Self-Made Billionaire Has Brutal Message for Younger Generation: They'll Never Make It Unless They Stop Watching TikTok
This is a guy who should be delivering commencement addresses — with words young Americans might not want to hear but could actually use.
While the president of the United States president might fill his speeches to students with hallucinations about “white supremacy” (for a black audience) and billionaire Oprah Winfrey can babble to graduates about all things woke, New York City business mogul and talk show host John Catsimatidis is offering a different take.
And it’s a better formula for success than anything the left will ever put on the market.
In an interview reported by the U.K.’s Daily Mail on Sunday, Catsimatidis boiled down the secret to success in words that would have been all but universal to previous generations of Americans:
Nothing comes without hard work.
“That’s one of the problems we are having in our country these days,” Catsimatidis told the Daily Mail. “The kids are busy playing TikTok.”
‘Kids Are Busy Playing TikTok:‘ Billionaire John Catsimatidis Expresses Concern Over Gen Z‘s Work Ethic https://t.co/i0THp5LCK2 via @BreitbartNews
— John Catsimatidis (@JCats2013) May 17, 2023
“The harder you work, the easier it gets to win,” he said. “Look at people only working three days a week, and I’ll show you failures.”
That’s a message being lost on too many young Americans, who are being deluged with a world view of victimhood, railing at “injustice” and spewing outrage against a country where almost anything’s possible.
Of course, older generations have been scolding the young about their work ethic ever since there have been older generations with younger ones to scold. (Socrates’ famous words about the youth of his day in ancient Greece never go out of style.)
But a 21st-century American twist is that it’s older generations who are also providing the easiest way out for the generations to follow, with automatic excuses for failure (“Systemic racism!” “Misogyny!” “Climate change!”) and targets to blame (generally white, generally male and almost always conservative).
And the poison is being delivered 24/7 on devices pretty much everyone — especially a younger person — has at hand.
On Sunday, President Joe Biden went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., to deliver a commencement address long on progressive talking points and short on anything useful.
“The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy,” Biden told grads at one of the country’s premier historically black colleges and universities. It wasn’t even close to being true, but it was applauded by a crowd that had just been given what it wanted to hear.
(Biden neglected to mention that the last successful proponents of “white supremacy” were the members of his own party who mentored him in his early Senate days.)
Earlier in May, as Fox News reported, Winfrey used her time at Tennessee State University to tell the listeners at her alma mater they should devote their lives to the liberal causes of fighting climate change, ending supposedly systemic racism, pushing gun control and gay rights and battling a Supreme Court majority that follows the words of the Constitution. She somehow even managed to slide the Capitol incursion into it.
“We live on a planet where there is more than enough wrong to keep you busy trying to make things right for the rest of your natural life,” Oprah said.
Yeah, well, first it might help to make something of yourself. Which is where Catsimatidis would come in — with a success story that virtually screams “Only in America.”
Catsimatidis recounted the story of his life in a memoir published in February, “How Far Do You Want to Go: Lessons from a Common-Sense Billionaire.”
As the Daily Mail reported, Catsimatidis’ family came to the United States from Greece in 1948, when he was only 6 months old.
He told the outlet his business career got started after he graduated high school, thanks to a mother who “threw me off the couch” and sent him out to find work.
Catsimatidis started putting in 70-hour weeks at a supermarket, he told the Daily Mail, the beginning of a career that would make him now, at age 74, a true American success story. He has amassed about $4 billion and is the owner of the New York-based supermarket chain Gristedes and the Red Apple Group, a diversified conglomerate that ranges from retail stores to real estate.
Can anyone guess where he leans politically? He’s a Republican who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for New York mayor in 2013. He’s also a pragmatic enough businessman that he’s donated to both parties, according to the Washington Examiner, but has said he is willing to put up considerable money for pretty much any Republican who wins the nomination to get Biden out of the White House.
Catsimatidis’ weekly radio show, “The Cat’s Roundtable,” is an influential voice that draws top names on the right — such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and columnist and political strategist Dick Morris.
Politics alone, unfortunately, would likely disqualify Catsimatidis from serious consideration as a source of advice by American leftists, but there’s no denying he is an example young Americans could do well by following.
They could do a lot worse, too — say, by registering and voting as Democrats and joining the party that’s devoted to the country’s disgraceful abdication of responsibility for both world leadership and the wealth and welfare of its own people. (Inviting countless millions of illegal immigrants to cross the southern border, for one thing, is an insult to the idea of world leadership and injury to the health and welfare of Americans already here.)
But the first thing they need to do, as Catsimatidis put it to the Daily Mail, is get their heads out of TikTok — and their smartphones in general — and start putting in the work in life that’s necessary for success.
That’s a commencement speech most parents would be ecstatic to hear. And one a modern liberal will never give.
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