Don't Give Thomas Sowell the Medal of Freedom

"Thomas Sowell is a genius. Listen to him."

I hear it all the time. Rarely does a week go by without someone messaging me about how I should start a petition for Thomas Sowell to receive the Medal of Freedom. People send me their own petitions, their own videos and articles making the case, asking me to share it… and I often do!

I get it. You want to honor the man. You want to show everyone how great he is, and how much you respect him. I feel the same way. He's given us so much, let's give him a little something back, right? Let him know it was all worth it.

And yet… with all the asking, all the petitions, all the years, there's still no medal, and no real reason to believe it's going to happen any time soon.

Why do we even care? Why is it so important to us?

I've been asking myself this question a lot lately, as the calls to honor him with the Medal of Freedom intensify. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I've written my own piece making the case, and it went viral. If I shared it again today, it'd almost certainly go viral again.

Others have done bigger numbers than I have with the same idea, but they didn't achieve anything either.

But let's imagine for a second that we were successful… that the Trump Administration hears our call and honors it. They invite Thomas Sowell to the White House to receive the Medal of Freedom.

What would that look like? Picture it. Thomas Sowell standing there. Ninety-six years old, surrounded by the very class of people he spent sixty years exposing for exactly what they are. And now they want him to stand beside them and smile for the camera…

What makes you think Thomas Sowell even wants this "honor"?

I can't speak for him, and I would never try. I have no affiliation with him, and I doubt he even knows I exist. But, I can speculate as someone who has spent an unseemly amount of time consuming his work.

Everything I've watched and read tells me he wouldn't care about this medal. Not even a little. In fact, I think he would be annoyed by the suggestion that he would have to go to DC and mingle with the political class to receive it. It wouldn't even surprise me if he'd turn it down.

Have you seen what Thomas Sowell writes about these people? Seriously, what makes you think he wants to be honored by them, or spend any of his precious moments at 96 around them?

If it were possible to enforce a ban on lying, a ghastly silence would fall over the city of Washington.

Are you ready for a hard truth?

The calls for him to get the medal were never really about him. It's about you… and me. It's about making us feel good, like we are "doing something". It's pure ceremony. Pageantry. There's no power in it. In terms of realpolitik, it's completely unserious. The more I think about it, the amount of time we spend on this reveals why our side loses everything.

Because here's what we do… we chase the recognition instead of power. Ceremony over conquest. We would rather be told we were right than actually win.

If you want to see exactly what this medal is, look at who already has one. George Soros. Hillary Clinton. Megan Rapinoe… to name a few.

Are these the kinds of people you would put Thomas Sowell next to? Are we honoring him by giving him the same award Hillary Clinton already received? Are we really begging for him to be an equal with Megan Rapinoe?… Is it possible we're actually insulting him and his legacy with this gesture? Doesn't he deserve something greater?

The funny thing is, he has been offered greater things… do you know how he handled them?

Let's go back to 1981. Ronald Reagan was just elected President, and he wanted Sowell in the room. He put him on his Economic Policy Advisory Board. This wasn't just a room full of no-name bureaucrats, this was the big leagues. George Shultz, Alan Greenspan, Art Laffer and Milton Friedman himself. The most influential economic minds in the country, advising the President directly.

A seat like that is what an entire career is supposed to be building toward.

Do you know what Sowell did?

He went to one meeting. Then he resigned.

Why? He told us himself. He cited his mentor, Milton Friedman:

some people can contribute more by staying out of government

One day… that's it. He didn't need any more information than that one single day to know it wasn't for him.

That's who he is. He never wanted a seat at their table.

So think about what we're actually doing when we beg the political class to recognize this man. Our hero. We're begging the people whose table he walked away from to hand him a ribbon. Sure, it's a nice gesture, but it's really not that important.

You know what is important? Power.

The most basic question is not what is best, it's who decides what is best.

Every political question comes down to this. We spend so much time arguing about what the correct policies are, we don't stop to consider whether we have the power to decide any of it. What's the point of having correct opinions, if you have no power to implement them?

While we're spending our time circulating petitions, let's talk about how the other side honors their heroes. Do they ask for permission? No. They take territory, claim it as their own and then force you to obey.

Take black history month, for example. When's the last time you saw Thomas Sowell honored by anyone who celebrates black history month? Why is that?

Black history month, just like the Black Lives Matter movement and Saint George Floyd himself, are sanctified by the regime. They are weapons. Tools used to control you. A leash put around your neck. And the second you pull against it, they give it a tug. "Racist!" "Uncle Tom!"… Get back in line…

The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything, and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'

So why is Thomas Sowell never honored? Because it was never about black excellence. If it were, he'd be the face of it, right next to Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson… but these aren't the right kind of blacks, for some reason.

If a black Supreme Court Justice and a literal brain surgeon who made medical history do not qualify… what does that tell you?

It's really about the leash.

It was never about racism, it was always about power.

So let's talk about power. Real power isn't in a medal. It's in who gets to decide who's sacred. Who gets to say a man is holy, that attacking him is a sin and that honoring him is mandatory. That is real power, built through the conquest of the institutions.

The progressives understand this intimately. Our side does not.

Ask yourself… what power was there in elevating George Floyd to Sainthood? Well, now the regime gets the power to excuse riots, sanctify disorder, and make criticism socially punishable.

What power was there in elevating Martin Luther King to a martyr?

The power to decide what is good and what is evil for an entire generation.

That's real power. Compare that to your little fantasy about a Medal of Freedom ceremony. We don't have to imagine what that would look like… we just had one.

Charlie Kirk received the Medal of Freedom posthumously. They had a ceremony. I watched the whole thing live. It was very nice. Erika Kirk was there, she received it for him and gave a very moving speech. Charlie's parents were there. My heart sank just looking at them. You can see the pain in their faces. They're never going to get over this… neither am I. Neither should you.

These people who are coming around shooting people and calling them fascists are so ignorant that they don't even know what the fascists were doing. But Charlie Kirk went around talking to people, trying to convince them. Fascists don't do that. Fascists shoot people.

America should not get over Charlie Kirk, just as it did not get over MLK.

One of these men was honored with a medal. The other with a Nation.

Our enemies have their eye on the prize, and they're playing for keeps. We get distracted by things that don't matter. To them, throwing a Medal to a political ally is a trivial matter. An afterthought. Something they can do on a whim. To us, it's something we expend endless energy begging for.

Do you see the difference? It's time to stop begging, and start taking.

So stop staring at the medal. Stop putting so much energy into trying to get petitions started for it. It's not a priority for me, I'm pretty sure it's not a priority for Thomas Sowell, and it shouldn't be a priority for you. I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, I know your heart is in the right place, but it's time to get serious.

And so, here we are on the precipice of a new age. New revolutionary technologies are emerging, old powers are being disrupted, and grand new opportunities are in front of us, but you need clear eyes to see them… and you can bet that our friends, the progressives, are out hunting for these opportunities right now too.

So how do we beat them this time? Well, I'll tell you this. It's not with ceremony and medals. It's not going to be that easy.

You don't honor these great men of history with trophies, you honor them by using their legacy to take power from their enemies and give it to their friends, and the descendants of their friends.

We honor Charlie Kirk and Thomas Sowell by pursuing the progressives like we are pursuing an indictment. We remove them from the institutions, and replace them with our own people. With people who think like Charlie and Thomas.

But I'm going to be real with you. I'm not going to sell you a fantasy. We might lose. In fact, that is the most likely outcome. But, so what? We are in pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful. We are correct. Thomas Sowell is correct. Charlie Kirk was correct.

But they lost. That's the tough pill that we have to swallow. We're losing too. The progressives still own the institutions, even in a Trump administration.

I do think that there is a very serious chance that we are doomed.

That's not exactly what you wanted to hear, is it? Well, so what. Toughen up. We're going to fight anyway. Thomas Sowell has carried this fight on his shoulders for more decades than I care to count. He lost. He hasn't stopped, even well into his nineties.

It's not over. We're not dead, yet. It's our duty to honor the fight that these great men have fought, by continuing when they cannot. This is harder than any medal. This has real costs. Look at Charlie.

So, if you're still here, you're still breathing, and you want to know how you can honor the 96 year old man whose birthday we are celebrating? Get to work. Stop begging. Improve yourself, find your edge, and start accumulating wins, however small.

Start thinking like a predator, not prey.

Wherever there were people who were vulnerable, for whatever reason, those were the people who were preyed upon.

And so, this is the lesson. The harsh reality. Politics is not a debate club. The "marketplace of ideas" is not a marketplace at all. It is a battlefield. You are in a fight for the future of your country, and whoever wins gets everything.

The winner gets to decide who your grandchildren learn about, and who they never hear of. They get to define what is good and what is evil for the next hundred years, and raise future generations in their own image.

We either take it from them, or they keep it. There is either regime change, or the progressives take this century just like they took the last one. Those are the stakes.

So, what are you going to do about it? What can you do about it?

You'll have to figure that out for yourself, but I can tell you exactly what I'm doing.

I'm following in the footsteps of the best teacher I ever had. A man who doesn't even know I exist. I am internalizing the lessons he gave us, just as he internalized the lessons of great thinkers before him.

Sowell ignored the noise, put his head down and just kept writing for decades. Through that work he has inspired millions, including one of the greatest Supreme Court Justices in history.

And so, I'm going to take my own shot at that. I left my software engineering career to write full time. I'm going to put my head down and write, every day, just like Sowell did. I am developing my own doctrine, I call it "Stop Being Prey".

You will have to find your own path, but whatever it is, you don't get to sit this out. You either figure out how to stop being prey or figure out how you're going to submit to your predators. There is no third option.

Thomas Sowell is 96. He doesn't know you exist. He'll never know you signed a petition for him to get a medal. So get over it and start fighting.

He lit the flame, now it's our responsibility to carry his torch into the fight for the future.

At the end of his most recent interview, Sowell didn't reach for his own words. He reached back, to a man who came before him, and read this.

If I could think that I had sent a spark to those who come after, I should be ready to say goodbye.