Quiet Riot
Sovereign Sunday | A lightning round (and a personal note)
A quick note before we get going: this week is a lightning round, not a full issue.
I’m on the road. College reunion, and something bigger. I’m out in Pennsylvania to watch my daughter graduate fire academy: cleared now to go into burning buildings, run the hose, work the ladder. (Translation: she has traded her own drama for everyone else’s, which is one of the best trades a young person can make.)
I’ve written before about how hard it is to raise kids in a culture that feels engineered to break them. The social media slot machines. The Covid lunacy. The shuttered schools and the stolen years. A world that so often seems uniformly sick and quietly aligned against them.
And then you watch one of them, a kid who had her own rough stretch, dig in, find her grit, and come out the other side stronger and steadier than you dared hope.
There is no feeling like it.
God is good.
A few thoughts from this week’s session first. Then we go around the horn.
The Quiet Riot
I run a live coaching session most weeks for clients, and the through-line this week kept circling back to one idea: perspective, and the people who still have it.
We got to talking about work. Real work. The crews out in 100-degree heat running twelve-hour days and rarely complaining. The welders, the plumbers, the laborers, the guys operating a shovel all day and then heading to a second job. Somebody on the call put it plainly: everybody is convinced they have it as bad as anyone ever has. There is always someone who has it worse.
That used to be common knowledge. Now it’s contrarian.
Because the other thing we kept circling was a culture that has gone soft and sick at the same time. A feed engineered to convince every comfortable person that they are uniquely oppressed. Idle hands, the devil’s playground, except now the playground is in your pocket and it never closes.
The antidote isn’t complicated. It’s responsibility. It’s service. It’s having somewhere to be. A kid who joins a firehouse, or volunteers at a rescue, or learns a trade is a kid who has swapped the manufactured drama of the screen for the real stakes of the world. That trade saves lives, sometimes literally.
And here’s where a parenting observation turns into a political one.
The people who build and serve and produce are the same people who will have to save this country. But they fight differently than the other side. They have jobs. Mortgages. Skin in the game. They are not going to throw a Molotov cocktail or camp in a tent city for a month.
Their resistance is a quiet riot: a vote, a check, and increasingly, a moving truck, as more of them vote with their feet.
That’s the strength and the weakness in a single breath. The productive class is hard to mobilize precisely because it is productive. The paid agitators have nothing to lose. The people who could actually change things have everything to lose, so they keep their heads down and grind.
Which brings me to the part nobody on our side wants to hear.
Winning a round is not winning the war. November of 2024 was a round. It was not the final whistle. You do not make any of this permanent with one election, or with raids alone, or with a good news cycle. You make it permanent by cutting off the oxygen: the fraud, the funding, the NGO money laundromat that lets the whole machine reboot the second the wind shifts.
The one grace we have right now is how genuinely insane the other side has become. (Case in point: a major party rallying behind a man who wore an SS death camp tattoo for eighteen years. More on Graham Platner below.) But you cannot build a future on the assumption that your enemy will keep handing you gifts.
So build. Serve. Worship. Vote. Write the check. Raise resilient kids. Lots of them.
That’s the long game, and it’s the only one that counts.
Around the Horn
1. Six years ago this week, “the science” showed its hand
June 2, 2020. Read the date and feel your blood pressure rise.
While you were being arrested for opening your shop, cuffed for paddleboarding alone in the ocean, and forced to follow arrows taped to the grocery store floor, dozens of public health “experts” signed an open letter declaring the anti-racism protests an urgent public-health priority. White supremacy, they explained, was the real lethal pathogen.
Two months of “stay home or you’ll kill grandma.” Then, the instant the politics flipped, a thousand credentialed mouths produced a permission slip for riots in the streets.
As PoliMath points out, plenty of those signatories weren’t exactly titans of the field. Grad students. Med students. Names padding a list. The actual experts mostly stayed silent, because objecting would get you branded a racist, so the loudest activists became the official voice of “science.”
That was the tell. Not a virus. A revelation.
“The science” was always downstream of the agenda, and it always will be.
If you still had a functioning brain and weren’t fully red-pilled by the end of that week, I’m not sure what it would take. It may be the low point of the American 21st century. I’m open to other nominations.
