Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the proliferation of rage heads who can only communicate in emotions, a post about how we have become a nation of liars and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

The British conservative party, known as the Tories, finally settled on a new leader after they were nearly zeroed out in the last election. The pick to lead the party is a Nigerian woman calling herself Kemi Badenoch. Her official name is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, but that is far too British these days, so she has shortened it to a single word “Kemi” like pop stars do. She is now the face of the party that is supposedly the face of traditional English people.

The absurdity of this is obvious to most people, but not to everyone. The people running the Tory party are over the moon with this. Many of them are snickering into their sleeves about how the Labour party is “pale, stale and male.” Other are sure that it will take a Nigerian princess to restore British honor and finally confront the multicultural forces that have turned Britain into a zoo. This is their version of “Mexicans are natural conservatives”, popular with American conservatives.

The ridiculousness of this does not stop there. Look at the career of Kemi Badenoch through a traditional lens and her resume is a baffling mix of things that have no connection to one another or fit into a clear theme. She bounced from one thing to another, never accomplishing much but then suddenly she became a hot property among the consultancy class. That is where she was discovered by the political class and turned into a Yoruba version of Barak Obama.

The parsimonious explanation for Kemi Badenoch’s shambolic rise to the top of the Tory party is something John Derbyshire observed about Barak Obama when he suddenly burst on the scene. What appears to be a random walk preceding the meteoric rise is the result of the warm thermals created by white guilt over race and the desires and projects to seek forgiveness. The idealized black flits about until finally catching the sharp upward gust into the clouds.

Upper and middle-class whites in the Anglosphere seem to be driven to do these things, in part, by a desire to be ruled by Africans, who just happen to agree with them or “hold their values”, as they prefer to state it. There is also the desire to be punished by Africans, but not so much as to cause them real harm. They prefer the harm to fall on the bad whites. Then there is the strong undertow of salvation. These whites believe that this process will lead to their salvation.

This explains the weird exultation we see from these whites when a chosen one turns up to confirm the prophesies. The mania over Barak Obama was so bizarre people compared it to the cult of personality seen in places like North Korea. The Obama fans could tell you almost nothing about him, but that did not matter as simply being in the mobs worshipping him provided the religious experience they desired. You see the same look among the Tory members regarding Kemi Badenoch.

It is easy to mock this, but this behavior is driven by strong cultural and spiritual forces, and it is having a real impact. This phenomenon is mostly a product of the United States, exported around the West. The desire to build a city on a hill evolved into a sense of shame coupled with a desire to heal the world. The result is something approaching idolatry, with the well-behaved black person being treated like an emissary of God, who must be allowed to perform his miracles.

It is not an accident that the script writers for Barak Obama had him say things like “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Many people dismissed it as emotive nonsense, but the line has African origins. For the intended audience, white, educated and upper-middle-class, the line struck like a thunderclap. They were the elect and the proof of this was their presence in the cult of Obama. Not only was the promised land near, but salvation was also at hand.

Salvation never came and the result was a decade of madness. It is not an accident that the street violence and other engineered destruction of the basics of society started in the middle of Obama’s last term. At that point, it was clear to all that salvation was not coming, so they had no choice but to search for a villain. This sort of cult like behavior never turns to self-reflection in the face of disconfirmation. Instead, the energy in search of salvation channels into the search for the devil.

It remains to be seen if this is the process in Old Blighty. The Tories are in the political wilderness for a few more years. Labour, which won the last election, is as popular as rectal cancer and faces nothing but bad options. Britain is much closer to economic and social collapse than anyone in power appreciates. Throw in the fact that Black Jesus is not supposed to come from what passes for the right and it seems unlikely that Kemi Badenoch will follow the Obama arc.

Instead, what this looks like is what we see all over the West these days and that is a reboot of an old classic but done by ham and eggers. The Tories, like their American counterparts, have reached the logical end of what has passed for conservatism since the middle of the last century. The only remaining constituency for conservatism is the economic elites who seek to keep the old dialectic going. In the end, this gambit will fail to change their political fortunes.

