The Foreign Policy Mule

Posted on June 20, 2025 by thezman

Trump has only been in office for five months, but he has quickly managed to smash up a bunch of things. One of those things is the relationship with Europe, which has been in place since the end of the Cold War. By walking away from Project Ukraine, he is putting the world on notice that things will never be the same between the United States and the rest of the NATO countries.

Something similar seems to be developing in the Middle East. He went for the homerun shot against Iran, but that failed, leaving the region on the edge of war and Israel scrambling to avoid Iranian missiles. Trump is left with two terrible choices, either of which probably breaks the old order in the region. He can launch and attack that probably fails or cut a deal, either option looks like a loss.

There is the third option to commit to a long air war against Iran, but you do not win wars with just air power. That was the lesson of Iraq. It took a million-man army to topple the regime. Iran is bigger, tougher, and more stable than Iraq under Saddam, so toppling the government will be much more difficult. The long air war would most likely be a very expensive failure.

The way things currently sit, the end result of this Iran – Israel war will be a new security arrangement in the Middle East. Israel will not be able to threaten her neighbors, expecting the United States to cash the checks she writes. That will be a revolutionary change in a region that needs it. Whatever it looks like in the end, it will be the result of Trump smashing and breaking things.

That is the show this week. As with so many other things, Trump is not the man with a plan, but a man with a hammer. He breaks the old stuff, often by his mere existence, but this opens the way for new stuff. He has broken the political order in Washington and now that he has real power, he is breaking the order abroad. He is the Mule, the destroyer of worlds, bringing the end of empire.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Trumps Foreign Policy
Project Ukraine
Israel
China
Fast Versus Slow
Trump’s Legacy

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Trump’s China Syndrome

Posted on June 19, 2025 by thezman

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One of the reliable bits of news that has emerged from the Iran crisis is that at some point, the Trump team radically changed the terms of the deal. Initially, they were willing to do the deal Iran signed with Obama, with some minor changes. The main change was to remove the time limit on its enforcement. Otherwise, Iran was close to agreeing to a deal with the Trump administration. Then out of the blue the Trump team made new demands and soon after we get the Israel sneak attack.

If you listen to what Trump says, he is all over the map, but the one thing he has been repeating recently is the demand that Iran give up all nuclear technology, even for medical uses, and abandon its missile program. This has been joined by a new demand for unconditional surrender. What he means by that last bit is a bit hazy as countries tend not to surrender when they are holding their own. They never surrender to a country that they are not currently fighting.

That is another consistent theme with the Trump people. They keep slipping up when they talk about the war. Instead of “they”, as in Israel or Israel and Iran, Trump people will say “we”, as in Israel and the United States. Then they will correct themselves or use some weasel words. Ted Cruz made this blunder when talking with Tucker Carlson and has been squirming ever since. This hints at the fact the Israel sneak attack was part of a larger strategy by the White House.

The question no one asks is why the administration would want a war with Iran when it brings so many risks. The closest we get is the chanting of the line, “Iran must never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Even if you accept that moral assertion, Iran was ready to sign over its nukes. The deal they were willing to sign was by all accounts a comprehensive agreement. Even if the negotiations were a ruse, to setup the sneak attack, why would Trump want this?

The most popular answer floating around is they did not want a war. They thought this Peal Harbor style sneak attack would work and by work it would cause the regime to collapse or immediately sue for peace. The Japanese thought the same thing, supposedly, so it makes some sense. Now that Iran is firing missiles at Israel, with no signs of letting up, the White House has a problem. They either go up the escalatory ladder or risk looking weak by taking a deal.

That is possible, but there is another possibility. When it comes to foreign policy, Trump has had one obsession and that is China. When he came down the escalator ten years ago, he was talking about China ripping us off. People forget that this was going to be his main issue until he stumbled upon immigration. When his comments about immigration caught fire, he became a hawk on immigration, but China was always right there at the top of his agenda.

Some say he has an Israel obsession, which is true. He seems to worship Jewish people, a common folk religion in Washington. In his first term, however, he delivered nothing of value to Israel. He was adamant about staying out of new wars in the Middle East and even wanted to close the bases in Syria and Iraq. Starting a war now, less than six months into his do-over term, makes no sense. The country is against war and his base will revolt if he goes to war.

Of course, if he signs off on an attack and Iran crumbles, then he looks like a genius to the average American who is incapable of thinking about what comes next. They will flip back to watching sports while muttering about how Trump wins again. Like it or not, that is how things work in American politics. On the other hand, if he signs off on a strike and it results in more escalation, he risks becoming George Bush. He would be worse than Bush, as people actually trusted Trump.

This raises another angle to this. China is deeply involved with Iran. They have signed a half trillion-dollar investment deal with Iran. They own 80% of the South Pars gas field, part of the biggest gas deposit on earth. They have just completed a railway that links China to Iran. Trains from Xi’an, the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi, started arriving at the Aprin Dry Port near Tehran in late May. All industrial and military goods will now go from China to Iran, bypassing the US navy.

The immediate effect of this is it allows Iran to reach the global economy without having to navigate around the American blockade. This allows Iran to get around the sanctions regime that is central to American policy. It would also make Iran a key cross dock for trade between the region and Asia. Of course, the big effect is it makes BRICS a big player in the region, challenging American hegemony. China, Russia, and India can now easily do business with the region.

