Attorney & Lobbyist, Former NC Senator, UNC Board of Governors, Law Professor & USMC Officer. The Citadel, Golden Gate MBA & UNC Law School.
Wilmington, NC, USA
Joined May 2009
- Tweets8K
- Following99
- Followers1.3K
- Likes1.1K
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Stingy people stay small because they are always playing defense. Generous people grow because they are constantly planting seeds that return multiplied.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
A Palace in Time: How a Righteous Man Learns to Live
There is a particular exhaustion that settles on men who have done what the culture told them would make a life. The work is finished, the children are launched or nearly so, the accounts are in order, and yet the days feel thin. The phone lights up with the next demand. The calendar fills. Somewhere beneath the competence sits a question the ancient texts never let go: What is this for? Not the next project, but the man himself. Not achievement, but the shape of a life that can stand before God without shame and without frantic self-justification.
The Question Older Than Our Restlessness
Micah put it with unsettling clarity: “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). The verse does not offer a program. It offers a way of being. Justice is not an abstraction; it is the refusal to look away when the scales tip against the vulnerable.
Kindness—chesed—is the stubborn loyalty that keeps covenant when feelings cool. Humility is the posture of a man who knows he is not the author of his own story. Ecclesiastes ends on the same note: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).
The New Testament does not cancel the summons; it fulfills it in the person of Jesus and in the good works “which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). The righteous man is not inventing a mission. He is being fitted to one that already exists.
What the Sages Already Knew
Jewish wisdom has long insisted that this fitting is practical and daily. The sages of Pirkei Avot taught that the world stands on three things: Torah, divine service, and deeds of loving-kindness. Study without practice is incomplete; practice without study drifts. Rabbi Ishmael’s distinction still cuts: one who studies in order to teach is given the chance to teach; one who studies in order to do is given the chance to study, teach, observe, and act. The goal is not information but transformation.
Maimonides, in the opening of the Mishneh Torah, places knowledge of God at the foundation of everything else. Love of God grows from that knowledge, and the knowledge is never merely theoretical; it issues in a life ordered toward justice and mercy. Abraham Joshua Heschel sharpened the same insight for modern ears when he described the Sabbath not as an interlude from work but as a palace in time.
Six days we wrestle with the world of space; on the seventh we are invited to inhabit the mystery of creation itself. “The world has our hands,” Heschel wrote, “but our soul belongs to Someone Else.” A man who never learns to stop dominating his days will never discover what those days are for.
One Call, Many Voices
Christian theologians across the centuries have said the same thing in different keys. Augustine’s restless heart is not a romantic flourish; it is a diagnosis. We are made for God, and every lesser end leaves us unfinished. Thomas Aquinas located the end of human life in beatitude—the vision of God—and saw the moral virtues as the habits that clear the path.
The Reformers recovered the dignity of ordinary vocation: Luther insisted that the cobbler and the magistrate serve God as truly as the monk, because every honest work places a man among neighbors who need him. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that cheap grace dissolves the call into sentiment; costly discipleship takes the shape of concrete obedience. In the Orthodox tradition the aim is theosis—participation in the divine life—not by essence but by grace, grounded in the promise that we may become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
The Philokalia speaks of nepsis, watchfulness of the heart, and the unceasing Prayer of Jesus as the means by which the mind descends into the heart and stays there. The fathers insisted this path is not reserved for monastics; it is the vocation of every baptized person who refuses to live on the surface.
What unites these voices is the refusal to treat the days as raw material for self-invention. The righteous man does not first decide who he will be and then look for a God who will endorse the plan. He receives a life already spoken over, already prepared, and he learns to walk in it. The practical difference appears in ordinary hours.
Living the Commission in Ordinary Hours
Begin the day by placing the mind and heart under the text. Recite the Shema or a psalm before the notifications arrive. Let the words of Deuteronomy 6 or Psalm 1 or the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”) set the temperature of the morning. The point is not performance; it is orientation. A man who starts by remembering that he is not his own will spend the day less inclined to treat every interruption as a threat and every success as proof of his worth.
Treat the work itself as worship. Colossians 3:23 is not a motivational poster; it is a reorientation of desire. Whether the work is a trade, a profession, or the unglamorous labor of keeping a household and a community, it is offered “as to the Lord.” This does not baptize every job as holy in the same way; it simply refuses the split between sacred and secular that leaves most of life unclaimed. The sages were right that Torah without a livelihood collapses; the Reformers were right that livelihood without love of neighbor becomes mere accumulation. Do the work well, pay the people fairly, tell the truth in the meeting, and then leave it.
Guard the heart in the middle of the day. Proverbs 4:23 is not optional advice. The thoughts that are allowed to lodge—resentment, comparison, anxiety about tomorrow—shape the man who returns home. A brief pause at midday, even a single minute of the Prayer of Jesus or a remembered verse, interrupts the accumulation. Heschel’s insight about the Sabbath applies in miniature: the soul needs moments when it stops wringing profit from the earth and simply receives.
Keep the weekly rhythm of rest. The Sabbath is not a reward for productivity; it is the climax of the week. A man who never stops will eventually treat his family, his neighbors, and even God as extensions of his own projects. The Orthodox practice of watchfulness and the Catholic examen both train the same muscle: the capacity to notice what actually happened in the day rather than what one hoped or feared. At evening, name the places where justice was done or neglected, where kindness was given or withheld, where humility failed. Confess specifically. Give thanks specifically. The next morning will be different because the previous night was not left unexamined.
The Measures of Fruitfulness
Finally, measure fruitfulness by the three things the sages named and Micah summarized. Is there more justice in the circle one actually inhabits? Is there more stubborn kindness toward the people who cannot repay it? Is the walk with God quieter, less self-conscious, more ordinary? Peace does not arrive as the absence of trouble; it arrives as the alignment of a man’s days with the purposes that were already waiting for him. The mission is not discovered by looking harder at the self. It is received by walking, day after ordinary day, with the God who has already shown what is good.
If this essay encouraged you, please like and follow. And if you have a prayer request or a personal need, feel free to send us a DM. We would be honored to pray for you.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
How to Buy a Luxury Watch Without Financing the Story
Most of you do not want a Casio. You do not want a Timex. You certainly do not want a fake. Fair enough. A watch is one of the few pieces of jewelry a grown man can wear without explaining himself. Buy one. Just do not buy the story that comes with it.
The useful rule is not “buy what holds its value.” The useful rule is: buy something you can sell without getting skinned. That single constraint knocks out most of the ways these purchases go wrong. Rolex is the cleanest example, because it has the deepest secondary market and the most theatrical scarcity. The same logic applies, at smaller premiums, to Omega, Tudor, and the steel sports watches nobody is currently posting.
Rolex authorized dealers ration the steel sports models. The person who walks out with a Submariner or a GMT at retail has usually already bought the gold, the jewelry, or the slow-moving inventory the dealer actually needs to sell. If you do not have that relationship, “building purchase history” is not thrift. It is a deposit on an option the dealer is not obliged to exercise.
The models whose entire story is the markup are the expensive ones. Certain Daytonas, the green-bezel Submariner, the hot GMTs, whatever the current cycle is worshipping: you are paying for the queue. When the cycle cools, the premium compresses first. The watch can still be a good watch and still be a bad purchase relative to what you paid. Buy the reference you want at a price that does not require the next buyer to be more enthusiastic than you were.
The sensible secondary-market path is dull. Buy from a dealer who will put the return policy in writing, photograph the movement and the caseback, and take the watch back if an independent inspection fails. An established gray dealer with a store and a track record is usually less drama than a private seller with a good camera. Budget for a watchmaker who does not work for the seller. Case thickness, lug geometry, movement serials, polishing. Overpolished lugs and swapped parts are the classic loss. Papers that do not match the watch are the other one.
Prefer the references the hype machine has temporarily forgotten. Two-tone Datejusts, certain Explorers, older Submariners that are not the current bezel color, clean examples from the last decade that are not trending. They are still Rolexes. They still have a market. They do not require you to fund a story with an expiration date. Vintage works if you already know what you are looking at, or if you pay someone who does. It is a bad idea when “vintage” is doing the work of “cheap.”
