Author: Robert Barrimond

Democrats Just Crushed Republicans

Democrats crushed Republicans not by shifting left or right—but by running the right candidates for their states, proving that normal, competent governance still wins. The GOP is cracking under Trump’s weight, and for the first time in years, the future looks governable.

AI Note

This summary was generated from The Next Level Podcast transcript using AI analysis to distill the episode’s core ideas. It’s meant as a guide — not a substitute — for watching the full conversation, which is absolutely worth your time.

The 2025 off-year elections weren’t just wins — they were a realignment. Democrats swept Virginia, New Jersey, and New York by running the right candidates for their states: Spanberger’s pragmatic normalcy, Sherrill’s suburban competence, and Mamdani’s populist activism.

“Tonight the resistance struck back.” — JVL, The Next Level

Together they proved the formula: coalitional pragmatism beats chaos. Turnout was massive, MAGA candidates were crushed, and the GOP now faces a lame-duck crisis. The Trump cult is fracturing — torn between populist grifters and exhausted traditionalists — while Democrats look energized and sane.

If this night signals anything, it’s that normal, competent governance still wins.

Watch the episode:
▶️ The Next Level Podcast: Democrats Just CRUSHED Republicans

The K-Shaped Economy: Raging Moderates on the Moral Collapse of American Prosperity

Galloway and Tarlov’s Raging Moderates episode captures America’s moral divide: a K-shaped economy feeding the top 1 percent while MAGA normalizes hate and authoritarian awe. Between Gatsby’s glitter and populist rage, they find the same creed—power without empathy, cruelty mistaken for strength.

This summary was generated with AI assistance to capture the moral and political through-lines of Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov’s latest Raging Moderates episode.

The full conversation is worth your time; watch it here.

Podcast: Raging Moderates – “Trump’s K-Shaped Economy”
Hosts: Scott Galloway & Jessica Tarlov

1️⃣ The K-Shaped Economy: America’s New Gatsby Era

During the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, military families lined up at food pantries while Trump hosted a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago—girls in martini glasses, confetti over unpaid workers. That tableau, the hosts argue, is the moral diagram of the K-shaped economy itself.

“Budgets are moral documents.”

“America is a terrible place to be unfortunate.”

GDP may grow 3.8 percent, but for most Americans “the bottom 90 serve as nutrition for the top 10 percent.” Markets become morality plays; as Galloway notes, “As long as the stock market is up, you can do anything—even deploy secret police with masks.”

The metrics that matter are off-book:

  • Pawn-shop sales, auto-loan delinquencies, Hamburger Helper spikes.
  • Teen self-harm, anxiety, and hunger.

These, not the S&P 500, are the nation’s true balance sheet.
The “K” is a hieroglyph of our values—one arm ascending toward excess, the other collapsing into despair.

2️⃣ MAGA’s Dark Communion

Later the hosts turn from money to morality. Their focus shifts to Nick Fuentes, whose praise of Stalin exposes what the MAGA movement has become: a coalition comfortable with white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarian awe.

“Strength and masculinity have been conflated with coarseness and cruelty.”

“The most dangerous person in the world is a young man without economic or romantic opportunity.”

Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and their online echo chambers reveal a movement that glorifies domination and calls it leadership. Algorithms amplify the poison because rage pays. Ben Shapiro, once an architect of grievance media, now looks aghast at the antisemitic monster it unleashed—a moral recursion too late to contain.

3️⃣ The Moral Through-Line

Between Gatsby’s glitter and MAGA’s rage lies a single creed: power without empathy. One end worships wealth; the other worships strength. Both treat human beings as expendable.

“Budgets reflect the values of a nation.”

When compassion is weakness and cruelty is currency, prosperity becomes performative. The republic mistakes spectacle for virtue, the algorithm for conscience, and domination for destiny.

Billionaires Should Exist

Billionaires aren’t the problem—rigged systems are. In any fair economy with risk and a healthy dose of luck, outliers will emerge. The challenge isn’t to erase them but to hold them accountable: fair taxes, honest competition, and reinvestment in the people who made them rich. That’s stewardship, not socialism.

(Version 1.1)

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars,” she wasn’t wrong to name exploitation. But she was wrong to name every fortune that way. The line lands because populism is simple — and it targets people for hatred. Naming an enemy works. It always has. But if you’re serious about justice, you can’t build it on resentment. Billionaires should exist for one simple reason: in any fair system that includes a healthy dose of luck, they inevitably will.

The Game Is Capitalism

If I play a game, I play to win. I learn the rules, find the META (gamer speak for Most Efficient Tactics Available), and compete to excel. The problem is that too many progressives want to play socialism while the rest of the world is still playing capitalism. They scold the game, refuse to play, and blame others for the loss.

Capitalism is amoral, not immoral. It doesn’t reward goodness or fairness; it rewards ownership of leverage, scale, and speed. That means we can — and must — bend it toward moral ends rather than cede the field to the greedy and rent-seeking. If you leave a game to the worst players, don’t be surprised when they corrupt it.

Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong

She’s right that some billionaires got there through extraction — underpaying labor, gaming laws, hoarding rents. That’s theft by another name. But she’s wrong to pretend that’s the whole story. Some fortunes come from creation: innovation, coordination, risk-taking, with, it must be said, a healthy dose of luck. In any fair system that contains risk and randomness, outliers will emerge. Sometimes spectacularly so.

The trick isn’t to stop them from existing (as if you could) — it’s to police them so they don’t rig the system after the fact. That means taxing fairly so wealth contributes to the society that made it possible, curbing monopolies to keep markets open and innovation alive, and limiting political influence so money can’t purchase democracy. The goal isn’t to eliminate winners. It’s to keep the game honest.[1]

Jay-Z parlayed his monopoly on his enormous talent (and his wife Beyoncé) into a billionaire power couple. What wages did he steal? What worker collective should he establish? Steven Spielberg? Oprah? And so on. Workers are the lynchpin here and that leads me to my next point.

The Moral Obligation of Winners

When capitalism’s winners forget the social fabric that sustains them — schools, roads, courts, labor, consumers — the system curdles into rot. Politics becomes ugly and bad things can happen. They need to remember that social fabric consists of people who have voluntarily made them rich. So show gratitude — and afford them fair taxes in proportion to the public goods they enjoy, living wages so full-time work leads to a full life, honest competition instead of monopoly or captured regulation, and reinvestment in the communities that raised your markets and your workers.

That’s not socialism. That’s stewardship.

The Progressive Error

Progressives often confuse moral critique with moral condemnation. They attack wealth itself instead of the unjust systems that distort it believe they are one and the same. The result is they drive good people out of the arena. If you vacate the field, you don’t purify the world — you forfeit it.

The moral task isn’t to wish capitalism away; it’s to discipline it — to aim its power at human flourishing instead of greed. That’s how you beat the game: not by quitting, but by outplaying the immoral within it.

The World I Want

I want a world where billionaires exist because they earned it justly — through ingenuity, service, and the courage to take real risks. I want a capitalism worthy of human dignity — one that lifts as it climbs and measures success by how many lives rise with yours.

If I play a game, I play to win. The difference is, I know what winning should look like: a world where success uplifts rather than devours.

  1. The Nordics are examples of societies where there are more billionaires per capita than the United States but also have the highest unionization rates in the world. Embarrassing facts for ideologues across all stripes of our political spectrum. ↩︎

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Forrest Gump’s plain wisdom—“Stupid is as stupid does”—frames a meditation on ideology and discernment. We trade freedom for the comfort of belonging when we let ideas think for us. Faith is the way back to freedom: to think, to pray, to see.

Forrest Gump, an intellectually challenged man who was at the same time exceptionally wise, had a maxim: “Stupid is as stupid does.” In that single sentence lies an indictment of much of what passes for intelligence in our age — people with expansive vocabularies and expensive degrees still doing stupid things because they’ve given themselves over to emotional need without discernment and stopped thinking for themselves.

Ideology (Merriam-Webster): “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture,” and more pointedly, “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.”

Ideological (Merriam-Webster): “relating to or concerned with ideas or ideology,” and more critically, “characterized by blind or partisan devotion to a system or belief.”

The first is descriptive; the second is diagnostic. To believe an ideology is one thing: you have an ordered worldview. To have faith in it, however, is to let someone else do your thinking for you.

Most people don’t wake up and say to themselves, “Today, I’m going to let [insert ideology] do my thinking for me!” It doesn’t happen that way. It creeps in. We inherit our slogans from parents, pastors, pundits, or professors, and we wear them like armor against uncertainty. Over time, the armor becomes a cage — most clearly when it fuses with our identity. What once protected us begins to define us. Principles and faith demand the work of discernment — they force us to confront ambiguity and to wrestle with conscience. Ideology relieves us of that burden. It offers the comfort of belonging without the discomfort of examination. It trades freedom for (false) certainty and sells the exchange as virtue.

Ignatius of Loyola would have recognized this as a disordered attachment — the subtle clinging to anything that offers security at the cost of truth. When we identify more with our camp than with Christ, when we prize being right over being good, we begin to confuse the voice of the crowd with the voice of God.

Many ideologies begin as attempts to make sense of the world, and some even manage to remain supple — capable of reflection, repentance, and reform. But most do not. Once the slogans take hold, questioning becomes betrayal of oneself and one’s tribe. Curiosity feels like disloyalty. A set of ideas becomes the grounds for personal and corporate Pride, the mother of all sin. The all-important We then determines Truth and all the rest — replacing God.[1]

Faith, by contrast, is trust in God whom we can never fully know and who is always Mystery. It grows by encounter, by humility, by the willingness to be surprised. It doesn’t spare us the work of thinking; it deepens it. It doesn’t silence doubt; it sanctifies it by putting it in conversation with love. That’s what Ignatius meant by freedom — not the ability to do whatever we wish, but the grace to choose what leads us toward God even when the world shouts for certainty.

So, yes, “stupid is as stupid does.” Stupidity is the refusal — the refusal to look when Truth is right in front of you, whispering through the noise, inviting you — again — to be free: to think, to pray, to see.

  1. The Examen exists precisely to disrupt that drift: to pause, to look back, to notice what moved us toward love and what led us away. It’s not a prayer for the pure but for the brutally honest, for those who know how easily conviction turns into control. The Examen is a bulwark against idolatry. ↩︎

No Kings, No Knee: A Movement for Democracy

This weekend, I couldn’t join the protests but felt a renewed sense of civic spirit while observing from afar. The recent No Kings gatherings have transformed from mere protests into powerful rallies of unity and resolve. They reflected a deep commitment to democracy, reminding us that the instinct to resist lives on. Hope flourishes!

I didn’t march this weekend. Family duty came first, so I only drove past a small satellite protest, stopped quick to chat up some protestors, and kept it moving. But even from the margins, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: the sense that ordinary people are remembering how to be citizens. For the last year I’ve had a gnawing feeling that Americans didn’t have the appetite to fight for democracy, that we’d rather rationalize power than restrain it. “No Kings” is the right slogan for that feeling: a polite, pointed reminder that we don’t bend the knee.

The first No Kings back in June gave me a pulse: hopeful, but fragile. The second one hit different. Same message, more backbone–a lot more. Less spectacle, more resolve. You could see it in the way people showed up everywhere and didn’t need a headliner to tell them what to do. It read less like a protest and more like a rally–a gathering of spirit.

