It's the Golden Age in small town and rural America.

@usaridge is just getting started, and with a number of high-conviction acquisitions in our pipeline, we have decided for the first time to open up our fundraising process.

Strap in.🧵 In late January, we announced the completion of our first marquis acquisition: Brewington Farms, in Whitleyville TN, where we are designing and building a thoughtfully designed rural agri-hood centered around a grassfed beef and lamb ranch.

https://x.com/Byzness/status/1881759736795976025

I joke about Highland Rim Nationalism a lot.

But enough people have asked "wat means" that I feel the need to give an earnest explainer about why this is one of the best regions of the country.

First, we must start in Nashville. Nashville, TN lies in the so-called "Nashville Basin" - an anomalous low-lying area (600' above sea level) in the middle of the state.

It hosts unique geographic features, such as arid Cedar glades with cactuses and exposed bedrock (one of the rarest ecosystems in the world).

Flank steak is an affordable, very flavorful cut of meat.

If properly prepared (big if), it can be as crave worthy as the best ribeye or filet.

Here’s how I do it. 🧵 1. The Steak.

Get the meat out of the fridge at least 1.5 hours before it needs to go on the grill (to warm up to room temp).

Back in January several folks who've publicly supported the Save Grove City campaign were contacted by journalists at Grove City's Collegian paper. It appeared they were preparing to run balanced coverage of the controversy.

Yesterday, the Collegian ran this piece instead. The Collegian reporters asked for extensive quotes from myself, Travis Barham, Scott Klusendorf and others. You can go read some of these quotes at the SGC website (below).

We are all busy people but took the time because we hoped for a fair story.

savegrovecity.com/timeline-of-ev…

Every week I hear from several companies whose founders are looking for values-aligned investors.

And I often hear from investors who seek exciting, credible opportunities in the burgeoning commercial-cultural revolution.

https://twitter.com/santspliego/status/1629175219813228544

@NewFoundingOrg wants to facilitate this activity as much as possible. But we encountered a challenge.

The pen and paper methods we use for deals where we play a highly involved role quickly exceeded our capacity.

It’s simple.

Reinvigorate federalism.

Consolidate power and practice deliberative republican governance in places where social conditions still allow it, as an exception to the general regime decay. This is not a revolutionary idea. It is deeply American and counterrevolutionary.

Reinvigorated federalism is a modest step back toward how the framers wanted our constitution to work.

Got a chance to visit Moscow, Idaho last week and meet with @douglaswils, @CrossPolitic guys, @RedBalloonWork team and folks from @NewSaintAndrews.

Grateful for the warm hospitality.

A couple quick reflections, some of which surprised me. 1. Moscow, Idaho has a thriving tech scene (ridiculous talent for the city's size), with both imported talent (ex-FAANG workers) and homegrown talent (NSA workers trained up at EMSI). They also have capable VC funders and noteworthy start-ups.

I understand the @GroveCtyCollege Board of Trustees will be meeting in coming days. Yet again, it seems likely that CRT-related issues are set to dominate the discussion there.

How can Grove City move past this issue? A couple thoughts. Grove City needs to restore trust with the CRT petition group (generally representative of its constituency).

That trust was broken when the administration responding to their concerns by attacking the CRT petitioners and denying that there was any mission drift problem.

Many well-intentioned conservative and/or Christian elites have a tendency to reduce every problem into an *intellectual* problem, for which the remedy is reasoned discourse. However, since not all problems are intellectual in nature, we get strategy mismatch. Take CRT as an example. To be sure, it was born in law schools and there is a pseudo-intellectual strain of it, but when conservatives critique it in institutions, they are typically referring to CRT as a blunt cultural force, as the plausibility narrative that leads to ...

Members of SATF unofficially met with Willy Rice, not Tom Buck.

Rick Warren had a deus ex machina appearance at a microphone given generous time to bloviate.

The SBC ought to be a carefully managed deliberative body. But it’s being run like a celebrity pastor cabal.

https://twitter.com/tombuck/status/1536846823242932224

What happens on the stage (and often, in the audience) is a carefully choreographed dance to maximize empathetic support for whatever the stage wants.

In rare moments, where the dance is interrupted and we get a real look at what’s there, it’s ugly.

This thread is for Cotton Mather respecters.

Cotton Mather - polymath, pastor, politician - an American original. Ingenius and hardworking, epitome of the Yankee.

