On the show Wednesday with Paul Ramsey, we talked about how Trump is a bookend for Nixon containing the period of peak managerialism. The managers ran Nixon out of town for the crime of being a strong executive and now Trump, the strong executive, is running the managers out of town. It remains to be seen if that is how it plays out, but it is a good way to containerize this period of history.

Doing the show, it occurred to me that we can do something similar with populism in that it was populism that gave birth to managerialism. When you look at the birth of progressivism, it started with the populist movements. It peaked with the FDR administration, which is the rise of the managers. Now we see a populist movement rising to smash what was set off by original populism.

Here is where you see the two faces of populism, democratic and authoritarian or anarchic versus orderly. Of course, it is a fact of history that democracy leads to authoritarianism, so this long cycle dating to the 19th century follows a predictable course, just more slowly and mildly. The synthesis that will result from it may be a modern version of what the Framers imagined.

Anyway, that is for some posts this week. The show this week is a review of and comment upon populism in its many forms, as well as the criticism of it in light of the events unfolding in Washington. It is one of those shows that meanders around a bit, so it has no main point, just a main theme. Perhaps if the topic is of interest, I can do a more formal deep dive into the topic.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Populism
  • Britanica (Link)
  • European Center for Populism Studies (Link)
• The Negative View
• The Positive View
• Populism in America

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One of the many failings of conservatism was the insistence that with just the right argument using just the right data points, the people they called the left would throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. At the core of what later became known as civic nationalism was the assertion that all political actors are looking for objective truth and therefore would respond to it. The reason for political disputes was the failure to flesh out the facts.

Politic is about morality, not facts. It is also about power, specifically the power to impose your moral vision on the rest. Facts have little to do with politics and are often seen by ideologues as a threat. The diversity cult looks at the FBI crime stats as a direct threat to their project, so they worked to suppress them. The flat earth people insist that intelligence testing is a conspiracy of some sort. They label it “race-science” because adding the words “race” to anything anathematizes it.

Another thing that the conservative view of politics got wrong is that it left people with only two choices when evaluating left-wing rhetoric. Either the people chanting about white power structures were lying or they were deeply confused. In both cases, it was assumed that they had to know the truth and that the truth would either set them straight or force them to stop lying. Untold man hours were wasted trying to explain the truth to crazy relatives because of this.

Even now, with all that is happening, it is hard for people to accept that the crazies are in fact crazy enough to believe the nutty things they are saying. This post in the New York Times feels like parody, but it is written to soothe the nerves of the believers while they huddle together plotting how to respond. The writer genuinely believes Washington is being taken over by a Stalin-like figure and he and his coreligionists are the beginnings of a great resistance to it.

This is the precursor to the forming of a narrative. The cult we call the left operates like all cults in that it has a story to explain itself and its destination. Within the story are stories to address the bumps along the way as well as the victories. Soon, others will take this framework in which the good guys are being oppressed by the bad guys and create a narrative that fills in the details, especially the part where they finally vanquish the monster and everyone cheers.

It is hard for normal people to accept that the writer is as crazy as it seems. After all, he had to have sat in meetings at the New York Times where people boasted of ruining critics of the Biden regime. He must be aware of the doxing campaigns and the hooded terrorist gangs sent to harass dissidents. It is inconceivable to a normal person that this guy does not see the irony in what he is writing. The truth is he is that crazy and the audience is right there with him.

Part of how cults respond to disconfirmation and setbacks is they create new pleasing narratives for why things have not gone as predicted. A month into the Trump presidency and the crazies have settled on an economic collapse as the most probable end to the Trump tyranny. According to the Times, the economy is already reeling from policies that have yet to be implemented. The Telegraph reports that the really smart people foresee disaster for the Trump economy.

This gets to another thing that people struggle to accept. These people lie. They will make up whatever whoppers they think they need for their narrative. Extreme partisanship rewards sociopathy, so over time the movement will be overrun by people who see no moral distinction between the truth and a lie. All that matters is whether it serves the cause, by which they mean does it strengthen their side or does it cause harm to their opponents?

Despite all that has been revealed so far, as well as the massive media gaslighting campaign last year, people still think there is truth in the media. There is little doubt that the Harris campaign turned many people from civic nationalist into something else, but for many, the whole thing was forgotten after the election. It is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which is when you see something in the media that is an obvious lie but then forget that story and trust the next story in the same media site.

What all this tells us is that even though normal defeated crazy in November and the Trump admin has a plan to defeat the Blob in order to restore sobriety back to politics, the road back to normal will be long and full of trouble. Scan the fever swamps and it is clear that events have had no impact on the crazies. If anything, they have become crazier now that they have shuffled off mainstream platforms into places like Bluesky and Reddit where they are free to fly their freak flags.

Similarly, the media has learned nothing from the last decade. They put everything they had into dragging Harris over the finish line but failed because not enough people trust them anymore. Despite the massive rejection that was the November election, they are now leaning into the same tactics that brought them to this point. The employees of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post still think they get to tell the owner of the company to buzz off and leave the running of it to them.

While it does appear that we have reached the end of a cycle of madness, perhaps several historical cycles that culminated in the last decade, it is going to be a long road back to normal. The crazies will not simply go away. They must be defeated, caged, and only released when the conditions that created them are eradicated. The normals will have to be trained in the new way of engaging in politics. Much like Russia after communism, America is on the road to recovery, but it is a long road.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

An iron law of the universe is the opposite law of liberalism, which states that whatever the left is saying, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. It is not a perfect rule in that the opposite is obvious or correct. It is just a good place to start when trying to figure out what they are doing. Projection plays a central role in the interior life of the progressive hive mind, so they inevitably accuse the enemies of the hive of doing what the hive is doing or has done.