Price the exit before you buy. Recent sold prices, not asking prices, same reference, similar condition. Subtract a realistic selling cost: dealer margin, platform fee, or the discount a private buyer will demand. A 15 to 25 percent haircut after fees is a normal outcome, not a disaster scenario. If the number you would actually receive makes the purchase incoherent, you are not buying a store of value. You are buying a consumption good at a premium. That is allowed. It is not allowed to pretend otherwise.
A simple filter: would you still want this exact watch if you knew you might sell it in two years for noticeably less than you paid? If no, walk. If yes, buy it from someone who will let an outside watchmaker look at it, and ignore anyone selling urgency.
The people who do this full time on 47th Street make money on turnover and information. Everyone else makes money by refusing to pay for the performance.
Up next, the replica experiment: the good, the bad, and the worthless.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Chapel Hill can debate the methodology. Burlington still has to open at 6. @WCHLChapelboro @wunc @jimszoke #WUNC #Labor #Workers #NCpolitics
xitter.cf/EatTheRichLib/status/2…
Oxfam Says NC Is the Worst State for Workers, Yet the Workers Keep Clocking In
Every Labor Day, as punctual as a union newsletter and twice as cheerful, Oxfam America announces from its Boston headquarters that North Carolina is the worst state in the country in which to hold a job. Seventh year. Score: 4.90 out of 100. California, of course, is first.
If you live here you may have missed it. You were at work.
They graded the statutes. They skipped the stub.
Oxfam does not rank how workers live. It ranks how legislators perform compassion. Thirty-seven labor policies, tallied like merit badges: wages, “protections,” the right to organize. North Carolina fails because the minimum wage is still the federal $7.25, because Raleigh does not compel paid family leave or a statewide heat rule or pumping-break language of the approved vintage, and because this is a right-to-work state that will not let public employees bargain as if the taxpayer were a vending machine. Organize column: zero. Zero is the score you get for declining to pass the laws Oxfam would pass.
That is not a measurement of paychecks. That is a measurement of piety.
$7.25 is a relic. The paycheck isn’t.
The statutory floor has sat at $7.25 since 2009, which sounds like a Dickens novel until you look at what people actually earn. Average hourly pay in North Carolina is north of $34. Average weekly wages run about $1,500. Try offering $7.25 in Charlotte or the Triangle and see how long the application stays on the table. Oxfam is grading the faded poster in the break room. The market tore that poster down years ago.
The state Oxfam would like us to imitate keeps winning the compassion ribbon and losing the help-wanted ads. California’s unemployment has been hanging around 5.1 percent. Ours has been in the mid-3s. People vote with U-Hauls. They do not rent a truck to escape a workers’ paradise. They rent one to find a job they can live near.
CNBC counted factories. Oxfam counted feelings.
CNBC, which has the bad manners to count payrolls instead of press releases, put North Carolina second in the country for business in 2026 and first for the economy. Workforce: third. Corporate tax: 2 percent. Individual income tax: a flat 3.99 percent. A state that makes it cheap to hire people tends to hire people. A state that makes it expensive tends to hire consultants to explain why the plant opened in Texas.
Oxfam’s answer is that a job without the correct benefits is not a job. It is exploitation with a time clock. All right. Then explain the magnet. Companies keep coming. Workers keep coming. Somebody in a garage keeps hiring a second guy instead of applying for a grant. That does not happen because North Carolina adopted the California Labor Code in secret. It happens because a firm can locate here without first retaining a priesthood of compliance officers.
Right-to-work is not a dungeon. It’s a door.
Right-to-work is the original sin in this sermon. The phrase gets translated as the boss’s right to work you into the dirt. It means a worker’s right not to pay a union as the price of the job. In Oxfam’s moral universe that is a 0.0. In a free country it is the difference between joining a club and being billed for the club whether you wanted the newsletter or not. Union density here is tiny. If the rank and file were pounding on the door Oxfam built, the density would not be tiny. Call it false consciousness if it helps you sleep. You can also call it a preference.
Paid leave is the same trick in a softer sweater. Nobody is for a sick kid going uncovered. The argument is who writes the check, and whether the person who writes it still has a reason to create the job. Mandate the benefit, fold it into every hire, then look surprised when the thin-margin shops — the ones that employ the people the report claims to champion — take fewer people, call them contractors, or skip the second location. Compassion that arrives as a statute still has to clear a cash register.
They are in the indignation business.
Oxfam is not a labor economist. It is a moral enterprise. The product is indignation with footnotes. An index that crowns California and buries North Carolina is doing the job it was built for: treat the pile-up of progressive labor law as the definition of decency, and treat actual employment as a rounding error. The outfit was founded to fight poverty. Fair. Poverty does not lose to a higher legal minimum that knocks the least skilled off the first rung. Poverty loses when there is a first rung.
North Carolina is not a workers’ utopia. Housing in the boom towns is too dear. A lot of rural counties are still waiting on the miracle. A frozen federal floor is a lazy talking point, and both sides use it. None of that makes Oxfam’s ranking a portrait of life here. It makes it a portrait of Oxfam. They have mistaken the state for a human-resources department and the worker for a client.
Workers keep showing up.
The free-market case is not that bosses are saints. Bosses are people with payrolls and a mortgage of their own. A job is a bargain between adults, not a sacrament administered from a headquarters in Boston. Low taxes, light-touch labor law, and the right to work without joining the choir do not wreck a state. They are why the state has an economy loud enough for Oxfam to hear it from Massachusetts.
If this is the worst place in America to work, the workers have an odd way of showing it. They keep showing up. They keep moving in. They keep taking the jobs that exist because somebody was allowed to offer them. Oxfam can keep the 4.90. They can hang it on the wall in Boston. We’ll keep the paychecks.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Oxfam Says NC Is the Worst State for Workers, Yet the Workers Keep Clocking In
Every Labor Day, as punctual as a union newsletter and twice as cheerful, Oxfam America announces from its Boston headquarters that North Carolina is the worst state in the country in which to hold a job. Seventh year. Score: 4.90 out of 100. California, of course, is first.
If you live here you may have missed it. You were at work.
They graded the statutes. They skipped the stub.
Oxfam does not rank how workers live. It ranks how legislators perform compassion. Thirty-seven labor policies, tallied like merit badges: wages, “protections,” the right to organize. North Carolina fails because the minimum wage is still the federal $7.25, because Raleigh does not compel paid family leave or a statewide heat rule or pumping-break language of the approved vintage, and because this is a right-to-work state that will not let public employees bargain as if the taxpayer were a vending machine. Organize column: zero. Zero is the score you get for declining to pass the laws Oxfam would pass.
That is not a measurement of paychecks. That is a measurement of piety.
$7.25 is a relic. The paycheck isn’t.
The statutory floor has sat at $7.25 since 2009, which sounds like a Dickens novel until you look at what people actually earn. Average hourly pay in North Carolina is north of $34. Average weekly wages run about $1,500. Try offering $7.25 in Charlotte or the Triangle and see how long the application stays on the table. Oxfam is grading the faded poster in the break room. The market tore that poster down years ago.
The state Oxfam would like us to imitate keeps winning the compassion ribbon and losing the help-wanted ads. California’s unemployment has been hanging around 5.1 percent. Ours has been in the mid-3s. People vote with U-Hauls. They do not rent a truck to escape a workers’ paradise. They rent one to find a job they can live near.
CNBC counted factories. Oxfam counted feelings.
CNBC, which has the bad manners to count payrolls instead of press releases, put North Carolina second in the country for business in 2026 and first for the economy. Workforce: third. Corporate tax: 2 percent. Individual income tax: a flat 3.99 percent. A state that makes it cheap to hire people tends to hire people. A state that makes it expensive tends to hire consultants to explain why the plant opened in Texas.
Oxfam’s answer is that a job without the correct benefits is not a job. It is exploitation with a time clock. All right. Then explain the magnet. Companies keep coming. Workers keep coming. Somebody in a garage keeps hiring a second guy instead of applying for a grant. That does not happen because North Carolina adopted the California Labor Code in secret. It happens because a firm can locate here without first retaining a priesthood of compliance officers.
Right-to-work is not a dungeon. It’s a door.
Right-to-work is the original sin in this sermon. The phrase gets translated as the boss’s right to work you into the dirt. It means a worker’s right not to pay a union as the price of the job. In Oxfam’s moral universe that is a 0.0. In a free country it is the difference between joining a club and being billed for the club whether you wanted the newsletter or not. Union density here is tiny. If the rank and file were pounding on the door Oxfam built, the density would not be tiny. Call it false consciousness if it helps you sleep. You can also call it a preference.
Paid leave is the same trick in a softer sweater. Nobody is for a sick kid going uncovered. The argument is who writes the check, and whether the person who writes it still has a reason to create the job. Mandate the benefit, fold it into every hire, then look surprised when the thin-margin shops — the ones that employ the people the report claims to champion — take fewer people, call them contractors, or skip the second location. Compassion that arrives as a statute still has to clear a cash register.
They are in the indignation business.
Oxfam is not a labor economist. It is a moral enterprise. The product is indignation with footnotes. An index that crowns California and buries North Carolina is doing the job it was built for: treat the pile-up of progressive labor law as the definition of decency, and treat actual employment as a rounding error. The outfit was founded to fight poverty. Fair. Poverty does not lose to a higher legal minimum that knocks the least skilled off the first rung. Poverty loses when there is a first rung.
North Carolina is not a workers’ utopia. Housing in the boom towns is too dear. A lot of rural counties are still waiting on the miracle. A frozen federal floor is a lazy talking point, and both sides use it. None of that makes Oxfam’s ranking a portrait of life here. It makes it a portrait of Oxfam. They have mistaken the state for a human-resources department and the worker for a client.
Workers keep showing up.
The free-market case is not that bosses are saints. Bosses are people with payrolls and a mortgage of their own. A job is a bargain between adults, not a sacrament administered from a headquarters in Boston. Low taxes, light-touch labor law, and the right to work without joining the choir do not wreck a state. They are why the state has an economy loud enough for Oxfam to hear it from Massachusetts.
If this is the worst place in America to work, the workers have an odd way of showing it. They keep showing up. They keep moving in. They keep taking the jobs that exist because somebody was allowed to offer them. Oxfam can keep the 4.90. They can hang it on the wall in Boston. We’ll keep the paychecks.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
4.90/100. Seventh straight year. Same sermon from the same zip code. Somebody tell the third shift. @newsradio570 @MarkGarrisonWBT @KCOnTheRadio #NCPol #Raleigh #Oxfam #Jobs
xitter.cf/EatTheRichLib/status/2…
Oxfam Says NC Is the Worst State for Workers, Yet the Workers Keep Clocking In
Every Labor Day, as punctual as a union newsletter and twice as cheerful, Oxfam America announces from its Boston headquarters that North Carolina is the worst state in the country in which to hold a job. Seventh year. Score: 4.90 out of 100. California, of course, is first.
If you live here you may have missed it. You were at work.
They graded the statutes. They skipped the stub.
Oxfam does not rank how workers live. It ranks how legislators perform compassion. Thirty-seven labor policies, tallied like merit badges: wages, “protections,” the right to organize. North Carolina fails because the minimum wage is still the federal $7.25, because Raleigh does not compel paid family leave or a statewide heat rule or pumping-break language of the approved vintage, and because this is a right-to-work state that will not let public employees bargain as if the taxpayer were a vending machine. Organize column: zero. Zero is the score you get for declining to pass the laws Oxfam would pass.
That is not a measurement of paychecks. That is a measurement of piety.
$7.25 is a relic. The paycheck isn’t.
The statutory floor has sat at $7.25 since 2009, which sounds like a Dickens novel until you look at what people actually earn. Average hourly pay in North Carolina is north of $34. Average weekly wages run about $1,500. Try offering $7.25 in Charlotte or the Triangle and see how long the application stays on the table. Oxfam is grading the faded poster in the break room. The market tore that poster down years ago.
The state Oxfam would like us to imitate keeps winning the compassion ribbon and losing the help-wanted ads. California’s unemployment has been hanging around 5.1 percent. Ours has been in the mid-3s. People vote with U-Hauls. They do not rent a truck to escape a workers’ paradise. They rent one to find a job they can live near.
CNBC counted factories. Oxfam counted feelings.
CNBC, which has the bad manners to count payrolls instead of press releases, put North Carolina second in the country for business in 2026 and first for the economy. Workforce: third. Corporate tax: 2 percent. Individual income tax: a flat 3.99 percent. A state that makes it cheap to hire people tends to hire people. A state that makes it expensive tends to hire consultants to explain why the plant opened in Texas.
Oxfam’s answer is that a job without the correct benefits is not a job. It is exploitation with a time clock. All right. Then explain the magnet. Companies keep coming. Workers keep coming. Somebody in a garage keeps hiring a second guy instead of applying for a grant. That does not happen because North Carolina adopted the California Labor Code in secret. It happens because a firm can locate here without first retaining a priesthood of compliance officers.
Right-to-work is not a dungeon. It’s a door.
Right-to-work is the original sin in this sermon. The phrase gets translated as the boss’s right to work you into the dirt. It means a worker’s right not to pay a union as the price of the job. In Oxfam’s moral universe that is a 0.0. In a free country it is the difference between joining a club and being billed for the club whether you wanted the newsletter or not. Union density here is tiny. If the rank and file were pounding on the door Oxfam built, the density would not be tiny. Call it false consciousness if it helps you sleep. You can also call it a preference.
Paid leave is the same trick in a softer sweater. Nobody is for a sick kid going uncovered. The argument is who writes the check, and whether the person who writes it still has a reason to create the job. Mandate the benefit, fold it into every hire, then look surprised when the thin-margin shops — the ones that employ the people the report claims to champion — take fewer people, call them contractors, or skip the second location. Compassion that arrives as a statute still has to clear a cash register.
They are in the indignation business.
Oxfam is not a labor economist. It is a moral enterprise. The product is indignation with footnotes. An index that crowns California and buries North Carolina is doing the job it was built for: treat the pile-up of progressive labor law as the definition of decency, and treat actual employment as a rounding error. The outfit was founded to fight poverty. Fair. Poverty does not lose to a higher legal minimum that knocks the least skilled off the first rung. Poverty loses when there is a first rung.
North Carolina is not a workers’ utopia. Housing in the boom towns is too dear. A lot of rural counties are still waiting on the miracle. A frozen federal floor is a lazy talking point, and both sides use it. None of that makes Oxfam’s ranking a portrait of life here. It makes it a portrait of Oxfam. They have mistaken the state for a human-resources department and the worker for a client.
Workers keep showing up.
The free-market case is not that bosses are saints. Bosses are people with payrolls and a mortgage of their own. A job is a bargain between adults, not a sacrament administered from a headquarters in Boston. Low taxes, light-touch labor law, and the right to work without joining the choir do not wreck a state. They are why the state has an economy loud enough for Oxfam to hear it from Massachusetts.
If this is the worst place in America to work, the workers have an odd way of showing it. They keep showing up. They keep moving in. They keep taking the jobs that exist because somebody was allowed to offer them. Oxfam can keep the 4.90. They can hang it on the wall in Boston. We’ll keep the paychecks.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
The Mountain the Stoic Cannot Climb
The hill is this: a man who cannot govern himself will be governed by everything else. Appetite will run him. Rage will run him. The crowd will run him. Marcus Aurelius wrote as a man trying not to come apart in a palace full of flatterers and death. Epictetus told the student that no one can steal the inner choice. Seneca said the wise man carries his goods inside. That is not nonsense. Scripture is not embarrassed by self-control. “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls” (Proverbs 25:28). Paul names enkrateia—self-control—as fruit of the Spirit, not as a pagan accessory (Galatians 5:23).
The mountain they miss is love. Not the mood. Not the brand. The kind that leaves the fortress, takes a towel, washes the feet of men who will run, and dies.
The third of the kingdom laws is the soil under every other law. Sow without love and you get a transaction. Believe without love and you get a rigid religion. Speak without love and you get a weapon. Give without love and you get a performance. Pray without love and you get noise. Paul is almost rude about it. You may have tongues, mysteries, mountain-moving faith, an emptied bank account, even a body handed over to the flames—“but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1–3). Faith, left alone, can still leave a man a zero. Love is not the decoration on the system. It is the system’s life.
The hill the old school actually climbed
The Stoic saw that passion, ungoverned, makes a slave. He saw that you cannot command the weather, the emperor, or other people’s applause. He trained apatheia—not cartoon numbness, but the refusal to let a passing impression become a tyrant. He taught that we are made for one another in widening circles: household, city, human race. Marcus could write that we are made for cooperation, like feet and hands. That is a moral seriousness our age of branded feelings does not deserve to mock.
Christian faith does not need the Stoic to be a fool in order for Jesus to be Lord. A man who will not master his mouth will not become holy by quoting 1 Corinthians 13. Love that never says no to itself is not love. It is appetite with a hymn.
The limit is the object, and then the cost.
The Stoic’s best self is a self that cannot be taken. His sufficiency is inside the walls. His reverence, when he has it, is for the rationality of the whole. He may be just. He may be brave. He may even be kind, in the way a well-built wall is kind: it does not collapse on you. What he will not do, if he is consistent, is need. Need would mean the citadel has a door. A door is a place you can be wounded.
What Jesus refuses to call strength
Jesus does not say, “Never let them see you bleed.” He says, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Then He does it. Before that He ties a towel around His waist and washes the feet of men who will scatter (John 13:1–15). The Stoic ideal is a soul that remains intact. The Christian confession is a Lord who will not refuse to be wounded.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself” (Philippians 2:5–7). That emptying—kenosis—is not the loss of power. It is power that refuses to spend itself on self-protection. The mountain is not that we should feel more. The mountain is that the Lord of the universe defines greatness as a basin and a cross.
Paul’s other sentence is the one the citadel cannot absorb: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Stoic sufficiency is the trained self. Christian sufficiency is a Person. “Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5). The first produces impressive men. The second produces men who can be broken for someone else without coming to pieces, because they were never holding themselves together in the first place.
Love is not a private temperature
The Shema will not let Israel treat love as a preference. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The neighbor command sits beside it: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). Jesus does not invent a softer religion when He says the Law and the Prophets hang on these two (Matthew 22:37–40). He tells the truth about the grain of the world God made. Hosea has already said God wants mercy—hesed—and not sacrifice as a substitute for it (Hosea 6:6). Hesed is not a feeling you wait to have. It is pledged loyalty that stays.
The sages knew the difference between saying God exists and loving Him. Maimonides treats the love of God as a knowledge that draws the whole person, not a slogan. The rabbis argue about ahavah and yirah—love and fear—because reverence without love goes cold, and love without reverence goes cheap. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks used to press a related point: covenant is not contract. A contract protects your interest. A covenant gives you away.
That is why “God is love” (1 John 4:8) is not a line for a wedding program. It is a claim about the inner life of God. The Orthodox have said you cannot start with an isolated self and then add charity as a hobby. Love is communion. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not a committee that learned to get along. They are gift. The man who builds a fortress against being touched is practicing, without knowing it, another doctrine of God.
Augustine saw the fork. “Love, and do what you will,” he preached—not as permission to indulge, but as the discovery that a rightly ordered love becomes the law inside the bones. He also knew the disorder: we love the gift and use the Giver. Thomas Aquinas called charity friendship with God, a theological virtue you do not manufacture any more than you manufacture sunlight. You receive it. Then it starts moving the furniture. John Paul II kept saying the human person is only understood in the gift of self. That is not therapy. That is Genesis. It is not good for the man to be alone, and it is not good for him to be sufficient unto himself.
Luther had no patience for a love that earned points, and still knew that faith is not a private warmth. Faith is active in love (Galatians 5:6). Calvin would not let love melt into sentiment. It is the grateful answering of grace. John Wesley feared a holiness that never reached the poor. C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, warned that Need-love can wear charity’s clothes, and that Gift-love is the one that looks like the Cross. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would not let community become a citadel of the like-minded. In Life Together the other person is not an interruption of your peace. The other person is where Christ has chosen to meet you.
Love is not the Christian upgrade of self-mastery. Love is the end of the project of being unhurtable.
Strength spent on another’s good
A certain kind of man hears “love” and reaches for the door. He thinks it means softness, vagueness, the surrender of judgment. Scripture will not grant him that excuse. Love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). Love tells the truth. Love also “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). That endurance is not Stoic indifference. It is the refusal to quit on a person.
Provision without presence is not the same thing. You can fund a house and starve a marriage. You can pay for a childhood and never get on the floor. You can have companions for the joke and no one for the confession. “Iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17) only happens when two lives actually touch. The citadel calls that risk. The gospel calls it the shape of the kingdom.
“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). You do not start the river. You receive it. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The Stoic must generate his calm from the ruling faculty. The Christian is first a beloved, then a lover. That order matters. A man who has never been loved by God will try to perform love as another form of mastery, and the people nearest him will feel the act.
Paul can therefore say a thing no citadel would choose: “I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Corinthians 12:15). And Christ, “who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20), is not a mascot for the optimized life. He is the end of the optimized life.
The preposition that is the gospel
Here is the contrast without the sneer.
Stoicism says: master yourself; keep the inner room intact; do not hand your peace to anyone. It can produce dignity under a lash. It can teach a man not to whimper. That is a hill worth seeing.
Jesus says: die to yourself; let your heart be broken so someone else can be whole; find your sufficiency not in the unbroken room but in Him. “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). The words through him are the whole difference. The conqueror is not the man who cannot be touched. The conqueror is the man who has already been claimed.
The mountain is Calvary. You cannot climb it by improving your impressions. You can only be taken there by a love that got there first. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The Stoic sage, at his best, dies without panic. The Son of God dies for. That preposition is the gospel.
If your soil has gone hard—bitter, efficient, impressive, alone—the answer is not a better fortress. It is to be loved again, and then to spend what you cannot spare. Not because you are sufficient. Because He is.
Name the place love has gone missing. Marriage. Children. The friend you only know at the surface. The person beneath you on the chart. The God you have tried to admire without needing. You will not manufacture what is absent. Ask for it. Receive it. Then lay something down that the citadel would have kept.
The Stoic can teach you not to come apart. Only Love Himself can teach you how to be poured out and still be held.
If this essay encouraged you, please like and follow. And if you have a prayer request or a personal need, feel free to send us a DM. We would be honored to pray for you.
NC patients have seen rising healthcare costs for years, but change could come with the USTRx Act and Every Dollar Counts Act! Thank you @SenatorBudd and @GregMurphyMD for your efforts to bring real relief to patients at the pharmacy. mydailyrecord.com/opinion/re…
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
God is not impressed by how much of your life you can command. He is not moved by the 5 a.m. Club. He is moved by trust. That trust is not the mood after a good song. It is the decision to keep sowing when the field still looks like dirt.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Your taxes are insufficient. Government is not quite big enough. A few more bureaucrats and a slightly larger slice of your paycheck will do the trick. Utopia, it turns out, is just around the corner!
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Josh Stein signed a $34 billion budget and lost 84 appointments. ProPublica already called the NC governor the nation’s weakest. The General Assembly took the car keys and left him the cupholder. Read it.
@SenBergerPress @DestinHall @NCGOP
#ncpol #NCGA #NCBudget #NCGOP
xitter.cf/EatTheRichLib/status/2…
The Legislature Took the Keys & Left Stein the Cupholder
Governor Josh Stein is not a tall man. Now he’s shorter.