A founder of the American nation - not a political founder, but a spiritual and cultural founder. Educated at Harvard College (where his father Increase Mather served as president), Cotton Mather was instrumental in shepherding a donation from a certain Elihu Yale to the then-obscure school "Collegiate School" in New Haven. Mather suggested that the school take Yale's name.

What if I told you that there's a treasure trove of ancient American protestant hymns out there that almost no one today has heard of. Except, maybe some of those old churches you've driven past in Appalachia; you know, the ones that look like this: Maybe primitive Baptist or Cumberland Presbyterian. Maybe still know how to sing with shape notes, as they've been doing since they were planted 200 years ago by circuit riders. Passing down secret harmonies from generation to generation until they take on local patina.

Grove City College:

Dueling petitions, lefty faculty members openly rebelling and coordinated character assassination attempts on Board members. There's a war for the school's soul afoot.

What exactly is the @GroveCity administration doing right now? Where do they stand? Let me put this as plainly as possible. If you are an administrator and you foster conditions where your employees feel comfortable engaging in personal attacks on your Board, that reflects on your job performance and your job is (or should be) in peril.

I pray Roe will be overturned. Not in the bag, but looking likely. And it's grimly fitting for Roe's end to be heralded by a leak - the high comportment that SCOTUS and its clerks seemed to retain despite norm destruction in senate, etc., may now be fraying as well. Because Roe best exemplifies a string of decisions, starting in the Warren court, that aggrandized SCOTUS's role to a senatorial/deliberative body with final word, thereby enacting de facto constitutional amendments.

Early today the GCC Board released a clear and fulsome report about what needs to be done at GCC.

I just learned that last night, GCC displayed some of the clearest evidence of its mission drift yet.

Interesting timing, to say the least. Details/analysis follow. 1/1

https://twitter.com/Byzness/status/1516895331539197953

Last night, the GCC College Democrats (faculty advisor @wthrockmorton) hosted an event on LGBTQ+ allyship. There, they distributed the flyer below, which calls on people to "always ask and never assume what pronouns someone uses" and to "wear your allyship with pride." 2/2

Today, the Board of @GroveCtyCollege released the findings of its investigation into CRT/mission drift at GCC.

gcc.edu/Portals/0/Spec…

The Board should be commended for taking this extraordinary step. The report is admirably clear on the ideal of the Christian university and how CRT contradicts that ideal. The report also demonstrates the methodical and rigorous approach with which the investigation proceeded.

I really try to avoid @davidafrench’s Sabbath screeds, but I heard that he recently misrepresented two things that I have an interest in: French's own reflections on critical theory at HLS and the fine folks who’ve been pushing Grove City College to avoid that garbage. 1/ I studied at HLS from 2012 – 2015, a period in which activism significantly grew, fueled by the Trayvon Martin verdict, Ferguson and the lead up to Obergefell. I read almost everything French wrote back then. I heard him lecture and had a meal or two with him. 2/

Since announcing a Board investigation into CRT and mission drift, @GroveCtyCollege has predictably started taking bullets from MSM outlets. These manufactured attacks are not real threats. To the contrary, they present GCC with an opportunity. A somewhat lengthy thread follows. The attacks on @GroveCtyCollege’s reform efforts have been coordinated by Professor @wthrockmorton and alumna @kahlernat.

Big update on the @GroveCtyCollege situation.

I have been approached by a group of current and former faculty members who put together and support a letter to the Grove City board of trustees regarding the CRT situation at Grove City. Members of this group asked me to make this letter public on their behalf (keeping them confidential).

Screenshots of the letter are down-thread.

I was surprised to learn that post-cultural revolution CCP leads a civilizational equal to the West.

Do you really have such dim view of our own patrimony (which continues to live off borrowed capital from 2 millennia of shared Christian heritage)?

https://twitter.com/gjpappin/status/1490022633345331206

N.B., I don’t want war with China. I think their leaders’ long term planning for and loyalty to their own people are a rebuke to our own elites.

But there’s no need to be sycophantic. The West is better, particularly since the brutal cultural revolution.

This thread is for fellow Appalachian respecters.

What if I told you that the forests that carpet the hills and hollers of Appalachia, from Georgia to Maine, have changed significantly in the last hundred years. No one alive has experienced them in their full glory. Until the early 1900s, there was a magnificent tree that comprised 1 out of every 4 trees in Appalachia. Its leafy boughs made up 30% of the canopy. The tree has been dubbed the "Redwood of the East." It looked like this: