Hola Libertinus,

Risk comes in all shapes and sizes.

Some risks are immediate—your safety, your wealth, your ability to protect what’s yours. Others are slower, like dry rot, undermining the foundations of a functioning society.

This week, we’re looking at both.

West breaks down the logic of carrying a firearm—not as a political statement, but as the ultimate insurance policy for an unpredictable world. And Zack takes us through one of the more bizarre symptoms of our current ideological decay: the left’s sudden, unhinged crusade against Tesla.

So grab a drink, settle in, and let’s navigate clownworld… one risk, one contradiction at a time.

🗞️ DISPATCHES

The Loudest Insurance Policy, Part 1

Guns are a controversial topic nowadays.

Some people love them, some people hate them, but a lot of people fall in between.

They aren't ideologically opposed to or supportive of gun rights, but maybe they feel they need a firearm for personal protection, especially a handgun that is specifically suitable for concealed carry.

During COVID alone, around 15 million new gun owners purchased their first firearm.

And its easy to see why - global pandemic, government authoritarianism, race riots, etc.

The point is that as things become more chaotic more people, understandably, want to own a gun.

The problem though is that just owning a firearm doesn't protect you against any of this chaos.

But being trained and having a firearm on your person may.

It probably comes as no surprise to you that I think about firearms in terms of risk management.

In other words, think about carrying a gun like an insurance policy.

So what risks are we managing?

The risk of becoming a victim of violent crime.

The most recent violent crime data we have (2023) shows that 363.8 out of 100,000 people were victims of violent crime.

That means that there's about a 0.4% chance that someone becomes the victim of a violent criminal.

Now of course, there's a lot of variables at play here.

For example, are you regularly engaging in illicit activity with violent criminals?

Do you live in the same area as a lot of violent criminals?

Are you sleeping with a violent criminals wife?

If so, the odds of you becoming a victim go up, and if not, they go down.

You have the power to reduce your likelihood of being the victim of a violent crime, but there will always be some threat.

Now, 0.4% isn't that high, so its understandable that some people may not want to carry a firearm with such a low risk of being victimized.

If you're one of these people, that's fine, but the remainder of this article won't pertain to you.

I personally take my life quite seriously, and also I live in a city with a higher than average crime rate.

I see enough things and am exposed to enough risk in my daily life, even while minding my own business, that carrying a firearm makes sense to me.

Since we're thinking about this in terms of insurance, and we now understand that we're trying to insure against the risk of violent crime, what are the costs of our insurance policy?

The most obvious is the cost of the firearm itself, but should only set you back between $400 to $600.

Another cost is training - please don't carry a firearm if you don't know how to use it.

Even if you don't pay for professional instruction, you will need to find a place to practice shooting and pay for ammo as well.

In addition to money, training also costs time that you could be spending on other pursuits.

Many gun owners treat shooting as a hobby though, so it may not really be a cost if that is the case for you.

The inconvenience of always having a firearm on you may be a cost as well, especially depending on the size of the firearm you choose.

Some concealed carriers opt to modify their entire wardrobe to accommodate the presence of a firearm on their person, although I don't believe going this far is necessary with proper firearm selection.

We also have to consider the costs of legal cases in the event we do have to actually use our firearm.

The modern US is the most litigious society in the history of mankind and there are a number of concealed carry "insurance" providers that can assist with legal fees, but of course you have to be a paying member to receive benefits.

The final cost that comes to mind is also the steepest - the risk of accidents.

After all, what good is an insurance policy if it is actually increasing your risk exposure?

Luckily, the vast majority of firearm accidents can be mitigated against through good training and basic responsibility.

Now, if you're still with me, weigh the cost to benefit ratio of concealed carrying for your particular situation.

In the next part of this series, we'll apply a risk based model to inform us on what features of a handgun are actually the most important. Stay tuned. ~West

The Bonfire of the Teslas

Imagine for a moment a utopian world where the richest man alive—

The techno-Machiavellian mastermind, the free-market Prometheus, the tech-bro Caesar, the titan of industry—

Isn’t some corporate villain hoarding wealth...

But a tree-hugging, carbon-fighting, climate-crusading...

Environmentalist.

And not just any environmentalist—a TRUE believer.

Picture it...

A man so obscenely, grotesquely, insultingly rich that even his bank accounts have (offshore) bank accounts, and yet...

He’s not just some self-righteous, virtue-signaling, I've-had-more-gala-luncheons-than-you've-had-hot-dinners billionaire, spouting climate change platitudes to a room full of nodding ESG types at Davos.

No.

He’s actually DOING something about it.

Wait. Scratch that.

In this perfect progressive utopia, the richest person would obviously be a woman (of color, of course), so let’s pivot.

Imagine her now.

A woman of titanic wealth, of inhuman ambition, of the kind of influence that could upset the balance of power between nations.

And she’s pouring billions—billions, I say!—of her net worth into saving humanity from itself.

Not for PR. Not for subsidies. Not because some board of directors demanded it.

No.

Because she actually believes. (In the way the left approves of, to boot!)

Because she’s looked at the data and came to the conclusion... yeah, we might have a problem.

She even calls fossil fuel use "the stupidest experiment in human history, by far."