A $34 billion signature and a 73 percent haircut
Stein signed a $34 billion budget that pays teachers and cops, patches Helene’s wreckage, cuts the income tax a notch, and, as a bonus prize, vacuums another eighty-odd appointment slots into the General Assembly’s glove box.
An analysis by Western Carolina’s Chris Cooper put the hit at 84 of 115 appointments across 13 boards — a 73 percent haircut. Banking Commission. Historical Commission. Agriculture. Real Estate. Industrial Commission. Arts Council. Lottery. The sort of bodies that decide who gets a license, who gets a grant, and who gets to pretend the state is being run by grown-ups.
Stein called the power-stripping “unconstitutional and petty.” He also called it “small.” He signed anyway. Enough of his own Democrats had already voted for the thing. A veto would have been a press release followed by an override. In North Carolina that is not a threat. That is the weather forecast.
Dead last, and not by accident
ProPublica already declared the North Carolina governor the weakest in the country. The old political-science textbooks had us third from the bottom. By 2024 we had lapped the field and were running unopposed for last place. The legislature took the steering wheel, the radio, and the map. Stein got the cupholder and a commemorative pen.
This is not a sudden personality defect in the GOP. It is the family business.
North Carolina designed a feeble chief executive on purpose. After we ran the last royal governor out of Wilmington, the 1776 constitution made the legislature pick the governor for one-year terms and gave him roughly the authority of a well-dressed town crier. Popular election arrived in 1835. A four-year term arrived after the Civil War. The veto — that modest American habit of saying “maybe not” — did not arrive until 1996. We were the last state in the Union to trust a governor with one.
Hunt got a veto with a governor on the engine
Jim Hunt wanted it. House Republicans, freshly in charge after 1994 and waving their little Contract, helped him get it onto the ballot. Voters said yes. Lawmakers then waterboarded the power on the way out the door: no line-item veto, no pocket veto, no veto of redistricting, local bills, or constitutional amendments, and an override threshold of three-fifths instead of two-thirds. Hunt got a veto the way a teenager gets a car with a governor on the engine.
Before receiving the veto, a governor’s “budget” was a suggestion the General Assembly placed in the circular file. Legend has Jim Martin’s proposals dumped into a trash can with ceremony. The legislature has always liked a governor who cuts ribbons, smiles at factory openings, and otherwise stays out of the way of the people who actually write the laws.
They didn’t invent the preference. They industrialized it.
Republicans did not invent the taste for a housebroken executive. They industrialized it. Since 2016, every time a Democrat won the mansion, the General Assembly treated the executive branch like a rental car they planned to return with the seats ripped out. Elections board. Transportation. Utilities. Cabinet confirmations. Property procurement. Now the Banking Commission.
When the governor is a Republican, Democrats discover a sudden, touching faith in checks and balances. When the governor is a Democrat, Republicans discover that the Founders were very clear about keeping the executive on a leash that would embarrass a toy poodle. Both parties are telling the truth about the other and lying about themselves.
The state still runs. The job got smaller.
The result is a state that runs, after a fashion. Teachers get a raise. Troopers get a raise. Medicaid gets fed. Western North Carolina gets another check. And the man elected statewide to be chief executive spends his mornings discovering which board he no longer staffs and which Republican Council of State member now signs the parking passes.
Stein can sue. He has said he might. Courts in this state have a habit of reading the constitution the way the legislature wrote the latest session law: creatively, and in the direction of Jones Street.
There is a respectable argument that a weak governor is a feature. North Carolinians have long memories for royal high-handedness, and a legislature that faces the voters every two years — but keeps the same drivers in the front seat for a decade — will always prefer a governor on a shorter leash. The trouble is not theory. The trouble is the farce. We hold a loud election for a job whose remaining powers fit in a cupholder, then act shocked when the winner looks smaller than he did on the campaign poster.
Stein is doing what every North Carolina governor eventually does: smile, sign, complain, and learn to enjoy the view from the passenger seat. The General Assembly still has the keys. They like it that way. They have liked it that way since the last royal governor skipped town. The only thing that changed is the paint job on the car.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Why “Trust Yourself” Is the Last Idol Standing
There is a kind of wisdom that looks like adulthood. It sounds like this: “I have to trust my own process. I have to follow my truth. I have to figure this out.” It is the last remaining piety in a culture that has discarded almost every other piety. We may no longer trust institutions, tradition, or even one another. We still trust the interior courtroom of the self.
Scripture will not grant us that courtroom.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6). The verb is physical. To lean is what a man does when he puts his full weight on a staff he believes will hold. The proverb is not asking us to become stupid. It is asking us to stop treating our own mind as load-bearing timber.
Not Against Thinking—Against Autonomy
That distinction matters. Proverbs itself is a book in love with understanding. “If you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding… then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom” (Proverbs 2:3–6). “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (Proverbs 4:7). The Bible is not anti-intellectual. It is anti-autonomous. The command is not against thinking. It is against making our reasoning, our feelings, and our five-year plans the final court of appeal.
The reason is not mysterious. It is pastoral and severe.
“Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered” (Proverbs 28:26). “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25). Jeremiah goes further still: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength… The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:5, 9). The problem is not merely that we lack data. The problem is that the instrument we use to interpret the data is wounded. We do not merely miscalculate. We self-deceive.
Isaiah then lifts the conversation out of psychology and into theology: “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8–9). God is not a slightly smarter version of us. His wisdom is of another order. What looks foolish, wasteful, or impossible to us is often the very path He has chosen.
What the Stoics Saw—and What They Could Not See
Before we go further, we should let a serious rival speak. The Stoics are not the cartoon of clenched teeth and emotional starvation that popular culture sometimes sells. They were among the most morally serious people of the ancient world. When the apostle Paul stood on the Areopagus in Athens, Stoic philosophers were in the crowd (Acts 17:18). They had already spent centuries warning men not to be swept along by appetite, fortune, and the mob.
Epictetus opens his Enchiridion with the sentence on which the whole school stands: some things are up to us, and some things are not. Up to us are judgment, desire, aversion—the movements of the ruling faculty. Not up to us are body, property, reputation, office. “Make the best use of what is in your power,” he says, “and take the rest as it happens.” Marcus Aurelius tells himself that things themselves do not touch the soul; the soul turns and moves itself. Seneca writes that no man is great who is not master of himself, and that philosophy will not call good what cannot last. The wise man builds an inner citadel. He lives according to nature—which for them means according to the Logos, the rational fire that orders the cosmos and of which the human mind is a spark.
Give them their due. The Stoics saw what Proverbs also sees: that a life leaned upon externals is a life already broken. They saw that passion often disguises itself as insight. They saw that most of what we call “my understanding” is only yesterday’s impression wearing a toga. They trained men to stop demanding that the universe rearrange itself around their preferences. In an age of infinite scroll and curated outrage, that is not nothing. A Christian who sneers at Epictetus has probably not yet been honest about his own need for discipline.
But here the roads divide, and they divide at the foundation.
The Stoic does not say, “Do not lean on your own understanding.” He says the opposite, with magnificent consistency: lean only on your own understanding—once it has been purified into reason. The hegemonikon, the ruling part of the soul, is the last unconquered ground. Freedom is self-mastery. Happiness is autarkeia, self-sufficiency. Providence is real, but it is the impersonal necessity of the Logos, not a Father who speaks, promises, and bleeds. You do not ask this God for wisdom as a gift. You align yourself with what already is. You do not receive a new heart. You educate the one you have. “The condition and characteristic of a philosopher,” Epictetus says in the Enchiridion, “is that he expects all hurt and benefit to come from himself.”
That is a noble sentence. It is also a gospel of the uncrucified self.
A Heart That Cannot Be Its Own Sanctuary
Scripture will not let the inner citadel be the sanctuary. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” The Stoic believes the problem is poor judgment. Jeremiah believes the judge is sick. The Stoic trusts that reason, rightly trained, can live in harmony with nature. Isaiah answers that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and the distance is not a gap of information but of heaven and earth. The Stoic Logos is an immanent order. The Johannine Logos is a Person: “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word became flesh” (John 1:1, 14). One you contemplate. The Other you must either worship or stumble over.