There is more to it though. This unsatisfied desire for forgiveness that lies at the heart of this worship of Africans in the Anglosphere is not going away, because there is no mechanism to achieve it. Christianity, from which this desire was inherited, had mechanisms for forgiveness of sin. It also had a logic to address those things for which forgiveness in this life was not possible. The secular ideologies that rose up to replace Christianity have no such mechanisms.

Each turn of the wheel has led to a more reckless pursuit of salvation, because “more of the same” is the only possible answer to the inevitable failure. It is why we have gone from the reasonable extension of legal protections to former slaves to a world of unlimited non-white immigration and the erasure of white people from the cultural spaces, like movies, television and advertising. The burning desire to cleanse their souls of this sin has led to the desire to burn it all down.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what is killing the West is something that will lead the people to come down from their cross of ebony and embrace a new moral framing which gives them a purpose that elevates their people, rather than sacrificing them in search of forgiveness. That is unlikely to be found in the past. Instead, it will be found in the rubble of decline. At some point, even the fanatic must submit to reality or at least be overcome by it and those who rise from it.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m09s Is the West waking up?
• 12m48s The Hanns Johst reflex
• 20m12s America’s can’t-dos
• 29m11s What’s up with Koreans?
• 32m12s New Yorkers don’t vote
• 34m12s Garbagegate
• 37m09s Trick-or-treat fades
• 39m23s Signoff: Halloween Hank

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was a snippet of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your awesomely genial host John Derbyshire with news of the hour.

Nothing much of any interest is happening here in the U.S.A. right now, so this week’s podcast will lean heavily on foreign topics. And no, this does not mean that Radio Derb is shedding our isolationist convictions. We remain as opposed as ever to foreign entanglements. Events beyond our shores, though, have an abstract interest of their own, and may have things to teach us.

So let’s go scanning the world. Before we do, though, let me direct you once again to my personal website johnderbyshire.com where, along with much fascinating reading and listening matter — including, just posted, my October Diary — you will find instructions on how to support me using snail mail, PayPal, or crypto, or via Zelle direct to my bank, or with a tax-deductible donation by a check earmarked with my name and mailed to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you as always for your encouragement.

02 — Is the West waking up?     A major problem facing Western civilization for more than a decade now has been mass illegal immigration. North America and Europe have been worst affected.

This is a topic it’s hard to be optimistic about, as good news has too often been followed by bad news. That pattern goes at least as far back as 1986, when Ronald Reagan signed IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of that year, which provided amnesty for illegal aliens who’d lived in the U.S.A. for at least five years, balanced by sanctions on employers who knowingly hired illegals. The amnesty happened; the employer sanctions didn’t.

It’s been like that all over. Thirty years on from IRCA, in 2016, voters in the U.K. took their country out of the European Union, telling pollsters that a major motivation was to regain control of their nation’s borders. The result was that border control collapsed completely, with tens of thousands of illegals pouring in every year since.

As I said, it’s hard to be optimistic. There are powerful forces driving mass illegal immigration: cheap-labor business lobbies, politicians looking for grateful immigrant voters, world-saver human rights agencies, immigration lawyers’ cartels, left-wing judges — kritarchs — dominating the courts, …

So I say the following thing cautiously, ready to be disappointed yet again, but I say it anyway: There are signs all over the West that citizens are waking up, in numbers big enough that the politicians are reluctantly, grudgingly paying attention.

Let me just run through some news stories I’ve bookmarked the past month. I haven’t followed up on all of them diligently and it’s possible there have already been reversals; but the increasing frequency of these stories all by itself suggest the conclusion I’ve drawn: citizens of the West are waking up.