She's quite the radical, remember?

So she acts.

She works obsessively, compulsively, maniacally, engineering solutions to humanity’s biggest existential threat...

🥦 Building an electric car company that de-Priusifies EVs, making them so fast that even die-hard, red-state gear-heads realize the future is electric.

🥦 Acquiring a solar energy company to accelerate the transition to renewables and moving us away from coal.

🥦 Revolutionizing battery storage so homes, businesses, and entire power grids can reliably keep the lights on.

🥦 Even personally putting up $100 million of her own fortune to fund carbon capture technology—literally pulling CO₂ out of the sky.

And we’re not even done yet.

In this flawless, far-left fever dream, this billionaire doesn’t just accept government regulation...

She says it's a good idea!

🚩 She pushes for a carbon tax.

🚩 She urges a mass revolt against Big Oil’s propaganda machine.

🚩 She calls out fossil fuel execs for knowingly suppressing climate science for over 50 years.

Surely, in this utopia, the left would worship her.

✊ They'd chant her name at climate marches.

✊ The New York Times would write hagiographic profiles about her efforts to save humanity from itself.

✊ College kids would plaster her face on their dorm room walls, right next to Che Guevara.

Can you imagine if we lived in this world?

Surely, if everything I just described were true, the left would be ecstatic—finally, a billionaire using her obscene wealth for good!

Right?

Well, dear reader, you already know who I’m talking about.

So what went wrong?

How did the man who accelerated the energy transition more than any climate activist in history end up getting labeled a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist tech bro who must be stopped at all costs... by the very people who claim to care about the environment more than anything else (except maybe DEI)?

It's a funny old world, innit?

So funny, in fact, that now we've got a full blown "Tesla Takedown."

Yep, the great progressive crusade against Tesla is escalating... to say the least.

We went from NPC TikTokers making outrage videos about the "Nazi car" to now Teslas are being attacked with molotov cocktails and gunshots, graffiti, and widespread vandalism.

And the left is eating it up!

Just this week on The Daily Show, the audience literally clapped and cheered to a bunch of exploding Cybertucks.

This is “progressivism” now.

You’d think, after decades of protesting fossil fuels, the left would be thrilled that someone was actually facilitating the transition.

But no.

Welcome to the left’s long, proud history of cutting off their nose to spite their face...

➡️ Progressives demand clean energy… but protest nuclear plants, forcing a reliance on coal and gas.

➡️ They call for affordable housing… but fight every new development with zoning laws and environmental regulations.

➡️ They demand “livable wages”… then push policies that make everything more expensive.

➡️ They demand high-speed rail and better public transport… but kill projects with NIMBYism and bureaucratic gridlock.

➡️ They want to end “corporate greed”… but push regulations that crush small businesses and empower monopolies.

The list goes on...

And that, dear reader, is why the left keeps losing.

They don't build. They don't solve. They don't create.

They protest, regulate, and tear down.

They don’t even need the right to sabotage their agenda, they do it themselves.

That’s why their vision for the future is so comically unpopular.

Now, I'm obviously no Democratic strategist, but if I was...

Here’s the unvarnished truth:

Nobody wants what you’re selling.

Nobody wakes up in the morning dreaming of rationed energy, cold showers, and a future where every human indulgence is taxed, banned, or monitored by an NKVD official with a sociology degree.

Nobody fantasizes about a world of gray, joyless, state-approved minimalism, where we all live in Soviet-style stackable pod apartments, eat cricket paste, and bike to work in the rain (or just stay home, watch TV, and live off UBI) while the ruling class flies overhead in private jets.

And yet... that’s the "bright" future you keep pushing.

It is a ‘great replacement’... of everything with a worse alternative.

A world that's cold and miserable. A world where human civilization is no longer advancing... just “managing decline.”

And that, dear leftists, is why your approval ratings are circling the drain.

And let's not forget the people who push this dystopia—the politicians, celebrities, the ESG moochers—don’t actually plan on living under these conditions.

Oh, no, no, no. I won't even bother to go there. You know these people aren’t cutting back. They never will.

They just want you and me to be poorer, hungrier, and more dependent.

Not a great campaign slogan.

The left could have championed technology, innovation, and Promethean optimism.

They could have led the charge for nuclear energy, electric infrastructure, and a brighter future.

But they didn’t.

Instead, they chose wokeism, neo-Malthusianism, and a doctrine of scarcity, shame, and eternal repentance.

So now, in 2025, we live in the clownworld timeline where progressives are boycotting electric cars and cheering as Teslas burn.

Let’s just sit with that for a second.

They’re setting fire to the most successful green energy company in history.

The revolution came.

And the only thing the left could do… was try to burn it down. ~Zack

That’s it for this week.

The world is only getting weirder.

Lawlessness is being sanctioned. The same people who clutched their pearls over January 6th are now cheering as a green business is literally getting firebombed. And the loudest voices in the room have no core values beyond whatever the algorithm tells them to care about this week.

Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. Facts don’t matter. Only outrage.

NPCs are glitching. Narratives are shifting faster than ever.

So hedge accordingly. Own real assets. Train real skills. Build redundancy into your life.

And, above all, think for yourself.

Sic semper debitoribus,
~ West & Zack

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