An old example comes from the heady days of the Tea Party, which was a genuine populist and grassroots response to the cultural revolution. Normal, middle-class people started to organize against the Obama administration, but also the sissies of conservatism who were hiding under their beds at the time. Suddenly, people were turning up to protest and fight back against the gathering madness. It was a foreshadowing of what would come in 2016.

The response by the left was to accuse these people of being part of a conspiracy organized by the enemies of history. Nancy Pelosi famously said it was not a grassroots movement, but an AstroTurf movement. For those who do not know, AstroTurf is a genericized brand name or proprietary eponym for fake grass. Of course, what was true at the time and true to this day is the “grassroots” support of the left was bought and paid for by tax dollars laundered through the Blob.

It was one of those moments that revealed something about the sorts of people who end up in left-wing social movements. They always assume that the enemies of the hive operate as they do and will act like they would if given the chance. It is why they were sure Trump would trample your civil rights after he won in 2016. They knew that if they were in his position, that is what they would do. After the color revolution that toppled Trump and installed Biden, it is exactly what they did.

Now that Trump is back, we see the opposite rule kicking in as part of their coping strategy and effort to organize a response. The crazies are now free speech warriors, claiming Trump is going to start censoring people online. The very same people who chanted “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” as anyone with a sober thought in their head was evicted from Twitter are now carrying on as if they are Ann Frank, hiding in the attic from the MAGA police.

This story about how a handful of zombies turned up to yell at a Congressman is framed as a populist rebellion. These are people made angry by their television, so they show up on command at this event to be angry. A defining feature of these old, white progressives is they have no idea why they are angry. The person on their television is angry, so they are angry. They are the sort that started saying “keev” the weekend the war in Ukraine started, as if they always said it that way.

Of course, nothing about this is on the level. That is the great lesson of the populist rebellion that started with the Tea Party. Our politics have been entirely fake for decades, manufactured and controlled using government money. These efforts to repeat what worked in the past affirm it. Our politics for the last several decades have been pretty close to the opposite of what was beamed to us. “Our democracy” was absolute party control.

All ideologies rely on lies to fill the gap between their vision of the moral society and the reality of the human condition. This habit explains the violence that comes when the ideologues gain control. The lies are replaced by a program to fill the gap between ideology and reality. That gap is always filled with corpses, but it is never completely filled, so the lies return as the cost-effective option. In time, they become so comfortable with the lies that lying is the solution to everything.

We are seeing this in the “resistance” being rolled out in the media. It is not connected with reality but dreamed up by the same people who claimed they were defending democracy when they were harassing people for Facebook posts. The same narrative makers who swore all their failed schemes were working right up until it was obvious that they were not working are now busy imagining a scenario in which they are carried back to power on the shoulders of the people.

Things like the opposite rule are part of the essential appeal of ideology, which is an escape from reality. This is what ideology inherits from Christianity. The losers drawn to the new religion spreading around the Roman Empire were attracted to the promise of escape from this life. If they followed this new religion, they would one day stand shoulder to shoulder with the great men of this age in the sight of God. Ideology says the same thing but stops at the bit about God.

Libertarians imagine that one day they will be yeoman farmers, totally self-sufficient and liberated like the rich guys they admire. The antifascist imagines herself as a stunning and brave member of the committee, as respected as the men who never pay much attention to her. The conservative believes he will one day be rich like Donald Trump, but classy like Bill Buckley. The fascist imagines himself in a snappy uniform in charge of men, instead of a loser playing video games all day.

This is what brings us back to the opposite rule of liberalism. The last ideology, like all ideology, requires the suspension of disbelief. Accusing the bad guys of doing what you have done or are currently doing is a way to escape the reality of politics. It is not a fight for power, but a great crusade between white hats and black hats. To think otherwise is to be back in the reality from which you are trying to escape. The “resistance” to Trump are not losers, but the heroes of a story they are now writing.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the blob, a post about big stupid trucks, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Last Wednesday was the kickoff of a show with Paul Ramsey, which you can watch on Paul’s channel. I also did an appearance on the Mike Farris show, which can be seen here.

The Trump administration’s opening of direct talks with the Russians setoff panic in Kiev and the capitals of Europe. The reason for that is Project Ukraine was centered on the acceptance that there could be no direct talks with Moscow, until the Russians surrendered their country to the control of the usual suspects. Trump’s call with Putin and then the meeting in Saudi Arabia violated this central assumption. First there was panic and now there is a game of chicken.

The Trump administration has concluded, after assessing the situation inside and outside the issue of Ukraine, that normalizing relations with Russia is in the best interest of the United States. One of the obstacles to that is the war in the Ukraine, so logically they are looking to wrap up the war as quickly as possible. The Russians have agreed to talks with Ukraine but insist on elections in Ukraine first. They point out that by the laws of Ukraine, Zelensky does not have the power to sign a deal.

Russophobes argue that this is a stalling tactic, but they are the ones demanding the unconditional surrender of Russia before any talks can start, so this is the usual projection that is a feature of the post-liberal West. The Russians, having been burned by the Minsk agreements charade, want the next deal to have teeth, so they are insisting that it be signed by the internationally and domestically recognized leader of Ukraine, which means new elections.

The Russians would probably drop this demand if the EU were willing to co-sign whatever deal is struck, but such an offer will never come. The reason is the whole project relies on never having direct talks with the Russians. This is the trap setup in 2023 to keep everyone committed to Project Ukraine. Ukraine passed a law forbidding direct talks with Russia in exchange for unlimited support. Europe signed on in exchange for unlimited support from Washington.