That may be the reason for the change in approach by the White House. That railroad begins operation and all of a sudden, they change the terms of the deal to something they know Iran can never accept. This is, ironically enough, the same scheme the Biden people used to induce a war in Ukraine. Notice that the West is still demanding Russia surrender as part of their “negotiations.” The best way to get and keep a war is to demand unconditional surrender.

Another thing that supports this theory is that Trump is a transactional guy who thinks about everything in terms of money. He would understand right away the economic aspects of this China – Iran relationship. It is a threat to American control of the energy markets, something that Trump understands well. He looks at BRICS as part of China’s plan to supplant the United States as the global economic hegemon. A war with Iran, therefore, would appeal to him.

There is also the fact that Trump seems to think he can peel countries away from China in order to isolate her. He has flat out said this regarding Russia. He has convinced himself that he will talk Putin into abandoning China in exchange for some empty words from Trump and maybe a White House visit. He probably thinks he can pry Iran lose from China as well, either by force or by threats. It worked with Panama, so he could think the same trick will work with Iran.

In the end, this looming war with Iran looks more like the start of a war with China, rather than just a war for Israel. The Israelis are getting clobbered with missile strikes, so if Trump were acting out of love for Israel, he would not be escalating with Iran, threatening a new war in the region. No doubt Israel is happy to participate for cynical reasons, but the real driver is probably the China issue. It has been his obsession since he came down the escalator and remains so now.

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Time Dilation

Posted on June 18, 2025 by thezman

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Note: Last night, America’s two leading moderate voices held a special episode to discuss the looming war with Iran. You can listen here.

One of the things skipped past in the flurry of happenings over the last ten days is that the Trump administration has abandoned Ukraine. Pete Hegseth said as much in Congressional testimony where he said there were no plans to send Ukraine additional weapons or ask Congress for more money. At the G7 in Canada, Trump blew off a meeting with Zelensky without saying a word. The reason given was the crisis in the Middle East, which is now the priority.

For the Iran hawks, this is being greeted as good news as they assume this means Trump is onboard with their war schemes, but it may simply be the result of the clash between short term and long-term thinking. Like the this war scheme, Project Ukraine was a short-term operation. All involved assumed it would be a quick and glorious victory, but it turned into a long grind. The American empire does not do long grinds, so it is onto the next military project.

Project Ukraine did not become a long grind by accident. It was made so through deliberate actions by the Russians. Once they realized in 2022, after the war started, that the West was never going to negotiate, they quickly reorganized themselves and their war plans to turn it into a long grind. They correctly surmised that if they wanted a long-term solution to NATO, they needed to win a war of attrition with NATO, so they made Ukraine into a war of attrition.

It is why Trump’s deal making with Russia failed. He assumed that the people who got everything about Russian wrong to this point were right that Russia would jump at a short-term solution, so they used that as leverage. What he learned was that those people advising him were all wrong and Russia was unwilling to take a short-term deal like a ceasefire or a quick peace. Trump has dropped normalization talks with Russia because he sees that he has no cards to play.

Project Ukraine is an important lesson that no one in Washington is ready to grasp as the empire stumbles its way into another Middle East quagmire. The same people who were entirely wrong about Project Iraq two decades ago turned out to be wrong about Project Ukraine, but the results are much worse. The empire was eventually able to subdue Iraq and install a neutral government, but it came with long-term costs that continue to drain the imperial coffers.

The lesson of Iraq should have been that there are no short-term solutions to long-term problems and long-term problems come with long-term costs. People forget that the war with Iraq was touted as the solution to the Middle East problem. Even if it did not result in regime change in Iran, it would sufficiently terrify them that they would cease to be a problem as far as Washington was concerned. Twenty-five years on and Trump is on the edge of becoming George Bush.

We are getting the flickers of this gap between the long-term and the short-term in the war between Israel and Iran. When Washington and Tel Aviv cooked up the Pearl Harbor style sneak attack, it had two base assumptions. They assumed it would work and by work it would collapse the Iranian regime. There was no thought to what would happen after the sneak attack. There was no thought to what could happen if it did not work exactly as the planners promised.

Note that the Iranians have turned this into a long-term issue. They have more missiles and drones than Iran has attack missiles and air defense. Iran is ten times the size of Israel, so they can take a lot of damage and survive. Just as Ukraine found itself in a numbers game that favored the Russians, Israel is facing a similar math problem with the Iranians now. It is why they are demanding Trump join the war. They cannot overcome the math of their war with Iran.

If you can bear listening to the cries for blood from the usual suspects in Washington, what you hear is a demand for quick action. They insist that the Iranian regime is fragile, and it just needs to be pushed over in order to get regime change. These are the same people who said the same things about Iraq in the Bush years and said the same things about Russia just a few years ago. There is no talk of what comes next, because like Ted Cruz, they are incapable of such thinking.

What we are seeing with Iran is the same time dilation that has haunted the American empire since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps it is the result of foreign policy being run by short-term visitors or perhaps it is the nature of democratic societies. No matter the cause, America operates in a world where the clocks always speed forward to the desired result. In the rest of the world, clocks move at their own pace and often that pace is very slow and deliberate, as we see with Ukraine.

An attack on Iran assumes the clocks speed up, but that is unlikely. For all its problems, Iran is a stable society. It has survived fifty years of American sanctions. It survived a monstrous war against Iraq. They think in the long term and seem to have been thinking for a long time about what will happen if America makes war on them. Victory over Iran means a long, bloody fight, one where the clocks move slowly. What would come after that is decades of blood and treasure.

