21 car century insurance: Embarrassed into making a statement

View in browser

I'm writing to you this morning from England -- Brighton, specifically, where Jenna and the baby and I took the train from London yesterday so we could see Marillion last night. (The first song I ever sent her was "Afraid of Sunlight.")

It was funny to walk down the street here and have someone say to me, "You look like Tom Woods." Indeed.

Down to business: it looks like people are paying a little more attention than before to crazy academics who say blood-curdling things. Case in point: Carnegie Mellon's Uju Anya, who has said, among other, similar things: "Die first, white man, then ask yourself why I'm dancing."

Perhaps this is getting tiresome because it's eight decades since the early civil rights movement and this kind of hatred seems remote from the multiracial harmony we were promised, and perhaps it's that people are growing tired of tax-funded so-called academics who produce nothing of value using their subsidized perches to make statements white people would be instantly fired and shunned for if the situation were reversed.

As angry emails began accumulating at Carnegie Mellon, a confident Anya told a critic on X, "My department chair just texted me saying they're throwing all your emails in the trash." Her department chair is Rémi A. van Compernolle.

Well, as of this moment "Dr. Anya" is officially on leave, and Carnegie Mellon, which would have continued looking the other way had there not been a public uproar, has been embarrassed into making a statement. It concludes with: "We are deeply concerned by recent hostile and threatening social media posts by Dr. Anya and are reviewing this matter closely."

As of yesterday, Anya had deleted her X account.

As had Rémi A. van Compernolle.

Now, returning to a theme from last week, notice what neither of these people has ever once had to do: convince anybody of anything.

A subsidized perch means you can say the most vicious thing that enters your head and never defend it. You don't lose clients, you don't lose customers, you don't get market feedback. And then when you're subject to actual scrutiny, there's no argument to fall back on, because there never was one. There's just a deleted account.

You don't have that luxury, dear reader. You have clients, or patients, or a board, or a roomful of people who can quietly decide you're not worth listening to. Nobody is obligated to take you seriously. You have to earn it every single time.

And that's a skill -- and one almost nobody knows how to hone.

But ol' Woods here does.

The reviews I got on the session I held last week on speaking and influence (not just "public speaking," but any kind of speaking in which you need to influence a room) was pretty darn well received -- as I expected, people were surprised that I gave away such a valuable presentation for free. But indeed I did.

Although what I'm teaching certainly works for people who give speeches for a living about ending the Fed, I assume there are relatively few of those. I'm thinking more broadly here: this is for any time you need any kind of room to sit up and take notice.

It's so that jerk with five percent of your qualifications but who gets what he wants might for a change have to sit back and watch you get what you want.

So that most people won't have work commitments, I've scheduled this live event for early Saturday afternoon Eastern Time.

This skill doesn't just open doors for you that you hope to open. It opens doors you can't even see right now. Trust me on this.

Just my three suggestions alone on how to start your talk (not "with a joke," that's for sure) are worth the time you spend with the whole presentation. People will put their phones down when you open like this.

Reserve your spot, and let's open those invisible doors for you:

https://www.tomwoods.com/speakingandpersuasion

Tom Woods