I’ve spent enough time explaining myself to people who weren’t comitting.
That stops here.
This isn’t a pitch.
It’s not a lesson.
It’s not written to be liked, shared, optimized, or approved by strangers who skim with one eye and judge with the other.
This is me, taking my turn.
For a long time I wrote with restraint. I watched the edges. I measured the temperature of the room. I asked—quietly—what people might tolerate before they walked out. That kind of writing teaches you something useful and ugly: most people don’t want truth, they want comfort that sounds like truth.
I’m done confusing the two.
The gauntlet isn’t something you throw at others.
It’s something you step into yourself.
It means accepting that once you stop catering, a lot of people disappear. Not because you became wrong—but because you became inconvenient. You stopped cushioning the landing. You stopped translating plain language into something easier to swallow. You stopped apologizing for having a spine.
Good.
If a thought can’t survive being stated plainly, it doesn’t deserve protection. If an idea collapses without etiquette wrapped around it, it was hollow to begin with. I’m not here to preserve hollow things.
Some of what I write from here on out will be calm.
Some of it won’t.
That’s not volatility—that’s range. Real thinking has weather. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a product or hiding from themselves.
Anger doesn’t scare me. Suppression does. Anger is often the body noticing a boundary that’s been crossed too many times. You can waste years sanding it down into something polite and useless, or you can aim it inward, refine it, and let it sharpen your words.
That’s what this is.
I’m not here to hurt people.
I’m here to stop lying for their comfort.
If you’re looking for reassurance, this won’t be the place. If you’re looking for agreement, you might get it—or you might not. If you’re looking for honesty that doesn’t flinch, stay.
This is my workbench, not a waiting room.
My cadence, not the algorithm’s.
My turn, not a committee vote.
The gauntlet is down.
I’m walking through it.
At the end of each post, there will be a buy button.
That’s it.
No selling.
No explaining.
No convincing people who already decided it’s foolish, unnecessary, or just an old man trying to sell nothing.
If that’s how you see it, fine. Move on.
You’ve already bought into the grift mentality—that everything must be packaged, softened, and marketed to be worth attention. That belief didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s how we ended up here. Accept it or change it. That part is on you.
My mind’s been set since the escalator of doom.
I don’t hedge about it anymore.
You know where I stand.
For the things that were tossed aside.
For standards.
For judgment.
For restraint.
For a country that once knew the difference between freedom and decay.
Not nostalgia. Memory.
This isn’t a pitch.
It’s a line drawn.
For my peace of mind
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
Unauthorized commercial use prohibited.
© 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC
