Wallace Garneau

Words matter. Before we can have an honest discussion about Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Zionism, or Palestine, we first have to know what those words actually mean. My latest: wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

The WNBA had a special task force meeting of really smart people to determine what the phrase, "Only women may play in the WNBA" means. They determined that this is far too cryptic of a statement for really smart people to decipher in one meeting, and that they will need more time to deliberate. I suggest finding a cryptanalyst like Alan Turing to figure this out. If someone like Turing could break the German Enigma system, there must be someone somewhere who can decipher a phrase like, "Only women may play in the WNBA." Hire that person. I know it is difficult. We use words like 'woman' to throw people off track. It's like when someone asks if I have a pet, I say, "I have a dog named Sherlock." "Dog" is not a word with an established meaning. We assign that word an arbitrary meaning in our Euro-centric, Western culture, but who is to say that someone else could not use that word to mean something else entirely? Perhaps Sherlock is really an aardvark - a German Shorthaired Pointer might be a breed of aardvark. I mean, who can really say? I'm not a biologist, so who am I to use arbitrary terms like 'dog' or 'cheeseburger.' I had a panic attack at Five Guys the other day when I realized that every item on the menu is listed using an arbitrary term that could mean anything. I ordered jalapeños on my burger and then got a manager when the guy who made my burger did not put on an olive aeoli instead of jalapeños. I tried to explain that jalapeño is an arbitrary term our culture assigns to a particular hot pepper, but that my cultural expression was to use that term to indicate that I want an olive burger, which is conspicuously absent from the Five Guys menu. The manager was of course perplexed. He too understood that every single word on the menu has a culturally-assigned arbitrary meaning and that there is no way to really know what anyone ordered without accepting that the terms our culture assigns are somehow more correct than what someone else might decide to use. The manager had no solution to this. He offered me my money back, but what does that even mean? How much did I pay? Did I pay an arbitrary amount like $12.75, or did I assign a different value to the payment I made? We contacted corporate, and now the Five Guys corporation is going to put together a special task force of really smart people to see if they can invent a way for people to communicate clearly. I suggested that whatever methodology they invent, they might call it 'language,' which I don't think is at this point a word with any established meaning. I'll let you know how this thing with Five Guys turns out. In the meantime my aardvark needs a walk.

If you are wondering why the political left is so focused on Fauci being a hero, even after his diary shows him to be a monster, it is because Fauci's role under Covid-19 perfectly personifies the power the left wants beaucratic 'experts' to exert over your every day life. Admitting that Fauci abused his position would be to admit that their model of governance was a failure.

He didn't draw First Blood...

To understand Zohran Mamdani is to understand what he is. He is not really a mayor. He is an influencer with national aspirations using the city of New York to pay for his social media platform. And that is all he is.

People talk about Elon Musk 'accumulating wealth' as if he is walking around raking money out of people's yards, like leaves in the fall. It is never, "Elon Musk created another company doing more things everyone said were impossible and creating an industry that previously did not exist." Instead it is always just, "Elon Musk has accumulated an astonishing amount of wealth." People - it did not fall from the sky. Elon Musk can put a satellite into orbit for one tenth the cost of NASA. Every time you use Google Maps you are benefitting from that. @elonmusk

Louis Philippe II embraced the French Revolution completely. He renounced his title, changed his name to “Philippe Égalité,” and voted to execute his own cousin, the king. The Revolution executed him anyway. Revolutionary systems do not stabilize. They radicalize. wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

Gerrymandering is not the disease. It is a symptom. The real issue is legitimacy. Both parties increasingly believe the other side is too dangerous to govern, so process gives way to power. That is how republics crack. wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

Most abortion arguments are built around euphemism. We use phrases like pro-choice, pro-life, women’s health, and reproductive rights to avoid what we are really debating: under what conditions is the intentional ending of a developing human life justified? The moral framework already exists. We call it justifiable homicide. wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

The Law of Moses isn’t brutal. It’s misunderstood. People confuse moral law with civil and ceremonial law—then use that confusion to attack Biblical morality. Now we’re making the same mistake at the national level. A man can turn the other cheek. A nation cannot. When governments adopt personal morality as policy, they don’t become compassionate—they become weak. That weakness invites chaos, aggression, and collapse. Europe is already showing us how this ends. wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

Free markets work, but nobody controls them. Those who seek control thus hate free markets, and make an unholy alliance with those who hate responsibility to destroy them. Evil does not promise ruin. It promises 'free.' Ruin is simply the result. Socialists always blame free nations for the failings of socialist ones, as if the purpose of a free people is to support enslaved ones. That argument is absurd on its face, but only if you use logic. It is easier to argue from emotion, comparing functional systems to utopian visions no actual system can achieve in order to tear functional systems down. Understand that labor is the biggest piece of the 'means of prodiction,' such that in a truly socialist system, the government does not serve the people. It owns them. And that is the point.

Everyone knows the system is broken. Almost nobody understands why. Meet Jamie. She knows the system is wasteful. She knows it’s abused. She gets benefits she is not qualified for. Why? Because she gets the benefit and someone else pays the cost. Scale that across millions and you don’t get reform. You get collapse. wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

This may be my most important podcast episode in some time. This war is not a mistake. It is a necessity. Join me on an important episode of Cutting Through the Chaos. americaoutloud.news/islam-an…

The fastest way to destroy a society is to make tolerance for immorality the only moral virtue.

Masculinity is not toxic. Undisciplined masculinity is. Aggression isn’t the problem. It’s the fuel. Directed, it protects. Suppressed, it explodes. We didn’t make men safer by attacking masculinity. We made them unstable. Toxic Masculinity Is a Myth. wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

War is not always a choice between war and peace. Sometimes it is a choice between war now or a bigger war later. Iran has made its intentions clear. We should take them seriously. A War for Our Time wallacegarneau.substack.com/…

Young Americans think the system is broken. They’re right. Since the U.S. left the gold standard, inflation, debt expansion, and repeated stimulus cycles have quietly eroded the purchasing power of the dollar. The result is an economy that punishes new workers first. I explain why here: wallacegarneau.substack.com/…