Ironically, the clock is now ticking on the Trump admin. They can take the bait and fall into another grinding war of attrition. That is the quick answer and the way the trap has been constructed by the trap makers. They want to speed up time for Trump so he cannot wait for better choices. On the other hand, they can just wait to see if better choices emerge over time. In Trump’s office, there are two clocks. One moves normally and the other races forward. Which one does he choose?

Remembering What Comes Next

Posted on June 17, 2025 by thezman

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Note: Tonight at 8:45 PM EDT I will be on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Dan Lyman and Jared Taylor. The topic will be who is really in charge of the country.

Thirty years ago, when Bill Clinton was caught chasing interns around the Oval Office, many assumed it was the end of him. Instead, he not only wriggled free of the scandal, and many other scandals, but he seemed to be stronger for it. The reason is Clinton was an extraordinarily clever man. He was not a smart man, in the sense that he could anticipate and avoid problems. Smart men do not have sex with interns. He was clever like a fox in that he could always find a way to slip out of a trap.

The Clintons, of course, set the tone for post-Cold War politics. They brought to Washington the style of politics that is now normal. They formalized both narrative politics, which relies on abductive reasoning to win debates. They also introduced things like media spin and media jamming where they sought to control the narratives at any given moment by overwhelming the system with their messaging. The Clintons made politics into a guerilla media war.

This sort of politics selects for clever over smart. When everything is done in the moment, there is no patience for deliberative politics. In the current Middle East crisis, for example, the information space is controlled by actors chanting rehearsed lines to the other actors in the media. The mainstream media is a Greek chorus and whoever can get the chorus chanting their chants wins. In such an environment there is no room for well thought our arguments and serious debate.

This is a world that favors the clever over the smart. In fact, it strongly selects for the clever and selects against the smart. The guy who tries to make a well-constructed argument from facts and reason does not get invited onto cable chat shows, podcasts or gain a following in social media. On the other hand, the person who is glib and quick on his feet will be in great demand. If he is also entertaining, then he can become a media star and help set the tone of political discourse.

What the Clintons did was merge entertainment and politics so that public policy is often sold to the public as political entertainment. Genuine debates, if they happen at all, are done behind the scenes. Usually, policy is crafted by the powerful interests that have come to dominate a specific domain. Foreign policy, for example, is run by the Israel lobby and the neocons. The political show of the last week around Iran, is about selling it to Trump voters, not genuinely debating the issue.

Another factor here is the explosion of media. Fifty years ago, this sort of politics was impossible as Americans were not living in a 24×7 theater. They consumed news slowly and deliberately through newspapers. Television news was limited to a half hour in the evening and maybe an hour on Sunday. The media menticide of this age was not possible as everyone lived outside the great public theater. Today, most everyone is plugged into the mass media hivemind.

This produces a childishness in the people, because the focus is always on the moment rather than what comes after the moment. Like children, they want their desires satisfied right now, not at some future date. This in turn favors the performers who can deliver that satisfaction right now. As a result, our public discourse is like a comedian rattling off jokes in rapid succession. He may pause and enjoy with the audience the jokes that land, but he quickly moves on from the ones that fail.

You see this with the crisis in the Middle East. The people who caused the crisis quickly moved to the next bit when their first scheme failed. There has been no discussion of what they did or even why they did it, beyond the emotive gibberish, which is intended to set up the next bit. The people who were wrong about the decapitation strike and wrong about the response, are now dancing around on stage promising more good vibes with their next performance.

This is the cause of the collective Gell-Mann amnesia. This is the cognitive bias where people notice the errors in the media about topics they know but trust the same media on the topics about which they know little. Collectively this results in a public fully aware that the media is fake news but still believing what is in the media. Similarly, people who are perpetually wrong, perhaps degenerately so, can continue to control the media narratives on their particular subject.

This sort of public environment rewards those who can quickly slip out of a self-created mess and focus the crowd on the next performance. The clever man, taken to the extreme, is devoid of both a conscience and second order thinking. He lives only in the moment, responding only to the crowd. Like any other actor, he exists only while he is on the stage, performing his role. It is why our politicians look and act like the kids from the high school theater club.

Even the producers of our political theater are not immune to it. They also lack second order thinking. They never ask themselves, “then what?”, after they have settled on some scheme. They just get busy training up the performers. We see this with the Middle East crisis. No one thought about what happens if the scheme fails or what happens if it succeeds. No one thought about what might happen after this caper because they are biologically incapable of second order thinking.

In the fullness of time, the Clinton era will be seen as an inflection point, but it would be unfair to treat them as a cause. Bill Clinton was more of a proof of concept for the emerging mass media politics of the internet age. People forget that Reagan was a trained actor who relied on Hollywood for his public performances. Bill Clinton was the logical extension of what started with Reagan. Bill Clinton was the new performative politics for the mass media age.

The result is we are now dominated by clever men. The genuinely intelligent who possess second order thinking are forced to work within a system that rewards the clever at the expense of the smart. The smart people must find a way to arrange the clever so that they manage to arrive at the right answer while they are searching for a clever way to win the internet or win the news cycle. The smart seek to control the fire that causes the shadows on the cave wall.