2. California is cheating in broad daylight, and the bettors know it
The LA mayor’s race, June 2. Karen Bass is through to November. The fight for the second runoff slot is between Spencer Pratt, the reality star turned giant-killer who lost his home in the Palisades, and Nithya Raman, the DSA councilwoman running to Bass’s left.
Pratt has been leading the count for that second spot.
So why, days after the polls closed, was Kalshi pricing Raman as the heavy favorite to “advance,” with Pratt the long shot, even while he sat ahead in the actual returns?
Because the smart money has read this script before. Hundreds of thousands of ballots are still “uncounted.” California says it may take weeks. And the bettors are calmly wagering that when the dust settles, the numbers will have been massaged just enough to slot in the weaker progressive, so Bass never has to spend six months on a debate stage across from a Republican.
Andrew Isker can’t get past one detail: a batch of 24,000 ballots dropped in LA without a single vote for Pratt. Run for mayor as a despised unknown who never campaigned, and you’d still pull a few dozen by accident or as a prank. The odds of a clean 24,000-to-nothing are Powerball-five-times-in-a-row territory. “This is what 2020 was like.”
When the prediction markets treat the steal as the base case, that isn’t a conspiracy theory. That’s consensus pricing.
People just watch and laugh now, because it’s so blatant. Maybe that blatancy is finally the straw for a few of them. I am not optimistic outside of what the administration and the DOJ choose to pursue.
Which is the whole argument for the executive branch, by the way. You can have a Justice Department that investigates actual fraud and actual domestic terrorists. Or you can have one that perp-walks grandmothers for praying on a sidewalk. We’ve now seen both. I know which one I want holding the gavel.
And here is the part that should make your blood boil.
There is a fix sitting right there, and it is not controversial with anybody outside the Beltway.
Eighty-four percent of Americans support showing photo ID to vote. Not 51%. Eighty-four. It polls higher than ice cream. Nearly every functioning democracy on earth already does it. You show ID to board a plane, buy a beer, or pick up a package, but asking for it at the one moment that decides who governs is somehow “voter suppression.”
That’s the SAVE Act in a sentence: prove you’re a citizen to register, show ID to vote, clean the noncitizens off the rolls. The House passed it. And then it died in the Senate.
Read the vote count and find the Republicans in it. The bill to secure American elections failed, and it failed in part because members of the party that screams about election integrity at every fundraiser could not be bothered to vote for it when it counted.
The Democrats will call ID “Jim Crow.” Even Fetterman won’t go that far: he’s said he isn’t going to tell 84 percent of the country, including most Black voters, that they’re bigots for wanting it.
So remember this combination. One party openly blocks the most popular election-integrity measure in modern polling. The other party can’t hold its own caucus together to pass it. And out in California, the count grinds on. None of that is an accident. It’s a system working exactly as the people who profit from it intend.
3. I’m bearish for the first time in a long while
Let me say what I rarely say: I’m bearish.
Not apocalyptic. Bearish. It feels like a temporary top with a correction due. I can see a blistering rally setting up into or just after the midterms. But my gut says flat to short is the right book right now, and my gut is usually loudest right before it’s right.
Here’s the case.
By almost every metric, this is the most expensive market in history. More stretched than the 2000 tech bubble. More stretched than the post-Covid melt-up. The whole thing rests on one trade wearing different costumes: Mag Seven, then storage, then semis, now whatever’s next, all of it the same AI bet. When left-for-dead names like HPE and Dell go vertical, I don’t see strength. I see 2000.
And there are real questions under the hood. Is the AI super-cycle actually profitable and sustainable? When the cost of a token starts rivaling the cost of a human, the “we’ll figure out the revenue later” story gets a lot harder to tell. You cannot torch $80 to $100 billion a year forever on faith.
Now layer in the exit liquidity.
SpaceX has filed. Anthropic has filed. OpenAI is teed up. Three of the largest private valuations ever, well north of three trillion dollars combined, all marching toward the public markets in the same window. (SpaceX alone is reportedly targeting around a $2 trillion valuation, with a roadshow already in motion.)
