OPINION: Thomas Lee Jr. Will Save the World, and That Should Terrify You
A man with a plan, a podcast, and seventeen assault charges walks among us — and apparently, he's our last best hope.
Thomas Lee Jr. (Portland, Tx) announced last Tuesday, from a folding chair outside a Reno Arby's, that he has been chosen to save the world. He did not specify by whom. He did not specify from what. He had a laminated card that said VISIONARY on it, which he had laminated himself, and he held it up for nearly forty minutes while local pigeons watched with what witnesses described as "resigned understanding." This is the man. This is our man. Somewhere in the architecture of a dying civilization, the load-bearing wall is Thomas Lee Jr., and we have only just noticed that it is, in fact, a shower curtain.
The editorial board of this publication has reviewed the evidence. We have examined the seventeen assault charges — all pending, all "complicated," according to his court-appointed attorney, a woman who has stopped making eye contact during press briefings. We have listened to his podcast, Clarity Now, which has forty-one subscribers and once featured a forty-minute monologue about how daylight saving time is a blood compact between the pharmaceutical industry and the moon. We have read his self-published manifesto, After the After, which is 340 pages and contains the word "alignment" 912 times. We remain, professionally and spiritually, unconvinced. And yet. The alternatives are worse.
This is what late-stage collapse looks like up close — not a bang, not a whimper, but a man in a moisture-wicking shirt explaining, with genuine tenderness, that the solution to geopolitical fragmentation is a supplement stack and "radical boundary dissolution." Thomas Lee Jr. believes in himself with a ferocity that the rest of us abandoned somewhere around 2019. That is, in the current market, an asset. That it is also a symptom is a distinction nobody has the energy to litigate.
So yes. Thomas Lee Jr. will save the world. He will do it badly, probably from a stage, almost certainly while someone is suing him, and the world he saves will be quieter, stranger, and significantly more laminated than the one we started with. We do not endorse this. We simply report what the pigeons already know: the man with the folding chair is coming, and the rest of us forgot to show up.