• Opening paragraph from an Associated Press story, October 25th, quote: “The hard-right Dutch government announced unprecedented measures Friday aimed at reining in migration, including a re-introduction of border checks, making the Netherlands the latest European nation to take a hardline stance against migration as anti-foreigner sentiment surges throughout much of the continent.” End quote.
• October 9th Sweden — Sweden! — deported 22 Iraqis back to Baghdad. The news report says these were just rejected asylum applications, unrelated to any criminal activity. Sweden!
• Poland has elections in a few months and the political parties are telling voters their policies. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has proposed ending the right to asylum.There’s a caution we should add when talking about immigration politics in Eastern Europe. Their illegal immigrants aren’t coming in across the Mediterranean, not directly anyway; they’re mostly coming from further east, from Ukraine and Belarus.A lot are Third Worlders none the less , just taking a roundabout route. Quote from a Turkish news source, quote: “Most applications (60 percent) came from citizens of Ukraine and Belarus. The largest rise was in people from African countries, including Somalia, as well as the Middle East, including Syria.” End quote.
• Italy’s conservative government worked out a deal with Albania to ship migrants from safe countries there, to wait in detention camps for decisions on their status. Twelve illegals from Egypt and Bangladesh were actually shipped to the camp in Albania two weeks ago.Italy’s leftist judiciary, however, overruled the government on the grounds that Egypt and Bangladesh are not safe. The twelve illegals are now back in Italy. The elected government and the unelected kritarchs are locked in battle over the issue.
• Austria had an election at the end of September. The populist-conservative Freedom Party won the most votes with more than 29 percent.This is one of those multi-party parliamentary systems where like-minded parties have to form a coalition to get a government up and running. None of the other parties wants to play with the Freedom Party, so they won’t be in government.It’s plain, though, that widespread resentment about immigration was a big factor in the party’s success. Quote from EuroNews: “In its election program, titled ‘Fortress Austria,’ the Freedom Party calls for ‘remigration of uninvited foreigners,’ achieving a more ‘homogeneous’ nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.” End quote.
• Mid-October, ahead of the European Council summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged European leaders to consider the development of, quote, “return hubs outside the EU,” end quote. That means detention camps in third countries, like the one Italy set up in Albania, or the ones that Britain’s last government wanted to set up in Rwanda, where illegals could be incarcerated while their cases were decided.
• The European Union has its own parliament, and the EU Parliament has to pass budget resolutions. They failed to do so October 23rd, for interesting reasons.The budget resolution they were being asked to vote on included amendments to increase funding for border security and Albania-style deportation centresThat led to some nasty infighting. The amendments actually passed, but the budget resolution overall was voted down because it cost too much.
• Meanwhile, here on our own continent, headline from Bloomberg.com: “Support for Immigration in Canada Plunges to Lowest in Decades.” Sample quote: “Nearly six in 10 people now agree ‘there’s too much immigration to Canada,’ according to the country’s longest-running survey on the topic by the Environics Institute. It’s the first time since 1998 that this view is held by a clear majority, and a stark shift from favorable opinion over the past two decades.” End quote.

I repeat my caution about the need for proper pessimism here, but that’s interesting stuff.

The apparent acceptance of the idea of detention centers in third countries — what President Ursula von der Leyen calls “return hubs” — is particularly encouraging.

The Euros — and perhaps we North Americans, too — might speed up the turnover in those “return hubs” by casting the nets a bit wider than Albania and Rwanda. Why not send illegals to Haiti or the Congo to await decisions on their court cases? Why not Somalia or Sudan?

Hey, I’ve got an even better idea: why not North Korea?

03 — The Hanns Johst reflex.     You want Nazis? I got Nazis. Here’s one: Hanns Johst, an actual Nazi, a German poet and playwright who joined the party in 1932. One of his plays was staged in 1933 to celebrate Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany.

The only reason for non-German-speakers to remember Hanns Johst is a line from that play, which has been endlessly mis-quoted in translation. The line is, actual quote: “Wenn ich ‘Kultur’ höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!”

Translation: “When I hear ‘culture’ … I unsafe my Browning!” end actual translation. He means a Browning pistol, of course. To unsafe it, you release the safety catch. Usual mis-translation, quote: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.”

[Added when archiving:  James Fulford, my handgun advisor, tells me that: “I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure Johst would have meant one of these 1910 pocket pistols rather than the big 1935 the British and Canadian armies used.” Thank you, Sir.]

That quote, or mis-quote, is a popular way to put down the kind of person who’s not interested in anything mentally or spiritually improving, only in force and violence. A great many Nazis were like that; so, of course, were and are a great many non-Nazis. It’s a human type.

I’m not like that and I try to avoid people who are. I like culture, at any rate in the sense of the English word: the German one carries a bit more semantic load.

I’ll confess, though, that Johst’s famous line did come to mind when I was reading this piece at the Daily Wire, October 30th. Headline: “UN Non-Profits Pave The Way For Permanent Mass Migration.”

