So Long, and Thanks For Putting Up With Me
So…. If you’ve been wondering why there hasn’t been a new post pop up around here, sit tight. I’m about to tell you. Four days ago I woke up and just…didn’t. Didn’t open the laptop. Didn’t scroll through the news looking for something to light my hair on fire about. Didn’t draft a single word […]
Where Was All This Outrage Before November?
Tucker Carlson is tormented.
He said so himself, on his podcast this week, voice solemn, brow furrowed, shoulder-deep in a mea culpa that would make a televangelist blush. He campaigned for Donald Trump. He’s implicated. He misled people. He’s so, so sorry.
Megyn Kelly is furious. Candace Owens is done. Alex Jones — Alex Jones — has opinions about presidential fitness. And they are all, every single one of them, raging at Donald Trump like he just showed up uninvited to their kid’s birthday party and ate all the cake.
I’ve got one question for all of them.
Where exactly was this burning conscience before November 5th, 2024?
THE PRODUCTIVITY PARADOX: WHY THE BEST TOOLS IN THE WORLD ARE IN THE WORST HANDS
For the past two years, economists have been confronting a data set that defies the conventional framework.
The most powerful productivity tools in the history of human commerce are available on every laptop, at a price point accessible to individuals and small businesses. AI systems capable of writing functional code, analyzing complex datasets, designing products, and synthesizing research that would have required entire departments a decade ago are now a monthly subscription.
And American productivity is essentially flat.
Economists are calling it the Productivity Paradox. The tools exist. The capability exists. The economic results do not follow. The question being asked in faculty lounges and financial journals is how this is possible.
The answer is not complicated. The tools are not in the hands that would use them to build something. They are in the hands of institutions that will use them to manage something. There is a difference between those two activities that no amount of economic modeling fully captures — but that anyone who has ever worked inside a large organization understands immediately.
THE GREAT DIGITAL HANDSHAKE
There is a pattern worth understanding before it becomes the water you swim in.
Every great institution in American life — the school board, the city hall, the university, the church, the corporation — begins with a mission. Serve the students. Govern the community. Pursue knowledge. Preach the truth. Create value. The mission is the reason the institution exists.
Then something happens.
The institution grows. Budgets expand. Bureaucracies form. The people running it discover that the mission is hard and self-preservation is easier. Slowly, quietly, without any single moment you can point to, the mission gets traded for the arrangement. The institution stops serving the people it was built for and starts serving itself.
You have watched this happen in education. In government. In the church. Now watch it happen in real time — faster, larger, and with more consequence than anything that came before it.
The institution is Artificial Intelligence. And the capture is already underway.
Same Playbook. Different Building.
There is a particular kind of silence that follows when institutional machinery does its work.
Not the silence of resolution. Not the quiet that comes after a hard question gets an honest answer. The other kind. The kind where people who used to greet you in the hallway suddenly develop a deep interest in whatever is on the other side of the room. Where conversation dries up. Where you stop getting the email chains. Where you can watch the moment, almost to the day, when you went from being a person to being a problem.
I wrote about that silence Monday in the context of the institutional church. How the machinery activates when the arrangement feels threatened. How Matthew 18 becomes temporarily invisible when the people running the institution decide you are more useful as an example than as a brother.
What I did not say yesterday — and what needs saying now — is that I have seen the exact same machinery running in every other institution Americans have handed authority to. Same gears. Same levers. Same silence at the end of the process.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern. And once you have seen it up close in one place, you cannot unsee it anywhere else.
NOBODY TOLD ME BLOGGING COULD GET THIS INTERESTING
Let me tell you something about why this blog exists.
Not the sanitized version. The real one.
Some people process things by talking. Some by praying. Some by going for a long drive with the radio off and letting whatever’s rattling around in their head settle on its own. My wife would tell you to pray through it. And she is not wrong. But for me the writing and the praying are not always separate things. Sometimes working it out on a page is how I work it out before God. Sometimes the post is the prayer.
Average Bubba — Unfiltered exists because some things need to be said out loud. Because there are people reading this who have been through something similar and nobody in their circle had the nerve to name it. Because truth spoken plainly — even when it makes people uncomfortable, even when it costs something — is more useful than carefully managed silence.
That has always been the point of this.
It is more the point now than it has ever been.
imNsho and the Man I Used to Be
Before Average Bubba there was imNsho. In My Not So Humble Opinion.
WordPress. No Elementor. The old Weaver theme. And a voice that did not apologize for itself on even the best of days.
If you were around conservative blogging between 2009 and 2015 you know what it looked like. It was not a sanitized space. It was loud, pointed, opinionated, and it did not spend a lot of time worrying about who it offended. The blogrolls of the bigger conservative voices were full of people saying things plainly that the mainstream media would not touch. Rule 5 posts — patriotically dressed young ladies, flag bikinis, American flags and firearms — were a Friday staple across a wide swath of the conservative blogosphere. imNsho was no exception.
SUDDENLY, EVERYONE’S A THEOLOGIAN
Let me tell you exactly what happened last Sunday night and then ask you one question.
On April 12th — Orthodox Easter Sunday, of all nights — President Trump posted an AI-generated image to Truth Social. The image showed a figure in a white robe, one glowing hand resting on the forehead of a sick man, rendering that resembled nothing so much as the classical religious paintings of Jesus healing the infirm that hang in every art museum in the Western world. Behind the figure: an American flag, the Statue of Liberty, bald eagles. The patriotic backdrop made the messianic foreground impossible to miss.
The internet promptly lost its everloving mind.
By Monday morning the image was gone. When reporters asked about it, Trump told them: “I did not catch all that religious imagery.”
He also said he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
In a white robe. With a glowing hand. On Orthodox Easter Sunday.
I will let you make of that what you will. But before we go any further, I have one question for everyone reaching for their theological fire extinguisher right now.
Where were you for the previous eight years?
Rule 5 (Sorta) Post: BEER, BACON AND BABES
Now that I have your attention — let’s talk about Rule 5 and why a couple thousand conservative bloggers, give or take a hundred, take a deliberate break from the punditry on a regular basis. If we talked 24 hours a day, seven days a week about politics, social decay, Leftist goofballs, institutional rot, and […]
Why I Write
People ask me sometimes why I write what I write. Fair question. Honest answer — most of what ends up on this page isn’t the result of a content strategy or an editorial calendar. It comes from what I read. What I hear. What somebody brings up over coffee or across a tailgate that sticks […]
LUTHER’S GHOST IS BACK — AND HE’S WEARING A COLLAR
On October 31, 1517 a German monk named Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and cracked the foundations of Western Christianity in a way that has never fully been repaired.
He wasn’t trying to destroy the Church. He was trying to reform it. He was tired of the corruption, the indulgences, the gap between what Rome preached and what Rome practiced. He wanted the institution to return to what it claimed to believe.
Rome’s answer was to excommunicate him.
The result was the Protestant Reformation — the splintering of Western Christianity into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of competing denominations. The Catholic Church responded with the Counter-Reformation. Tightened doctrine. Reasserted authority. Drew hard lines and dared anyone to cross them.
For centuries it held.
Until it didn’t.