his insurance company wouldn’t pay to fix.

It’s possible the 'system' had a share in derailing Mangione’s life, but surely there are many other factors, including the belief that all pain requires treatment.

But apparently the surgery, which he had no problem paying for, was a success. On Reddit, he raved about it and even recommended it to others. There is no record of him complaining about back pain after the surgery.

We do have a record of Mangione complaining of other maladies: Lyme disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and brain fog — all relatively new conditions often regarded as having a psychosomatic component.

Chronic endless pain

I have a good understanding of this because I come from a family of doctors, and my mother is one of these chronic endless pain people. I also worked in Big Pharma branding for two years, as well as for other creepy, well-funded Silicon Valley health start-ups on the agency side.

Via these experiences, I have come to basically the same conclusion that RFK Jr. has. The American for-profit health/pharma system is the most evil single institution on earth. It's also the most powerful.

This should've become obvious during COVID, where it literally took over the world. It should also be obvious given that it currently has the power to mutilate our own children, sometimes against our will, and to addict them to expensive drugs they will have to take for a lifetime.

I'm dubious that what we're seeing with UnitedHealthcare and Luigi Mangione is the whole story, but I'm more interested in the glaring contradiction at the heart of the alleged killer’s motive, seemingly expressed in the message left on the shell casings: “Defend, deny, depose.”

Among Mangione’s online sympathizers, even those who don’t go so far as to applaud the assassination claim, believe there’s a coherent political message behind it. But that rests on a faulty assumption about pain: that it must always be "treated" via medicines and surgeries.

Physical diagnosis, spiritual condition

This assumption certainly benefits the pharma industry — the more patients with chronic and consistent pain, the better. The only limit is what their insurance is willing to pay. As rapacious as insurance companies may be, some claims actually should be denied.

It’s not uncommon to get a physical diagnosis for a spiritual condition. I've seen my mother go through this her entire life, always with some new pain somewhere or some all-encompassing bulls**t diagnosis like "fibromyalgia" that gives pharma open access to her insurance funds.

Literally millions of aging single women suffer from various versions of chronic pain. They have been told, not by insurance companies, but by pharma companies and the media, that this pain is the result of treatable illnesses. Yet, somehow the more profits are made, the more “treatable” new illnesses pop up in need of cures.

But when none of them work, which is actually a quite common occurrence, what exactly is an insurance company supposed to do? Just pay endless claims forever, knowing that nothing will work? Denying the claims at least communicates that it’s time to try something else besides paying pharma companies with perverse incentives.

Whose profit?

It’s true that companies like UnitedHealthcare shouldn't exist in the first place. Even Adam Smith, father of market capitalism, said specifically that certain products were too elastic to be handled by a market, and medicines would certainly fit that category. The fear surrounding a person's health, and the desperate reliance on authority, warps the market and creates a terrible potential for very deep, evil, and pervasive abuse.

This is exactly what has happened, and it's eaten the globe. But in this instance, it doesn’t seem that UnitedHealthcare's "profit motive" had much to do with Mangione’s struggles. Of course, Mangione’s alleged manifesto encourages us to see his motivations as purely political rather than personal. He is targeting the “parasites” to blame for America’s extremely expensive yet extremely ineffective health care system.

As a diagnosis of what needs to change, the manifesto, if you could even call it that, is unsatisfactory. It ignores the bad actors upstream of the insurance companies: the doctors who offer unnecessary surgeries for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the pharma companies that run commercials telling everyone that chronic pills are the solution to their chronic problems.

Bad pharma

It’s mind-boggling that such commercials are so prevalent. Pharma has become the single biggest advertiser in all media by a massive margin: It literally keeps the mainstream media alive. A culture that heavily restricts cigarette ads should ask itself why it gives free reign to legal international drug cartels to spread their sales pitches. What impact does that have on public health?

We saw the impact during COVID, where people abandoned family members to die because the TV told them to do so. And who was the TV being controlled by? Pfizer (pharma) and Fauci (public health). Not by the insurance companies who had to foot the bill.

It’s possible the “system” had a share in derailing Mangione’s life, but surely there are many other factors, including the belief that all pain requires treatment. Maybe in a less stubbornly secular society he would’ve been able to understand his suffering as a necessary — or at least inevitable — consequence of being alive. Maybe then a father would not have been murdered in cold blood.

But our society has no concept of beneficial pain. In fact, we’re obsessed with eliminating pain entirely. That’s why our medical ideal is to match cause and cure so precisely that one treatment can eradicate a disease with maximum efficiency — and without any collateral damage.

This power such treatments promise is so seductive that it’s easy to succumb to wishful thinking, if not outright delusion. It’s right there in the name we commonly use for them: magic bullets.

Dog years: A decade as a MAGA exile in Los Angeles



Twelve years ago, my mother had a manic breakdown. She was found in Molokai, Hawaii, after disappearing for several days. The fugue state — in which she turned into a nightmare version of herself, eyes afire, flagellating her loved ones with a stream of deranged insults and delusions — lasted about six months until someone finally got her on lithium.

As she returned to herself, I pressured her to get a dog. She lived alone, so it would help her get a grip on reality. She said she liked whippets, so I found a local breeder. I wanted to name him Knut after Knut Hamsun, but she decided on Eliot after T.S.

I lost many jobs, many friends, many family members, all of whom called me problematic crazy fringe incel bigot weirdo resentful loser failure. But I just couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t not see the lie.

When the fugue began, I was finishing law school. When it ended, I’d taken the bar and moved to Los Angeles. I’d already experienced my parents’ terrible divorce as an only child at 17, but this year, 27, was the toughest and most isolating of my life. The safety net had ripped open, and I’d fallen through. Everything was most definitely not going to be okay.

After hitting the ground and dusting yourself off, making sure you aren’t dead, there is a sense of relief. “That happened.” There on the ground, you see the world as most people on earth do, all victims of abandonment or neglect or abuse or poverty or other societal failure, just not the upper middle-class American suburban milieu I’d been comfortably incubated within.

And when you hit the earth, you suddenly want to tell the truth. You don’t want to “win” any more. You want to help other people figure this thing out.

I was always edgy, but a good boy politically. In fact, I thought if myself as edgy for a good cause, that cause being “equality.” I’d dutifully campaigned for Obama, and my diverse group of friends had tearfully celebrated when he won in 2008.

But now it was 2012, and I worked for a gay Hollywood agent with six other young men, all of whom were gay. The time came to vote for Obama again, but this time, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt phony, a little numb spot where my righteousness had once curled.

What the hell did this guy know about anything? He certainly wasn’t talking to me. I told my co-workers this, and they were deeply offended. Didn’t I understand their rights were at stake? I already didn’t fit in, but this made it terminal. I was out within three months.

And thus began a decade of professional, personal, and familial torment as I slowly came out of the closet as a political bad boy, just as much to myself as to the world. I was, and still am, a liberal — it’s not possible to completely erase my deracinated bohemian upbringing. But it became increasingly clear to me that the good guys were in fact a mask covering a barely perceptible leviathan pulsing under the surface, rapidly reaching its tentacles across the earth.

As Eliot grew and my mother healed, I lost many jobs, many friends, many family members, all of whom called me problematic crazy fringe incel bigot weirdo resentful loser failure. But I just couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t not see the lie.

In L.A., I became a lone Trump supporter. I had zero MAGA friends, zero contacts to celebrate with when he won, maybe only one or two even in 2020 to lament the loss. On Tuesday, I celebrated with 100 friends, all culture kids and almost all recent converts who, like me, just couldn’t bring themselves to lie any more.

The thing we share in common? A breaking. Some loss, failure, death — the cozy cloak of a bourgeois upbringing ripped off, however fleetingly. All men used to be broken by war. Now far fewer are. But everyone in that room had gotten a glimpse. Tuesday: a decade of pain vindicated in a single night.

Wednesday morning after the all-nighter, I drove down to San Diego to put Eliot to sleep. He had a tennis ball-sized sarcoma dangling off his arm and typical whippet heart issues. It was time. Two guys came to the house and did it — it took 20 minutes. A decade transcended in a few quiet moments.

Mom is doing better now, but she still hates my politics.

This essay originally appeared on the Carousel.

'Dear Kelly' fails to heal its MAGA misfit's 'trauma'



Andrew Callaghan is Gen Z’s favorite gonzo journalist, or was, at least, before he got canceled early last year for “sexual misconduct.”

The cancellation came shortly after HBO premiered Callaghan’s feature film debut, “This Place Rules,” a documentary about the 2020 presidential election. It gave Callaghan a bigger budget to do the same man-on-the-street videos that first elevated him on YouTube, where he still has 2.7 million followers. As we learned from "Hawk Tuah Girl," man-on-the-street is as big among Gen Z as prior generations, only they consume it via the scroll.

Isaac Simpson

But Callaghan isn’t your average man-on-the-streeter. He goes deeper and farther into “real life” than other YouTubers. He approaches the kind of characters more cautious interviewers avoid, the kind you would assume have no incentive whatsoever to appear on camera: Antifa foot soldiers, rioters, drug dealers, homeless people.

And yet they talk to Callaghan; there’s something about Callaghan’s awkward, innocent, pimply-faced teenage demeanor that slices through barriers. He’s the opposite of Alex Jones, who is all libido, id, and agenda: concave. Callaghan takes it all in, he listens intently, doesn’t judge: convex.

Then there’s his editorial genius. I love Werner Herzog because his documentaries are about everything besidesthe subject. The camera always lingers a bit too long. The interviewee breaks character. Maybe something occurs behind them. We see something we weren’t supposed to see. These little ironies make the audience belly-laugh, or they move us with great power — strange synchronicities that make us feel less alone.

Indeed, the first part of Callaghan’s new documentary, “Dear Kelly,”is filled with these Herzog-ian moments — as when an onlooker trips and falls at the exact moment a woke interview subject says something grating — and the result is total gonzo brilliance.

Callaghan has a tendency to drink beer and interview subjects in bathrooms, a trend he keeps up throughout the movie. At one point and “because reasons,” he throws a big party at Chico State, where he gets many awesome drunk bathroom interviews in which he himself seems nicely wasted, which comes off as endearing.

At the party we also witness a fistfight, which seems to genuinely excite Andrew; we, the audience, see his danger-seeking edge. But within fifteen rapid cuts of the fight, the two bloodied fighters drunkenly hug it out. You see this in Hollywood comedies, but very rarely do you see the real thing.

“Dear Kelly”is a short, immaculately edited, feature-length documentary about a man named Kelly J. Patriot, one of those sign-waving MAGA enthusiasts you see in all the protest videos. His favorite flagpole can fit four flags on it.

In one moment, Callaghan shows us one of Kelly’s heart-wrenching home videos from the 1990s, a time before his life was consumed by obsession. The camera freezes perfectly on a retro can of Bud Light. The audience immediately understood the reference and roared with laughter.

In another moment, Callaghan interviews Kelly’s kids, lesbian daughter and White Boy Summer-coded son together. The son goes off on a slight tangent “... not that I don’t love capitalism, but …” and the daughter cringes, starts to interject, then stops herself. A beautiful sibling moment in 2024, reflective of the most politically polarized generation yet, in which the men and women are straying apart in unprecedented fashion

I saw the film at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on the last night of its 38-city premiere tour. I felt ancient amid what appeared to be a sold-out crowd of 2,300 Zoomers in their casual Sunday Dodgers hats.

My very pregnant wife’s belly seemed to stick out another foot or so, garnering looks or intentional ignores from the sea of scuzzy kids. I haven’t seen so many “young people” in one place since last time I ended up at trending Silverlake cocktail bar Tenants of the Trees, and it was a similar crowd. Everyone dressed like they’re in a Macklemore video. Many seem nonbinary.

