Sharing the insights I've had over the years.
Joined April 2024
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Michael Cluney retweeted
THIS IS THE HEALING THAT TRANSCENDS HISTORY
So many of us walk through life with unhealed stories about “mother” or “father,” about what they did or did not do, about how they failed to see us or hold us or meet the parts of us that were aching to be known.
But if healing is what we truly seek, then we must dare to step beyond the familiar narrative of parent and child and look deeper into the essence of what actually unfolded.
The labels “mom” and “dad” are powerful archetypes, and they carry immense emotional weight. They bind us to certain expectations, to ideas of how things should have been. Yet those labels also obscure the deeper truth: before they were “mother” or “father,” they were simply human beings, shaped by forces they never chose and carrying pain they never resolved. And if we are to free ourselves, we must be willing to see them as such.
So take a moment and strip away the titles. See her not as “mom,” but as Sally. See him not as “dad,” but as Robert. Say their names, and in doing so, watch the illusion of authority and blame soften. Look at them not as the towering figures of your childhood, but as the tender, frightened, confused children they once were, and in many ways, still are.
They too were born into someone else’s story, shaped by someone else’s conditioning, doing their best with the limited awareness they had. They inherited belief systems, fears, and coping mechanisms long before they ever met you. Most of the wounds they passed on were not acts of malice, but echoes of their own unmet needs.
This is not to excuse harmful behavior, but to illuminate the truth: their actions were never truly about you. They were projections of their own unresolved suffering, replaying itself unconsciously through the generations.
When we begin to see our parents through this lens, something extraordinary happens. The weight of resentment starts to loosen its grip, and the story of victimhood that once defined us begins to dissolve. We see, perhaps for the first time, that no one was to blame. Not them, not us.
Everyone was acting from the confines of their conditioning, from the small, often fearful mind that was trying desperately to protect itself. And within that understanding, forgiveness ceases to be a moral obligation or a spiritual task. It becomes the natural byproduct of awareness. We do not have to force it. It arises organically when we realize that there was never anyone to forgive in the first place, only unconsciousness acting itself out.
This is the profound liberation that unfolds when we stop relating to our parents as the mythical figures who “should have known better” and start seeing them as fallible, wounded humans navigating their own journey of inherited pain.
The narrative shifts from “They hurt me” to “They too were hurting.” And in that moment, the entire framework of blame collapses. What remains is compassion, not just for them, but for yourself. Because the resentment you have been carrying was never just toward them; it was toward the younger version of you who felt powerless, unseen, or unloved.
By releasing the story of fault, you free that younger self from the burden of needing an apology that may never come. You reclaim the authority to define who you are now, independent of what they could or could not give.
And something miraculous happens inside of you when this shift occurs. The heart, once armored by anger and betrayal, begins to open again. The nervous system, long trapped in a defensive posture, starts to relax. The story of “what happened” loses its emotional charge, and in its place emerges a deep peace, a peace born not of forgetfulness, but of profound understanding.
This is the healing that transcends history. It does not rewrite the past, but it releases you from being its prisoner. And in doing so, it allows you to love them not as the parents you once wished they were, but as the humans they have always been. It allows you to love yourself not as the child who was hurt, but as the being who is now free.
✨🙌🏾💫
Michael Cluney retweeted
This is how Christianity failed.
Believers see Christianity as revealed truth, but whether you believe or not, religion serves an earthly purpose, and that purpose is to hold civilization and the family together.
Understand this — we can argue all day about whether a creator god exists. You think yes, I think no, we debate.
But that debate is inconsequential. It's just the high-IQ equivalent of a pick-up game of basketball. Because it's not important what you believe... it's important what your beliefs make you do.
For over a thousand years, Christianity held the family together by tying sex to family responsibility, through marriage.
And for over a thousand years, Christianity held civilization together by tying marriage to male productivity and prosocial behavior.
These two links forged a chain that ran directly from "building civilization" to "getting laid".
Men who helped civilization along got laid. Men who didn't, didn't. This supported civilization in two ways. First, in the individual lives of men, it was motivational. Men worked hard and did useful things because that was how you got a pretty wife who was nice to you. Second, across generations, it was eugenic. Anti-civilizational men didn't get to have as many children.
That's how Christianity helped build civilization in the West.
Now, any religion could have done this, so long as it had certain traits. And in other places and times, other religions did do this. But in the West, it was Christianity in particular that did this job.
So why is the non-believer praising Christianity? Because I'm a non-believer, not an angry reddit church-hater. I'm interested in what's actually going on. If Christianity does a good thing, I'm going to say so.
Unfortunately, the praise stops here, because the reverse is also true. We have to fearlessly look at where Christianity failed, and why it no longer serves the civilization and family preserving functions that it once did.
Having created these two causal links:
"If you get married, you can have all the sex you want."
and
"If you work hard and do the right thing, you can marry a desirable woman."
... Christianity's responsibility was to preserve them.
The driving force behind civilization wasn't religious zeal. It was always the male libido.
(And yes, later, also love for your children. But that's a different topic for another day.)
So long as these two things remained true, the powerful engine of male libido would continue to pull the train of civilization.
The responsibility of Christianity, as an earthly institution, was to make sure these two things remained true forever, regardless of what changes technology wrought.
It failed.
Christianity failed to preserve the second link in its chain. Here's how and why.
In any agrarian society, from the neolithic era to early America, a teenage boy is functionally a man. He can do farm labor, he can fight wars, he can serve an apprenticeship and become a craftsman.
So if he wants sex, and what teenager doesn't, he can get married. Because he is a productive, respected member of the community, and all the women are socialized to want exactly that.
This is no longer true.
Christianity failed to defend marriage, because it thought "defending marriage" meant lecturing young people about getting married, instead of making sure they could.
Christianity sat by while women entered the workforce and earned as much as men. It sat by while women amassed more political power, social status, and respect than men.
When this happens, men can't marry, because women are genetically programmed to marry up.
Not down.
Not across.
Up.
If the average woman regards the average man as her equal, weddings are going to become increasingly rare. And the average Western woman does not regard the average man as her equal. She regards him as her inferior. She is egged on in this by every Hollywood movie, every show on television, every book in the bookstore, every story in the newspaper, every speech by every politician, on both sides of the aisle.
Christianity failed to stop this.
Worse yet, Christianity allowed the age where a man could even afford to marry to increase from 15 to 20 to 25 to 30.
With enough lectures and social pressure, you can stop teenagers from having sex until they are 15. In strict religious communities full of zeal, you might even hold some of them back until 18 or 20.
But if dudes can't afford a home or a wife until 30 or 35, what the hell do you expect them to do? Of course they're going to fornicate.
But Christianity did nothing about this either, because that would have meant taking on people with serious economic and institutional power, the scribes and Pharisees of our day.
It was much easier to lecture young people, because young people don't have any power.
So the Christians fought a culture war with the left, a war of condom-based sex education versus abstinence-only sex education, over who was better at preventing "teen pregnancy".
And no one stood up and shouted the obvious truth, like this:
"Teenage girls are supposed to get pregnant, you fucking noodle! What the hell do you think they get horny for?"
Nature, or god if you like, programmed teenagers to be horny so that you can have more humans. The command is right there in the bible "Be fruitful and multiply."
But somehow Christianity, the earthly institution, twisted this into "keep it in your pants".
No religion can fight human genetic programming and win.
It's not supposed to. It's supposed to work with that programming, not fight it. It's supposed to channel those instincts into healthy ways of life, not suppress them.
But lectures were easier.
Christianity forgot that traffic laws are not a highway. You cannot drive on a lecture about traffic safety and get to where you are going. You have to actually maintain a fucking road.
The path forward for young men's sexual urges no longer runs through work, marriage, and children. It runs though pickup artistry and looksmaxxing and hookup culture.
Christianity is perfectly willing to take on all of these things, but it is unwilling to pick a fight with the real political, economic, and institutional powers that gave rise to them.
This is why young people abandoned the church in droves, generations ago. Churches simply no longer had answers to the problems that they really had, and the needs they really felt.
Now they're all on reddit making edgy posts about how god is a monster, but that's only what they think they mean.
What they actually mean is that the church failed them.
Michael Cluney retweeted
Someone once asked me:
“It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
But how does the warrior stay a warrior when life becomes peaceful?”
I thought about that for a while.
And I think the question may be backwards.
A warrior in a garden does not spend every morning proving that he is still a warrior.
He tends the garden.
He protects what has grown there.
He fixes what is broken.
He teaches the young.
He does the difficult things nobody sees.
And when the people he loves can sleep without fear, he does not wonder whether he has become weak.
That was the point.
Perhaps peace does not mean the warrior has lost his purpose.
Perhaps peace is what all that training was for.
We spend so much of our lives asking:
Am I still strong?
Am I still useful?
Am I still respected?
Do I still matter?
Maybe those are the wrong questions.
Look at what is under your protection.
Is your family safe?
Are the people around you stronger because you are there?
Did you do what needed to be done today, even when nobody was watching?
Then the warrior is still there.
A sword is not valuable because it is always drawn.
Sometimes its highest purpose is making sure it never needs to be.
Take care of your garden.
That may be the greatest battle you ever win.
Michael Cluney retweeted
The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real.
1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.
2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after.
3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state.
4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging.
5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design.
6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.
7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.
The French knights at Crécy and Agincourt were full of honor and panache.
Beautiful horses, beautiful armor, beautiful feathers – formidable. Magnificent.
The English were efficient.
Guess who won?
The longbowman was a peasant. No noble blood, no chivalric code, no magnificent plumes. He trained every Sunday by royal decree until he could put an arrow through armor at two hundred yards. He was not impressive to look at. He was devastating to face.
