Thirteen years ago, a 29-year-old government contractor named Ed Snowden gave a reporter proof that the U.S. government was secretly collecting the phone records of millions of ordinary Americans.

Snowden considered himself an American patriot.

His parents both worked for the government, and he proudly traced his American ancestry all the way back to the Mayflower.

He had a solid salary, a serious girlfriend, and a house in Hawaii.

But on June 6, 2013, he flew to Hong Kong with a stack of classified files, sat down with journalists, and tried to explain to them why he was blowing up his whole life.

He said he didn't want to live in a world where everything you say and everyone you talk to and every expression of love or friendship gets recorded.

If you’re a Baby Boomer and a socially-conservative Christian, and you don’t understand young men nowadays, I’m writing for you.

I also have something to ask of you at the end of this essay.

It recently came to my attention that some of you don’t understand why a large number of young men have become shut-ins, often addicts, without career or romantic prospects.

The term used for this now is “NEET.”

That is, they are Not in Education, Employment or Training. Men described as NEETS are those who were once simply called slackers, basement-dwellers, and so on.

I’d like to explain how this happened. 

First, a little about me

I’m a young man, somewhere between a Millennial and a Gen Z. I’m Christian, had good grades in school, worked hard, and finished college.

I was raised well, too. I don’t want everything handed to me, and I don’t like those who do. You’d think that would help me in life.

It doesn’t.

The world right now is in a bit of a precarious energy pinch. There is lots of what we need available. Getting it delivered is currently the biggest problem.

If oil isn't moving at its usual volume through the Strait of Hormuz, it has to be rerouted in a different direction, and it just so happens that every other default transit 'chokepoint' is having issues at the same time.

...But 16.7 million barrels a day don't vanish off the map…They get rerouted, and rerouting oil means shoving it through some other narrow place that was already busy. Brent was around $91.62 on Wednesday and WTI at $85.56, and a fair slice of that is just the cost of the detour.

So the more useful question right now isn't what's happening in Hormuz. It's what's happening everywhere else. There are five other chokepoints that matter, and every one of them is currently doing something. They're below in rough order of how likely they are to ruin somebody's quarter, starting with the one that already is.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) marked the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth by attempting to resurrect one of the bloodiest dictators of the twentieth century as a champion of humanity.

In an official statement, the DSA praised Castro as an “organizer, a fighter” and a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle.”

It accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio of committing “genocide” against the Cuban people, demanded his prosecution for “crimes against humanity”, and blamed the United States for the devastation created by nearly seven decades of communist dictatorship.

This was not an impetuous social media post from an errant intern. It was a considered declaration of allegiance to the totalitarian regime Castro built and his successors still operate.

Stone’s Rule applies here: when the left invokes genocide, examine whose firing squads actually operated at dawn.

Spend five minutes on social media and you’ll discover America suffers from an epidemic of terrible leaders.

Politicians are corrupt, CEOs are exploitative, pastors are compromised, police chiefs are incompetent, university presidents are ideologues.

Apparently we’ve managed to elect, hire, appoint, or promote the worst human beings in recorded history.

What remarkable luck! Maybe… or maybe we’re thinking about it myopically. I’ve become convinced that America doesn’t primarily have a leadership crisis, but a followership crisis, too.

Leadership has become the political equivalent of a piñata. Everybody enjoys taking a swing at it. Followers, meanwhile, somehow escape all responsibility, as if institutions simply malfunction on their own. They don’t.

Institutions reflect the incentives created by the people inside them.

Politicians keep making outrageous promises because voters reward outrageous promises.

Cable news keeps manufacturing panic because panic keeps ratings high.

Social media influencers keep posting intellectual junk food because millions of us consume it like it’s Thanksgiving dinner.

Markets generally produce what people repeatedly buy.

Politics is no different.