Touring a documentary release like a concert is a genius idea for a scroll star — a way to monetize your audience for its full value, so the social platforms don’t drink all your milkshake. Callaghan himself introduced the film, and certain elements were tweaked to be Los Angeles-specific.

At the beginning of the screening, a QuickTime screen reading “Dear Kelly LA Cut” was dragged across a desktop to the center of the screen. Callaghan said, “We just exported the L.A. cut 15 minutes ago,” and the whole janky DIY vibe drew great cheers from the audience.

At one point, the show stopped and a rapper named Uncle Bill, featured in the documentary, performed live on stage. Other clever “utility” plays included mystery bundles for sale on the website and a moderated Q&A with Callaghan after the show, which we couldn’t stay for because we had to relieve the babysitter.

Isaac Simpson

Initial publicity for “Dear Kelly” suggested it would be about Kelly J. Patriot “saving Callaghan’s life.” And in its early sections, the film does seem as though it’s working up to a sympathetic, or at least nuanced, portrayal of Trump supporters.

The film opens on what is supposed to be a “White Lives Matter” rally in Huntington Beach, where Callaghan encounters Kelly J. Patriot.

It’s a truly incredible scene, epic in scale. Antifa “counter-protesters” mob an intersection, waiting for the marching army of white supremacists, which of course never shows up, having failed to materialize from the fevered imagination of the media.

The only person who does show up? Kelly J. Patriot, waiving his quartet of MAGA flags. Kelly doesn’t even know why he’s there. It’s Callaghan who has to tell him about the “White Lives Matter” rally; Kelly just heard there was a chance to protest.

The counter-protesters are happy to oblige Kelly with a thorough beating. It’s one against a hundred. Kelly’s bloody but unbowed. You get the sense that this is exactly what he came for.

Callaghan lets this scene play out transparently — no spin. Thus the media comes off as culpable, and Antifa, who are exactly the type of fat, mouth-frothing dysgenic freaks the right thinks they are, come off as dangerous, disturbing bullies. The cops look bad too. They end up ignoring the Antifa troops and arresting Kelly instead, for “wielding a weapon,” e.g. his giant flagpole. Kelly looks like the hero.

Callaghan also takes a jab at cringey media libs when he reveals that “This Place Rules” producers pressured him to make a heartfelt speech in support of Biden for the film, which made him deeply uncomfortable. We see a clip of him attempting to do their bidding, which feels pure 1984.

Callaghan seems poised to confront biases about Trump and the fervor he inspires. Maybe beneath their lowbrow political theatrics, these MAGA people have as profound an understanding of America as the liberals who find them so alarming. Maybe they’re on to something.

Isaac Simpson

Unfortunately, the honesty with which Callaghan first portrays Kelly soon turns patronizing .

The plot hinges upon a surprising answer Kelly gives to Callaghan’s usual open-ended questioning. Kelly reveals that it’s not necessarily political fervor that drives him, but hatred of a predatory lender named Bill Joiner who screwed him over. Callaghan, smartly, seizes on this bit of information and pursues it.

Zeroing in on the topic of Joiner allows Callaghan to get to know Kelly. It also provides Callaghan with the thesis that gives the movie its structure — political obsessives like Kelly are actually driven by a past trauma that deprived them of their Maslowian needs — home, safety, family, etc.

Sure enough, it turns out that Kelly lost his home and family to Joiner, whom he now obsessively stalks. His obsession with attending MAGA street protests is a kind of extension of his obsession with Joiner. Joiner and the evil regime MAGA purports to fight aren’t exactly one and the same in Kelly’s mind, but they’re definitely related.

As Callaghan and Kelly become what you might call friends, Callaghan decides to take Kelly’s claims seriously enough to begin investigating Joiner. And here is where Callaghan’s genius begins to give way to his youth.

While the duo’s search for Joiner allows for a fun interlude in which they dress up in ghillie suits to approach their quarry’s home, it ultimately proves unsuccessful. Not finding Joiner is a huge narrative problem, at least if Callaghan wants to do justice to Kelly as a character.

As a filmmaker, Callaghan had three choices at this point: 1) admit you don’t have enough for a feature and move on to something else; 2) pivot to exposing the absurdity of Kelly being unable to trace or contact the man who had him evicted from his home; or 3) double down on your thesis: that it’s really all Kelly coping with his trauma.

He chooses number three, and the film falls apart. The quick, funny takes are replaced with long, boring speeches full of therapy-speak. There’s nothing about Kelly saving Callaghan’s life, besides a quick reference to Kelly calling Callaghan after he was canceled.

In fact, “Dear Kelly” is more accurately described as Callaghan throwing his unlikely friend under the bus. Callaghan clearly reveals our country as a place where an angry mob of “protesters” are free to physically assault a man for displaying a flag and where police are free to arrest that same man after deeming his flag a “weapon.”

And Kelly’s the one who’s driven by psychotic delusions?

Concluding that “trauma” is Kelly’s problem lets Callaghan and his audience avoid pondering any uncomfortable political solutions: We just need to get this poor guy some therapy.

Callaghan’s timidity as a filmmaker inadvertently results in an incisive portrayal of his generation. At their core, they’re what we’d call “post left,” bulls**t-resistant and not easily swayed by the usual appeals to the Big Boomer Stories about oppression, Whig history, and Good Versus Evil. They dislike being told what to think and say and admire those who express the blunt truth, no matter who it offends.

They also don’t shy away from traditional displays of masculinity, like the kind of public brawling unthinkable to your average Millennial yuppie.

And yet, much like “Dear Kelly” itself, this rough-and-tumble exterior conceals a soft, gooey center. All of the misbehavior comes with a disclaimer: No matter what we do to you, we’re still the victims. Yes, we may be ugly, we may be violent, we may believe the craziest sh** and think nothing of caving your head in with a bike lock. It simply can’t be helped, you see, because of our trauma.

Hurt people



"Your trauma” is the designator theater kids give to those moments during childhood when you were made to understand that life is not a fairy tale. In my view, your reaction to “your trauma” defines whether you are a good person or a bad one.

There are only two ways to react:

  • Option A is to work to become more like the person who hurt you. This is the natural reaction. When someone makes you feel jealousy, rage, loneliness, etc., that person has power over you. That power is attractive.
  • Option B is to work to rid the world of the kind of pain you suffered. This is the less natural reaction. It requires the acceptance of duty and responsibility. It is less attractive, harder to swallow.

Consider the story of Tucker Carlson. His mother, San Francisco heiress Lisa McNear Lombardi, abandoned Carlson and his brother when Carlson was six. She left to join David Hockney's gay, bohemian Los Angeles entourage; her boys never saw her again.

Carlson is clearly an Option B man. “I got married at 22 and had four kids,” he's said. “I just had this drive to have a really close, normal, happy family with dinners together where no one’s doing anything weird.”

He's also spent his career warning against precisely the sort of derangement that caused his own unstable upbringing. When Carlson rails against the excesses of the left, it's from first-hand knowledge.

Rising and falling in America

My background is very different from Carlson's, but there are enough similarities for me to take a personal interest in how he's used parental incompetence as motivation.

I, too, am unlucky in family; I rolled a three or four out of ten.

I am an only child sprouted from the unhappy endings of two classic stories of American decline. My mother's side are Reform Jews of the progressive diaspora, the men spineless workaholics, the women narcissistic hippies. The parents put their bare feet up on dinner tables and shoplift socks from T.J. Maxx. Their daughters marry homosexuals (real) or become nonbinary and get their boobs chopped off (also real). The words honor, integrity, and loyalty have no meaning to any of them — they are “path of least resistance” people — and thus progressivism and pharmaceuticals have become their religion.