I’ve been helped in naming this by The Bulwark crew, who’ve framed it not as left vs. right, but citizens vs. subjects. Their read tracked what I felt driving by: this wasn’t outrage cosplay. It was calm, patriotic, neighborly. Families with flags, marshals with de-escalation, a lot of honking. “There was nothing hateful about it,” someone said on the show, and that mattered.

Authoritarianism is, in part, a spell and these crowds broke it by refusing to play the villain in someone else’s story. MAGA provocateurs got a very powerful response: nothing. They were ignored. That discipline meant that this was not merely about just showing up. It was about movement, about soldiering.

What moved me most is how joy and seriousness coexisted. Joy says we remember who we are; seriousness says we know what’s at stake. The Bulwark folks called it out: June was people shouting “No!”; October was people saying “We still here…and we are moving.”

So, no, I didn’t lace up and chant this time. I waved, prayed a little, and kept my commitment to family. But I also exhaled. The first No Kings let me hope. The second let me believe that hope might scale. If democracy survives, moments like these will sit on the timeline—not because they fixed everything, but because they proved the instinct to resist still lives in us. And the slow work of God continues.

The Subtle Whisper of the Evil Spirit: When Pro-Life Ideals Are Corrupted

In Ignatian spirituality, we learn that the evil spirit employs cunning tactics to corrupt even noble ideals. This post explores how the pro-life movement, despite its aim to express Christ’s love for innocent life, has been spiritually derailed by rigidity and judgment. Through discernment, we uncover how subtle distortions of truth can lead even the most righteous causes astray and reflect on how to stay anchored in Christ’s compassion.

In Ignatian spirituality, we learn to discern the movements of spirits—those that draw us closer to God and those that subtly lead us away. For those practiced in this discernment, the evil spirit does not come clumsily or overtly. It is not a shouting adversary but a cunning whisperer, cloaking itself in righteousness to ensnare even the most devout. St. Ignatius teaches that the evil spirit adapts its tactics, employing deceit and half-truths to corrupt what is good and noble.

When I reflect on the current pro-life movement, I see not just a political struggle but a spiritual battlefield. The ideals of protecting innocent life—so central to the message of Jesus—are noble. Yet, like a wily general, the evil spirit exploits the movement’s zeal and transforms it into a source of harm, even to the very lives it seeks to protect.

The Advanced Tactics of the Evil Spirit

For those of us who strive to live the Exercises of St. Ignatius, the evil spirit no longer tempts us with base desires. Instead, it cloaks itself in what seems good. It whispers: Your cause is just; therefore, any means to achieve it are justified. This is a subtle distortion of truth, for it turns a righteous passion into rigidity, zealotry, and even cruelty.

The evil spirit plays on our desire for control and victory, urging us to silence doubt, ignore criticism, and dismiss the human faces of those we oppose even those we intend to help. Instead of inspiring compassion, it inspires pride. Instead of fostering dialogue, it sows division. Instead of focusing on Christ’s love for the vulnerable, it subtly shifts the focus onto our own righteousness and power.

How Corruption Manifests in the Movement

In the pro-life cause, this spiritual corruption can be seen in actions that betray the very principles the movement claims to uphold. Consider how laws are enacted without regard for the complexities of women’s lives, ignoring the cries of those in desperate situations. When compassion and accompaniment are replaced with legalism and judgment, the evil spirit’s influence becomes clear.

This is not to say that the fight for the unborn is wrong—it is noble. But when the effort to protect life results in policies that disregard the needs of the vulnerable mothers who carry those lives, it becomes a shadow of the ideal. The evil spirit is at work here, twisting a good intention into an instrument of harm, just as Ignatius warns.

The Way Forward

How do we resist this subtle corruption? Ignatius would direct us back to Christ himself. Jesus, who cherished the dignity of all life, never enforced his teachings with cruelty or coercion. His way was one of mercy and accompaniment. He dined with sinners, healed the outcast, and showed unwavering compassion even to those who opposed him.