This must inevitably fail because the cultural environment favors the clever man who maximizes the moment over the man who thinks long term. The clever guy who can quickly craft a compelling, plausible argument that appeals to the immediate desires of the crowd will always win out over those who seek the right answer. The result is a politics that is more like a variety show than politics. We live from moment to moment, never remembering and never thinking about what comes next.

The American Alcibiades

Posted on June 16, 2025 by thezman

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the film Accountant 2, a post about our rulers love of narrative, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the features of the Trump era has been the sense of chaos that seems to surround everything about the man. Whether as a candidate, as president or as the hero in the fight against the villains of Washington, there is always a whirlwind of action around him that makes understanding it difficult. We now see this in his foreign policy which looks more like a game of flipping over tables and smashing things than a coherent strategy to advance national interests.

The most recent example is the caper to regime change Iran in the middle of negotiations to end the half century cold war with them. Despite the mountain of lies, it is clear that the plan was to decapitate the Iranian government, attack the nuclear facilities and then usher in a regime change. Israel went after military leaders, political leaders, and the top nuclear scientists. They also attacked what they thought were their key nodes in their air defense system.

Despite Trump’s denials, it is clear that the Trump admin knew about this scheme from the start and helped make it possible. When it looked like it was successful, Trump posted about how negotiations were just a ruse to get the Iranians into a false sense of security, but he changed gears once it was clear the scheme failed. He also claimed to have vetoed the killing of Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader of Iran, but that is just damage control after the fact.

As an aside, if you want to get a sense of who really runs American foreign policy, look at the parallels between this sneak attack on Iran and the sneak attack on the Russian strategic bombers. Both used pre-programmed drones launched from trucks. Both used negotiations as a ruse. Both served the interests of those who wanted to halt negotiations with the targeted party. In both of these cases, we see the same fingerprints, but who belongs to those fingerprints is not clear.

That aside, the plan failed. After the initial shock, Iran was able to quickly respond to the attacks with what has been a very effective missile campaign. They also got their air defense system back online and now Israel jets have to operate well outside of their range, which limits what Israel can attack inside Iran. Israel, of course, is lobbying Trump to attack Iran, but so far, he has resisted. The rumor at the moment is that Israel is quietly asking for a truce.

To make things more complicated, Chinese aircraft are landing in Iran, presumably with missiles for Iran. These could also be North Korean missiles. China is Iran’s biggest customer for energy products. China is an 80% owner in the South Pars gas field, which is part of the North Dome field, the biggest on earth. Of course, Russia has a security agreement with Iran and is no doubt providing intelligence for Iranian missile strikes on key targets inside Israel.

On the surface, this looks like a disaster. There is no reason for Iran to do a deal with Washington after this betrayal of basic diplomatic norms. There is no reason for Iran to take the deal on officer, if they decided to come back to the table. They have leverage now, so they will demand much more from Trump. The Israel lobby is now in crisis as the options here are terrible. If Trump green lights an attack on Iran’s nuclear bunkers, we probably get a regional war that America cannot afford.

The Israel lobby does not care about the damage done to America or the American people, but they do care about Israel. What the weekend revealed is that the vaunted Israel air defense system is a paper tiger. Iran was able to overload it and is now hitting targets inside Israel at will. A regional war could very well mean the end of Israel or at least turning Tel Aviv into Gaza. Expect to hear the usual big mouths like Lindsay Graham demanding a truce in the air war this week.

Attacking Iran brings other risks. It is clear that Iran can reach out and touch American assets in the region. That includes naval assets. Trump called off the operation against the Houthis due to both the cost and the risk to American assets. Iran is orders of magnitude more powerful than Yemen. Then you have the American bases in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. There are secret bases that do not appear on any map in Saudi Arabia where the U.S. military operates.

Then there is the elephant in the room. If Trump escalates, the Iranians will probably close the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis will shut off access to the Red Sea. That means a third of the world’s oil supply stops flowing. What Trump has to ponder, therefore, is whether this is worth gas lines and perhaps rationing. Disrupt the flow of energy and the rest of the world gets involved in this war. The rest of the word does not care about the psychological wellbeing of the Israelis.

Rational people look at this and conclude that Trump will do the rational thing and avoid taking the bait, while working to get a truce. Rational people forget that a rational actor would never have signed off on the sneak attack. Two data points does not make a pattern, but Trump has signed off on two Pearl Harbor style schemes in just the few months he has been in office. This morning brings news that an “armada” of refueling planes left for the Middle East.

Note also that Stealth Bombers have been positioned at Diego Garcia for months, which is from where an attack on Iran’s nuclear bunkers would be launched. These are the planes that can drop the bunker busters that could possibly get to the underground facilities housing Iran’s nuclear program. Trump has been talking about Iran and Israel maybe getting a truce deal done. Given Trumps habit of attacking the people with whom he is negotiating, an attack in Iran is probably imminent.

Regardless of whether Trump throws gasoline on this fire or not, the region is now in chaos and that seems to please Trump. Not only that, but his base of support in the United States is sharply divided. The old people who let Fox News do their thinking are waving the flag and screaming for blood. The younger side takes the phrase “America First” literally, so they oppose another pointless war of choice. Trump is now blasting people like Tucker Carlson over this situation.

That seems to be the goal of the Trump chaos. Another feature of the Trump era is that he never gains anything from the chaos. In this situation, he has the Israel Lobby on their heels, so he could get an Iran deal done that ends this issue for good. There is no reason to think he will take advantage of the opportunity. It is why the way to bet is on an attack this week. It is the one option guaranteed to create more chaos, which seems to be the narcotic of Trump’s choosing.