My mom is the “creative one” who blew it all on a theater career and other related boomer fantasies. She once disappeared for several days in Hawaii. I was twenty-six years old, midway through my law school finals. I finally tracked her down to a hotel in Molokai, in the middle of a manic episode in which she believed she was having a telekinetic love affair with indie film auteur Jim Jarmusch. She had never met him but believed he was signaling his love with collections of rocks and sticks she found and that he intended to fly out and marry her on the beach. Her reasoning: They were both from Cleveland.

The episode lasted for several months, during which time she became a sort of satanic version of herself. She texted me that she rued the day I was born, poured an entire bottle of milk on her head, and was arrested for erratic driving. Finally, her semi-estranged father — the episode was in reality a cry for his attention — got her admitted and treated with lithium. As you may imagine, the incident (which she now refers to as the time she was “very, very ill”) did not do me any favors career-wise.

My father is the second of four boys from a suburban Chicago family whose lineage can be traced to the Mayflower. Like my mother, he and his brothers were poisoned by the sixties; the poison made them antisocial, and they rejected their parents’ values to the degree of self-immolation.

My father had promise as a young actor. His talent and looks landed him an agent and roles in respected off-Broadway productions. But he was incapable of handling rejection, so he preemptively embraced failure by taking stranger and stranger jobs.

His final bow was in a dingy Chicago black box, where he appeared in the sleazy, bodily fluid-obsessed transgender romp "Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack." He then hung it up for a career as a language teacher. He spent the next few decades squeezing drops of St. John’s Wort in his espresso to treat his growing depression.

The world's cringiest divorce

Out of both resentment over the fact my mother was more successful and a belief that “people have sex with each other, it’s just what they do,” he cheated on her with an actress in an out-of-town production. He got caught, his WASP quietude crumbling in the face of her Jewish matriarchy, and their phony, selfish sexual revolution values revealed themselves inadequate to the task of holding a marriage together.

So, when I was 17, they enacted the world’s cringiest divorce, replete with performative acts of self-sacrifice, including giving over my childhood home to a Northwestern University theater troupe (which included Zach Gilford, future star of NBC drama series "Friday Night Lights"), which left it littered with half-empty beer bottles and condom wrappers.

My point is not to garner sympathy. The point is to illustrate why I learned much earlier than almost all of my vaguely Jewish, stubbornly self-important, bourgeois classmates that I was to be alone on this Earth. If I wanted to base my life on some kind of solid foundation, it was up to me to build it.

God has a way of balancing these things out. While I was unlucky in family, I got lucky in love. Just before my mom went nuts, I met the woman who would become my wife.

I was a 26-year-old Tulane Law student pondering a career in international law; she, a 20-year-old Sarah Lawrence junior studying abroad. We both ended up at the University of Amsterdam. We also both ended up in the same ridiculously gorgeous dorm, located next to the Anne Frank House along the Prinsengracht Canal. We occupied units in the same stack, mine on the third floor, hers on the fourth.

She and her friends were the first real art hoes I’d ever met, which I found irresistibly hot. I pursued her aggressively and insisted we were meant to be, not just for the moment, but for life. This was quite a bold proposition for a girl accustomed to the ambivalent attentions of the soft campus simps back in Yonkers.

Killing the monster

Pursuit of women, I believe, relies mostly on certainty. If you like a girl, find a way to get word to her about it. Then make an initial approach and don’t get fazed when she rejects you. And she will almost certainly reject you, no matter how much of an alpha you are. In fact, how you handle this rejection is a test of your alpha-ness. You approach again, gently, and again, gently.

In this case, I told future wife’s friend that I had a crush on future wife, knowing that word would get around. Then, I asked future wife to come to a concert with me. Once I got the date, a harder task remained: overcoming her 20 years of Los Angeles private school conditioning, which frames male jealousy as problematic and commitment as weird. She was dating a German guy when we first met, and I had to wrest control from him by repeatedly and consistently declaring that she was my selected partner, not a fling.

