Rugged Individualist. Husband, father, entrepreneur.
Ashland, OR
Joined December 2021
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Brian Hellwig retweeted
Actual progress comes from hard-to-build technology.
Which comes from competitive, creative, free-market capitalism.
Which comes from one small, precarious area and then diffuses to the rest of the world.
Snuff that out, and it’s global stagnation for an extremely long time.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
OK let’s imagine that! $500M would fund Medicare for exactly 4 hours. Hospital closed by lunch.
Medicare costs us $1.2T a year. Thats $2.7B per day. You people literally have no clue how anything works. You elect people who are financially illiterate, and everything gets worse.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
The only thing worse than the Republicans not understanding the repudiation that just occurred is that Democrats actually believe they won based on their policy positions.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
Yes. Temporary electoral setbacks, when met with clear-eyed strategy rather than despair, can accelerate the very renaissance of competence, tech ambition, and institutional renewal this moment demands. The "longer arc" favors those who build, not those who merely oppose.
What if last night was the best thing that could have happened to us?
I know how that sounds. Democrats just took the House and the Senate. Texas went blue. Everyone on our side is depressed this morning. But step back and look at the longer game, because I think we might be living through the beginning of a renaissance.
History has a pattern. When a party wins big, it confuses a protest vote with a mandate. And that's exactly where it starts making mistakes.
1994: Republicans sweep Congress. They overplay their hand, shut down the government, and hand Clinton a comfortable reelection two years later. 1998: they push impeachment against public opinion and lose seats in a midterm they should have won. Victory breeds arrogance. Arrogance breeds overreach. Overreach breeds backlash.
Now look at what Democrats are walking into. They control Congress, but not the White House. They can't really govern. They can block, investigate, subpoena, and posture. For two years, their entire identity will be opposition. Endless hearings. Impeachment fantasies. Shutdown brinkmanship. Purity tests from their activist wing, emboldened by a win they'll believe was ideological when it was mostly a midterm reflex.
And every one of those moves will be on full display, in front of voters who just gave them a chance and will expect results.
That's the setup for 2028. Not a narrow win. A clean one. White House, House, Senate. Full power, with a clear mandate and two years of Democratic overreach as the backdrop.
And this time, full power has to mean something different. Not just holding office. Building.
What I believe we need is a techno-republic. A state that runs like the best companies do: fast, measurable, accountable. Where public services are rebuilt from first principles with the best technology available. Where talent and merit matter more than credentials and connections. Where we stop managing decline and start building again: energy, industry, infrastructure, AI, space.
Because the stakes are civilizational. The West has spent decades losing confidence in itself. Its institutions hollowed out, its elites ashamed of its own history, its universities captured by an alliance between the radical left and political Islamism that sees Western values as something to dismantle rather than defend. Free speech, secularism, equality before the law, the idea that a civilization has the right to exist and to defend itself. None of that survives on autopilot.
A techno-republic is how we rebuild that foundation. Not through nostalgia, but through competence. Prove that a free, confident, technologically ambitious West works better than any alternative, and the debate is over.
So yes, last night hurt. But maybe this is the detour that gets us there faster. Let them win this round. Let them show the country who they really are. And be ready.
The renaissance won't come from comfort. It'll come from the moment we stopped being comfortable.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
This one hit hard this morning….
“We spend the majority of our life, looking for recognition and validation from a world that crucified a perfect man.”
Brian Hellwig retweeted
this post has so much wisdom in it i thought naval wrote it
and i don't think the author even realizes why
if you understand this properly, you can explain almost all political issues we see in the world today
you can't take care of your loved ones if you can't even take care of yourself. you can't build a functioning country if your loved ones aren't taken care of. and you certainly can't save the world if your own country is falling apart. responsibility has to expand outwards.
the problem with so much left-wing thinking is that it's backwards. it starts with the most noble sounding objective imaginable, "saving the world" or "climate change" or "poor migrants", and thinks about the most nice-sounding solution, without considering if the conditions required to achieve it even exist, and that's why so many apparently well-intentioned policies end up doing the exact opposite of what they were supposed to achieve.
they sound compassionate, but completely ignore incentives, tradeoffs, or second-order consequences
clean your own damn bedroom and put your house in order before trying to change the world
you will never be able to fix the world if you can't even get the order of your own responsibilities right
Brian Hellwig retweeted
If your country sucked so bad you came to the U.S., then don't bitch about the people already here. If you consider it an insult to be told, "Go back to you country," well then, show some fuckin' gratitude.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
The trick of socialism is to make it appear like we depend on the state, when in fact the state depends entirely on us.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
“I won’t vote for the “lesser of two evils!”
Says the person who if they were on the ballot themselves would still be the “lesser of two evils” to someone.