The French knights found it offensive. To be killed by a commoner with a stick and a string – it violated the entire aesthetic of war. They charged anyway, because the code demanded it, because the horses were magnificent, because retreating was unthinkable for a man of honor. The arrows didn’t care about the code.
This is the oldest story in Western civilization, told every century in a different costume. The beautiful system versus the efficient one. The one that looks right versus the one that works. The French had the better uniforms at Crécy, at Agincourt, at Waterloo, and in 1940. The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a civilizational tendency – the preference for the magnificent gesture over the effective one, for the noble form over the brutal function.
The market is the longbow. Unglamorous, democratic, slightly disreputable in polite company – and devastating to any system that faces it while still believing that looking correct is the same as being right.
The arrow doesn’t care about your panache. It never did.
Michael Cluney retweeted
America turns 250 today.
Let me read back the resume.
We started by telling a king to pound sand, in writing.
By 1803 we bought half a continent from France for about four cents an acre.
We fought a war with ourselves and somehow stayed one country.
We strung a railroad across the entire thing.
We handed the world the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane in about thirty years flat.
Then a man named Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and made half the planet actually livable.
You are welcome, Texas. You are welcome, Dubai.
Twice the whole world caught fire, and twice we showed up and helped put it out.
We split the atom.
We put men on the moon in 1969.
Then we went back and hit golf balls up there, because why not.
We invented jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop, and the whole planet is still dancing to it.
We put a burger and fries on every corner of the earth.
We built rockets that fly themselves home and land standing straight up.
We flew a helicopter on Mars.
We launched a car into actual space and it is still out there cruising.
We also invented ranch dressing and somehow talked the entire world into putting it on pizza.
Priorities.
We even invented three of our own sports so we could win them.
Baseball, basketball, and football.
Real football, the kind with hands, because we named it and we are not taking corrections.
The rest of the planet can keep soccer, which is fine, we are hosting it in our backyard this summer anyway.
And yes, Canadian football exists, wider field, extra man, one fewer down, and we try very hard not to think about it.
Frankly it was generous of us to invent our own games.
If we put all that energy into soccer, nobody else would ever lift that trophy again.
We would win it so often they would just rename it the America’s Cup and hand us the keys.
You are welcome for the suspense.
And in 2026 we threw a birthday so big a German tourist live-tweeted our gas stations to 750,000 people.
Not every chapter was clean.
We argued, we stumbled, we fixed what we broke, and we kept building.
That is the whole trick.
Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still the loudest, brightest, most improbable experiment on the map.
Not bad for a country that started as a strongly worded letter to a king.
Happy birthday, America.
🦋
Michael Cluney retweeted
I am told that as a state representative this is the moment where I'm supposed to express my heartfelt condolences and then stand in solidarity with those on the other side of the aisle as we condemn political violence and stand unified as one people.
But we aren't "one people" are we?
The truth is we haven't been for some time now, and there is really no point in pretending anymore, if there ever was.
We are two very different peoples. We may occupy the same piece of geography, but that is where the similarities seem to abruptly end.
I convinced myself for a long time that whenever the left called me a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a fascist, a "threat to democracy" for even the most innocent of disagreements, that it was simply hyperbolic rhetoric done for effect.
And now the "effect" is a widow and two orphaned children, because the left couldn’t bear the thought of a peaceful man debating them and winning.
I don’t think they realize it yet, but murdering Charlie is going to be remembered as the day where we finally woke up to what this fight really is.
It’s not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another. One side will win, and one side will lose.
Charlie tried to win that fight through argumentation, through discussion, through peaceful resolution of differences.
And the other side murdered him.
Not because he was “extreme” or “inciting violence” or any other hyperbolic slur they hurled at him. They murdered him because he was effective. Because he was unafraid. Because he inspired others and made them feel like they had a voice, that they were not alone. And he did it at the very institutions which have fomented so much hatred toward conservatives.
I don’t want to “stand in solidarity” with the other side of the aisle. I want to defeat you. I want to defeat the godless ideology that kills babies in the womb, sterilizes confused children, turns our cities into cesspools of degeneracy and lawlessness…and that murdered Charlie Kirk.
Social media is aflame right now with leftist celebration of Charlie’s death.
I wonder if any among them understand what has just happened. If there is a Yamamoto somewhere in their midst warning, that all they have done is awoken a sleeping giant.
I doubt it. I think they gave up such introspection and self-awareness long ago.
I don’t know exactly what will happen next. I just know that it won’t be the same as what has happened in the past.
There will be thoughts and prayers…Charlie would have wanted prayers. Not for himself but for those left behind and for the country that he loved.
But then there will be a reckoning.
My Christian faith requires me to love my enemies and pray for those who curse me. It does not require me to stand idly by in the midst of savagery and barbarism...quite the opposite.
So every time I feel tired, every time I feel discouraged or overwhelmed, I am going to watch the video of a good man being murdered in Utah…I will force myself to watch it…and then I will return to the work of destroying the evil ideology responsible for that and so much more.
Rest with God Charlie, your fight is over.
Ours is just beginning.