At the same time, I had to battle my own insane, insatiable paranoia and jealousy, no doubt a byproduct of my parents' infidelity. This was the true monster I had to slay in order to save the damsel and win her love. Option B is all about finding — and killing — the monster within.

We fell in love at the Rijksmuseum, cycling along the bay in the green farmlands, dancing at dubstep shows almost every night, smoking joints while hanging out the window watching the canal roll by. It was pretty much the most idyllic romance you could possibly imagine: 10/10. But only possible because I kept my hair-trigger insecurities under control.

Husband material

My wife is a happy, calm person who doesn’t care about money or online clout. Had she not, by sheer chance, encountered a psycho like me, who refused to let her go, she would’ve ended up with a sweet outdoorsy high school teacher in somewhere like Bend, Oregon.

She doesn’t take selfies and has never seen an episode of the Kardashians; she’d rather watch movies, or, more often, watch nothing. She loves libraries and art museums, where she reads every single placard and where I’m the one pulling her arm to go get lunch. She has never taken SSRIs and stopped taking birth control even before we got married.

She spends no time considering politics or culture war issues of any kind. Despite the wokest of all possible upbringings, she approaches motherhood, loyalty, and family in a deeply traditional manner; always insisting on quality time together and putting our daughter and me at the center of her world. She insists on eating together as a family.

My friends complain about their wives all the time. The typical stuff: They’re airheaded, they watch trash TV, they don’t let them off the leash, they spend money, they’re high-maintenance. One of my friend’s wives doesn’t cook or clean. Another whines constantly about male privilege. A third doesn’t let him out of the house without her. A fourth is the opposite — she never leaves the house with him.

I deal with none of these issues. I’m the high-maintenance one. My wife lets me do what I please. Everyone talks about how lucky I am, how long a leash she gives me.

I respond, of course, by denying the notion of leashes entirely! I stomp around the house, terrorizing her at the slightest attempt to reign me in. I accuse her of holding me down, preventing me from flying the way I could without her, of making me middling, of stopping my shine. I wake up in the morning too proud to apologize, breath from hell, and demand hamburgers delivered to the couch.

So, the question is, how does an emotionally damaged, deeply indebted, right-wing, alcoholic gonzo travel writer get such a wife when so much worthier husband material languishes in inceldom? Like so many things in life, getting the beautiful things depends on how you handle their ugly neighbors.

The Harpo within

There were two ways I could’ve reacted to being the neglected son of checked-out, theater-kid failchildren. Most would’ve read the environmental cues and doubled down on the pity party, embracing the degenerate artistic wasteland. I could’ve tamped down my desires for stability and numbed myself, let the world come take care of me. I could’ve been a lecherous lefty cool kid, reveling in the self-indulgent nihilism my personal trauma permitted me.

I would’ve ended up like Janice Soprano’s son Harpo (and Janice Soprano’s son I very much am), a “street person,” rebelling against my parents by embracing their own shiftless lifestyle and showing them how much further I could take it. Option A: s**t flows downstream. I just pass it along.

In some ways, this was my trajectory before I met my wife. Once I changed course, I risked reacting too strongly in the other direction, becoming one of those glorified pimps who regularly inspects his wife's phone, soothing his insecurities with control and manipulation, brainwashing his wife to interpret possessiveness as love.

Instead, I worked to undo my own brainwashing. I owned up to my latent fears of abandonment. I created frameworks to understand the behavior I reacted to in its proper context — didn’t I flirt, too? Wasn’t I just as free? Why get angry at her for being attractive?

I fought my demons and won. This is how you stop the s**t cascade and accept the responsibility God has laid upon you.

Had I not done that, had I instead tried to make her responsible for my pain, I’m sure she would’ve left me long ago. Once, she nearly did. After a family feud where I felt she didn’t take my side against her parents, I disappeared to Tijuana for several days. She was just about done after that.