The reason the Biden administration expedited the remaining weapons and money allocated to this project was an effort to prevent the incoming Trump administration from rethinking these arrangements. They would not have time to do that, as Ukraine would immediately need more money and weapons. The assumption was that they would have no choice but to go along with more money and weapons, thus entangling Trump in the Ukraine trap.

The underlying assumption was that Trump would not walk away from Project Ukraine and risk the image of Russian tanks rumbling through Kiev. This is the assumption the Europeans and Zelensky are relying on as they deal with Trump. In fact, Zelensky is so confident of this that he is going out of his way to jerk around the Trump administration on the mineral rights deal. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are coming to Washington this week to set Trump straight.

Reportedly, Starmer and Macron will present a plan to Trump that has the UK and France putting troops into Ukraine, while the United States provides air cover from bases in Poland and Romania. In effect, the United States must create a no-fly zone over Ukraine and go to war with Russia if the Russians violate it. The madness of the scheme is so beyond the pale it is hard to accept as real, but the Europeans are operating in an alternative reality from the rest of us.

The Trump people see that the main obstacle to their plans for normalizing relations with Russia is Zelensky. Anyone who has dealt with a deadbeat knows Zelensky and the best way of dealing with this type is to get rid of them. Elections will remove him from the picture. The end of American support will also remove him from the picture, as the only reason for him to exist is as a facilitator of money and arms into Ukraine, mostly the money, which is stolen by Ukrainian officials.

The danger of pulling the plug on Ukraine is that it could be bad public relations, which is where the mineral rights dispute comes into play. The point of this is to make it appear as if Zelensky is unwilling to make a deal for more money and make it look like he is the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump’s team has figured out that Zelensky cannot sign the mineral deal, and he cannot agree to negotiations, so they are pressing on both in order to shift the blame to him.

What is setting up is a game of chicken. On one side we have Zelensky and the Europeans, who are sure Trump will never walk away from Ukraine. It is why they are getting bolder in their demands. They think Trump is bluffing. On the other side we have Team Trump who is sure the Europeans will fall in line, rather than risk a break with Washington, even if it means abandoning Ukraine. Zelensky is sure he has fooled everyone with his latest schemes.

For their part, the Russians are making the prudent bet. It costs them nothing to talk with the Trump administration and there is a good chance it leads to a positive outcome, so they will follow that route to the end. Similarly, the Chinese have made positive noises about the start of talks between Moscow and Washington. Like the Russians, the Chinese welcome the return of normalcy to Washington. China and Russia are open for business and ready to make deals.

It is too soon to know how this ends, but this game of chicken revolves around Zelensky being the ruler of Ukraine, which means the way to avoid a collision is to remove him from the equation. The Russians figured this out two years ago. The Chinese figured it out last year when they had talks with him. Now the Trump administration has arrived at the same conclusion. That leaves the Europeans and the bet in the White House right now is they will choose Washington over Zelensky.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 03m05s Snobs & Slobs, Euro style
• 10m11s Trump trashes Ukraine
• 15m12s The mystery of South Africa
• 21m29s Don’t look up
• 28m31s Scatter the feds!
• 31m16s Fort Knox, wha?
• 34m30s Return of Butch & Suni
• 36m16s World Hippo Day
• 39m05s Silly signoff

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Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your stratospherically genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you some notes from the week’s news seasoned with wit, cynicism, and some bafflement.

Most of this week’s news has related to foreign affairs. That puts me at a slight disadvantage as I’m not really engaged with matters foreign. I often find them interesting, from a detached historical and anthropological point of view; and I have sympathies and unsympathies, both governed by my strong preference for civilization over barbarism.

Those are calm abstractions, though. I’m not engaged with foreign issues in the way that I see commenters on social media engaged, with deep feeling and strong commitment. I’m a Fortress America guy.

I want us to have lots of nukes. I’ve been telling the world that for more than twenty years. Actual quote from me in 2004: “You Can Never Have Enough Nukes.” End quote. I likewise want every kind of anti-missile defense we can devise, and state-of-the-art protections against anything a hostile power might hit us with: conventional, nuclear, chemical, biological, drones, … everything.

That attained, I want us to mind our own business while the rest of the world goes hang.

So I’m not really your go-to guy for news about foreign parts. They’re in the news, though, and we’re tangled up with them because of past stupidities; so I’ll do my best.

02 — Snobs & Slobs, Euro style.     There is no doubt at all that the Speech of the Week was the 20-minute address delivered by our Vice President J.D. Vance to the annual Munich Security Conference on February 14th.

What is the Munich Security Conference? Well, it describes itself on its website as, quote:

The world’s leading forum for debating international security policy. It is a venue for diplomatic initiatives to address the world’s most pressing security concerns.

End quote.

In other words it’s a big talking-heads show for diplomats and national-security decision-makers from umpteen countries, mainly those belonging to NATO and the EU, although other countries have open invitations.

I have no idea how much influence the Conference has on geostrategic developments, or whether it has any at all; but it lets us see what these people are thinking.

So what did our Vice President tell them? In very brief, that their countries were too much under the domination of globalist elites and should pay more attention to what ordinary citizens want. To put it in terms of the monosyllables favored here at Radio Derb, he told Europe’s Snobs to listen more to Europe’s Slobs.

The Vice President’s speech included references to three events close to it in time: two in the recent past, one in the near future.

In the past was the annulling of the December election in Romania — which nowadays is a member nation of both the EU and NATO. There was no clear winner in that election, but a strong showing by parties described in the regime media as “far right,” “ultra-nationalist,” and so on, and accused of being illegally influenced by Russia. Sound familiar?

