Kenneth Xu's Blog, page 2

Trump should ban TikTok instead of letting Microsoft sale go through

This article originally appeared in Washington Examiner, dated August 6th, 2020.

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President Trump initially planned to ban the social media app TikTok, a video-making platform popular with Generation Z, from being accessible in the United States due to its affiliation with the Chinese government and invasive data collection policies. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he said bluntly. 

Then, on Sunday, Microsoft announced it was moving forward with plans to purchase TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, by Sept. 15. The deal is not done, however, and Trump has stated that he will deliberate on the matter.

Trump should stick with his original plan. No company, American or Chinese, should have the kind of access to confidential and extremely personal information that TikTok requires of its users.

As part of TikTok’s user agreement, new users are required to give its parent company access to personal phone information, user typing patterns, and photos and videos. Said Bloomberg News: Once you use TikTok for a few days, the app has a good idea of what you look like, how you hold your phone, who your friends are, what videos you like to watch, what topics you’re interested in and what websites you visit. It reads the messages you compose and exchange on the app. TikTok can then match this data to other information collected about users from third-party services and publicly available sources. 

However, TikTok’s data harvesting is actually not significantly more invasive than the likes of Google and Facebook. In some cases, Facebook’s data harvesting is more invasive, and it can actually track your personal and phone data even when you are not usingFacebook and your phone is off. 

Now, the critical difference: Facebook is headquartered and run in America, while TikTok is owned by a Chinese company that is required to give the Chinese government its data if asked thanks to a 2017 Chinese surveillance law. In fact, although TikTok denies it, it is possible that TikTok has already been asked to turn over its data now that Beijing sees that its preferred platform may be nearing the end of its life. 

That ability for the Chinese government to access hundreds of millions of young U.S. users’ personal data alone makes TikTok banworthy. The U.S.-China relationship is growing increasingly frosty, and China will seek advantages wherever it can, including in the realm of data collection. If China can justify banning Facebook and Google over U.S. security concerns, then certainly our country has the right to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok from our shores. 

Just because a company such as TikTok could potentially be transferred to Microsoft, and therefore American ownership, does not mean that it is suddenly off the hook. We will not, likely ever, have true clarity on whether TikTok’s promised “divestiture” of data from all of its Chinese operations would ever happen. 

As far as U.S. security analysts are concerned, TikTok is already a compromised company, with many structural and security deficiencies, including its high rate of data transference to its home base in China. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said to reporters: “I will say publicly that the entire committee agrees that TikTok cannot stay in the current format because it risks sending back information on 100 million Americans.” 

Even under a sale, severing that many connections with its home company would be extraordinarily difficult and would leave room for hackers to step in and get the data on their own.

Although selling to Microsoft does assuage some concerns about direct foreign interference, Big Tech companies are vulnerable to China’s strong-arming as well. 

Apple, for example, relies very much on its relationship with China (in particular, China’s parts-making factories) to keep costs down and increase its profits. Who is to say that China might not come back and ask Apple for a favor of its own? 

Also, lax security practices in the technology industry have partially led to China’s stealing of trillions of dollars worth of data theft over the past 20 years, giving China a rapid expansion in its technology industry that now boasts nine of the world’s top 20 technology companies. 

And yet, when grilled on China’s technology theft on Wednesday, three of the four Big Tech CEOs — Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, and Sundar Pichai of Google — demurred on the question, refusing to say outright their position on a technology crisis that attacks their industries in particular. Only one, Mark Zuckerberg, went so far as to saythat the problem has been “well documented,” which it is.

It appears as if it is not just Chinese companies that have the potential to get starry-eyed with the Chinese Communist Party. There are too many concerns both with TikTok’s transfer to Microsoft and with the state of the Big Tech industry’s relationship with China in the first place that make this potential deal a no-go.

To Stop Canceling People Like Bari Weiss, Do What J.K. Rowling Did

This article originally appeared in The Federalist, dated July 16th, 2020.

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Bari Weiss, the Jewish-American columnist at the New York Times who argued sometimes controversial but well-reasoned positions, left the Opinions section of the paper in a stormy resignation letter. In her letter, she describes in chillingly familiar terms the culture of the nation’s paper of record.

“The truth is that intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times,” she writes. “Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world?”

The prevailing conservative interpretation of Weiss’s resignation is that Weiss was a “martyr” overrun by the cancel-culture mob, yet another example of the left’s sadistic sacrifice of dissenting viewpoints on the altar of wokeness.

“What’s happening is that [people like Bari Weiss] are being rooted out, or they just can’t work there because it’s such a miserable climate because of what the other employees, some small minority of very angry woke progressives, are subjecting them to harassment and bullying and name-calling that makes it a toxic environment for anyone that disagrees with them,” said Reason senior editor Robby Soave on Fox News.

Whining About Cancel Culture Won’t Stop It

This is a true statement, but it’s also not enough. The right can complain about cancel culture and cry “1984” all they want, but a minority of angry progressives exerts a huge influence over all our mainstream institutions of power, and conservatives seem helpless to stop it.

The left does not care about dissenting views. They have already made that clear. If they could suppress every conservative in America into hiding in a cave, they would. Vanity Fair even says flatly that “for Bari Weiss it was bound to end like this.”

While the right’s usual free-speech strategy, crowing about “intellectual diversity” and lamenting the Orwellian suppression of “wrongthink,” might make conservatives feel better about themselves, it will not win the narrative back from the left.

Ross Douthat, also from The New York Times, argues convincingly in his July 14 column that the right and left both cancel. The right is just far too weak to do it effectively. “Attempted cancellations on the Right are mostly battles for control over diminishing terrain, with occasional forays against red-state academics and anti-Trump celebrities,” Douthat says. “Meanwhile, the Left’s cancel warriors imagine themselves conquering the entire non-Fox News map.”

If the right is to stop hemorrhaging territory to the left and even start rolling back the left’s domain, it must follow a different strategy, led by individuals, not collectives. Individual conservatives must each take one — yes, probably just one, as the individual burden would be unbearable with more — viewpoint about which they are passionate and knowledgeable and then die on it. I call this the “Rowling strategy,” named after the woman who personifies it best.

As many conservatives now know, J.K. Rowling, the acclaimed author of the Harry Potter books, tweeted her support for a woman who was fired for saying “men and boys are male” and “it is impossible to change sex,” comments that were accused of being anti-transgender.