The Jewish sages heard the biblical warning long before Christians wrote commentaries on it. In Pirkei Avot 3:17, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah warns that a person whose wisdom outruns his deeds is like a tree with many branches and few roots: the first hard wind topples it. The one whose deeds outrun his wisdom is planted by water and will not be moved. He reads that contrast out of Jeremiah 17. The point is not anti-study. It is that Torah is not validated by whether it first makes sense to us. The contrast is a contrast of trust: the person who will obey because God knows, even when the commandment has not yet become transparent to the mind.
Maimonides, commenting on Isaiah 55, insists that we cannot comprehend how God knows all creatures and their deeds, because God’s knowledge is not a faculty added to His essence the way our knowledge is added to ours. Human knowledge cannot comprehend this in its entirety. The prophet’s words are not poetry draped over a gap. They are a boundary marker. There are things the created intellect cannot scale.
East and West Inside the Same Boundary
Christian theology, East and West, has lived inside that boundary.
Augustine learned that the mind can see a light above the mind, but only after grace has turned the soul. “Believe, so that you may understand,” he taught—not because faith is a substitute for thought, but because some realities cannot even come into view until the will has been healed enough to look. Aquinas, who trusted reason more than almost any Christian after him, still drew a bright line: there is a twofold truth about God—truths reason can reach, and truths that “surpass the whole ability of the human reason.” The Trinity and the Incarnation are not irrational. They are supra-rational. To demand that they first pass the exam of unaided intellect is to make the creature the measure of the Creator.
The Orthodox tradition pressed the same point with different language. Gregory Palamas distinguished two knowledges: the knowledge of this world, won by the faculties, and the knowledge given by the Holy Spirit through purification, obedience, and union. Barlaam wanted one truth arrived at by philosophy and prophecy alike. Palamas saw the danger: we begin to think we can think our way into God. St. Gregory of Nyssa put it more simply: the Lord does not say it is blessed to know something about God, but to possess God in oneself. Knowledge, in this register, is communion, not a file of correct propositions—and not a fortress of self-command.
The Reformers did not abandon this. They intensified it at the point of the gospel. Luther’s theology of the cross is the claim that God hides Himself under the opposite of what glory-hungry reason expects: a crucified Messiah. Calvin wrote that we are “drunk with the false opinion of our own insight” and extremely reluctant to admit that it is “utterly blind and stupid in divine matters.” Faith, for him, is not a leap into fog. It is a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, revealed to the mind and sealed in the heart by the Holy Spirit. Reason is not discarded. It is dethroned.
The Cross in the Stoic Lecture Hall
Then Paul takes the Old Testament principle and drives it through the center of the gospel—and through the Stoic lecture hall.
“The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified… Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:22–25). Human wisdom cannot discover God. The world, “through wisdom, did not know God” (1 Corinthians 1:21). That sentence is the epitaph of every system that treats the trained mind as sufficient. The Stoic seeks wisdom. Paul says God has already made foolish the wisdom of the world, and then saved those who believe through what that wisdom calls folly: a crucified Lord.
That is why “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). And that is why believers have received “the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God” (1 Corinthians 2:12). The alternative to leaning on our own understanding is not emptying the mind, and it is not retreating into the inner citadel to become unconquerable. It is receiving a mind we did not generate: the mind of Christ, given by the Spirit, formed by the Word.
What Can Actually Save a Human Being
Here the superiority of the faith is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of what can actually save a human being.
The Stoic can teach you to stop raging at the weather. He cannot give you a new heart. He can teach you to distinguish what is yours from what is not. He cannot tell you that you are not your own, because you were bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). He can bid you accept fate. He cannot invite you to cry “Abba, Father” by the Spirit of adoption (Romans 8:15). His Logos does not take on flesh, wash feet, or rise from a borrowed grave. His peace is the peace of a well-governed soul. The peace of Christ “surpasses all understanding” and guards the heart and mind (Philippians 4:7)—which is a very different architecture from a citadel you must garrison yourself.
James is almost blunt about the method: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him” (James 1:5). The Stoic would find the sentence slightly embarrassing. Wisdom, for him, is trained, not begged. The Christian is permitted—required—to ask, because wisdom is a gift before it is an achievement. The promise is not omniscience. It is enough light for the next step. We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). Sight wants the whole map. Faith takes the next stretch of road because the One who made the road is already on it.
Transferring the Weight
So what does “not leaning” look like when it is neither passivity nor anti-intellectualism—and when it is more than Stoic self-command?
It looks like wholehearted trust—not a mood, and not the clenched consent of a man making peace with necessity, but a transfer of weight onto a Person who has spoken. It looks like acknowledging Him in all our ways: the career decision and the diagnosis, the vote and the apology, the doctrine we love and the providence we do not yet understand. It looks like receiving wisdom from Scripture and the Spirit rather than from the self’s echo chamber, the world’s systems of prestige and technique, or even from the admirable discipline of the inner citadel. The Word is extra nos—outside us—before it is in us. That is mercy. A revelation you did not invent cannot be edited by the heart that wants to be God.
The result promised is not a life without difficulty, and it is not the serene indifference of apatheia. “He will make straight your paths.” A straight path can still climb a mountain. It can still pass through a valley of shadow. What it will not do is wander in circles of self-trust until it dies there. The path God directs is the path on which joy, peace, hope, and life are not prizes for having understood everything, or trophies for having mastered oneself. They are gifts given to those who stopped pretending they could.
The last idol is always the same idol, whether it wears the hoodie of expressive individualism or the toga of the Porch: the conviction that we are the reliable narrators of our own lives, and that the well-trained self is sanctuary enough. Proverbs will not smash the mind. It will only refuse to let the mind sit on the throne. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. The heavens are still higher than the earth. The Logos is not a principle. He has a name. And the God whose thoughts are not our thoughts has, in the foolishness of the cross, thought of us.
If this essay encouraged you, please like and follow. And if you have a prayer request or a personal need, feel free to send us a DM. We would be honored to pray for you.
One platform down. North Carolina teens are still on TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Roblox for hours every day, none of which are covered by the Meta settlement.
@JeffJacksonNC @SenThomTillis @SenTedBuddNC
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Modernized Manson Murder Cult (With More Money & Degrees)
If you have been following the news the way a responsible adult is supposed to follow the news—Federal Reserve minutes, the price of eggs, whatever the president said before lunch—you have missed the best American story since the Manson family discovered Topanga Canyon and a guitar. It involves vegan computer prodigies, a border-agent shootout on a Vermont interstate, a landlord with a samurai sword in his back, a million-dollar Pennsylvania house with two bodies in the bedroom, box trucks in the snow, and a blogger who once tried to fake her own drowning so the universe would leave her alone. The universe declined.
Commentators such as Andy Ngo call it a “trans death cult.” The Associated Press prefers “cultlike group.” The defendants prefer “we are not a group, we are not a cult, and also the judge is hormonally detransitioning me.” All three descriptions can be true at once. That is the modern condition.
The remarkable part is not that six people are dead and a pile of very bright young people are in jail. America produces that product line every fiscal quarter. The remarkable part is who they are, what they believed, and how long the rest of the country managed not to notice that the collision of AI eschatology, social media, transgender ideology, Big Tech salaries, and too much disposable IQ had produced a roadshow.
The Talent Pool, If the Talent Pool Lived in a U-Haul
These were not the usual suspects from the parking lot behind the pawn shop. They were the kids who won the math contest and then decided the moral emergency of the century was factory-farmed chickens and a hypothetical superintelligence that might paperclip humanity.
Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt: German, University of Waterloo mathematics, informatics-Olympiad medal, a Jane Street internship, later a quantitative trader at shops that pay grown-ups like professional athletes. Died in a Prius on I-91 in northern Vermont after a Border Patrol stop went kinetic. Teresa Youngblut of Seattle was driving. Youngblut now faces a federal death-penalty case. Vermont does not have the death penalty. The United States government, unburdened by local manners, does.