In the much more immediate past was an attack in Munich itself the day before our Vice President spoke. A fanatical Muslim illegal alien from Afghanistan drove his car into a crowd, killing a two-year-old girl and her 37-year-old mother and injuring 36 others.

The future event is of course the federal election taking place in Germany this Sunday, February 23rd. Polls show the center-right alliance — approximately the pre-Trump Republican Party — at thirty percent, the populist-nationalist Trumpish AfD at twenty percent, and other parties down at fifteen percent, or thirteen percent, or single digits.

Populist nationalism dwells under a dark cloud in Germany, for reasons not hard to figure. Big old respectable parties like that center-right alliance have sworn not to join in coalition with AfD. Since there can be no effective government in a parliamentary system of this kind without coalition, we have a problem. Could we see a Romanian solution? It’s possible.

So that was the context for J.D. Vance’s remarks. He spoke to the Conference from the other side of the Trump Revolution, which none of them has experienced yet. “Trust your citizens,” he told them. “Let your people speak.” Quote from MSN, quote:

Vance accused European leaders of using [inner quote] “Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” [end inner quote] to suppress dissenting ideas — rather than engaging in debate with their own people to figure out what they are fighting for.

[Inner quote:] “I believe deeply that there is no security if you’re afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” [end inner quote] he said, adding there’s “nothing” Europe can do for the US if they are “afraid” of their citizens.

End quote.

The assembled Snobs didn’t take it well. The Conference Chairman Christoph Heusgen, in his remarks wrapping up the event, actually started weeping. Quote from him:

this conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.

End quote.

The news source I took that from — it was actually the Times of India — told us that the Chairman’s voice was, quote, “breaking with emotion,” end quote.

The people running Europe are not just Snobs, they’re also pussies.

03 — Trump trashes Ukraine.     The Vice President’s Munich speech and the reactions to it make the case for Fortress America all by themselves.

While the Euro-pussies are yielding up their nations to barbarian settlers from Islamia and black Africa, they’re looking to us to defend them from mighty Russia? Really?

Mighty Russia has 150 million people and a total GDP of seven trillion dollars. Hold those numbers in your mind a moment: 150 million, seven trillion.

Europe — the EU plus the U.K. — has 520 million people and a GDP of 20 trillion: three and a half times Russia’s population, three times its wealth. Two of the 28 European nation-states there, France and the U.K., have nuclear weapons.

These people can’t defend their territories against a corrupt, way-overstretched empire whose male population is drunk half the time? Too bad.

Our President has generated much tut-tutting with his recent comments on the Russia-Ukraine war — the one I have been referring to since it started as the war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations.

Some of those comments deserve a tut-tut, or at any rate a tut. No, Sir, it wasn’t Ukraine that started the war. They weren’t blameless, and neither were we; but there were alternatives to a military solution, alternatives the Russians might have explored; but Putin decided on straight aggression.

To me, an isolationist, that’s all academic, though. The squabbles among Eastern Slavs are none of North America’s business. They are Europe’s business; and a Europe run by wise decision-makers might have averted the whole thing, while at the same time being well-prepared to defend their territories if matters went seriously pear-shaped.

Whatever, it’s not North America’s business. We should have withdrawn from NATO back in 1991 after the Warsaw Pact folded up their tents. Europe was richer and more demographically stable then than it is now; Russia was in a state of collapse. The Euros could have waved us a cheerful goodbye and rechristened NATO to ETO, the European Treaty Organization.

Historians of the future, studying the West’s geostrategy in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War, will shake their heads in disbelief at our colossal collective stupidity. What on earth were our statesmen thinking?

Now perhaps at last, under President Trump, we may put things right. We know that Trump is, in a general way, anti-NATO. Just pull us out of the darn thing, Mr President.

Our Vice President seems to be similarly inclined. He got my attention in last year’s election campaign when some reporter asked him about Ukraine. Replied Vance: “I don’t care about Ukraine,” or words to that effect. Neither do I, J.D., neither do I.

To the world-saving Snobs that makes me a stooge of Putin. So what? I don’t care. The world-savers are out of power. We Slobs are running the show. Get us out of NATO, Mr President!

04 —The mystery of South Africa.     This week Cyril Ramaphosa commenced his eighth year in power as President of South Africa. That comes one week after President Trump issued an order stating that, and I’ll quote direct from the order here, quote:

(a) the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and

(b) the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.

End quote.

Trump’s order is in reaction to South Africa’s parliament passing an Expropriation Act back in December. The Act aims to correct what black South Africans consider to be an injustice: that a disproportionate quantity of the country’s best farmland is owned by whites, who are only seven percent of the country’s population.

The way the Act is written, though, it seems to disregard private property rights — particularly white people’s property rights — as it permits land seizures by the government without compensation. Hence our President’s response.

Again, as an isolationist, I’m not sure that the travails of white South Africans are any of our nation’s business. That’s by the way, though. The main emotion stirred in me by this story, and every other news story about South Africa, is wonder: wonder that the place is still on the map, is still functioning as a more-or-less modern society, and still has a seven percent white minority. Heck, they even have an illegal-immigration problem.

Thirty years ago when Apartheid ended and blacks took over the government, I was cynical. Zimbabwe, next door to South Africa (and today a major source of those illegal immigrants) had gone under black rule fifteen years before, and was a mess. The joke among us cynics was in fact:  Q — What’s the difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa?  A — About five years.

Yet South Africa’s still there, and still in one piece. It has problems, to be sure: but there’s been no tribal war, no economic collapse, no outward floods of refugees. If you meet white South Africans — I met one a few months ago — they shrug and say, “Yeah, crime’s bad …,” but they don’t seem inclined to emigrate.

Crime is bad, most notoriously crimes of violence against white farmers, although the actual statistics are unclear. It of course doesn’t help that the Economic Freedom Fighters, a fringe political party led by black supremacist Julius Malema, has “Kill the Boer!” as a campaign song (although the New York Times tells us we shouldn’t take it too literally.)

Yet still there’s no outgoing flood of white refugees. Reporting on Trump’s order, Reuters records a lukewarm response from Afrikaners. Sample quote from the Reuters report, quote:

The order provided for resettlement in the U.S. of [inner quote] “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” [end inner quote] as refugees.

Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers, who own most of the country’s farmland.

[Inner quote:] “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go,” [end inner quote] said Neville van der Merwe, a 78-year-old pensioner in Bothasig near Cape Town.

[Inner quote:] “There hasn’t been any really bad taking over our land, the people are carrying on like normal and you know, what are you going to do over there?” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

To me — a race realist, pessimist, and cynic — South Africa is a mystery. If anyone has a theory, I’ll listen to it attentively.

05 — Don’t look up.     It’s not only human action that creates dangers for us. While wars between nations can be very destructive, there are sources of destruction outside the human realm, too.

There are, for example, rogue asteroids. The latest one to disturb our peace of mind is unromantically named 2024-YR4. In hopes of allaying your fears, I shall refer to the thing as Daisy.

Astronomers only got acquainted with Daisy in December, and there are still some important things we don’t know about her. Her size, for example, given in Tuesday’s New York Times as between 130 feet and 300 feet across.

We do know enough about Daisy’s orbit, however, to predict that there is a one-in-thirty chance she will hit our own planet on December 22nd 2032 — just in time for Christmas!

Supposing we do in fact draw that one-in-thirty chance, how much damage might Daisy do?

That, no-one can really say. There are too many unknowns. We don’t know Daisy’s composition, for instance. She could be a solid lump of iron, or a loosely-bound collection of stones, ice, and rock fragments. Nor can we say how she will hit us, if she hits us: just skimming across Earth’s upper atmosphere or crashing vertically down.

A stony asteroid could break up in the air, turning into a shower of meteorites. With a really solid one, it of course matters whether it hits on land or at sea; and if on land, how populated that bit of land is. A solid vertical hit on land could generate an impact crater as much as two-thirds of a mile across. That’s just the crater: there’d be total destruction from the blast wave for miles beyond that.

Well, it’s a one-in-thirty chance (although the astronomers keep updating that number) and we have nearly eight years to prepare ourselves, so don’t be losing sleep over this.

And astronomically speaking, far worse things can happen — have happened. I’m going to quote myself here, if you don’t mind. This is from my monthly Diary, December 2018. The Mrs and I had taken a short vacation in Cancún on the northeastern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Here I was reporting on that trip. Quote:

If I had the time and leisure to do serious travelling in Yucatán … the first place I’d head for would be the little coastal town of Chicxulub Puerto, 200 miles west of Cancún.

That town marks the precise spot, as near as we can figure it, where an asteroid smacked into our planet 66 million years ago. The subsequent ructions and climatic disasters wiped out much of life on Earth, most notably the dinosaurs.

My desire to visit Chicxulub is not, I’ll admit, rational. There’s nothing to see there. A lot of natural landscaping goes on in 66 million years, and the crater — it’s 93 miles across — can now be seen clearly only with special scientific intruments. Half of it’s under the sea.

Still I’d like to stand there where that thing hit, just for the imaginative thrill. Plus, on the assumption that two asteroid hits at the same place are highly unlikely, being in Chicxulub there’s one less thing to worry about in the cosmic-catastrophe line.

(Reflecting on that when reading through: Given that the great worldwide die-off following the asteroid strike was from drowning, burning, freezing, suffocation, poisoning, or starvation, being at Ground Zero when the asteroid hit might actually have been optimal.)

End quote.

To further allay your fears, gentle listener, please notice the difference in scale there. The biggest estimate for the size of Daisy is 300 feet; the Chicxulub asteroid was six miles across. That was one hell of an impact. The worst thing Daisy might do would be a gentle bump by comparison. A crater two-thirds of a mile across? The Chicxulub crater — still detectable after 66 million years — is 93 miles across.

Sure, the human world can be a dangerous one. Try as we might, though, we can’t deliver danger in anything like cosmic quantities.

06 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Of all the administrative reforms undertaken or proposed by President Trump and his people, the one that gets the loudest cheer from me is the idea of moving the headquarters of federal agencies out of Washington, D.C. to some location elsewhere in the other 99.99827 percent of our country’s land area.

The first Trump administration actually tried this, in a half-hearted and ineffectual way. Three and a half years into that administration, in August 2020, the Bureau of Land Management — that’s the agency within the Department of the Interior responsible for managing land owned by the federal government — the BLM had its headquarters office moved out of D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado.

The government people weren’t happy about it. More than 87 percent of the Bureau’s D.C.-based employees quit.

I’d call that a plus; but a year later, September 2021, the Biden administration — or Third Obama administration, George Soros administration, whatever the more accurate term is — moved the BLM head office back to D.C., where it’s been ever since.

With modern communications, there is no case at all for headquartering all the federal agencies on one 70-square-mile patch of real estate. Scatter them to the four winds! It would even make better sense national-security-wise. As things stand, one well-aimed missile with a 50-megaton warhead could wipe out the federal government and all its data.

(Hey, stop that cheering in the back row! Show some good taste, please, and proper respect for our nation’s public servants. Thank you …)

Item:  Fort Knox has been in the news. That’s the bullion depository at Fort Knox army base in Kentucky, where the U.S.A. stores around half of our gold reserves.

I confess I’m not clear as to why Fort Knox has been in the news. Apparently Elon Musk has been posting on X some skepticism about whether the gold bullion there is secure. Maybe we should audit it, he’s said. Wednesday this week, talking with reporters on Air Force One, President Trump confirmed that they are indeed going to do an audit. Actual quote from him, quote:

We’re going to go to Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there.

End quote.

The Treasury Department tells us there are 147,341,858.382 troy ounces of gold in the Fort Knox bullion depository. That’s awfully precise; why do we need an audit?

And with gold currently trading at $2,951.90 the troy ounce, that Fort Knox share is worth only $435 billion. I make that just 1.2 percent of our $36.22 trillion national debt — a mere bagatelle.

Working the arithmetic the other way, that $36.22 trillion national debt equates to around 421,000 tons of gold. Is there actually that much mined gold in the entire world?

So our weeny little $435 billion deposit isn’t going to be much help with the trillions that dominate our national finances. Is it even worth the trouble of auditing? Didn’t we come off the gold standard decades ago?

I guess I’m not really getting the point of Fort Knox. But hey, we got a fun movie out of the durn place — Goldfinger, remember that?

“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.”

Eh, they don’t make ’em like that any more.

Item:  Just one more from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA has now given us a definite date for the return of those two astronauts stranded in orbit on the International Space Station: March 19th.

You’ll no doubt recall that the two — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, aged 62 and 59 respectively — arrived at the space station June 5th last year, for a stay that was only scheduled to last eight days. However, the Boeing vehicle that was supposed to return them to Earth was judged not spaceworthy, so they’ve been waiting for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be ready.

There’s been some concern about their health up there, after all these months in weightlessness. NASA says not to worry, they’re fine; but some physiologists say that without the regular constant stresses on bones, muscles, and body fluids that we get from gravity, there’s bound to be deterioration.

Let’s hope there’s no permanent harm, and these two brave, cheerful astronauts return home safely March 19th. And let’s hope they negotiated a good overtime rate before they went up there.

Item:  Did you know — I bet you didn’t: in this case, in fact, I’d bet money on it — did you know that last Saturday, February 15th, was World Hippo Day? I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that “every dog has its day.” Well, it’s not only dogs; hippos have their day, too — February 15th.

Here in New York State I have been leading a small group of citizens agitating to have World Hippo Day moved from February 15th to October 18th, the birthday of our State Attorney General. So far, however, our efforts have met with no success.

I’m looking at a World Hippo Day commemorative website that tells me, quote:

These adorable creatures spend their days splashing in the water, munching on grass, and wowing us with their powerful jaws!

End quote.

You might get a different point of view from 72-year-old Craig Manders of Cranford, New Jersey. June 5th last year Mr Manders and his wife Lisa, age 70, were on safari in Zambia to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Then while Mrs Manders was standing on a river bank taking pictures of a partially-submerged hippo at rest in the water, the beast suddenly came charging up out of the river and crushed her to death with its enormous jaws.

Last week Mr Manders filed suit against the tour company, which is based in Connecticut, for failing to protect him and his wife.

Radio Derb’s sincere sympathies of course go out to Mr Manders, with hopes for a fair judicial outcome. Being crushed to death by a rogue hippo is a dreadful fate indeed. As a former employee of VDARE.com I can imagine it all too easily.

07 — Signoff.     That’s the show, listeners. Thanks as always for your time and attention, your donations and support.

Thanks also to the listeners and readers who emailed in their sympathies after I reported last week that Mrs Derbyshire and I were both unwell. Thus encouraged, we are now back to normal — bless you all! We are in fact looking forward in good cheer to a small life milestone this weekend: Sunday, February 23rd, is E-Day minus one hundred. I shall have more to say about E-Day in future podcasts.

All those thanks come with my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation during its suspension by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to that fine monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!

For signoff music this week, I’ve settled on something silly. I like silly and try to encourage it; I don’t think there’s enough silliness in the world.

The land of my birth, it seems to me, has been way out ahead of other nations in the cultivation of silliness. Sure, Americans can be silly: think of the Three Stooges or the Keystone cops. Our TV sitcoms occasionaly attained well-nigh British heights of silliness. Even Saturday Night Live had silly moments, as I remember; although I’m remembering the show as it was forty-some years ago.

In silliness, however, the Brits reign supreme. No other nation could have generated Monty Python’s Flying Circus — even the title is silly.

I don’t know how it was here in the States, but across the pond there, broadcast silliness goes way back before the age of TV. I can remember as a child, before we had a TV, listening spellbound to a deeply silly half-hour radio program called The Goon Show on BBC Radio. Among other keen listeners to that show was Charles Windsor, then Prince of Wales, nowadays King Charles the Third. He was mimicking the silly voices from The Goon Show well into the 1970s.

That great tradition of British Radio silliness continues to the present day. There’s a show on BBC Radio 4 with the title I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, where a panel of comedians is challenged to do silly things … like, for example, singing the words of some familiar song to the tune of a different familiar song.

To give you the idea, here was comedian Tony Hawks in Season 43 of the show, April 2004, singing the words of the Muppet Show intro theme to the tune of the late-1960s pop music hit A Whiter Shade Of Pale.

Yes, it’s silly. That’s the point.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

In every human organization there are things that are true but for one reason or another, everyone agrees to ignore them. It may be that these things are just annoying, like the personal ticks of the boss. In other cases, they are things that would put the organization at risk if people tried to address them. Human systems often must ignore things that contradict the logic of the system.