For the pro-life movement—and for all of us in any moral struggle—the call is to imitate Christ’s love, which is never coercive but always invitational. Discernment requires us to ask: Is this action truly of God? Does it reflect the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? And to be clear, this must not be merely in our minds but in the real world by our actions and in others. If it does not, we must be willing to reevaluate, no matter how noble the cause.

Recognizing the Evil Spirit in Our Midst

The evil spirit thrives in division, pride, and fear. It whispers that compromise is weakness and that love is insufficient. But Christ shows us that true power lies in humility, and true victory is won through love, not domination. For those of us trained in Ignatian spirituality, the call is to remain vigilant, discerning not only the good from the bad but also the good from the counterfeit.

The pro-life movement, like any human endeavor, is susceptible to the cunning of the evil spirit. Its noblest ideals can be corrupted when we lose sight of Christ’s example. We must remain anchored in prayer and discernment, striving always to express God’s love—not our own righteousness. For in the end, it is only by walking humbly with God that we can do what we were born to do: God’s will.

My Zwift Setup

It can difficult and confusing to figure out how to set yourself up with Zwift. My hope is this will clear some of that up.

Because Zwift has a plethora of configurations it is compatible with on setting up your own pain cave, it can be really hard to figure out how to get things working. It was often confusing for me to nail down details and design a cost-effective setup. As you can see, my pain cave is not that large, but it took time, a fair bit of research and a bit of luck to get the setup to where my wife and I think it’s perfect for us. I hope taking look will give you some ideas about your eventual setup! Ride on!

The Basics

  • Wahoo Kickr Snap smart trainer
  • Wahoo Kickr Headwind smart fan
  • Trek FX 2 Disc fitness bike
  • Schwalbe 700c x 35 indoor trainer tire
  • Front wheel block (included with Kickr)
  • TV/Monitor stand
  • Insignia 32″ HD TV
  • Apple TV HD with Zwift app

The Why

My FX 2 hybrid is classified as a “fitness bike” which is perfect for Zwifting. (My wife has a Trek Verve 2 comfort hybrid.) Because it’s a smart trainer, Zwift can control my Kickr Snap to accurately simulate climbs and descents as well set the resistance for workouts, esp. in ERG mode. To keep from overheating, I picked up the Headwind smart fan which adjusts fan speed automatically based on my speed or heart rate. (WARNING: Overheating can become a real safety issue. For your own safety, always use a fan with Zwift.) I had to get the training tire because both the trainer and my original rear tire were damaging each other! The roller was literally wearing the rubber away like a pencil eraser and the road debris jammed in the tire tread with marring the roller. The rubber compound in the blue training tire fixed both problems. (WARNING: Never ride a training tire outdoors! That’s an accident waiting to happen.) Because I have 50-year-old eyes, I run Zwift on a somewhat older Apple TV connected to a flatscreen. I need the bigness! 邏

The Quality of Life Stuff

  • Apple Remote case with wrist strap
  • Apple AirPod Pros
  • Phone mount
  • Zwift Companion app on my iPhone and Apple Watch
  • Yoga mat
  • Rock Bros. bike thong
  • Tommaso commuter shoes with SPD cleats
  • Bontrager commuter pedals
  • Specialized BG Grail gloves

The Why

With the Zwift app running on the Apple TV, the remote case keeps the remote attached to my wrist and the AirPods gives me the best in-game sound experience possible. I run the Zwift Companion app on my phone mounted to the handlebars. That app makes interacting with Zwift easier, allows me to message other Zwifters as I ride and connects the trainer, my bike’s cadence sensor and my Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor to Zwift. (Apple TVs have some Bluetooth limitations the Companion app gets us around.) The yoga mat and bike thong just keep things clean and sweat from destroying my bike’s finish or the carpet.

