The Aaron Renn Show

The estate of Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), has engaged so-called "sensitivity readers" to re-write portions of the text to be compliant with today's ideologies. I discuss this trend, the idea of editing old books in general, and a practical response we can take to mitigate against this trend. 

It's a free country and people are entitled to live however they want. But it's important to put forth and advocate for general patterns of life that are mostly likely to lead to flourishing - particularly when we've been following them ourselves. In that light, this month's newsletter contains ten of these theses about marriage and family.

In the mid-century era from World War II (or even before that) to around 1990, America had a mass market common consumer culture. With the fragmentation of that culture accelerating post-1990s, the upper middle class and middle class began to develop distinct cultures and folkways. Even removing race and politics as factors of division would not address this, because even among whites, the upper m...

Eric Brende spent a year living with the Amish, and also time trying to live a similar homesteader life in a small town environment. He decided that that there is no place quite like the city to build a productive household environment that is less dependent on the industrialized, technological economy for day to day life. He joined me to talk about his journey and how to get started with the prod...

President Nate Fischer and Executive Director Josh Abbotoy join me to talk about American Reformer, a non-profit focused on reinvigorating Protestant Christianity in American life. 

In pro wrestling, the "face" is the hero and the "heel" is the villain. The incentive structures of our society are willing to personally reward people, especially conservatives, who engage in heel behavior in real life. This is because by acting the heel, people serve as a foil to the hero the media wishes to build up. Even Peter Thiel fell prey to this, helping to propel Rigo...

With remote work giving people flexibility on where to live, and people moving because of politics and other social factors, where should we live personally? I will examine different types of communities, and share some thoughts on their pros and cons.

I will look forward at potential trends for 2023, including the theme of the return to normal.

Returning to the theme of deficits in the American leadership and elite classes, I will examine some of the reasons why evangelicals in particular seem not be high impact leaders in our institutions and in society. In particular, I will discuss evangelicalism's weak sense of "calling" and it's low view of the created order.

Doxxing is the internet practice of revealing the identity of an anonymous social media account and/or digging up controversial or offensive social media content in order to get someone fired or worse. It's nearly universally viewed as a shady practice, but is a common technique for cancellation today. In this month's newsletter I provide a primer on doxxing: what it is, who does it, wha...

Change, whether in personal self-improvement or social evolution, is not linear. There are quantum leaps and discontinuities. This can be deeply unsettling and render obsolete previous ways of doing business and operating in the world.

Companies have long used aggressive sales tactics to maximize units sold and prices charged. Customers have long tried to get the best deal. With the rise of digital technology and financial disparities, these conflicts are highly asymmetric to the disadvantage of ordinary consumers. It's similar in competition for many essential goods like housing, where the equation for the average consumer...

Gambling, drugs, loan sharking, and sex used to be the province of the mob and other shady characters. Now they are big business, legally sanctioned by governments which often profit from them, and in which even major institutions and respectable figures profit. This is a perfect microcosm of the decline of American leadership. NYT: Key Findings From The Times’ Investigation of Sports Betting: htt...

Online or other criticism, combined with receiving support from unexpected quarters, is one of the most powerful dynamics promoting political realignment today. I discuss these, why you need to protect yourself from them, and why you should be careful about how you criticize people on your own "team" online. Twitter thread on career selection: https://twitter.com/aaron_renn/status/159071...

Thoughts on the midterm elections in 2022 and why you should get out and vote.

With the ongoing flight from the label "evangelical", I will discuss the various meanings of this term and why, rightfully understood, there is no escape from the name.

There's an increasing consensus that elements of the Covid response went way too far - especially long term school closures. It's also clear now that many things that were said turned out to be untrue. For example, vaccine efficacy was clearly overstated. That may have been an honest error, but it was still a serious one. Our society seldom holds people in leadership positions to account...

The question of the vocation of masculinity today is not what it is but whether it exists. I examine how traditional societies, and texts like the Bible, assumed pervasive gender polarity that's greatly attenuated today. I discuss what would have traditionally been common attributes of masculine vocation, and how they relate to contemporary society and ideology. The key point of conflict is o...

Videos from the 1980s show a vanished America. You see the near total absence of the detached, ironic, cynical tone that characterizes the country today and which came to the fore in the 1990s. It's largely a pre-obesity. And it's still a mass culture America. Despite its flaws, the median American today might actually be better off in that era than today.

Conservatives bristled when President Obama said "You didn't build that." But they should understand that theologically and practically, we did not actually build all that we've accomplished by ourselves. We benefitted from good fortune, and often especially from networks and access to capital. Paying it forward in terms of helping be the network for others is one of the way we...

Conservatives tend to view the media as leftist. Due to certain experiences of the Reagan and Bush II administrations, they also seem to believe the media tries to undermine a muscular foreign and defense policy. In fact, on matters of foreign policy and reporting on foreign countries, the media should largely be seen as supporting whatever the US policy towards those nations might be, policy that...

There's an element of social contagion in divorce. We are more likely to get divorced if our friends and associates are divorced. Hence, we should carefully monitor both our own and our spouse's friend networks, keeping an eye out for divorces. 

A Dutch soldier in Indianapolis for training exercises was murdered downtown, creating an international incident with global press and cabinet level officials in both the Netherlands and the US having to address it. And yet local Indianapolis leaders, in contrast to the abortion issue, can't talk about the role of crimes like this in our business climate and reputation.  From crime to the wat...

Andrew Tate, Kevin Samuels (RIP), the FaZe Clan and many others online figures most Americans have never heard of have no become the decisive influence on Gen Z. While all of us know this at some level, few appreciate the full reality of it in practice. This feeds off of, and accelerates, the decline of trust in institutions. NYT: Can FaZe Clan Build a Billion-Dollar Business? - https://www.nytime...

Some observations on the way evangelicals leaders have been speaking of "violence" as distinct from injustice, and present it as if it were a natural force like thunderstorms rather than a product of human agency.