Perhaps this is just a symptom. Trump as the Mule from the Asimov novel could be what happens at the end of democratic empire. Athens also suffered from a mercurial figure at the end of their empire. Alcibiades, known for his personal ambition, ego and unpredictable behavior, was a key figure in the downfall of Athens. Perhaps that is what we are seeing with Trump. He is the American Alcibiades presiding over the final phase of the American empire.

We Are Doomed

Posted on June 13, 2025 by thezman

The show was recorded while the usual suspects were starting yet another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran. At this point it is hard to know where it leads, but we know Trump is powerless to do anything about it. It is sadly clear over the last three administrations that no White House runs foreign policy. The important decisions are made by people outside the political system.

That is why war is on the list of things that could bring doom to America. The people making these decisions are not thinking about what is best for the United States or the American people. Therefore, the United States and the American people could easily be sacrificed, deliberately or accidentally, in service to the alien cause. Civilization ending wars tend to be tragic accidents.

Even so, America is in no danger of being conquered militarily, so it is hard to see war as the direct cause of our demise. War could trigger other things, like a massive spike in oil prices that then set off a financial collapse. If Iran decides it needs a regional war and blows up Saudi oil facilities, then we could see an energy crisis. Unlike the 1970’s, an energy crisis today could trigger collapse.

That is the show for this Friday the 13th. I go through the possible end times scenarios and rank them on a scale of one to ten. A bit of a spoiler, but war is pretty far down the list of possible doomsday scenarios. It could be a triggering event that eventually leads to one of the other items on the list, but war itself is not a likely end for us. The most likely cause of our doom is, well, you will just have to listen.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Doomsday
Debt Bomb
Financial Collapse
Civil War
Secession/Breakup
War
Collapse
Technology – AI
Biology – Genetic Hazard
Demographic
The End

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The Story Of Hollywood

Posted on June 12, 2025 by thezman

If you make any effort to consume popular films and television shows, you will notice that much of the content is now locked away on streaming services. You will also notice that many films go straight to a streaming service, or they have a short run in theaters then get sent to a service. Everyone in the film business now has a streaming service and they need content. Like a great, gaping maw that must be fed, the services are sucking up everything they can find.

The funny thing about this shift is that the services are turning out to be a massive money loser for the industry. On the one hand, streaming robs from the theaters, especially small local theaters, by removing cheap content they would use to attract daytime audiences in the summer. On the other hand, the public has not embraced the streaming service concept as expected. Every service, except Netflix, is a money loser at the moment and none of those are close to getting in the black.

The prime example of the streaming problem is Disney Plus, which loses money every month despite having the massive Disney catalogue. It has the most subscribers and it does generate a lot of monthly revenue, but it also generates massive amounts of expense that swallows up that cash. Much of this is due to the many flops Disney has produced recently, but the concept seems to be the problem. That and the costs make pirating films much more attractive.

The streaming story is a good example of how culture is too complicated to model with a green visor and excel spreadsheet. The bean counters just assumed streaming would follow the model of the rental market, which followed the pattern they saw in the secondary theater market. Low budget films, mediocre films and even terrible films made additional money in the secondary theater market. When take-home rentals came along, these films often got a second life in this market.

It has not worked that way with streaming. A film like the live action Snow White, which was torn apart by internet critics, was a massive flop at the theaters, but then had no life in the streaming market. In the old days, it would get rentals from people curious about it or for get-togethers with friends to have a good time laughing at a bad film. That is not the dynamic with streaming. People will watch nothing rather than sit down to watch a bad movie or something unknown to them.

What streaming failed to account for is the social aspect of films. In the old days, going to the theater for many people was like going to church. It was a thing you did every weekend, not because of the content but because of the social aspect. The theater was where men took their dates and the choice of film or how they selected the film to see was part of the courtship. Friends went to the theater, even if the films on offer were unknown or not good, because it was part of the social event.

Today, the theater is, at best, a sterile place to just see a film. In most cases, it means wading through diversity and tolerating people screaming at the screen, or shooting at it, in order to see a film that will be streaming in a few weeks. The theater is also an expensive proposition now. While this still works for big blockbuster films with good reviews, it is a deal killer for everything else. The theater is no longer a community experience, but a transactional one.

A similar dynamic held the rental market together. People in the suburbs stopped at the rental place to shop for videos. Usually, it was with friends or family, as it would be part of the social experience. Young people with little money could rent some bad films, buy a pizza, and make an evening of it. At the rental place people often talked about the films, which could result in a low-budget film becoming a hit in the rental market as word of mouth boosted its appeal.

That social aspect is gone with streaming. It is a solitary thing for many people because of the atomization of society. No one deliberately watches a bad film on their own because the best way to enjoy that content is with friends. Mystery Science Theater 3000 became a hit because everyone could relate to it. At the same time, people are less likely to try something unknown because why waste your leisure time on a film that you have never heard of, that might be terrible?

Of course, the dynamics of the American film market is why the studios now look to foreign markets for profit. This means more films high on big flashy effects and low on sensible dialogue and plot. They went all in comic book films at the same time they went all in on streaming for the same reason. The flashy stuff on screen works for non-English speakers abroad, so maybe it will work on them at home. Maybe it will also rope in the valuable white audience as well

The reason Hollywood is in trouble, and they are in serious trouble, is they detached themselves from the social aspects of their industry. No other country was able to produce a movie industry like America, because America was a unique place that needed a popular culture to hold it together. In the 20th century, film, television and sports were what everyone had in common. Hollywood was part of the national social capital that defined “American” for people.