The mob descended immediately, demanding a retraction and apology. Rowling did not bend. She dug in her heels, doubling down on the fact that transgenderism denies biology and that allowing men in women’s bathrooms endangers women. No matter what the left threw at her, Rowling did not recant her statements and has emboldened a previously demoralized conservative movement on the sex issue.

When the left-inspired “Equality Act,” which would allow transgender people to enforce their identity in all of public life no matter the repercussions, reached the Senate, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., successfully blocked the bill, in part due to his citation of Rowling’s defense of the true meanings of sex and gender.

Choose Your Battle, and Don’t Stop Fighting

Conservatives need more people like Rowling, who isn’t even a conservative, taking a stand on just one thing they really care about. Of course, most conservatives don’t have the clout of Rowling, who is arguably one of the most famous authors in the world. Many professors, scientists, students, and others have been canceled for trying the Rowling strategy long before she did it successfully, and her fame is a significant factor in why she is seemingly uncancellable.

But the culture war needs more than isolated instances of people speaking up. The Rowling strategy is an individual mandate — but it’s a mandate for everyone on the right.

We need to expect full-forced attacks from the left and then realize how puny and small they really are when pitted against a true defense. Each individual conservative thinker needs to pick an issue, do his or her homework on it, draw a line in the sand, and refuse to budge.

One of President Donald Trump’s most admirable moments occurred when he defended his judicial nominee Brett Kavanaugh when Christine Blasey Ford accused the judge of sexual assault. Trump could have allowed the left’s wailing and howling to get to him, forcing Kavanaugh to get canceled and lose everything, but Trump stood by his judge and fought back at the complete lack of evidence from Ford and her leftist cronies. As a result, Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, and the left has hushed up about sexual assault grievances now that Joe Biden has his own problems.

Conservatives must learn to specialize. Being a general “conservative” means nothing if every tenet you hold dear is sinking rapidly into the quagmire of the racists and bigots. We must dig deeper than the left, which is not too hard, and sustain the pressure, which is harder. If we do, we win. If we don’t, the left not only wins but will use that win to compel us into shame, misery, and defeat.

This Legendary Civil Rights Advocate Is Taking on School Diversity Quotas

This article originally appeared in The Daily Signal, dated January 8th, 2020.

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When a school system draws racial boundary lines and denies entry to qualified students on the basis of race, it doesn’t matter if it’s done in the name of segregation or so-called diversity—it is still wrong, according to one prominent civil rights advocate.

Terrence Roberts, a member of the original “Little Rock Nine” who entered a segregated Arkansas high school under National Guard protection in 1957, appeared in front of a Connecticut parents union Dec. 5, criticizing the local Connecticut school board for instituting blatant racial quotas in its magnet school programs.  

Roberts, who has served as a professor of psychology at UCLA and a consultant, focused his ire on a Connecticut state law that mandates a minimum of 25% white and Asian students in the Hartford magnet schools.  

“Here in Connecticut, by lumping together whites and Asians, blacks and Hispanics, that’s playing a giant game of ‘Let’s you and him fight,’” he said in an interview with Gwen Samuel, the lead plaintiff in a court case challenging the racial quotas.

Because many Connecticut magnet schools draw primarily black and Hispanic applicants, if too few white and Asian kids enroll, the schools may deny spots in the school for the qualified black and Hispanic students who continue to apply. This creates absurd outcomes in these magnet schools such as empty seats in the school, while qualified black students get stuck on the wait list.  

The Connecticut school board justifies these quotas in the name of integrating the school systems. It points to a 1996 court case called Sheff vs. O’Neill that ordered the Connecticut education system to provide better opportunities for black students, thus sparking the construction of these magnet schools as integration devices.  

A state commission designed to enforce the Sheff decision established as a goal that 41% of Hartford students would be in “integrated” environments by 2013, which it defined as being at least 25% white and Asian. Without meeting that quota, a magnet school could be subjected to demagnetization and loss of funding.    

This has created a local controversy over which races “deserve” the limited spots in these magnet schools, which are widely viewed as gateways out of poverty. Roberts views this competition with distaste, having seen what this kind of identity politics has done in the past: strengthen constituents’ dependence on the people in charge.

“People don’t often realize this, but the powers that be pull the strings,” he said. “As long as they can have you battling it out, they have total satisfaction, because they don’t have to go in and beat you up.”

Members who attended Roberts’ lecture were inclined to agree. RJo Winch, a former Hartford city councilwoman, disputes the notion that the court order under Sheff vs. O’Neill expanded state authority to the point where they could arbitrarily deny entry to applicants to local magnet schools on the basis of race. 

“Sheff. vs. O’Neill was about letting parents who wanted to send their kids to another school attend another [school],” Winch says, adding that the lead plaintiffs themselves simply wanted to have better options for their schooling—not necessarily a mandate for diversity quotas.

The Connecticut Supreme Court even admitted that lagging educational achievement was mostly a function of poverty, not race. This leaves the question: Why the zeal to integrate based on race specifically? Why the push for more suburban white people in these magnet schools, when it’s really the underserved black communities in Hartford that need the schools more?  

Indeed, there is something particularly uncomfortable with the board’s insistence that these gleaming magnet schools be built for the purpose of attracting white people, as if merely being around white people would improve the lives of these low-income black students, who are presumably suffering from much greater problems than the lack of white people in their classroom.

Roberts is certainly skeptical of this “white osmosis” theory, calling it demeaning to the ability of black students to form their own habits of excellence. He even pointed out imperfections in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education civil rights case for focusing its reasoning too much on the need for black students to be around white students to succeed.

“I think what happened with the Brown decision was somewhat problematic, because there was a great deal of emphasis put on the need for black people to feel better about themselves by being put in classrooms with white kids,” he said. “The real issue has always been resources, material resources, opportunities.” 

And in Connecticut, such resources are being denied to these black and Hispanic kids to satisfy an arbitrary diversity quota. 

Roberts called for vigilance against those who claim they are on your side but engage little with the actual community that they purport to represent.

“There are people out there who are doing white ally training,” he said. “I can just sense people going for the ally training and feeling good … they go home to suburbia and they got a certificate on the wall: ‘I was trained, I’m an ally.’”  

But then he adds: “In my mind, it is not that we have a problem, and we need allies to help us. No, it’s that the country is sick, it is diseased, and we all need to come together and figure out how to find a remedy to make it work.”

Dropping SAT from college admissions hurts minorities in the name of wokeness

This article originally appeared in , dated May 22nd, 2020.

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We should all be concerned about the University of California regents’ decision to eliminate the SAT and the ACT from college admissions by 2025. This change will harm the very same minority students who administrators supposedly seek to protect. 

The decision flouts the recommendations of UC’s own faculty leadership and the task force convened to study the issue. It reflects not rational policymaking but a growing movement on the Left to do away with standardized testing in college admissions due to a perceived racial bias against black and Hispanic applicants.

These sentiments are simply false. 

There is no evidence that the SAT is “biased” against black and Hispanic applicants. What is used to justify these claims are the sizable differences in average scores across demographic groups. But discrepancies alone do not prove discrimination.

The true purpose of the SAT is to predict college success, and it does that very neutrally along racial lines. SAT correlations with college GPA are nearly identical between black students (0.49), Hispanics (0.55), Asians (0.54), and white students (0.56), all of which are considered “high.” In fact, there is potential evidence that the SAT tracks college GPA in black students better than it does for white students. This is likely why there hasn’t been much noise from predominantly black colleges to eliminate the tests.

SAT and ACT scores also hedge against a very real fraud sweeping the country and devastating low-income black and Hispanic communities: grade inflation.

In places such as New York City, in predominantly low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods with decrepit public schools, such inflation runs rampant, and the number of students in NYC who pass math classes but fail basic math performance tests is unconscionably high. Over 140 high schools in New York City have entire grades with over 90% math exam failure rates, but grade inflation and unwritten “no-fail” policies have allowed them to pass students anyway. 

In fact, between 80% and 94% of students in NYC public middle schools passed their math classes, but just 2% to 15% passed their math exams. There is little doubt that as students in NYC are being passed from grade to grade, the acquisition of true math skills that would help them succeed in college or in working life is criminally perfunctory. And that lack of preparation will show up in college life. 

On the other hand, many wealthy white parents exploit the predominance of extracurricular activities in college admissions to give their kids an unmerited advantage in the admissions process. In one extreme example, famous Hollywood actors were able to get their children into elite schools by bribing their swim team coaches. Even without explicit bribery, wealth is far more likely to buy dance lessons or lacrosse uniforms that provide great boosts to extracurricular profiles than it is to buy actual cognitive ability as measured by a test. 

To gain the latter, you have to work hard and prepare, or at least show enough discipline to grind out study hours on practice exams.

Does anyone really think making an admissions system less accountable, less reliant on objective metrics, and more dependent on the individual sentiments of college admissions officers who hold biases just like any of us will somehow result in a less corrupt system? 

More likely, it will just benefit the rich and white even more. 

The moral blinders on the elite UC system are so strong, however, that it chooses to ignore this data, as well as the recommendations from the very people it hired to make a decision on this matter, and to vote 23-0 to eliminate the tests. Why?

Truthfully, this is all part of a left-wing push to reduce and eventually eliminate the notion of individual merit altogether. Believing judging people on the basis of merit to be odious, the Left would prefer to structure its institutions on the basis of race, ethnicity, and its own political predispositions. Don’t believe me?

A bill to revoke neutrality laws and allow race and sex preferences in public college enrollment and government employment is also making its way through the California legislature. Democrats’ piety about “diversity” should not be interpreted as sincere outreach to black people and Hispanics. It is just another power grab to restructure society how they see fit.

Why Are Millennials the Least Entrepreneurial Generation Since WWII?

This article originally appeared in The Daily Signal, dated May 22nd, 2020.

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It used to be that starting a small business was seen as the way up to wealth, or at least middle-class respectability.

Nearly half (49.7%) of American World War II veterans started their own small businesses, and it became natural and admirable for the nation’s young men to go from uniform to financial independence.

Through their endeavors, millions of Americans got employed, and this country became the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the world.  

We don’t live in that world anymore.

Testimony before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship four years ago indicated that less than 4% of 30-year-old millennials report being self-employed/entrepreneurial—a stark decrease from 5.7% of Gen Xers and 6.9% of baby boomers when they were the same age. From 1977 to 2013, startups as a share of all firms fell from 16.5% to 8%.

Why is that? In an age of more access to information than ever, in an age when personal branding has overtaken the millennial generation and the youngest generation lives in a luxury of technology, why are they not creating businesses left and right?  

Attitudes of Scarcity 

First, with the Great Recession, and now COVID-19, millennials can’t seem to catch a break—or so the thinking goes. 

Most millennials came out of school to find their job prospect severely reduced by the Great Recession. Although the economy has since recovered from that, many millennials were left psychologically scarred with feelings of financial insecurity and instability.  

People who feel financially out of place don’t tend to take huge risks with their lives or careers, but tend to overvalue their present securities, which explains why millennials make up about 43% (by far the largest percentage) of what Harvard Business Review describes as “work martyrs.” Those are people obsessed with their jobs and with proving themselves valuable to their employers.

This prevalence of workaholism—but lack of “venturism” into entrepreneurship—reflects what former presidential candidate Andrew Yang calls “attitudes of scarcity,” which is a belief in the contracting nature of the world and the increasingly limited supply of opportunities to succeed.  

 Yang writes in his book “The War on Normal People” that it “turns out that depressed, indebted, risk-averse young people generally don’t start companies.”

Those low-grade, depressing attitudes about the state of reality are unique in the sense that they seem to extend across races, classes, and sex, with more than half of millennials reporting leaving a job at least partially due to mental health and anxiety.  

But the question remains: Why the sour outlooks, even during the times of economic boom?  

Manufactured Eliteness

Due in varying degrees to parenting, media consumption, and the exploits of “elite” companies themselves, our nation’s brightest young people, who should be natural business leaders and innovators, are instead being nearly unanimously driven into one of a very few ruthlessly competitive professions and industries that generate a ton of profits, but come at sacrifices of backbreaking hours and narrowly tailored definitions of “success.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is right when he said last week that “too many smart people go into finance and law.” According to Manhattan Prep, 91% of the most selective college graduates invariably flock to six professions—finance, tech, medical school, law school, consulting, and grad school.

Furthermore, those opportunities are also increasingly geographically concentrated in six cities—New York; Washington D.C.; Boston; San Francisco; Los Angeles; and Seattle.

