The Gold Standard: Every complaint about Donald Trump is a complaint about ostentatiousness that nobody is allowed to aim at anyone else chrisabraham.substack.com/p/the-gol…
Is this the most NIMBY thing you’ve ever seen? youtube.com/watch
A moment on your tweets a lifetime on your deets.
John Kennedy presses Biden judicial nominee Dale Ho during a Senate confirmation hearing over past tweets youtube.com/watch
Fact check false?
AOC claims American revolution was against “the billionaires of their time youtube.com/shorts/si…
I know it’s a cinematic framing thing but two adult men talking to each other and a work environment this close together gives me hives and total anxiety. Does anybody ever talk this closely? Or is it only cinematic and screen ratio?
Redemption is the act of saving, delivering, or regaining something, often through a payment, atonement, or effort.
In a culture war, you take 4 hills and cede 2 or 3 and you win 1 or two. That’s how the Dems should look at this. It should not be an all or nothing gambit. Fair play.
New York Times EXPOSED for Anti-White, Anti-Male DISCRIMINATION?! youtu.be/HPsBg9O4x…
Grogu is Scrappy-Doo now. Cute helpless baby works. Tiny agent with attitude and powers is just a gremlin spending goodwill he earned in a bassinette.
I came away thinking: “thank God for the shadow docket”—does Oliver know he’s done that?
John Oliver discusses the shadow docket – a “shortcut” to the Supreme Court youtube.com/watch
Is Donald Trump the most self-realized man in human history? open.substack.com/pub/chris…
Great stuff! Amen!
You weren’t created to live weighed down. If you’ve been carrying stress, pressure, guilt, or expectations you were never meant to hold, God is inviting you into a different kind of rest — one built… pca.st/episode/2…
AI Is Public Education’s Perfect Scapegoat The real reason schools are failing has nothing to do with ChatGPT—and everything to do with what we’ve been too afraid to say for fifty years chrisabraham.substack.com/p/ai-is-p…
For you youngins: colleges in the 60s/70s were more radical, not less. Buildings occupied. Bombs set off. National Guard on campuses—students shot dead at Kent State. The Weather Underground didn’t hold candlelight vigils. Today’s protests are tame by comparison.
Was Buchanan Right? Is That Why They Silenced Him? chrisabraham.com/blog/was-…
The left didn’t suppress Buchanan because he was dangerous and wrong. They suppressed him because he was dangerous and right. Yikes! Buchanan’s 1992 “culture war” speech is yikes AF.
Carter ~145. Clinton ~155. Obama ~130. Trump ~101. One of these punched harder than his IQ score suggests. A dead-average American—a normie 101—cut a swatch through world history. That might be the most democratic story ever told.
Carter: estimated IQ around 145. Nuclear physics at Annapolis, one of the sharpest technical minds ever to occupy the Oval Office. Clinton: around 155—Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Yale Law, a political mind so quick it bordered on unfair. Obama: around 130, President of the Harvard Law Review, the most credentialed editorial job in American legal academia.
Trump: approximately 101.
Dead average. Textbook normie. The kind of IQ score that gets you through life without anyone calling you gifted.
I had my IQ tested in the high 130s. I grew up in Honolulu at St. Louis School—ILH, not Punahou, so I carry that particular chip knowing Obama walked those manicured grounds across the island while we were busy proving something from Kaimuki. I know what the high-IQ credentialed world looks like from the inside. I know how much we quietly rely on those numbers to tell us who matters.
And then there’s Trump at 101, and I have to just sit with that for a second.
Because in 79 years, a dead-average American—no photographic memory, no Rhodes Scholarship, no law review—cut a swatch through world history that none of the geniuses managed. Two presidential wins. Reshaped both political parties. Survived legal, media, and institutional onslaughts that would have vaporized anyone without his particular brand of teflon. Became the most polarizing and consequential figure of his era.
A 101 IQ didn’t hold him back. It might have been load-bearing. He was legible to normal people because he essentially is one—he thinks at the speed of a bumper sticker, which turns out to be exactly the speed most people actually process politics.
The genius presidents had their moments. But none of them pulled off what the normie did. If the IQ estimates are even roughly right, that’s not an insult to Trump—it’s the most democratic, most American story in the history of the presidency. You don’t need to be exceptional to be historic. You just need to want it more than everyone else in the room, and refuse to stop.
The elephant identifier wins again.
The populist right and the populist left are eating the center alive on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ve been watching this coming from my window. Pull up a chair. open.substack.com/pub/chris…