The American political order as established by the Constitution has holes that the Framers chose to ignore because they had no choice. The final results were a compromise between thirteen states that often had serious conflicts on things, conflicts that could not be reconciled, so they were ignored. The most obvious one is the issue of slavery that was resolved at a later date.

The managerial system that is under assault by Trump was made possible by ignoring things that were essential to its existence. The creation of executive agencies and who controls them is a good example. For fifty years everyone in Washington pretended that these agencies were a fourth branch of government. Trump has stopped pretending and is challenging a core assumption of managerialism.

That is the show this week. It is yet another way of looking at how we got to this place and why Trump can do what so-called conservatives had promised for decades but were never able to do. At the heart of managerialism was mokita, things everyone knew were true but agreed not to discuss. Like a body, the truth can only be hidden for long until it bobs to the surface.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Mokita
• The Political Mokita
• The Constitutional Order
• The Managerial Mokita
• The Trump Challenge

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Full Show On Spreaker

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One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

Once you look at the war the way Trump has been looking at the war since it started, his approach makes perfect sense. He is doing now what he would have done if he were in the White House for a second term. He opened a dialogue with the Russians, and he minimized Zelensky. The reason for that is this war is not about Ukraine or some abstract concepts from the past century. It is about how conflicts between the great powers will be settled in the future.

Here is where you see the two class of people. Zelensky is operating from the old model where moralizing about world affairs was the rule. It was about those old 20th century ideas of good guys and bad guys. Trump is operating from the new model where everything is about business. Project Ukraine is bad business, so it must end and there is nothing more to say about it. Zelensky is the project manager who thinks the project is about something other than business.

Zelensky is not alone in this. His friends in Europe are also trapped in the past, thinking that they are skillfully playing the old game, when in reality they are soon to join Zelensky in the room of formerly relevant figures. The British figurehead Keir Starmer is coming to Washington next week thinking he is going to explain things to President Trump with regards to Zelensky. In reality he is going to be sat down by Trump subordinates and told he has been demoted.

Trump signaled as much when a reporter asked him about Starmer announcing his trip to Washington last week. Trump casually said that Starmer wanted to visit, but he was unsure of when he was coming. He treated it like the pool guy called and said he had to do something about the algae. That should have been a signal to the Brits that Starmer will not be welcomed as an equal, but like everyone else in Europe, they are struggling to come to terms with the new world order.

The same thing is happening locally. Scan many conservative sites or their accounts on Twitter and they are carrying on like it is 1985. Granted, this has been their act since 1985, but it is clearly not 1985 now. They are still doing the “If we use our power then the we are no better than the Democrats” act. The dumbest ones are still singing from the neocon hymn book. Dissidents have often joked that conservativism is a museum to the Reagan years, but now it is painfully true.

In fairness, the dancing partner of the conservatives are struggling as well. This tweet from a progressive chattering skull is emblematic. He is working from the old playbook that says the “left” calls out the “right” about not following the rules and the “right” then uses that to fink on their voters. The people operating in the new way of things just shrug at this stuff. The whole point of the present moment is to flip over the tables in the temple of politics and usher in a new age.

This is not just a struggle for the establishment. Old think is a problem for people who claimed to be dissidents. The people called “right-wing influencers” are struggling to maintain an audience because their act is suddenly irrelevant. Many are now becoming Trump critics because it is the only way to get attention. It turns out that they were never for anything, just against things. Remove those things they oppose, and they are left with a gaping hole in their act.

Where all this leaves us is we have two classes of people now. There are those who are embracing the new way of doing things, even if how it all works is not all that clear, and then there are those who wish to remain in the past century. Perhaps this will be the new political spectrum. The left will be the dead-enders who continue to look backward, and the right will be those facing the future. Regardless of the labels, the future will belong to those who embrace it, leaving the past in the past.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The assault on the Blob has taken up most of the attention in Washington, along with the reproachment with Russia, but the biggest item on the Trump agenda is the restructuring of the American economy. If you listen to what Trump says when asked about what has been happening thus far, it often circles back to the economy and how he imagines it to be after his changes. The thing is no one in the media follows up on it so Trump is never asked about that end goal.

There were some hints in the Russia coverage. One of the participants from the Russian side was the head of their sovereign wealth fund. This is something Trump has said he wants to create for the American government. A sovereign investment fund is a state-owned investment fund that does the same things a private investment fund, except it also has an eye on policy. A sovereign wealth fund acts as an additional level in both foreign and domestic policy.

This is not a thing you typically see in the West, as the Western economic model is built on the assumption that the government should not meddle in markets. This is a big lie, of course, as Western governments regulate everything. The thing is the regulations are dictated by the market makers through the miracle of regulatory capture, so the political class has limited control of the regulations. A sovereign wealth fund would put the political class on an even footing with the market makers.

That brings us back to the administrative state and the Blob that has consumed it over the last thirty years. In theory it regulates the economy in the interests of the people, but in reality, it has been a conduit so that the parasites within the blob can suck the blood, as in money, from the system. That money is used to maintain control of the host and launch projects abroad. Trillions are sent into the system, but what comes out does not make any sense to anyone, even the people inside it.

Take the Department of Education, for example. It was organized under Jimmy Carter for the purpose of housing all educational programs under one agency. Today it has a quarter trillion-dollar budget and employs 3900 people. Now, that does not mean those employees have a sixty-million-dollar salary. Most of the money gets sent to the states via grants and subsidies. Put another way, a tiny number of people in Washington dictate education policy to the country through this agency.

Trump has ordered its dismantling, but it is not about the money. Pell Grants, for example, are not going away yet. They would be shifted to another agency and eventually either automated or killed off by Congress. The reality is things like Pell Grants are a subsidy to colleges and universities, not students. All government subsidies end up in the pockets of the industry getting the subsidy. If you create grants for buying BMW’s, then BMW raises its prices by the amount of the grant.