I use gloves with padding in the palm to reduce the sweat and discomfort from holding onto a flat bar for long time. I clip in on Zwift to maximize power and to train for when I use my road bike. The commuter pedals give me the flexibility of having flat pedals for casual riding/stopping safety and clip-in pedals for power. The shoes have mountain bike/gravel bike oriented SPD cleats that work well with the pedals.

The Extra

  • Bontrager Connection aluminum wheel
  • Shimano 11-28 rear cassette
  • Disc brake pad spacer (in my hand)

The Why

I got these items because my wife and I both Zwift on different hybrids. The third wheel and cassette however can be used by both bikes. Finally, braking can seriously damage a wheel-on trainer. That’s why there is no disc brake rotor on that wheel. The brake pad spacer keeps the brake pads from sticking together if one of us accidentally squeezes the brakes.

So there you have it. I hope this post was informative and you have the info you need to get you’re own setup going!

What is ERG Mode?

ERG mode effectively turns your bike attached to a smart trainer into an exercise machine you would use in a gym.

When I was brand new to Zwift and started experimenting with the workouts, I noticed a little setting that was checked called ERG Mode. I left it on not really knowing what it was. If you are like I once was, this post will attempt to explain.

ERG mode effectively turns your bike attached to a smart trainer into an exercise machine you would use in a gym. No changing your gears. No worrying about the terrain in the game. You just pedal and Zwift will have your trainer force you to output the required power target during the workout and, this is key, no matter how fast or slow you pedal or what gear your bike is in.

This is where I screwed up in the past and I’ve seen friends new to Zwift doing the same. During my workouts, I would shift gears and/or pedal faster or slower (adjust cadence) depending on the power target. I’d be struggling to keep consistent. It was a mess. Essentially, I was in a tug-of-war with Zwift and frankly mislead by the on-screen prompts. (With ERG mode on, the game should be prompting people to pedal at a certain cadence, but that’s a discussion for another day.) Once I understood what ERG mode does, I stopped trying to meet the power target and focused solely on keeping my cadence as smooth as possible.

Take a look at the time line below from a Sweet Spot Training session. The SST target is to work at near your Functional Threshold Power. You can see my power output in black and my cadence in blue on the graph. Notice the relatively steady cadence around 90 rpm and yet my power changes for each interval. That’s because Zwift was adjusting my trainer’s resistance to match my cadence and set my power output to the target.

Zwift Ride Timeline
This is a timeline from a Sweet Spot Training workout. Notice the steady cadence.

This is why ERG mode is so cool. You get exactly the workout you expect from Zwift. You’re not shifting gears or trying to find the right cadence at a specific gear to get to the power target. You focus simply on managing your cadence and getting through the suffering! 🤣 Maximum efficiency workout for your precious time!

Sea Gull Century 2022

First Sea Gull Century and had an awesome time.

Savor the Blessings on Two Wheels

Please savor the blessings you have on those two wheels and life in general. They’re gifts.

Recently riding in FL, I met a man named Jaime (IIRC) who really showed me how blessed we are especially on two wheels. I was coming off my first 20 miles touring Tampa Bay and stopped at WaWa to get my nutrition and hydration and rest. Jaime sat at the table next to me and we struck up a conversation, laughing at a cock and hen (!) just hanging out with us. He looked like most who have had a hard life in FL. Scars, leathery wrinkled deeply tanned skin, dirty feet and hands, etc. He told me some crazy stories. Going down an overpass at 50 mph, cracking wheels in half and such. His MTB had seen better days. Was missing a pedal in fact.

But he spoke casually just relating to me as a cyclist and I tried to return the favor. As I was leaving I told Jamie it was really nice to meet him. As I pedaled away, I felt really grateful to God that I was blessed to be able to go on an all day ride on a nice bike, all kitted up with no care in the world (right then) but making sure I had nutrition and hydration for the next 20 miles. Jamie had far larger concerns when he rides. I have been admonished by cycling friends to remember this.

Please savor the blessings you have on those two wheels and life in general. They’re gifts.