“Elite” firms, such as investment banks, consultancies, and the like also heavily target elite schools, interviewing hundreds of applicants at a select few schools—for reasons most often related to prestige and connections, rather than true merit, while largely ignoring others.  

That in turn ironically only heightens the social anxiety ambitious young people feel about getting into elite schools and working daunting hours at elite firms. 

That’s why although more than 60% of millennials desire to own a business sometime, so few do. The best and brightest talent too often cling to their high-paying, elite jobs, rather than venture out and make something of their own.  

Say what you want about how big those firms are, but they still only represent a tiny slice of what America and American success looks like. Yet, this generation grew up with movies like “Legally Blonde,” “The Social Network,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” movies that constantly market to us the glamour and hedonism of elite jobs. 

On the other hand, few of us can name a single movie released recently that shows us the honor of starting a small business.  

Finally, our parents are not off the hook, either. In the age of luxury parenting, they often gain value from their kids, based on the perceived status that eventually accompanies the child. That’s why we have grotesque scandals involving the bribing of college admissions officers and extracurricular activities designed to build networks and resumes, rather than skills.  

It also raises fragile “do not touch” children who lack the self-confidence to go out on their own.  

Lack of Community 

But you don’t need an elite education to start a business. You don’t even need a crazy tech idea.  

An overwhelming majority of the businesses created in America—89%—have fewer than 20 employees. Those are ice cream shops, hair salons, plumbing services, and whatever else is in demand today.  

They were started by people from all classes and places. The distinction is that those businesses don’t exist to serve a country or the world, like Google or Facebook or Goldman Sachs. They exist to serve a local community, one with which the business owner has a special bond.

But those ties of community are breaking down in young people. Some 30% of millennials report feeling always or often lonely, while 27% say they have no close friends. We don’t even say “hi” to our neighbors.  

A side effect—or, some would argue, the main effect—of globalization is that local communities are often ignored or abandoned. 

Despite a strong preference among the U.S. consumer base for local products, millennials flock to work for companies such as Google and Amazon over starting businesses that affect the people around them because they don’t have as much of a connection with the people around them.  

For the sake of this country’s health and economic robustness, this is not a good thing. This country’s small towns and incipient cities were built on small businesses. Removing the incentive to stay and build something for one’s neighbors will only hasten the decline and hollowing out of this country’s economic base.

The Solutions

What kind of solutions do we have to reverse this flight of young people from entrepreneurship?  

It must start in the home. Our young people are marketed a linear set of options for success. Our parenting culture needs to improve our messaging to focus on the wealth of opportunities we have to go back to school, to find a new job, and to have the willingness to fail and then succeed.  

Instead of aimlessly pursuing whatever “the next thing” is, such as the automatic track of students going to college immediately after high school with no plan for how to use their degree, we should emphasize that our young people first should come up with a long-term plan, and then decide on the best avenues to pursue their vision.  

We also need to restore our young people’s faith in this country. America-hating public school curriculums and the destruction of respect for our nation’s entrepreneurial history have already shell-shocked our young people into jaded cynicism for American ideals. People who are distrustful of this country tend not to want to invest in it.

We need to reject the idolization of status. Instagram creates people who spend inordinate hours of their days crafting personal brands—but have no substance to back it up. By contrast, business owners, in an effort to create the best possible product, have to deal with failure and the potential for losing social status and position. They have to soldier on.  

We have to teach our children to value truly helping people—instead of gaining followers. A brand is not a business. We have to venture out into the world and create something someone else actually wants to make a business. 

These are the classic values of entrepreneurship that are not being emphasized to our next generation. It will take a revolution in culture and thought to bring them back.

California Democrats Try To Legalize Racial Discrimination During Pandemic

This article originally appeared in The Federalist, dated May 1st, 2020.

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The California Legislature, with a Democratic supermajority, reconvened in the state Capitol May 4. Their second day back in office, with a pandemic raging around them, Democrats introduced a bill to bring back race preferences.

Bill ACA-5, which “would allow for sex and race to be considered for state positions once again,” including university admissions and public employment, was brought to the table by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber and Assemblyman Mike Gipson, both Democrats and stamped for recommendation to the State Assembly and Senate floor by the Assembly Public Employment Committee that same day.

It was instantly clear that Weber had been preparing during the pandemic to push this bill through as quickly as possible, as the hearing in the Labor Committee was accompanied by nearly 100 on-script leftist California organizations calling in to say how “strongly” they supported ACA-5, despite the legislature having not even debated the measure yet.

Race Preference Policies Lack Support

This is the third time in just less than 25 years that the California Democratic Legislature has tried to abolish California’s Proposition 209, a California constitutional amendment passed in 1996 that explicitly banned any form of preferential treatment on the basis of race or sex. Both previous times, their measures failed, despite California being a heavily Democratic state with one of the largest percentages (63 percent) of racial minorities in the country.

Why would liberal Democrats try to pass this bill now, in the middle of a pandemic? Perhaps they hoped no one would notice, but people are noticing. Nearly 30,000 people have signed a petition against ACA-5.

Asian Americans, in particular, have already mobilized against the bill and are pressuring the legislature to end the push. Studies on Harvard University’s racial preference programs show they most directly harm Asians, for these policies advance similarly qualified black and Hispanic applicants over them for no reason other than their race.

It isn’t only Asians who are harmed. After the passage of Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action, black and Hispanic admission decreased, but their graduation rates in the University of California system increased significantly, resulting in the same number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to black students as before Proposition 209. This suggests race preferences plug promising black and Hispanic minorities into landing spots considered more “prestigious” but less beneficial for their long-term welfare.

Liberal Democratic politicians obsess over getting back race and sex preferences because they believe standing in solidarity with affirmative action will help them politically with minority constituents. But do these policies really garner political support? Only if you are extremely cagey with the wording.

A 2014 Gallup poll suggested 58 percent of Americans supported “affirmative action” in concept, but when the questioning got more specific, into whether admissions should be solely merit-based or whether race should be considered, support for race preferences dropped to a measly 28 percent. In the latest Pew poll, 62 percent of blacks and 65 percent of Hispanics said race should not be a factor in college admissions, suggesting an even broader dislike for race preferences when the issues get more concrete.

This is likely because many Americans still think affirmative action means simply “improving opportunities” for racial minorities historically excluded by racial discrimination. ACA-5 is more radical. It says those opportunities can come directly at the expense of whites or other minorities, such as Asians. It is preferential treatment on the basis of race.