Get over yourself.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
I regret to inform you that nobody cares. When you’re winning, nobody cares. When you’re losing, nobody cares. Stop fearing the judgement of people who were never even thinking about you. Nobody is thinking about you. They’re too busy thinking about themselves. Go do the thing.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
My brutally honest advice to someone who wants to make a lot of money.
3 things nobody told you:
1. The only way to make a lot of money is to create a lot of value.
No one hands out money. No one is going to pay you just because they like you or think you're cool.
Money earned is a direct byproduct of value created.
The only way to get rich is to create an enormous amount of value for others, and capture a small portion of that along the way.
You create value by doing three things:
- Identify problems
- Create solutions
- Scale those solutions
It's not talking about the thing, it's not brainstorming about the thing, it's not asking about the thing, it's not thinking about the thing. The only way to create value is by doing the thing.
And if you don't know where to start, look around you. Customers, colleagues, bosses, shareholders, employees. Every single one of them has a problem.
What problems can you solve for the people around you?
Figure them out, solve them, scale that solution.
That's how you make money.
2. You don't need passion, you need energy.
I still have no idea what it means to follow your passion.
You don't have to be passionate about your professional pursuits, you just need to find energy in them. You just need to feel a pull towards them. You just need to feel that spark of curiosity in them.
Passion is usually a byproduct of energy.
When you have energy for something, you'll give it your deep attention to learn more.
You’ll ask the right questions. You’ll figure it out. You’ll win.
Follow your energy. Pursue interesting puzzles. Solve them.
3. You have to demonstrate excellence in everything you do.
Your income scales proportional to the amount of excellence that you're able to demonstrate.
Strategic incompetence is a lie. You don't get to pick and choose when to show up, because the world will ignore your best and judge you for your worst. Everything matters. Every single thing.
Top performers show up with energy and enthusiasm for the little things just as much as they do for the big things.
If you're in the top-10% of performers, there's no ceiling for what you can do. But the self-awareness to identify where you currently stack up, and adapt to the honest feedback on it, is very rare.
If you're in the top-10%, you know it. If you're not, figure out why and fix it.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
There is an important reason that the right never wins the culture war overall, despite the left being so poor at tactics that they often end up shooting their own feet.
That is the reality that logistics are more important than tactics, and tactics only matter once you have sorted logistics out.
The left has sorted logistics out by creating patronage networks, while the right refuses to do so because it's still controlled by a curious kind of boomer paleoliberal who thinks that "free market" means "everything should pay for itself".
Thus, both the cultural and political struggles of the right must be waged by broke young men as a side project to their careers, while fighting for the left is a career.
The young men fighting for the right are simply expected to purchase their own rifles, ammunition, uniforms and kit, provide their own transport to the front, then organize themselves into units to defeat the communists.
If you understand this, then you will understand why the retards manage to win a lot despite being retards.
The left is giving people 100K fellowships for writing lesbian novels, while the right is charging its own guys $200 to listen to some theoretical ramblings about the antichrist.
No, that's not a metaphor. I wish I had made either of those two facts up as some sort of hyperbole.
Only the left understands how to get and use political power.
The left understands that power is a form of currency. So if you want it, you have to buy it, with some other form of currency. Such as money.
The right thinks that political power is a side effect... something that you naturally accumulate while doing business.
Possibly this is because most wealthy right-wing people are investors. They start a project, or put money into it, and they expect to get their money back and then some. That's what they are used to.
That's how investment works.
But that's not how power works.
And if you have wealth, but no power, then the people with power will just take whatever you built.
I don't know exactly what the tech right, the business right, the wealthy right, should be spending on political power. But what they are spending is clearly not enough and in the wrong places.
Because George Soros sure as hell isn't selling people tickets to listen to him talk.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
Democracy is over and everyone is too scared to admit it because they’re terrified of what comes next
ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.
@ElissaSlotkin
Brian Hellwig retweeted
Why would immigration enforcement discourage voter turnout
Be very specific
Surge in ICE raids is aimed at discouraging voter turnout, immigration advocates say latimes.com/california/story…
Brian Hellwig retweeted
On paper, I’m in my 50’s & it’s really confusing…
In my head, I’m 35.
At a concert, I’m 25
After 10pm, I’m 72.
Getting up off the floor, I’m 93.
When someone makes me mad, I’m 2
BUT-
When an 80’s song comes on,
I’m 17, drunk in a field, & my mom thinks I’m at a sleepover
🤪
Brian Hellwig retweeted
Don't waste courage on a toxic friendship when you can use it to start a company.
Don't spend emotional regulation on a chaotic partner when you'll need it to care for aging parents.
Don't use discipline recovering from self-inflicted mistakes when you could spend it enjoying life.
Life will create enough difficulty without your help. Wherever you have the choice, choose people, environments and behaviours that make it easier to carry.