As we see everywhere, Hollywood looked at the social capital and wondered how they could turn it into quick cash. They were not alone and maybe not the driving force behind this phenomenon. Mass migration played a role. The desire to harvest American social capital was also behind mass migration. Hollywood, however, needs a shared culture to work and now that the national social capital has been just about consumed, Hollywood is just another commodity.

Wherever the current crisis takes us, it is likely that the story of Hollywood tracks the story of the crisis. An industry that was integral to the people who made it possible is suffering the same fate as the culture it helped destroy. You cannot have a common culture containing people from every part of the globe. At best, it is a somewhat peaceful marketplace where people retreat into their private culture to get away from the cacophony of alien voices in the public square.

Hollywood was always a product of the public square. For it to be Hollywood and not just a film production center, it needed that vibrant American public square created by the people who created America. The people who made Hollywood could not have done it anywhere else. Now that the public square is collapsing and the people who made it are marginalized, Hollywood is dying. The oxpecker finally found a way to kill the host and as the host dies, it dies with it.

The Legume Revolution

Posted on June 11, 2025 by thezman

Note: Last night I was on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, and Dan Lyman. The topic will be how best to remove the alien invaders.

Tonight, the two most moderate men on the internet, myself and Paul Ramsey, will be striking the reasonable tone on the Legume Revolution. You can watch on Twitter, YouTube or Rumble.

Since Trump arrived for a second turn at the wheel, everyone has been wondering when the Blob would make its move against him. The one thing we know about these people is they never take no for an answer. Every setback is met with a new round of schemes against their enemies. The relatively muted response to this point has had many people scratching their heads. The invader riots in Los Angeles that are spreading to other cities appear to be the long-awaited response.

At this point, it is clear that the Los Angeles riot is synthetic. The internet is full of images and videos showing professionally trained rioters. For example, whenever you see college aged white girls with whistles at one of these things, you know the army of not-for-profits has their people on the ground training protestors. The whistle is a common, low-tech item for professional protestors. It is often used to alert the lawyers stationed at the protest to come to the area.

There is also the fact that the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. This is one of the main hubs of the Blob, primarily used to stage color revolutions around the world. When Bass was in Congress she was on a committee that had the job of overseeing NED, while she was also their most senior board member. Of course, the color revolution queen, Victoria Nuland, is currently a senior Blob person at NED.

It appears that the plan is to replay the Summer of Floyd, but this time with little brown guys as the fig leaf for the project. The George Floyd riots were also a manufactured crisis, organized by white activists. They caught fire and became a series of race riots, where blacks burned down their own neighborhoods, but the general operation was run out of Washington. This time they are trying get the migrants and brown activists worked up into a ghetto riot.

That is looking to be a problem for a number of reasons. One is the scenes of masked men waving Mexican flags while standing on burned out cars was obviously a repeat of the scenes of blacks standing on destroyed police cars. For some reason, the people involved think this is good politics. It is bad politics because it is bad optics. In this case, it highlights the fact that our rulers abetted an invasion. Seeing foreigners celebrate in American cities like this just hardens attitudes toward immigration.

The other problem they have, and it is clear from the videos, is that the immigrants are not willing to riot like blacks. Legal immigrants are in favor and tough measures against illegals and the illegals have no interest in making it easier to get grabbed by the police and put on a bus back home. That leaves the rioting to the twenty-something white losers the Blob relies on as foot soldiers. Now, the blacks are taking advantage of the opportunity and looting the sneaker stores.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the Blob this time is the world has wised up to the color revolution rackets. Lately, they keep failing because everyone understands that these things are not organic. The authorities focus on the support networks in the same way you would attack an army’s supply lines. That was what we saw in the Caucasian country of Georgia last year. The government thwarted the Blob by going after the foreign networks operating inside the country.

The Trump White House has learned the same lessons, which is why they went after USAID on day one. That has hampered the Blob’s ability to subvert, but the Blob has access to lots of resources besides USAID. It seems the White House anticipated this, as well, which is why they were ready for these legume riots. Note that they keep escalating whenever the Blob people make threats. The response to Los Angeles is the same escalatory dominance the Blob likes to employ.

So far, this strategy is paying off the White House. The public overwhelmingly supports a tough response to these actions. The public sees foreign men waving foreign flags in an American city, while fighting with the police. The public naturally expects the government to send in the army. The White House being ahead of the curve on this makes Trump look strong and decisive. The Blob people mewing about it look weak and dishonest, rather than self-righteous.

There is also a secondary issue here. The center of gravity on immigration has been quickly moving in the sensible direction as the public has become fed up with the invasion and more aware of the details. These riots and the Trump response has put the foot on the accelerator. Suddenly, the edgy position in normie politics is a total ban on all immigration, not just illegal immigration. Trump himself is starting to look like a squishy moderate on the immigration issue.

Of course, the thing looming over all of this is the change that occurred in the oligarch class over the last year. During the Summer of Floyd, they were happy to join in on the chaos, so they could feel like one of the folks. They were all waving the flags and chanting the chants. Things are different now and the main reason is they see in their own world the risk automation brings. The AI revolution that has captivated them has also made plain the problem of too many people.

When they think of AI, they imagined the acres of cubicles suddenly emptied out, replaced by robots in the server farm. Those coders, engineers and support people will need something to do soon. AI may turn out to be a fantasy, but it could also be a tragic turn for the oligarchs, if we suddenly have millions of unemployed smart people, wondering how they are going to pay their bills. The scenes they now see in Los Angeles could just as easily be in their neighborhood.

The Legume Revolution is just starting, so it is too soon to know how this thing will playout over the coming months. The conditions are clearly different from those leading to the Summer of Floyd. It is also clear that the Trump admin is better too. On the other hand, the Blob people are relentless. Like a drug-resistant virus, they must be completely eradicated to make sure they do not return. There is much to be done on that score, but this crisis could be a step in that direction.

Materialism’s End

Posted on June 10, 2025 by thezman

Note: Tonight at 8:45 PM EDT I will be on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Dan Lyman and Jared Taylor. The topic will be how best to remove the alien invaders.

There is a famous movie line that says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The line does not originate with the film but much earlier, most likely by Charles Baudelaire. In the 19th century, the line turns up a lot and was used to mean that people often stand by and do nothing when terrible things are happening because they fail to appreciate the great struggle with evil that must define life when one acknowledges the existence of it.

Something similar persists to this day with something we can pin on Karl Marx and others regarding the nature of human society. Marx argued that oppression and inequality were the result of economic relations. Therefore, if you want to get a society free of oppression, then you need to get the economic relations right. Later, libertarians took up the same claim but arrived at a different path to liberation. Ever since, the West has been sure that nothing exists other than economics.

The story of the last century or so in the West has been the spread of materialism as the defining feature of Western thought. Getting the economics right has been the center of all political debate. The left-right axis found new poles with socialism on the left and libertarianism on the right. One side sees equality as the equal distribution of goods, while the other side sees it as the equal distribution of liberty. Both assume that once the economics are right, paradise must naturally follow.

The reason for the “cultural revolution” of the last decade or so is that a portion of the left began to see the error in this view. In the middle of the last century, they embraced the claim that Marxism failed because people were incapable of transcending their cultural conditioning. Therefore, the inevitable progress toward egalitarianism can only happen when the cultural restraints are removed. That required taking control of the centers of cultural production.

This is why the leftists in this age are perfectly comfortable working for wealthy oligarchs or even being oligarchs. They deliberately entered corporate life as they saw corporations as a center of cultural production. Similarly, they entered and then took over the vast, sprawling networks of the administrative state and then the managerialism system that directs it. All the people and things the left supposedly hated were turned into tools to bring about the revolution.

Ironically, that project is foundering for the same reason that its predecessors persisted long after reality made clear that Marx was wrong. The public embrace of economics as the standard against which everything is measured meant that the cultural revolution would be measured against its practical utility. The escapist phrase, “go woke, go broke” was factually incorrect, but it had a kernel of truth. In a purely materialist age, culture takes a back seat to the price of eggs.

The corrosive power of materialism is clear in the ongoing destruction of college sports where “reform” is about getting the money right. The reason college athletics is a thing at all is tradition, but everyone involved is willing to throw tradition into the furnace if it helps fire the economics. Everyone is sure that all they need to do is get the economics of the sport right and everything will follow. No amount of evidence will convince them that some things are too important for the marketplace.

You see it with libertarian cranks over the immigration bill. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is in trouble because weirdos like Rand Paul are able to rally the clown horn gang to oppose it on money grounds. Rand Paul is literally making the argument that your society is only worth saving at the right price. It is a great example of the expression, “A man who puts a price on everything values nothing.” This is the life motto of all those who embrace materialism.

The people siding with Rand Paul are psychologically incapable of understanding why a people can survive bankruptcy but not demographic replacement. For them, the holy crusade is to get the economics right. Their version of the egalitarian paradise may be different than that of the Marxists, but it is just as powerful. For them, the imagined Hell is the long promised fiscal collapse, whatever that means. Staving that off is the purpose of their life, so they cannot be persuaded.

Therein lies the small bit of good news. There is a growing number of people who see that there are some things too important to subject to the marketplace. This is the dissident view, which is the old conservative view. It is the very heart of the left-right concept that has haunted the West for centuries. The left says the truth lies with the people, while the right says it lies outside the people. For today’s dissident, the truth stands in judgement of the marketplace, not the other way around.

All the evidence tells us that material prosperity, the key to the materialist worldview, is not the roots of a healthy society. Instead, it is one of its flowers. In the West, we have reached material prosperity, but all of the measures of happiness are in decline, with some in rapid decline. The demographic collapse that comes with material superabundance is not a problem to be managed, but a warning that the logical end of materialism is death. We used to know this.

Again, there are signs that this old knowledge is not dead and buried, but simply in hibernation and now starting to spring forth. You see it in the hostility to the libertarian cranks on social media. You see it in the jeering at socialist cranks. Safety first commentators like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk are now repeating dissident things that used to be disqualifying for them. Perhaps in the end, the last materialist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

Temporarily Successful Paupers

Posted on June 9, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about bugmen, a post about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

A basic rule of complex systems is that within them, you get more of what is rewarded by the rules of the system and less of what is not rewarded. In the case of human systems, this manifests as status. High status people will possess many of the qualities favored by the rules, and low status people will have fewer of those things. The stars of a sport are those who are either great at some aspects of the sport or very good at a wide range of favored skills in the sport.