Only Democratic Lawmakers Support Affirmative Action

Democrats must increasingly resort to extremely tortuous wording to get any measure of broad public support for race and sex preferences. Here’s how they worded a 2019 referendum item in Washington state that would restore race and sex preferences:

The legislature passed Initiative Measure No. 1000 concerning affirmative action and remedying discrimination, and voters have filed a sufficient referendum petition on this act. Initiative 1000 would allow the state to remedy discrimination for certain groups and to implement affirmative action, without the use of quotas or preferential treatment (as defined), in public education, employment, and contracting.

Should Initiative 1000 be Approved [ ] Rejected [ ]

The ballot item later explained that “preferential treatment” meant only that race couldn’t be used as the sole factor for admissions, but that under the Initiative 1000 definition, Washington universities could still use race in admissions, as long as they did so “holistically.” The referendum measure still failed, 50.56 percent to 49.44 percent.

That’s right, even with that kind of wording in one of the most liberal states in America, race and sex preferences still failed as a ballot measure in 2019.

It really does appear that after 25 years, voters of all backgrounds are wise to Democrats’ race game. Conservative whites obviously hate race and sex preferences, but polls show even most moderates dislike them. Asian voters are perhaps the most passionate minority against them. When the stakes are framed correctly, majorities of blacks and Hispanics oppose them too.

Besides leftists, who exactly does that leave in support of race or sex preferences? The answer is almost no one. The California Democrats who try to advance this ridiculous bill in the middle of a pandemic are shooting themselves in the foot.

Why Won’t God Give Me a Sign?

“Models are only as good as their assumptions.”  You may have heard this line. It is about how the correctness of our predictions are only as good as the assumptions we plug into our predictions.  We model things every day. Every step we take is an incredibly detailed physical model of where we expect our foot to land. Our assumptions are plenty.  One is that we are not walking on a hologram projection. Another is that we won’t die in the next second. But every day, thousands of people die before they can take their next step.  They get hit by a car, or shot, or suffer immediate cardiac arrest. Their assumptions were wrong. They made a model of the world, and the model failed. And they died.

Many of us, who live in rich countries, who see everything largely working around us, make models of the entire world that we think are safe.  Our models of the world are deeply spiritual. Even the most ardent atheists make deeply spiritual models. We pursue love, and status, and sex, and money, and fame, and food and drink with spiritual zeal, and we model our lives off of the pursuit of these things.  Many of these things give us purpose. Make us feel alive.  Until we don’t.  Until we die.

Alternatively, and this is increasingly evident with people of my generation, we don’t pursue any of these things.  We don’t know what we are trying to pursue in the first place. We are grappling at unknowns and half-truths, and as the Bible says, “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”  (Eph 4:14) In doing so we don’t create models, but we go along with the world’s models, with the world’s algorithms for how they can take our money, keep us going from store to store, keep us fat and wanting and clueless. And then, by the way, we die.  

The greatest failure in the models that rich Westerners make about our own lives is that we assume we aren’t going to die.  Which is completely untrue, of course. But because everything in America is so clean, and we don’t see dead bodies lying naked in the sun like they do in repressive governments elsewhere in the world, because we have enough distractions and because people market us things that tell us that we can prolong and enhance our lives, we can delude ourselves fairly convincingly into not thinking about death at all.  We make our models based on the assumption that our lives are immortal.  This feigned immortality allows us to believe that things like sex, and money, and fame, etc. are actually valuable, because this world is all there is.  So why not pursue worldly things?  

How would our models for our lives change if we actually believed that the world and our lives are decaying, and that death is inevitable?  I would want to know what happens after I die. I’d be looking for every sign I can find to give a hint, a clue, as to what I may find after this world is gone.

I would be seeking and putting my mind on the eternity that potentially awaits me afterwards and the God that governs it.  

But why hasn’t God appeared to me?  Why is it that a God that supposedly wants to be found would  not simply reveal Himself to all men, and to me?  

Faced with aggressive questioning from some town intellectuals asking for “a sign” to confirm that Jesus is the Christ, Jesus answered them “an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.  For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three day and three nights in the heart of the Earth.” (Matthew 12:39-40)

I think this is the best explanation yet for why you may not have seen “a sign from God” yet.  I think Jesus’ response here is the most truthful response you can expect to see from a God who cares about us, who loves us, and who wants us to seek Him.  For Jesus said to the intellectuals that they are part of “an evil and adulterous generation… no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.”  I believe Jesus here is saying that for people as evil as us, as ignorant and prideful about our own immortality as ourselves, even if He gave a sign, would that lead us to change our heart?  Would we even see it?

By now it is commonly taught in basic psychology that the human brain is wired to see only those things that we value.  It is why you can walk down a busy street corridor, texting someone on your phone, and run headfirst into a sidewalk pole.  Even God’s most favored nation, Israel, was showered with many signs and wonders, and still blew off God and His commandments many times.  (Judges 19:6-17, for example) He sent mana down from Heaven and fed his people for weeks with bread falling from the sky! And despite such a clear and obvious sign from God, the Israelites still worshipped other gods and golden calves (Exodus 32).  They still did not follow Him. Before asking for a sign from God, it is worth asking ourselves: would that lead me to change my life at all?  

Because God has already sent us a sign.  A stark sign. An incredibly urgent sign that most of us don’t even see.  It is “the sign of Jonah” that Jesus was talking about. It is the sign of all human suffering and sin, borne within the body of Jesus Christ, and then conquered on the third day through His resurrection.  

When Jonah disobeyed God’s command to preach to the Ninevites, God sent a giant fish to swallow him up for three days.  For three days, Jonah suffered inside the belly of a fish. Still, in the midst of his suffering, he had a choice, because experiencing the reality of human suffering forces us to reckon with the reality of the world as a place of great suffering.  It makes us long to get away from suffering. It makes us long for a world in which people do not have to suffer. In which we don’t have to see our grandpas die from lung cancer or our hospital workers get infected with coronavirus.  

It doesn’t matter who you are.  You have seen suffering, or you will see suffering.  And then you will wish for a world with no suffering.  

