Chip J
Chip J is a contributing writer to Capitalism Magazine. You can follow him on X at @ChipActual.
“Diversity Is Our Strength”
“Diversity is our strength” began as an appeal for tolerance and inclusion—who could oppose that? It has since morphed into the opposite.
“See For Yourself”
The ability to see clearly—to form your own hypothesis about what’s actually in front of you, independent of what you’ve been told to expect—is the foundation of everything else in this book.
Philosophical Malpractice: January 6th and the Closed Room
A mind operating from prior conclusions does not go looking for evidence that might challenge them. It looks for evidence that confirms, and mistakes the confirmation for proof.
The Coward’s Epistemology
The future on offer is extraordinary. That should make us angry—genuinely, productively angry—that a coward’s epistemology is positioned to foreclose it.
The Sinister Machine of Compassion
The distance between Canada’s savings projections for euthanasia across an aging population and Xinjiang’s harvesting is not moral. It is procedural.
The Radio Priest Is Back with a Podcast
Tucker Carlson did not arrive at “this is Israel’s war” through serious engagement with American foreign policy. He arrived there because the audience that would reward him for saying it became larger than the audience that would punish him. He read the room. He adjusted the message.
How “Effective Altruism” Turned Self-Sacrifice into a Pseudoscience
Writing in 1957, decades before Effective Altruism had a name or a giving pledge, Ayn Rand described altruism’s core demand: that need functions as “the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence.”
How To Think: Conversations From a Father to a Son
I couldn’t find the book I wanted for my son. So I wrote it.
The Self Under Siege: What Ayn Rand’s Epic Novel “The Fountainhead” Shows Us About the Societies We Build
Ayn Rand built five main characters in The Fountainhead who function as psychological archetypes, but her real achievement was more precise than that. She mapped five distinct textures of subjective experience that emerge from a single upstream choice: where does the self live?
A Transformative President: The Meaning of The Presidency of Donald J. Trump
Greatness, in the presidential sense, means transformation—not moral perfection.
Endgame in Ukraine
Ukrainians Survived Stalin. They Fought Putin Bravely. They Deserve Our Honesty.
The Most Important Thing the Founders Built Wasn’t the Constitution
Their deepest fear was an ignorant citizenry—a public that could be handed liberty and squander it because they lacked the mental tools to defend it. The Founders understood something that gets lost in the monument-and-marble version of history: a republic is not a structure. It’s a practice. And practices die when people forget how to perform them.
Thinkers vs. Ragers: Epstein, Kirk, Iran—Same Grift, Different Day
Rachel Maddow monetizes liberal dread. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens monetize your dread.
What a Rational Immigration System Actually Looks Like
Americans have a rational self-interest in admitting people who will strengthen that protection and excluding people who will undermine it.
Why The Left Does Not Celebrate Iranian Freedom Protestors
The Iranian people celebrating Israel and America weren’t just rejecting the Ayatollah. They were rejecting the entire architecture of ideological capture—the architecture the Western Left has been building at home.
Trump’s Operation Epic Fury Iran Strikes Are Constitutional
The Iran Strikes Are Constitutional. That’s Not The Interesting Question.
Why Most Civilizations Fail, Part 3: The Choice Between Stasis and Infinity
What separates societies that generate knowledge from those that suppress it, and what does this mean for our future?
Why Most Civilizations Fail, Part 2: Why Geographic Determinism Fails
Ultimate causation lies in ideas: why did some societies exploit their geographic advantages and others didn’t, and why did some overcome geographic disadvantages? Geography can’t answer those questions, but knowledge creation can.
Why Most Civilizations Fail, Part 1: The Island Paradox
Geography alone can’t explain why some isolated, resource-poor societies like Iceland thrived while others like Easter Island collapsed.
America’s Triage: On Trump’s Economic Nationalism
“You should not be dependent for that which is fundamental to your sovereignty on any other nation.”
Left Can’t Meme
Richard Dawkins coined “meme” in 1976 to describe units of cultural transmission—ideas that replicate like genes.
Why America’s Land Isn’t Stolen
What conquest built justified the conquest—not because the process was clean, but because the result expanded human freedom and flourishing beyond what existed before.
Don Lemon’s Crime Was Not Journalism
Defenders call this an attack on press freedom, an authoritarian assault on the First Amendment. They’re wrong. Lemon didn’t report a crime. He committed one.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ICE, and Illegal Immigration
ICE agents enforcing the law aren’t the threat to American values. The threat is the accumulated mass of people who broke the law to enter, refuse to assimilate, exploit systems meant for citizens, and vote for politicians who promise more of the same.
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