Culture is the word we use for the complex system of rules and properties that define the societies in which we live. Like all systems, culture rewards some things and not others and punishes some things and not others. Status in the culture is determined by the overall quantity of these things. Some qualities are disqualifying, as the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein learned. He was very good at making profitable films, a highly prized quality, but he had habits that were eventually disqualifying.

This basic rule of systems can help explain why the United States finds itself in a crisis that, on the surface, seems easy to solve. The finances of the American empire are not so dire that they cannot be remedied. Some sacrifice would be needed, but with sound leadership, the fiscal house could be set right quickly. The same is true of the foreign policy challenges. The demographic and cultural issues are more complex, but the answers are known. It is a question of execution.

The most vexing problem of the current crisis for most people is why nothing gets done to address the known issues when the solutions are fairly obvious. On the one hand, there is an industry that exists to explain why the politics of each issue is such that the right answer can never be considered. On the other hand, there is libertarianism and conservatism that offer escape from the reality of the problem. These are the people who start every sentence with “all we need to do is…”

The corruption and escapism surrounding the question of why the issues that plague the country are never addressed are not explanations. They are part of the set of things that are caused by the core issue. We have gotten a hint of this in the first months of Trump’s second attempt at the wheel. He simply did things, like void longstanding executive orders on affirmative action. Suddenly, a man with the will to act was acting on a problem of politics, and the problem stopped being a problem.

What the first months of the new Trump term show is that leaders can simply act, and their actions can change the rules of the system. The racial rackets are suddenly in crisis because one man signed his name on some paper. We are seeing the same thing with immigration, where the political center is now speeding so quickly in the direction of the patriotic position that people are struggling to keep pace. It is as if there is a revolution going on in elite opinion.

This returns us to the question of why the same thing has not been done with regard to the main issues of the current crisis. The reason is systemic. The system rewards certain types of men and not others. That means our elites are high in the qualities that are rewarded and low in the qualities that are needed to solve the problem. The fact that Trump is universally hated in Washington speaks to the fact that he is high in qualities that the political system abhors.

An example of how this works is Mark Cuban, the billionaire who used to own the Dallas Mavericks and now agitates people on social media. He is a billionaire and therefore a member of the elite. The difference between Mark Cuban and the people in the stands at an NBA game wearing a team jersey is only about money. In fact, Cuban was one of those people as the owner of the team. He was not just the owner. He was the number one superfan of the team.

John Steinbeck coined the phrase “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” to describe the attitude of the typical American. The American Dream says that through hard work and determination, you can become wealthy. There is also the sense that serendipity plays a role in getting rich. You increase your odds of getting that winning ticket to the upper classes if you work hard. In this regard, Mark Cuban is the manifestation of this concept, as he got rich through hard work and serendipity.

There is a flip side to this that is clear with Cuban. Our elites think of themselves as temporarily successful paupers. The same turn of fortune’s wheel that made them rich could easily make them poor again. This is why American elites are so desperate to imitate the ways of the lower classes. It is as if they feel they must be penitent in order to prevent the hand of fate from sending them down the economic ladder. This is why rich celebrities are so fond of playing the victim.

Of course, it is not merely dumb luck that explains success. Hard work and determination play a major role, but the main driver is the relative quality of those things rewarded by the culture. America is a materialist society that rewards those who are good at our peculiar form of economics. Mark Cuban got rich because he was able to fob off onto tech billionaires a company that turned out to be worthless, but at the time looked like a goldmine.

Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by flattering the political class that his businesses were holy crusades. If they invested public money in those enterprises, they would not only bring salvation to society but also be seen as virtuous. Without hundreds of billions in public money, Musk is just an eccentric weirdo. His love for Donald Trump now looks like opportunism. It was a chance to run the same game on the MAGA movement that he ran on the left for so long.

The recent public feud between Trump and Musk is useful in understanding something else about our elites. Musk feels like Trump used him, but he should not be shocked, as to be an elite means being a tool. Success in economic endeavors is never about higher values or transcendent beliefs. It is about making the mechanics of the economic system work in your favor. At every level, the people involved are nothing more than tools to be used by those above them.

This makes the people at the top the most successful tools in the system. They are the tools the system uses to exploit the rest of the tools. It is no wonder then that the political elites use the economic elites as tools for their success. Trump’s relationship with Musk shows that Trump has learned how to be good at politics by using members of the economic elite like Musk as tools in his new trade. In a society of tools, everyone is eventually used and then discarded, even the elite tools.

This brings us back to those vexing problems of the current crisis. The solution is clear, but the execution requires men with the will to do it. Such men are never mere tools of the system, but men with a sense of nobility. They are men who understand why old men plant fruit trees. They have a higher purpose than the mere collection of things, and they do not see themselves as temporarily successful paupers. Their nobility is independent of their utility.

The American system does not produce such men because it does not reward the qualities that such men must possess. In fact, having a higher purpose is disqualifying in most areas of life. The businessman who sees his company as part of the social fabric will be ruined by those who can think only in money. The politician who speaks of sacrifice will lose to one promising free money. Materialism demands that you live in the present, so you can never transcend the present.

It was not always so for America. It is the transformation that occurred in the twentieth century that resulted in a system that produces our current elites. It is the failure of those elites that will bring about the end of the system that created them. Perhaps what comes next will once again reflect the essential American character, but this assumes there will be enough of those essential Americans to make it possible. That is the great question at the heart of the current crisis.

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