Jonah wished the same.  And he prayed and grieved those three days in the fish.  He cried out to God for His forgiveness, realizing that his life was terribly mortal, not immortal, and that running from God was never going to solve his problems or conquer his fears.  He cried, as so beautifully recounted in the Book of Jonah,

“Those who pay regard to vain idols 
forsake their hope of steadfast love. 
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
Will sacrifice to you;
What I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the LORD!” 

“And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.” (Jonah 2:8-10)

When Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah, He is referring to this story, this incredible and moving account of God’s perfect forgiveness of sins.  As per the beauty and awesomeness of the Bible, He is also referring to Himself, as the three days Jonah spent in the fish also parallels with the three days Jesus would spend between His death on the cross and His resurrection.  And just as Jonah’s disobedience was punished in the belly of the fish, so was our disobedience punished on the cross borne by Jesus Christ.  

So the Sign of Jonah is the sign of sin, and the suffering incumbent upon sinners, finally redeemed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That is what Easter commemorates. The triumph of God’s love over death and despair.

So let’s stop making models of our life based on false assumptions of our immortality.  Let’s wake up to the reality of our death and search for the eternal truth. Let the moment of Jesus’ death in our place and His resurrection conquer death once and for all, convict us and show us the deep and unbreakable love of God.  The beautiful, amazing story that despite our inevitable deaths, we may gain eternal life because of the work of God – if we accept His free gift of salvation.  

Only then, will it become clear that this world, this material world we live in, is but a false model of reality. I find that the more I seek God, the more He reveals His signs to me. And the more I turn away, the colder I feel from God. This is the reality of what Jesus said when he said “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (Matt 25:29) The more we seek, the more we gain of God and His riches. And if we refuse to even seek, then even what little we have will be taken away, at our time of death.

To the struggling Christian or nonbeliever, there is only one prescription I have, and it is not even mine: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not in your own understanding.  In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” (Prov 3:5-6)

I believe that if we take one step today towards God, whether it be to pray our first prayer or whether it be to quit a lifestyle we know is killing us and rotting us inside, whether to walk away from that next drug or one-night stand or power play that we know is from the devil, that God will welcome us in with open arms, will say gently, cradling our weak and broken arms, whisper in our ears, “your sorrow will turn into joy.”  (John 16:20)  

For Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the father in my name, He will give it to you.  Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” (John 16:23-24)

Will you stick with your model, your models of the world, and take it with you to the grave?  Are you really set to bet your life on that? Or will you dare to pray a word, say to God as the men in the Bible did, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 10:3)

To my LORD, to my Savior, you have helped me overcome my deep anguish, my anger at those who love me.  For I was broken, chasing every idol in the world, seeking to be popular, seeking the attentions of the world, seeking to build myself in my status, and in the process, turning far away from You.  And I hated myself for who I was, everything from my social awkwardness to the color of my skin. I took it out on the world, on those I loved, and my life was spiraling out of control. But I was invited to enter into the Gospel, and I took it, and LORD, you rebuilt my life.  A colossal gift I received; you healed by hate, my spite, and my misery; you gave me the greatest family and friends I ever had. You helped me to take comfort in my stages of life instead of always wanting more; LORD, as you calmed the storms of the ocean, you calmed the storm of my heart.  You built in me miracles I could have never anticipated. You protected me when I was about to fall, you allowed me to love myself and live for others. Now I see how blind I was to the reality of your Kingdom. Now I see the futility of the world; LORD, now use me and my story to bring others to Christ so they too might see the breadth and depth of your goodness!  Of your goodness, my LORD! My LORD my God!

The Coronavirus: A Perfect Storm of a Virus

The novel coronavirus’ unexpected and massive spread across the world has shaken the West to its core, prompting many to ask the question: why this disease?  Why not Ebola, or SARS, or any of the other strains of the flu that come about every season? What is it different about the coronavirus, and our clearly inferior response, that has the world reeling?  

You can blame politics; you can blame China; you can blame Trump.  In America, you can blame the outdated and obviously lethargic Center for Disease Control for ineffectively mobilizing to defeat the virus as soon as it arrived on Western shores.  All should share in some blame. 

But the truth is, the novel coronavirus itself, and the factors surrounding its origin, contain some unprecedented characteristics that made the disease difficult to predict and stop from the very beginning.  And, the signs that we did get were based in faulty statistics that drastically underestimated the disease’s capabilities to wreak havoc on the global ecosystem.  

The R0 Factor

The R0 Factor signifies the average number of people that a person with the coronavirus will pass it to.  Initial estimates by the World Health Organization pegged the R0 factor between 1.4 and 2.5 (meaning that an infected person will spread to between 1.4-2.5 other people).  However, followup research in January by a team of researchers led by Swedish health professor Joacim Rocklov revised that range upwards to between 1.4 and 6.9 people.  The initial underestimation of COVID-19’s contagiability led to a false sense of security by world leaders and possibly contributed to its more relaxed approach to the virus. 

This range is far more concerning due to the now-prevailing consensus that COVID-19 spreads faster than the notoriously fast-spreading SARS disease (which is in the same family as COVID-19) during its Chinese outbreak in 2003-2004.  With SARS claiming 8,000 infected and COVID-19 claiming over 200,000 now, that increased R0 factor has been proven correct in real life.  The original SARS outbreak had an R0 of 4.

The other recent disease of note that was eventually contained, the 2014 Ebola outbreak, only had an R0 of 2.  The coronavirus is well on its way to getting a much higher contagiousness label.  

The Potential Asymptomatic Carrier Function

What makes this disease even more dangerous than its previous recent counterparts, however, is the discovery of its contagiousness through asymptomatic carriers as young as pre-teens.  “Asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic transmission are a major factor in transmission for COVID-19,” says Vanderbilt professor of medicine Dr. William Schaffner.

Asymptomatic carrier transmission is truly unprecedented in the history of recent disease, to the point where Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar denied such a capability as late as March 1st.  An outbreak in Massachusetts was initially started by an asymptomatic carrier, the state Department of Health asserts.

Neither SARS nor Ebola were contagious before symptoms, and Ebola couldn’t be transferred except through bodily fluid direct contact – meaning it couldn’t be contagious through the air or through coughing or sneezing.  This enabled governments to quickly get a hold of Ebola cases and quickly quash its spread. In contrast, COVID-19 can pass to others through any of the above means – making it much harder to isolate and control.

Even more damning is COVID-19’s long incubation period over 2 to 14 days with an average estimate of 5.1 days – during which time it is still contagious.  Compare this number with the incubation period for the common flu, which is 2 days.  This extended lease on asymptomatic contagiousness makes COVID-19 even harder to track and contain than other diseases of its time.  

The Origin and Spread

The geography of COVID-19’s initial spread and its timing of arrival also played a huge factor in making it a truly crippling disease to the entire world.  Although you likely had not heard of Wuhan, China before the outbreak of this disease, the reality is that the city of 11 million people, called “The Chicago of China” by international observers, is one of China’s biggest railroad and transportation hubs. It is quite unfortunate that the deadly coronavirus decided to make Wuhan its epicenter, because the city is quite literally the Gateway across all of China and the rest of the world.  As Chinese authorities suppressed information of the disease in its early stages, the coronavirus was allowed to make its way across multitudinous railways, waterways, and roads and infect thousands.  

This is simply an unlucky event.  The Ebola virus began in the much more socially and geopolitically isolated West African region, which impacted poorer regions of the world but also limited its spread.  The SARS virus first impacted Southern China in 2003, but at a time and place where China was less socially and infrastructurally developed than it is today. We live in the most globalized and interconnected time in human history.  The confluence of the time and place of origin compounded the virus’ spread.

The Deadliness

And of course, the coronavirus is a deadlier strain of virus than others like it.  The common flu has a death rate of 0.1 percent, while the coronavirus’ death rate appears to be larger – at least 10 people per thousand infected (1 percent).  

Part of this reason is because the COVID-19 virus has mutated in a number of innovative ways to penetrate more deeply in the human body than other diseases.  The deadliest innovation is a protein found in a virus that latches onto a human enzyme called furin – which is found all over the human body.  This allows the virus to penetrate both the upper respiratory and the lower respiratory systems, which is rare for a disease of its kind.  Upper respiratory diseases tend to spread more quickly but have milder symptoms, but lower respiratory diseases tend to be less contagious but inflict greater damage to the body.  COVID-19 is unique in that it afflicts both systems.

The Unknowns

Now we live in a new era, one of social distancing and the closure of businesses across America.  Some Americans question the supposedly “extreme” approach that our government is taking to prevent the spread of this highly pathogenic and damaging virus.  Yet, our approach is sound and right. Any less cautionary approach would be gambling thousands of lives for the sake of a few weeks of comfort.  

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, mathematician and venerable risk analyst, first noted back in January 26th, long before the coronavirus “officially” hit Western shores, that the virus has a potential for a multiplicative effect with few ways to stop the disease if it really got going, advocating for a “precautionary principle” that cut off access to the disease before it could multiply as it did in Wuhan.  Then, on February 2nd, the Trump Administration instituted a travel ban with China, which likely mitigated the initial onflow of cases to the United States. However, even that travel ban was not enough as by then the virus had spread undetected into the U.S. and Europe.  

It was impossible to truly know how deadly this virus could be.  But what this virus showed the world is that unknowns with even low probabilities of severe impact need to be treated and mitigated based on its potential future risk, before waiting for empirical data to confirm or deny our hypotheses.  We need to be wiser, and be more cognisant of extreme possibilities, and quicker to react in protective ways than we currently are.  We cannot assume that historical distributions can always predict the future, because there’s so little we know about the future. Whenever possible, overcorrecting is likely the better option than allowing for the potentiality of the future to play itself out.  Because when it does, the consequences can be more severe than we could ever think.

You Reap What You Sow

Dear friend,

I wanted to share with you a third personal update, drawing from a revelatory three months in my life.

Over these past three months I have explored the meaning of friendship and place. 

First, I want to point out a common misconception about my life that may surprise you.  I don’t actually live in D.C.  I don’t actually work in D.C.  (I know, I am extremely guilty of labeling myself as a “D.C. denizen” as well; see my first personal update).  I both live and work in Reston, VA, a suburb in Northern Virginia about 20 miles from D.C., which is a world away from the so-called “D.C. life.”  In Reston, VA, you can actually find a decent parking spot.  Rent isn’t half your salary.  And in Reston, VA, politics doesn’t make the world go ’round.

Don’t get me wrong: I go to D.C. very often.  When there is a political event that interests me, I go.  I keep up with what’s going on.  But let’s just say I’m more of the exception rather than the norm in my community.  I live in a place fully ensconced in the strip of land known as the “Dulles Technology Corridor” – the home of so many technology servers that over 50 percent of US Internet traffic goes through my neighborhood.  Let’s just say if bandwidth were radiation, I’d be fried to a crisp.  When you meet someone by chance here, they are more likely to be a programmer or engineer than lobbyist or political operative.  I realized early on: my conversation opener isn’t exactly going to be my thoughts on supply-side tax policy.  (Though, knowing me, it isn’t necessarily not, either :))

And
how do I feel about this arrangement?  Well – who knew, making friends
with people outside the political world isn’t so bad after all!

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Over the past several months, I have built strong bonds with local young
people who I have the pleasure to call friends.  I give a ton of credit
to my church, Reston Bible Church.  RBC is a mid-size church focused on
Biblical teaching.  Being able to serve and live in community with my
friends from church has allowed me to develop lasting bonds and
Christian accountability in a world where both are quickly falling out
of favor in society.  I play guitar (and also do tech) for our Young
Adults group, which is growing quickly after launching in September.  We
do church events like Christmas parties and lunches, and I help to
organize these fun ways to fellowship together. 

Yet,
I have also developed friendships in eclectic, almost random, places. 
One of my best friends met me on a late-night metro ride back from D.C. 
Others come from reconnections with past internships and even some old
high school bros.  I’ve made friends with coworkers over board games,
happy hours, and swing dances.  And I’m blessed to have friends in
places as far away as San Diego, Virginia Beach, Princeton, and of
course, Charlotte, NC.  My circle, as usual, is as scattered as ever.  I
wouldn’t have it any other way.

One thing
I have learned in this unique time of my life is how the old Biblical
axiom: “You reap what you sow” really plays out in real life.  There was
a time in my life when I took friendships for granted.  I don’t
anymore.  Bonds take time to build.  If anything, my job in development
for YAF has taught me this.  People will take chances on you if you
present yourself well.  But you have to reward them with faith, loyalty,
and commitment.  Otherwise, good presentation just leads to wasting
time.  It’s why in fundraising, they teach you that at least initially,
it’s not about the first gift.  The first gift is just a starting point,
an invitation to play.  But if you play with honor, and respect for
people’s intentions, those relationships can go a long way.  Whether in
expanding people’s philanthropic horizons or building lasting
friendships, that much is true. 