The writer here is Todd Bensman, a seasoned reporter from the Center for Immigration Studies who knows the immigration topic forwards, backwards, and sideways. I have watched him speak in person, giving clear, detailed answers through a long Q&A session.

Here, in Todd’s own words, is what he’s writing about in this piece, quote:

The dozens of migration-oriented UN agencies and private international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have already plowed hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. tax money into constructing a permanent, incentivizing safety net of aid way stations for migrants. Way stations that stretch for thousands of miles along the migration routes from South America to the U.S. border, all built over the last nearly four years of President Joe Biden’s administration.

End quote.

Yes, listeners: Our money, your tax dollars and mine, have since 2021 been sluicing through the U.S. State Department as grants and spending contributions to the UNHCR, the IOM, UNICEF, and dozens of private, mostly religious-based NGOs to build … Wait, sorry: did I lose you there among the abbreviations? Sorry. Here’s a guide:

• UNHCR:  United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
• IOM:  United Nations International Organization for Migration.
• UNICEF:  United Nations Children’s Fund.
• NGO:  Non-Governmental Organization. These are theoretically private agencies, most with reassuringly-religious names, but heavily loaded up with government money, which is to say taxpayers’ money. Bensman names two NGOs in this Daily Wire article, both religious: Cadena, a Spanish-language Jewish NGO, and ADRA, an agency run by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

So … what was I saying? Yes: Our money, your tax dollars and mine, are sluicing through the U.S. State Department as grants and spending contributions to the UNHCR, the IOM, UNICEF, and dozens of NGOs to build a highway thousands of miles long from South America to the U.S. border, stocked with way stations to provide, quote, “cash cards, cash in envelopes, food, vouchers for onward travel and lodging, medical treatment, pharmaceuticals, legal counseling and much more,” end quote.

Listeners, I urge you to read Todd Bensman’s article — there’s a link in the transcript of this podcast. If you read it all the way through you will have acquired a Hanns Johst reflex like mine.

When you next hear the phrase “United Nations” or the word “non-profit” or one of those abbreviations like “NGO” or “UNHCR” or “IOM,” or even perhaps the word “humanitarian,” you will experience a powerful urge to reach for your gun.

04 — America’s can’t-dos.     I was of course just screwing with you back there in my intro when I said that nothing much of any interest is happening here in the U.S.A. right now. There’s an election happening in four days time as I record this.

People keep asking me what the result will be. I honestly have no clue. Donald Trump and his people seem optimistic. Indeed, Trump himself seems to be thoroughly enjoying the campaign. He’s out there addressing huge crowds, dressing up as this and that, cracking jokes, having the time of his life apparently. Good luck to him! He’s got my vote.

Well, actually he hasn’t got my vote yet. Hoping to avoid the lines on November 5th, my lady and I tried for early voting on Tuesday this week. I’d mis-read the schedule, though; we went at 6 p.m. but the polling place had closed at 3.

My reaction was: Serves us right. I don’t like the idea of early voting; should have stuck to my principles.

We’ll vote next Tuesday instead. Lines be damned: voting should take place on one day, in one location. Show up; show your i.d. as that of a registered citizen on the voter rolls; cast your vote.

I’m an American, twenty-two years a citizen. I count myself lucky to be one, and don’t wish to be anything else. I pay my taxes and salute the flag; my son served four years with the U.S. Army.

I love my country, but I reserve the right to criticize. We do most things right, but there are two things we don’t do right: voting, and foreign policy.

We are still, I do believe, the can-do nation — as well we should be, having so many people blessed with so much liberty. Those two things, though, are America’s can’t-dos, our two zones of incompetence.

On voting, there are regular reminders as to how incompetent we are. This week’s reminder: the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in so that the State of Virginia could purge 1,600 noncitizens from its voter rolls.

Why were there 1,600 noncitizens on the voter rolls? Beats me; but the kritarchs of the Virginia State judiciary were fine with them being there and had ordered the Governor to stop trying to purge them. That’s why the Supremes came in.

Our voting system’s a mess, even when you get the date and time right … which, OK, I didn’t. Why should we not have one day, one place voting, citizens only? Make it a public holiday.

