Make Normal Normal Again—We Need a Little Intolerance
The 2024 election was a cultural earthquake, and it’s got us rethinking what we’ve tacitly chosen to accept as a society. Consider California as an example. Skid Row, roughly 50 city blocks of downtown Los Angeles, is an ungoverned tent city for drug use, prostitution, death, and human misery… on “public” streets. America’s largest cities have become increasingly detached from basic principles of public order, something Daniel Di Martino, who was recently on Dad Saves America, has called “Third Worldism.”
Third Worldism, according to Di Martino, looks like “Trash-strewn streets, loud music in public, brazen shoplifting, rising disorder, and a general decline in civility.”
It starts with a soft approach to public disorder like drunkenness or sleeping on benches, and somewhere along the line it becomes decriminalizing car theft and shoplifting. Washington, D.C., Portland, and Seattle all saw versions of this in the last 5-10 years.
A few months ago, I proposed a framework to grapple with this societal downslide: the “cultural bell curve.”
It’s about behaviors, social acceptance, and facing reality instead of indulging utopian dreams. American culture has been torn apart by blank slate ideologues who believe that every lifestyle and form of “self expression” is equally valid, opposing any shame or judgment for anti-social behaviors.
Third Worldism is the belief that you’re entitled to use public spaces without any responsibility to care for them - Daniel Di Martino
A Minor Defense of Karens
Historically, almost every society was rigid—think feudal caste systems. Step out of line, and you’re ostracized, or worse, you get thrown off a roof (looking at you, Iran). In response, the 19th and 20th centuries gave birth to moral relativism and postmodernism, which I refer to as “tolerance communism.”
Everything’s fine, no behavior’s better than another. Sounds nice, but it’s a lie.
The irony is that “repressive tolerance” slowly morphs into its own kind of intolerance. The bad guys of the broader culture are called “Karens,” code for a suburban white lady who objects to your loud music or not wearing shoes inside TGI Fridays. This person is involved with their community HOA, they police architectural codes of the neighborhood, they call the police when things are wrong on the streets, and they correct other people for behaviors out of the norm.
Karens are the bad guys of the social media age. And I get it, they can be a pain, but are they really the enemy of society… or its lone defenders?
The Cultural Bell Curve
Reality demands a cultural bell curve. On this curve, most behaviors cluster around a norm we celebrate (telling the truth), some get side-eye (bragging about a raise to your coworkers), and others—sorry, pedophiles and rapists—belong in the “nope” zone.
Zoom in on sexual behavior. Married mom-and-dad families sit at the top of the curve. Social science backs it; most every mainstream religion does too—kids thrive with stable, married parents.
Single moms, gay couples, or interracial marriages? They’ve all moved from totally ostracized… to side-eye… to mainstream. That’s progress. But pretending everything belongs at the top—like “minor-attracted persons”—is delusional and dangerous. Some things deserve shame, not acceptance.
Health’s another example. Even if they don’t admit it, everyone has a sense of what a healthy weight looks like without having a medical degree, and they know what unhealthy looks like too. Anorexia’s one extreme, obesity the other. Both are unhealthy, yet the blank slate crowd pushed “healthy at every size” throughout 2020, dodging the fact that obesity spikes mortality risks for COVID—and just about everything else. We were all told not to talk about it for fear of generating shame in that class of people. You know what’s worse than feeling shame? Being dead.
It’s not kindness, it’s denial.
We need norms, not a free-for-all where truth is treated as a threat.
Parents! Teach the Curve
The blank slate is a trap. It promises freedom but delivers tyranny, paradoxically both through cancel culture and through our culture being too spineless to call out actual wrongdoing. It delivers Third Worldism.
As parents, we can’t sit back and let our kids buy into this. Teach them the bell curve—some behaviors and ideas are just better. Honesty, family, and health—reward those things. Crime, predation, delusion—call them out.
I’ve raised my son to argue what’s right, not parrot “inclusion.” You do not want everything included on your city streets.
Ask your kids: What’s worth celebrating? What deserves the side-eye?
This is part of how you raise not just a child, but a citizen and someone’s future neighbor.