That is a generational wave of insiders looking to sell. Guess who they’re selling to.
This is the part I need you to internalize, so let me be blunt.
Do not buy SpaceX, or any hot IPO, on the day it starts trading. Unless you got in pre-IPO, you are the exit, not the entrance.
The mechanics are simple and they rarely fail. The bankers float a tiny sliver of the company (SpaceX is reportedly offering around 5 percent). Limited supply plus maximum hype equals a pop. Retail piles into the pop. Then the lockups expire, ninety days out, a hundred and eighty days out, and the people who’ve owned it for years finally get to sell. The supply floodgate opens. And the slow bleed begins.
I warned about exactly this with Coinbase in 2021: michaelkimelman.substack.com/i/33045477/coinbase
Coinbase went public in April 2021 and spiked to roughly $429 on its very first day. Then it came apart, all the way down to about $31 by early 2023. Apart from one fleeting brush near those highs in the summer of 2025, more than four years later, it never went back. Today it sits around $174. If you bought the hype on day one, you have spent most of five years underwater. That is the trade waiting for retail in SpaceX, in Circle, in the next dozen “can’t miss” debuts.
So no, I’m not chasing this. Flat to short, watching for the post-midterm setup, and happy to let the IPO circus dump into someone else’s account.
(None of this is advice. It’s how I’m positioned, and why. Do your own work.)
4. The Democrats found their guy
A quick word on just how depraved the modern Democratic Party has become.
In Maine, the party is consolidating behind Graham Platner for the Senate seat held by Susan Collins. Schumer is in. Sanders is in. Warren is in. The full progressive apparatus, all the way down.
Here is the man they’re so excited about.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, whose grandfather’s family was murdered at the Sobibor death camp, said it plainly on CNN. This is not some ambiguous ink. For 18 years, Platner wore the death’s-head of the SS concentration-camp guards across his chest. The same crowd that spent a decade branding every MAGA voter a Nazi is now lining up behind a man with the actual insignia over his heart, because they’ve decided he can win.
Platner’s story is that he didn’t know what the Totenkopf was, that he got it drunk in Croatia during a dark stretch. An ex-girlfriend told the New York Times that’s simply false: she said he understood exactly what it was and had taught her the word for it years earlier, calling it “my Totenkopf.” His campaign strongly denies he knew.
And the tattoo, it turns out, is the least of it.
Three women who dated Platner went to the Times describing relationships they found intimidating and disturbing. By their account he grabbed one hard enough to leave marks, once yanked her out of a cab by the wrist, and another time twisted her arm behind her back and held a bedroom door shut until she gave up and fell asleep. He kept an AR-15 lying around the apartment and liked to sharpen an axe while watching television. He talked about a “warrior ethos,” fantasized aloud about killing people he saw as threats, and told one girlfriend that rape was about power. He referred to women, casually, with a crude anatomical slur.
And then there’s the line that the whole internet is still chewing on: he said, repeatedly, that if anyone ever broke into his home he would rape them. Not for sex, he clarified. Just to assert dominance.
His campaign disputes the claims of physical roughness, and the Times noted it could not independently corroborate them. The central accuser has worked for Republican groups, which the campaign is eager to point out. Fair enough. But notice what the campaign did not dispute when asked: the rape remark.
Keep going.
His deleted Reddit history is its own genre. He lectured sexual-assault victims about taking some responsibility for what happens to them. He asked, while tending bar, why his Black patrons tipped so poorly. He called the rural Mainers he now wants to represent racist and stupid. He mocked a wounded veteran. His defense is PTSD and a dark period, which is a real thing for a real veteran, and also exactly the defense you’d expect.
Meanwhile the Journal and the Times report he was sending explicit messages to multiple women early in his new marriage, including while he and his wife were going through fertility treatments. His wife flagged it to his own campaign. The campaign looked at all of it and decided it wasn’t a problem.
Oh, and the salt-of-the-earth, working-class oyster-farmer backstory? Reportedly a good deal more boarding school than oyster boat.
Magills landed the only honest line of the cycle, deadpan: it’s just so hard to believe that a man with that particular résumé might also have done the things he stands accused of.
That’s their candidate. That’s their bench.