Yeah, yeah: Some people have to work the day — cops, doctors, er … election officers. Some people are hospitalized, or can’t make it to the polling place for other reasons. Some are out of the country, serving in our military or diplomatic services, or just employed abroad. It’s not that hard to organize exceptions. There’s no reason why citizens not in those categories should be able to vote early or by mail.

You hear it said that the Constitution is at fault. Article I, Section 4, for example: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof …” OK, but it goes on to say that Congress can make or alter the rules. The Constitution can in any case be amended, and has been, notably to allow for the election of Senators.

The whole system for federal voting needs to be tightened up and the rules, duh, federalized. There are plenty of foreign models we could look to for inspiration; just last week I spoke at length about India and Australia.

(In the matter of Australia, I mentioned there that they have compulsory voting, with fines for defaulters. My son pointed out that this may not be a great idea. A lot of people don’t want to vote. If you make them, they will mess up the ballot paper, or vote for the craziest fringe candidate, or just vote at random. He has a point; but this is the kind of thing we could resolve by public discussion as part of the federalizing process. Let’s at least get the process under way.)

I mentioned that there are two things we don’t do right: voting and foreign policy. However hard it is to fix voting, fixing foreign policy will be harder.

A big, populous, resource-rich, well-educated nation like ours, safe between two oceans and with no challenging neighbor nations, should have thoroughly mastered the art of minding its own business.

We can’t of course totally ignore the rest of the world. There are trade routes and space satellites to be protected, matters of common interest in the management of diseases, industrial espionage, and so on.

Personally, I’d also allow a certain, carefully-calibrated measure of favoritism towards other nations that share our cultural roots, especially in the Anglosphere; but I’m not sure that careful calibration is a thing our foreign-policy establishment is capable of.

In any case those are not the issues that have been driving our foreign policy this past thirty years. Some departure from the mind-our-own-business ideal was excusable during the Cold War; but management of our foreign relations since then has been disastrous. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, outsourcing jobs to China and India, making an enemy of Russia all over again, … catastrophes all.

So there are my hopes for this election result: a rational system of federal voting, a rational foreign policy centered on minding our own business. I doubt we shall get either; but a Trump administration will at least point us in the right direction, and perhaps move us a few inches forward in that direction.

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

Imprimis:  Back there I suggested detention centers in North Korea for illegal aliens. That prompts the question: What the heck is the matter with Koreans?

It’s not just the Norks, it’s the other half of Korea, too. Here is a posting on X, echoing others I’ve seen. Tweet:

South Korea has such cursed vibes. Everyone is working themselves to death and a majority of people say the country is hell. The politics is literally incels vs feminazis. Birthrate below 1.0. I can see why they are obsessed with zombie movies.

End tweet.

The poster there means “total fertility rate,” not “birthrate.” The CIA World Factbook actually gives South Korea a total fertility rate 1.12 children per woman, ranking it as 226 out of 227 nations, ahead only of Taiwan. Still, those two, along with Singapore, are demographers’ favorite bets for Nations Soon to Go Extinct.

It’s a shame. Remember Solzhenitsyn’s great Nobel Prize speech. Quote:

The disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

End quote.

I’ve never been to Korea — well, no more than a few yards in — and haven’t had much acquaintance with Koreans. And sure: North Korea is a horror show, and likely a menace to world peace. Korea, though, at least as currently embodied by South Korea, is a distinctive nation with a history, a culture, a language, and a cuisine worth preserving. In that Solzhenitsyn spirit, I’d hate to see it go extinct.

Item:  A footnote on voting. The topic here: Why is New York City so ill-governed? Last year, for example, the city got the How Many Stops Act, which forces city cops to fill out detailed paperwork on every encounter with members of the public — not just crime suspects, everyone. If I ask a cop what time of day it is, he has to write me up. This, in a city drastically short of police officers — even shorter after they passed that Act than it had been before.

New York is full of idiocies like that. Why? Because the City Council, which makes the by-laws, is a nest of crazy wokesters.