From the Trump perspective, the federal government meddles in the economy far too much, but even worse, it meddles in the wrong things, while at the same time it ignores the big things that it should be managing. The federal government spends hundreds of billions subsidizing colleges and universities but ignores the bizarre trade relations we have with Canada and Mexico. In other words, Trump-o-nomics is not rebranded conservatism or libertarianism. It is a radical reordering of priorities.

One way to think of what Trump has in mind is the corporate model, but the start-up variety rather than the late stage decline model. American Inc. is an aging company like IBM that is bogged down in old rules and old thinking. It survives, not on making new and better products, but on the proceeds of past success. If you were to revitalize IBM, you would strip out the good stuff into a new company and hand it to smart people and leave the old stuff to the investors.

That is the goal of the Trump program. The new model for American Inc. is to be like a startup where the people running it, the Executive branch, set the general goals and the broad operational outlines, but the people inside of it, the states, business, and the people, are left to figure out the rest. Things like tariffs, global trade deals and the sovereign wealth fund are tools for setting the broad agenda and correcting imbalances that arise inside the economy.

Anyone familiar with startups or growth companies knows that the enemy of growth and innovation is management. In the 1990’s, for example, ambitious people would see the hiring of human resources people as a sign to move onto the next startup, because they understood that human resources were the death of innovation. The assault on the Blob, therefore, is like the termination of the human resources, diversity, and training departments of a struggling corporation.

There is much more to this, but the thing to take away is that what is happening is just the small setup parts for a larger reshaping of the economic order. Those meetings with the Russians are more about economics than war. In fact, you already hear the change in language regarding Ukraine away from ideology and to economics. For Trump and America Inc., Ukraine is a bad business deal. The goal now is to bring it to a quick close and claw back some of the money.

In this regard, the Trump era may one day be seen as the bookend to the New Deal era that gave rise to the managerial state. It has been lost to the need to recast the New Deal to fit modern narratives, but the FDR people were inspired by what was happening in Europe at the time. This is what gave Burnham the inspiration to write the book, The Managerial Revolution. The irony of the man they swear is Hitler bringing to an end a system partially inspired by Hitler should not go unnoticed.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.

On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.

The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.

Ever since, the name of the game in politics has been to make sure you manage the media, which meant hiring an army of media consultants. Often, these people came out of the media. Of course, the media was an extension of the managerial class, so this new relationship created good jobs at good wages for people long on credentials and short on practical talent. This peaked under Obama when hundreds of media members got jobs in his administration.

This is why politics shifted from backrooms and onto the pages of the media, where narratives, narrative management and narrative collapse became the defining features of the public debate. The point of politics was to create a story, in which the hero defeated the villain and everyone clapped. This was to herd the managerial class into the hero side and paint the enemies of the managerial class as the villain. Politics was all about good guys and bad guys, as determined by the media.

In the end, American politics was like a Greek drama. The players on the stage were cast in their roles not by their actions, but by the commentary provided by the chorus, which was the media. It reached the point where in the Obama years, people truly thought “healthcare” was a thing that existed in unlimited quantities, but needed to be freed from the grasp of the monster called the insurance companies. Healthcare reform was a bizarre pantomime for the entertainment of Washington.

In the digital age, it went beyond the parlor games of the political class so that media power became the tip of the spear in the cultural revolution. Every activist declared herself a journalist and dedicated her life to finding heretics. Her job was to “report on the heretic” but her hope was that major media would pick up her “reporting” and have the heretic hurled into the void. Like every political terror in the ideological age, what started with the politicians was visited on the people.

This is when ideological and theological fevers break. People can suspend their disbelief and accept even the most bizarre moral framing, when it is limited to the action on the stage. They know it is just entertainment. Even when in the form of a lecture or sermon, they believe they can take from it what they will. When the directors of the moral drama begin dragging the people onto the stage, or off to the gulag, then the people can no longer suspend their disbelief.

The natural questions of all moral disputes then begin to appear. Those questions are “Who says?” and “So what?”. These questions crept up on the managerial class over the last ten years and they were never able or willing to answer them. This became obvious in the runup to the election. The media kept screaming, “Trump is evil!” and the people kept wondering, “Who says?” When they yelled about his alleged crimes and indictments, the response was, “So what?”

A great man once said that you will know that the revolution is upon us when a conservative waddles onto the stage muttering about the various “isms” and “who we are” and the audience remains silent. Then someone giggles, then another laughs and suddenly a wave of laughter sweeps the room. The great preference cascade is unleashed as everyone all at once seems to realize that everyone else thinks what they think about these ridiculous fools.

It is what we are now witnessing. Team Trump has started smashing up the managerial system in ways thought impossible. The media rushed to their pulpits to give their sermons, but the audience just laughed. The Wall Street Journal did the point and shriek at one of the DOGE kids and the audience not only laughed but turned “Big Balls” into a hero of the cause. The Vice President now goes on Twitter and mocks reporters who do the point and shriek.

There was a scene in the movie Braveheart in which William Wallace kills a group the king’s soldiers in an effort to free his wife. The last of them is the magistrate, who had killed Wallace’s wife. Wallace initially lowers his eye when he confronts him, then looks him straight in the eye and slashes the man’s throat. It is a great scene because it reflects the reality of power. The man had power over Wallace, as long as had moral authority, but he had squandered it.

That is what is happening in the United States. The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade. Their excesses not only damaged their credibility but also discredited their moral claims. They are now on the same level as the rest of us and we are cheering as the DOGE kids put them against the post.

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