And don’t forget what happened the same night a few states south. In New Jersey, Democrats just nominated Adam Hamawy for a safe House seat. As a young man, Hamawy testified as a defense witness for the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, the cleric convicted of inciting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He won his primary with the enthusiastic backing of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the Squad, lifted by a pro-Palestinian super PAC. His campaign assures us he condemns terrorism.
A man who wore the SS death’s head in Maine. A man who vouched for the Blind Sheikh in New Jersey. Same party, same week, same shrug.
Thank God they keep showing us exactly who they are.
5. Ninety percent of the new jobs went to foreigners. Almost all the rest went to women.
This one deserves its own siren.
Foreign-born workers took roughly 90 percent of the net new jobs created in this country since Covid. The household data is brutal: of about 5.4 million jobs added across five years, some 4.7 million went to the foreign born. Native-born employment grew by a rounding error. By one analysis of what was left, the share of those gains that went to white men rounded to zero, while white men remain nearly a third of the population.
Treason is a strong word. I’ll use it anyway. You do not import an entire labor force, hand it nearly all the growth, and then lecture the citizens you displaced about their privilege. There is no other country on earth that runs its economy as a jobs program for everyone except its own founding stock. That is not generosity. It is a quiet act of replacement, and the people doing it know it.
Now take the small slice of jobs that did go to Americans.
Of the 369,000 jobs created since the start of this term, 348,000 went to women and 21,000 went to men. That is not a typo. Ninety-four percent. Roughly 17 women hired for every man.
They will tell you this is just sectors. Health care and education are booming and skew female; manufacturing and transport are getting cut and skew male. True. And that is the whole point. The entire growth economy is being engineered around fields that exclude men, while the work men actually do gets offshored, automated, and immigrated into oblivion.
Look at where it leads. Male labor-force participation just hit its lowest level since 1948 outside the pandemic. Something like one in three young men is neither working nor looking. The employment gap that used to favor men by seven million has closed completely. And nobody in charge treats this as an emergency. Imagine the headlines if those numbers ran the other way.
There has been a quiet, and not so quiet, war on the American man, and especially the white working-class man, for thirty years now. Mocked in the ads. Lectured in the classrooms. Last hired in the data. Told his essence is ‘toxic’, that his problems are character flaws and everyone else’s are injustices.
This is not a grievance. It’s a fuse.
A society that strands a generation of young men with no work, no role, no family, and no stake is not building anything. It is storing up despair, and despair always gets spent eventually. You want fewer angry young men? Give them a job, a purpose, and a country that acts like it wants them here.
That used to be the entire bargain. We should want it back.
6. Follow of the week: The Samurai Who Sees us Clearly
To end on something lighter: go follow @japan_nobunaga on X.
It’s a Japanese samurai narrating life in modern America, and somehow a warrior’s deadpan astonishment cuts closer to the truth than ninety percent of the people paid to comment on this country. One of the best accounts on the platform. He explains America better than most. 🇯🇵 🇺🇸
A taste from a potluck dinner he was invited to:
“I studied the table like a battlefield map. Potato salad: defensive, reliable, old money. A vegetable tray, untouched, clearly a hostage offering no one expected to win.”
There’s a particular clarity that comes from the outsider’s eye and the honor culture behind it. He looks at what we tolerate, what we celebrate, and what we’ve forgotten, and names it without the fog of our domestic politics. Sometimes you need a stranger to tell you that your house is underappreciated, or that it is on fire.
(Fittingly, my daughter can now put it out.)
Worth your follow. It’s the rare account that makes you laugh and then sit up a little straighter.
See ya next week sovereigns.
Best of Twitter
Memetic Warfare
Parting Words….
That’s it for this week folks. Hope you enjoyed!
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Congratulations for your daughter! Great post.
That image comparing the number of Jews living in Muslim countries with Arabs in Israel really says it all. I'll never forget sitting next to a young Turkish person on my flight to Istanbul. We had an enjoyable conversation, in which he claimed that there were no non-Muslims living in Turkey - zero. I highly doubt this is true, maybe none that would admit it anyway. But regardless of the real stats, it's very revealing.
Congrats to your daughter!