But why is that? Because New Yorkers don’t vote, that’s why. Betsy McCaughey, writing in the New York Post, October 25th, quote:

In last year’s local elections, when all 51 council seats were up for grabs, voter turnout was a dismal 7.2 percent for the primaries and 12.8 percent in the general election.

End quote.

So even in the general, only one voter in eight showed up at the polls.

I take my son’s point about the downsides of compulsory voting, but could the results really be worse than this?

Item:  I keep telling you: Snobs and slobs, snobs versus slobs, that’s what our politics comes down to. None other than the President himself let the mask slip Tuesday on a virtual campaign call with Voto Latino, a Hispanic activist outfit.

This was after a comedian I’d never heard of, hired to speak at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden bash last weekend, had called Puerto Rico a, quote, “floating island of garbage,” end quote.

The President pretended to be outraged about that.

[Clip:  The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.]

That got added to the charge sheet of ruling-class snobbery towards us slobs along with Barack Obama’s “bitter clingers” and Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”

The White House made a clumsy attempt to detoxify it. In the transcript released by the White House press office, an apostrophe was inserted between the “r” and the “s” at the end of “supporters.” That made it read as though the garbage referred to belonged to some supporter of Trump, presumably the offending comedian. The apostrophe had not been present in the original transcript submitted by White House stenographers.

This developed into a big story, inevitably tagged as “Garbagegate.” Who authorized the insertion of the apostrophe? Was that what the President meant, or not? Which version goes to the National Archives, the one with the apostrophe or the one without?

I’ve watched the clip several times, and played the sound over at various speeds, listening carefully to the President’s intonation. He was calling us, Trump’s supporters, garbage. There’s no reasonable doubt about it. And why wouldn’t he? That’s how the snobs feel about us slobs.

Item:  Yesterday, Thursday, was Halloween. My grandson, two years and nine months old, was taken out by his Mom for his first trick-or-treating. Reports are, he enjoyed himself.

Little Mikey may be one of a dwindling few, though. We’ve been living here in the outer-outer suburbs of New York for 32 years now. Every year at Halloween we fill a bowl with candy to hand out to trick-or-treaters who come calling.

Lately the number of callers has fallen off steeply. Last year we got just one, although it was three or four kids in charge of an adult. This year … none. The bowl of Halloween candy sits there unmolested.

I’m seeing reports of the same on social media. Here’s one from Jacob Shell, Geography Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, tweet:

This was my first Halloween in the suburbs and I bought like 40 dollars of candy thinking it was going to be like what I remember from late 80s childhood with dozens of groups of kids out, and instead like 3 small groups showed up, mostly helicopter parents running the operation.

End tweet.

Are we de-socializing? Is childhood no longer a matter of having fun with other kids, but instead just a solitude of sitting at home diddling with a smartphone? Not for my grandson, it won’t be, not while I can do anything about it.

06 — Signoff.     That’s all, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, and for your continuing support.

The trick-or-treat tradition may be sliding into oblivion, but Halloween house and garden decorations are still going strong. My suburban street is well furnished with ghouls, skeletons, monsters, evil-grinning jack-o’-lanterns, and similar reminders of what, for the rest of the year, we’d rather not be reminded of. This week’s signoff music is in that Halloween tradition.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

Every four years the media tells us that this is the most important election in our lifetimes, maybe in the history of the world. It is always nonsense, of course, but even if it does turn out to be important, few people realize it. Hardly anyone realized that the 1992 election, for example, would be an inflection point. The Cold War was over, and it felt like politics was not all the important.

This time may be different. Trump is a unique figure and has come to define the first quarter of the 21st century. To understand him and his time on the stage, you must start with the election of the execrable George Bush and then follow the chain of events that flowed from that moment. Trump was the delayed response to the hollowing out of conservatism and the Republican Party by the neoconservatives.

What the Trump era has come to be about is who is going to run the country, Americans or a collection of alien weirdos? For their part, the alien weirdos have made it clear since Trump came down that escalator that they would rather blow up the world than allow normal Americans to rule themselves again. The election next Tuesday is the last battle in the fight between Trump and the alien weirdos.

By all accounts now, Trump is favored to win. If the riggers steal another election, then any hope you have for a soft landing is gone. The country plunges into the darkness and whatever comes out decades from now will bear little resemblance to what everyone understands to be America. This may happen even if Trump wins, but there is at least the hope that not all the lights go out.