So
I’m approaching this world with a heightened sense of the value of
relationships, and the value of pursuing life honestly, in helping to
show God’s love to people.  I’m so blessed to have a foundation of
amazing people, like you, to really build me up and build up my spirit. 

As for other things:  I have continued in my journalism while here in D.C., spending many nights and often weekends going to places to interview people and learn about the world, and then write about it.  I have a monthly blog on The Daily Signal, a national news and opinion site sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which you can find here.  I have continued in my dancing training.  Now I’m adding Balboa swing to my repertoire!  And I’m rooting for the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.  Go Chiefs!

I’m Rich

I went shopping the other day. I dislike shopping. There’s a reason why my mom and sister picked out my clothes until I was about 16. It just doesn’t occur to me very often that I need things. I’m not saying this to brag. That’s just who I am.

But I was shopping for Christmas presents. These are things that I don’t need, that the people I’m shopping for probably don’t need, and yet… here I am, walking at a Target with a bunch of 30-something women skeetering around on their carts, shopping for Christmas presents.

While I was at Target, something wild occurred to me. I realized that this wasn’t what I anticipated when I left college to go to D.C. What do I mean by this? I meant that the narrative I kept getting in culture is that wages are so low and prices are so high in D.C. that I would be literally scrapping for crumbs every day just trying to survive until I get my promotion. When I took my job I was thinking that the first year at least would be extremely difficult financially – that I would be hanging on by a thread on my salary.

And yet, here I was, buying gifts for people. This was after taxes (which are ridiculously high for an earner like me), rent, tithe, savings for retirement, and essential spending (health care, food, etc.).

I’m rich, and I don’t mean that with any kind of irony. I don’t want to speak for anyone else but me here, but I am. No, I don’t have a family inheritance. No, I’m not making secret stashes of money beyond my typical DC salary. But I am rich. I have all of my needs taken care of and then some – much more.

I’ve been thinking about God and the Christian life. What I’ve started to realize more and more is that the Christian life is totally incompatible with the way the world wants to live. It’s so incompatible, in fact, that the way God defines a word like “rich,” or “happy,” or “fulfilled,” is completely the opposite from the way the world defines it, and tries to trick you into believing it.

Look at what Jesus says about birds for an example of what “rich” means in God’s eyes: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26)

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ” (Matthew 6:28-33)

Under God’s eyes, the very fact that I am watched over and beloved by God makes me rich. So rich.

But that’s not the way the world wants me to think. The world wants me to think that I am poor.

Don’t believe me? Why do you get free magazines in your inbox advertising a new house, or new clothes, or cosmetics? Why would a stranger pay money for the creation of the magazine, as well as the postage, for the opportunity to send you free stuff?

The answer is simple: because they want to make you want what they have. No one who is satisfied in their current home would seek to buy a bigger one. No one who is satisfied with their current looks would seek to buy cosmetics. No who is satisfied with their current relationship (or singleness) would go on Tinder.

The object of the world is to make you feel poor. It’s the ultimate Jedi mind trick – to convince a rich person that they are poor. Because when you are poor, you want stuff. You feel like it is a basic necessity to have whatever they are having. You may even feel like there is a great injustice in the world that you don’t have it.

Already Christianity – in other words, the truth – is so radical. What God wants for us is to feel rich. But not in that idiotic, prosperity-gospel, Joel Osteen falsity about God giving us our new house or new yacht or whatever. In the truest sense of what richness is: lavished in God’s giving. Including the ultimate gift of all – in the sense of full and total communion with Him because of the death of Jesus Christ.

But that is a decision we have to make – to act like we are rich, and not poor. And the world will hate us for making that decision. It means less money for the world. It means less time spent scrolling through our phones, jealous of the manufactured lives cultivated on Instagram and Tinder.

Furthermore, to take the mantle of the rich means to take the burden of the rich.

“And as [Jesus] was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” 21 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22 Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.” (Mark 10:17-22)

The rich young man that Jesus asked to give away all his possessions was sad that Jesus told him that. He loved the world too much and Jesus too little. He probably thought to himself, “but I need these things.” Indeed, even a rich man in Jesus’ time was convinced by the world that he was poor.

But did you see that note that Mark made in that passage? “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, ‘you lack one thing.'”

Jesus didn’t seek to destroy the life of this rich young man. He loved him, and saw that he was suffering from his moral poverty. He was chained to the things that he owned. Jesus asked him to give them away to set him free.

See, the burden of the rich isn’t really a burden at all. It is that, by giving and loving others with your money, time, and kindness, you experience the true joy that can only be found in Christ.

I want to close with my own personal story of my first tithe. For a long time, I resisted giving. I thought: “I might need this in the future.” I anticipated what the culture kept telling me: you are poor, hoard what you have, don’t give any of it away, lest you lose that edge that will allow you to survive. 10 percent of my income seemed like a lot. I was like, “10 percent, in this city, on my income?”

In other words, I was acting like I was poor. But I wasn’t.

A friend convinced me to start giving. At first I resisted. I asked him what if I started out giving 2 percent and then gradually move upwards? I realize now that was a cowardly mindset. My friend thought so too. He told me God’s grace is sufficient.

When I arrived in D.C. and got my first paycheck, the thought of tithing came up against my own insecurity. I thought: dang, that’s a lot of money. But it wasn’t. It was actually nothing. Still, I flailed around. Finally, I prayed, and said: “God, I surrender this to you. You have blessed me unbelievably.” And I put ten percent of my post-tax income to a bank account that would all go to my church.

I waited a couple weeks. I kind of half-expected something in my life to tighten. My pocketbook to suddenly stretch. Suddenly, I would go into debt. None of that happened. On the contrary – the money that I saw I was making acquired new purpose. I realized how much of an impact I could have on the world – if I would just give.

The Word of God is being fulfilled, right before my eyes.

“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.” (Malachi 3:10)

Over these past few months on my own, I’ve realized how blessed I truly am. My church. My friends. My family. My ability to do something that I love, for the sake of God and His Kingdom. Isn’t that just the greatest blessing?

The world makes you feel poor. But the Christian life makes you rich. It really does.