Somehow, I crawled back into her heart. The solution was, once again, certainty. Reminding her, over and over, that this was it, life partners, thick and thin, sickness and health, to the end. When you know this, and you say it repeatedly over and over, it can overcome almost any female resistance. Women by their nature cling to certitude of vision and dislike being dislodged from it.

How to get lucky

Hurt people hurt people. The molested molest. The meanest girl in high school is always the one hurt most by some prior rejection. This is the challenge life throws at you, and how you respond to it is the difference between an evil life and a good one.

How do you handle the forces that took your innocence? Do you embrace them and give the world more of what was given to you? Or do you stand against them, not as some vague external evil, but as a very real, internal darkness always ready to engulf you?

Most choose the former, which is why our political landscape is full of the traumatized victims of progressivism’s inherent chaos, reflecting and amplifying their harm onto younger generations.

My luck in love comes from the ability to see, with clear eyes, the harm that came to me. I got a good wife because I needed one. But if I’d let my vision be clouded by anger, or resentment, or contempt, or simply the desire to get back at my parents, I would’ve never been able to understand the depth of my need.

My desire for some kind of "revenge" would’ve been so overwhelming I would never have accepted the challenge before me. The challenge to reject years of pop culture and classroom propaganda, and to ignore the smug certainty in the voices of family and friends. The challenge to believe that making a lifetime commitment to a 20-year-old art student was actually a good idea.

Love is the product of this commitment, of this deal with ourselves, our partners, and with God. We’re taught to weigh the benefits. Are you happy in your marriage? Are you fulfilled? If not, question it, find alternatives, maximize your happiness, get away.

Despite being taught this, I could see the evil in it. Love isn’t something that happens to you; it’s the product of righteousness. And the only thing it asks from you is complete and total commitment, lack of doubt, an overcoming of oneself in service to another human. So, I went for it, and it turned out to be exactly what we both needed.

Am I suggesting that everyone take my path? Not at all. In fact, my point is precisely the opposite. A good relationship requires its own, consistent, shared morality. People criticize swingers or hyper-religious couples, but those couples understand marriage better than most.

The marriages that fail are those open to the influence of public opinion and the various "shoulds" it imposes: My husband shouldn’t criticize me for my weight, my wife shouldn’t watch the Kardashians. All of my divorced friends married women whose mainstream expectations made them highly susceptible to social pressure, whether it came from social media, their families, or their colleagues.

My wife and I break most of the shoulds, as all good couples do, but we always return to tend to the fire burning between us, to renew the agreement no one else can amend. Failed couples are performances for the benefit of others. Successful couples are their own little cults.

The 'Pride' that undoes us all

These cults resist the reigning Cult of Dionysus and the "Pride" it insists we all observe. We think of "Pride" as a celebration of homosexuality and transgenderism, but it's rather more "inclusive" than that. Love whoever you want really means do whatever you want, and this credo provides cover for any number of heterosexual sins as well.

By today's standards, did Lisa McNear Lombardi do anything wrong? Isn't it good, and in fact noble, to shirk the oppressive, patriarchy-imposed duties of motherhood in order to "follow your bliss"?

To believe this lie is to be seduced by the same demon that urges the gender dysphoric to "change" sex; the same demon that tells two men facing the barrenness of their sexual proclivities that they can have a baby together.

The accusation of "virtue signaling" may be a stale right-wing trope, but it's true that we mostly define being a good person in terms of what you do in public. We no longer seem to understand that morality is also a matter of what you don't do. Then again, how could we? What could it possibly mean to resist temptation when one man's temptation is another man's truth?

This choice is available to us all. Boil down your experience to the specific evils God has put in your path. For me, they were degeneracy, atheism, and rootlessness. I fought back by following a traditional path and insisting that a woman in a similar situation do it with me.

What’s your version of this? What have you been given the opportunity to overcome? Do you inflict it upon others, or fight to stop it? Answer these questions correctly, and a woman will gravitate to you. Once she does, tell her you’re absolutely certain that she’s the one for you, and mean it. She’ll sense that you can conquer the darkness that chases her, too.