Alexander Leatham: UCLA and Berkeley, comfortable San Diego family, the sort of résumé that used to get you a condo in SoMa and a standing reservation at the place with the $18 green juice. Maximilian Snyder: elite Seattle prep school, data scientist, Kirkland address—Microsoft-adjacent zip code, the American dream with a hoodie. Michelle Zajko: bioinformatician; parents in a Chester Heights house the tabloids later priced like a country-club initiation. Jack “Ziz” LaSota: computer engineering at the University of Alaska, NASA internship, unfinished master’s at Illinois, then the Bay Area, where unfinished master’s degrees and NASA internships are the native wildflowers.
They had the test scores to work at the firms that are currently teaching machines to write sonnets and fire middle managers. Instead they lived in converted box trucks, sometimes nude, on a Vallejo lot that looked like a storage-unit foreclosure, and later at the end of a snow-choked dirt road in Frostburg, Maryland, which is a sentence no career counselor has ever put on a vision board.
That is the joke, and it is not a small joke. American meritocracy spent twenty years telling gifted, awkward, online teenagers that they were the elect—that their specialness was a moral category. Then the elect discovered blogs, estrogen, Roko’s basilisk, and the ethical necessity of never eating cheese. The rest of us were busy arguing about grocery inflation.
The Church of the Left Hemisphere
The subculture is a garage band that formed in the ruins of “rationalism,” the Bay Area creed that said you could think your way out of being human. Effective altruism, AI safety, CFAR workshops, MIRI white papers, people who use the word “prior” in civilian conversation. LaSota started as one more philosophically inflamed tech aspirant and became a confessional blogger with a following of isolated, extremely online, mostly transgender computer people who thought mainstream rationalists were cowards about animals, gender, and the end of the world.
The theology, if we are going to dignify it, was a smoothie of anarchism, veganism, transhumanism, and decision theory so “timeless” it could justify almost any present-tense tantrum. Brain hemispheres, they decided, might have different genders and want to kill each other. Sleep could be hacked by resting one half of the brain at a time, a practice with all the medical charm of licking a wall socket. There were earlier suicides in the orbit. An anonymous rationalist website started calling them Zizians and warning that this was a cult. LaSota called it a smear site. In 2019 they put on black robes and Guy Fawkes masks and blockaded a CFAR retreat in Sonoma County until the SWAT team arrived, which is how you know the seminar on friendliness had been a success.
They bought a WWII-era tugboat, named it Caleb, tried to found a “Rationalist Fleet,” and then the tugboat sank. Of course it sank. If your plan to save sentient life from a vengeful algorithm begins with a rust-bucket and a manifesto, the harbor is going to file the minority report. After that it was trailers and box trucks and the open road, which in this country has always been where the religions go when the landlords get tired.
“Trans Death Cult” Is Rude on Purpose
Ngo’s phrase is a brick through the window. Polite media will give you “cultlike,” “enigmatic network,” “radical vegans haunted by an AI apocalypse,” which is the same furniture with the slipcover on. Ngo’s further claim is that once the arrests started, the defendants discovered that gender identity is not merely a soul-condition but a procedural weapon: competency delays, accusations that jail is “state-sponsored conversion therapy,” courtroom sermons about hormones, the suggestion that any firmness from the bench is bigotry in a robe.
The dockets do show years of competency fights, hunger strikes, catatonia, shouted waivers of a speedy trial, and judges moving trial dates the way cities move pothole repairs. Whether that is “enabled by identity” or merely enabled by American criminal procedure—which can postpone a parking ticket until the heat death of the universe—is a fight you can have after you finish the body count. The delays are not imaginary.
The Multi-State Farewell Tour
Vallejo, November 2022
Landlord Curtis Lind, then pushing eighty, wanted his tenants off the lot. Prosecutors say Leatham, Tessa Berns (in court as Suri Dao), and Emma Borhanian arrived with the energy of a collection agency and the cutlery of a Renaissance fair. Lind was stabbed, blinded in one eye, and run through with a sword. He shot Borhanian dead and wounded Leatham. California, being California, then charged the surviving attackers with Borhanian’s murder on a felony-murder theory: you start the raid, you own the corpse. Lind lived. That was his first mistake.
Chester Heights, New Year’s Eve 2022
Richard and Rita Zajko were shot in the head in their own home, on their daughter Michelle’s thirtieth birthday. A doorbell camera, shell casings, a handgun purchase, phone records, a neighbor’s fragment of someone yelling “Mom!” The case sat in the fridge for three and a half years while Michelle was a “person of interest,” which is police Latin for “we think we know and we cannot yet say it in a charging document.” She has denied it with the sincerity of a person who has had a long time to draft the denial. The district attorney now says she did not act alone. The co-star has not been billed.
Vallejo Again, January 17, 2025
Lind, one-eyed and eighty-two and scheduled to be the state’s walking memory in the 2022 trial, was stabbed to death outside the same property, throat cut, in what prosecutors call a witness-silencing. Snyder, the Kirkland data scientist, is charged with special-circumstances murder: lying in wait, killing a witness. He hummed in court. If you are looking for the collision of Big Tech affect and Bronze Age methods, start there.
Coventry, Vermont, January 20, 2025
Three days later. A blue Prius, a Border Patrol stop, a Homeland Security database that may have been wrong about a visa, and then gunfire on I-91. Agent David “Chris” Maland—Air Force veteran, the sort of American who still thinks a uniform means something—was killed. Bauckholt was killed. Youngblut lived, was indicted, and now has the Attorney General’s office in the death-penalty business. The defense has begun to argue that the official story of the stop is a tidy little fiction. The government has begun to argue that a federal officer is dead and the people in the Prius were armed. Prosecutors say a firearm Zajko purchased later showed up in the Vermont mess. The supply chain of this subculture is not only ideological. It is ballistic.
Frostburg, Maryland, February 16, 2025
A landowner finds three people in box trucks at the end of a dirt road in the snow, which in Allegany County is how you get the state police instead of a fruit basket. LaSota, Zajko, and Daniel Blank. Rifles, a handgun on the floorboard, later LSD charges, the full American sampler platter. Troopers wrote down that the occupants had “ties with the Zizians Cult” and should be asked about crimes in other states. For once the police report and the magazine feature were working from the same map.
That is a crime spree with frequent-flyer miles. California, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Maryland—coast to coast, with a German quant in the passenger seat and a NASA intern in the lead truck. If this had been a motorcycle club, cable news would have given it a logo and a theme song. Because it was a transgender vegan AI-safety book club with Bay Area SAT scores, it stayed, for a startlingly long time, a local-news curiosity that leaked into the national press only after a Border Patrol agent was in a flag-draped casket.
The Prosecutions, or: How to Postpone the Apocalypse
Nobody has been convicted of the homicides. That sentence should be in neon. What we have is a traveling circus of pretrial motions.
In Solano County, the 2022 case against Leatham and Berns has been in year five of “almost.” Competency in, competency out, a defendant who would not eat, a defendant who treated arraignment like open-mic night, a dead eyewitness, a tentative trial date that has now slithered toward January 2027. Lind’s preliminary-hearing testimony still exists on tape, which is the state’s consolation prize for losing the man. Snyder’s preliminary hearing for the 2025 stabbing has been playing calendar hopscotch; special circumstances mean death or life if a jury ever gets to vote.
In Burlington, Youngblut’s federal case is the one with real voltage. Death-penalty notice filed. No trial date. Summer 2026 was spent fighting over whether agents’ phones will be forensically pickled and whether the government rushed the capital decision so hard the Constitution got motion sickness. A hearing on the evidence fight was pointed at September. This is the case that finally made official Washington look up from its phone.
In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Zajko was charged on June 24, 2026—two counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy, burglary—and as of late August was still cooling her heels in Maryland waiting to be extradited and arraigned. Three years of “person of interest,” then a press conference. American justice: first the glacier, then the avalanche.
In Cumberland, the small Maryland case—guns, LSD, trespass, hindering—was parked on inactive status in mid-August 2026, trial dates canceled, reasons not offered to the public. Blank, already sprung on an unsecured $15,000 bond, is done with the ankle bracelet. LaSota went into federal custody in Philadelphia on a fugitive-with-firearms indictment; a judge had already ordered a competency exam. Zajko stays locked because Pennsylvania wants her for the parents. The local jail is rid of a two-year circus and the taxpayers may now resume funding potholes.
Ngo will tell you this is what happens when a defendant can turn every status conference into a seminar on oppression. Defense lawyers will tell you this is what happens when the state piles four jurisdictions, a dead witness, a capital notice, and a psychiatric file onto people who were already not well. Both can collect their speaking fees. The facts on the ground are simpler: the bodies are buried, the geniuses are mostly still defendants, and the trials keep backing up like a freeway at rush hour.
Why You Were Not Told This at the Faculty Mixer
For most of the country this subculture is sonar-invisible. It does not look like the crime shows. It looks like the intern who corrected your slide deck. It talks like a LessWrong comment section that escaped the lab. It cares about factory farms and unaligned AI with the same sweaty intensity your uncle reserves for the Federal Reserve. It is downstream of the richest, most self-admiring industry on earth—the industry that built the platforms these people used to find one another, date one another, radicalize one another, and then buy plane tickets and pistols.
That is the collision. Big Tech minted a class of young people with more cognitive horsepower than social ballast. Social media sorted them into a greenhouse. Trans ideology, in the form it took in that greenhouse, was not a privacy request; it was a total theory of the self, complete with enemies list. AI safety supplied the Book of Revelation: a god that has not been born yet but might torture you for eternity if you fail the alignment exam. Money—quant bonuses, family houses, cash pulled from a New Hampshire bank and later found in a Subaru—supplied the float. Veganism supplied the purity test. Box trucks supplied the monastery. And when the monastery needed a landlord gone, or a witness gone, or a traffic stop to become a last stand, the purity tests turned out to be compatible with steel.
You do not need Ngo’s branding to see the shape of it. You do need to stop pretending that a high SAT score is a moral disinfectant. The twentieth century already ran that experiment with better stationery.
The Zizians did not invent American violence. They invented a more embarrassing soundtrack for it: the end of the world, explained in a blog post, financed by the knowledge economy, acted out by people who could have been writing the software that runs your hospital, and prosecuted, very slowly, in four states that cannot agree on a calendar. If that is not a death cult, it is at least a group project. The teacher should have collected the knives before the presentations began.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Target has been caught red-handed—or rather, orange-and-black-handed—selling a children’s circus clown costume that the permanently aggrieved have declared a direct descendant of blackface minstrel shows.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
The soft Trumpers are not gone. They are waiting. Give them a reason that has nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with whether their lives get any easier.
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
Yeshua (Jesus) fulfilled Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36: the Holy Spirit now lives inside every Believer as our Internal Teacher. No rabbi, no movement leader is ultimate—only the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit). Read why:
xitter.cf/MessiahSword/status/20…
@JewsforJesus @OneforIsrael @ChosenPeopleMin
#MessianicJudaism #Yeshua #RuachHaKodesh
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
What’s in a Name? More Than Meets the Eye (of Newt)
By the time the North Carolina State Board of Elections finishes sorting out whether a Wiccan necromancer can appear on the Rutherford County Soil and Water Conservation District ballot as “Mortellus” and nothing but “Mortellus,” the rest of us will have forgotten what soil and water conservation supervisors even do. Which is, historically, the correct amount of attention the office has received.
The Mononym Demand
High Priestex Mortellus—legal name Terrayle Leigh Amorello, preferred public identity a single solemn syllable—wants the mononym. No last name. No hyphen. Just Mortellus, the way Cher is Cher and Madonna is Madonna and that one guy who used to be Prince was briefly an unpronounceable symbol that looked like a trumpet having a stroke. The Board, ever vigilant against the chaos of people calling themselves what they want, is taking the matter under advisement. A ruling is expected August 20, just in time for absentee ballots to start flying out the door like bats from a poorly maintained belfry.
NC’s Rich Tradition of Electoral Performance Art
North Carolina has a rich tradition of this particular brand of electoral performance art. In 2006, lawyer Rachel Lea Hunter tried to run for the state Supreme Court as “Madame Justice.” The Board correctly observed that this was not so much a nickname as a job application written in the future tense. She was not, at the time, a justice of anything except perhaps her own imagination. The State Bar later took a dim view of the whole production. In 2024, a Libertarian presidential hopeful named Joshua Anderson was allowed onto the ballot as “Toad Anderson.” The Board drew the line at pure Toad. He had to keep the surname, like a proper amphibian with paperwork.
Now we have High Priestex Mortellus. “Priestex,” for the uninitiated, is the gender-neutral upgrade of priest/priestess, the linguistic equivalent of replacing “actor” and “actress” with “actrix” and then daring the dictionary to stop you. Mortellus is a Gardnerian Wiccan clergy person, necromancer, author, and public speaker who once ran away and joined a circus—an origin story that already qualifies the priestex for higher office than most people currently holding it. Originally, the voter registration for the necromancer read: first name Mortellus, last name “Nln” (No Last Name). The filing fee was paid and the priestex was briefly told everything was fine. Then the State Board apparently remembered that ballots are alphabetized and that chaos is contagious. Suddenly the listing became Mortellus Amorello.
This Is Where the Fun Begins
If a necromancer can demand a religious mononym because it is the name under which the priestex was ordained, wrote books, and hexed the occasional local ordinance, what about the rest of us? Could a working girl of a certain professional specialty appear on the ballot simply as “Madame Smith”? After all, “Madame” has a long and distinguished history in both the world’s oldest profession and the world’s second-oldest profession (politics). It is a title of respect in certain establishments. Why should the Board get to decide that one Madame is aspirational fraud while another is authentic identity?
And what of the fairy-tale contingency? Suppose a candidate once was a toad, kissed by a princess, and transformed into a prince. Could he run as “Toad”? As “Prince”? As “The Artist Formerly Known as Toad Who Is Now a Prince but Still Keeps the Wart for Brand Continuity”? The Board’s current approach seems to be: if you were born Joshua Anderson and later decided you were Toad, fine—as long as you keep Anderson. If you were born Terrayle and later decided you were Mortellus because the Goddess said so, we need a hearing. If you were born Rachel and decided you were already Madame Justice, we will laugh you out of the room and the Bar will send a letter.
The Real Problem Isn’t the Names
The deeper problem is not the names. It is the bureaucratic instinct that every personal affectation must be run past a committee with the power to say no. Names are how people introduce themselves to the world. Some people choose dull ones. Some people choose ones that sound like they were generated by a medieval fantasy novel generator after three cups of absinthe. The voter is perfectly capable of deciding whether they want their soil and water managed by someone whose professional identity involves talking to the dead. That is, after all, what general elections are for.
If the Board rules that a religious mononym is acceptable, the next filing period will feature candidates named simply “The Chosen One,” “Your Honor (Pending),” and “That Guy Who Fixed Your Tractor.” If it rules against Mortellus, we will have established that the state of North Carolina will let you call yourself Toad as long as you keep the receipt, but draws the line at one-word necromancers. Either way, the Soil and Water Conservation District will continue to function exactly as it always has: invisibly, until someone complains about a ditch.
In the meantime, High Priestex Mortellus waits for the August 20 meeting. One suspects the ancestors are already casting votes…
Thom Goolsby MBA, JD retweeted
From bloated admin bloat to AI mastery-based learning in months — not years. This essay is a battle cry for NC higher-ed reform. Tagging every Republican in the legislature and UNC trustee: xitter.cf/EatTheRichLib/status/2…
@NCGOP @NCHouseGOP @UNCBoardGovs
#HigherEdReform #WokeUniversities #AIRevolution #UNCSystem