That is the show this week. This is, at the minimum, a very important election, but also the last election for a uniquely American figure. No other country could produce a politician like Donald Trump. Even by American standards, he is a singular figure, a force of nature who has changed everything during his time in the arena. Enjoy the last few days of his last election. You will never see this again.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Enjoy The Ride
• The Case For Trump
• The Case For Harris
• Fraud Factor
• The Big Mo
• State Predictions
• How To Watch

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Much has been written in these parts about the crisis of competence that is creepy up on all aspects of life like the fog. Every day, competent people are aging out and being replaced by people who lack the competence. A complimentary problem, one also driven by demographics, is the Dunning-Kruger crisis. This the problem of incompetent, but highly confidence people, getting elevated into positions for which they are unqualified, simply due to the new ethics of the elites.

The difference here is that the crisis of competence is somewhat correctable, as the unqualified millennial replacing the retiring boomer, has some hope of learning what he needs to learn to do the job. He and his organization will have to suffer through the learning curve, but there is hope he will become competent. Alternatively, the race to supplement or even replace the incompetent millennial with technology offers the alternative of a robot competently doing the job.

The Dunning-Kruger, in contrast, offers no such hope. The person elevated into the position to satisfy the needs of the new morality has no chance to ever become competent at the task. Replacing them with technology is impossible, because it would undermine the whole point of the process. Instead, the system is simply expected to adapt to these new islands of confident incompetence. Every organization is being loaded up with crosses to bear as a form of contrition.

You see how this works with the Kamala Harris campaign. Regardless of the result, it will be remembered as one of the most inept operations in modern history, perhaps rivaling the 2004 Howard Dean campaign in Iowa or even the 1988 Mike Dukakis presidential campaign. After the initial media gaslighting, it has been one unforced error after another, all stemming from the fact the people running the campaign are sure they know everything, but in fact know nothing.

One small example is the Joe Rogan flap. Rogan is the biggest carnival act in so-called new media, so doing his show would be like doing Johnny Carson back in the 1970’s or the Rush Limbaugh show in the 1990’s. It offers a unique setting in front of a huge audience, which itself will attract an even bigger audience. It is the sort of platform a candidate needing attention craves. You take the gig, hope for the best and prepare for the explosion of post-show media coverage.

The Harris campaign never understood this. Instead, they tried to strong arm Rogan into rolling over for them, even leaving his comfy studio to meet them at a hotel somewhere to record a one-hour interview. They should have known he had no reason to take that deal, but stupid people lack second order thinking. Their unearned confidence in themselves compounded the error by carrying on as if they were doing him a favor by entertaining the request.

Rogan, who never liked Trump, did the shrewd thing and invited Trump on his show and Trump happily accepted the millions in free media. The resulting program broke the internet and further humanized Trump. The theme of his campaign this time is that he has dropped the sharp edges, having learned from the past. Hamming it up with Rogan, who was a smitten kitten the whole time, underscored this theme. Team Dunning-Kruger handed Trump a huge win as a result.

This one incident among many is a microcosm of the growing Dunning-Kruger crisis we see unfolding everywhere. It is not just that these people lack the required talents or experience for the task. It is that they lack the innate ability for the roles and the self-awareness to recognize it. Stupid people who realize they are outmatched can be managed, but stupid people who think they are geniuses are a danger to everyone and everything they touch. Invisible stupidity is lethal.

Look at who is running the Harris campaign, and the problem is obvious. The campaign boss is named Julie Chávez Rodriguez. She has three names because her only reason to exist in politics is she is the granddaughter of Cesario Chavez. Her qualifications for politics are that she is female, brownish and related to a famous brown guy. She has parlayed that into a career doing busy work, so that the nice white ladies could put her face on the organization brochure.

Julie Chávez Rodriguez no doubt looks in the mirror each morning and sees a world bestriding figure, when in reality she is a hapless simpleton. She is in this role because of her long relationship with Kamala Harris, another strong diverse female who is brimming with confidence despite having done nothing on her own worth noting, other than being a concubine of Willie Brown. The Harris campaign operates like the marketing pitch for the Christopher Rufo project.

There have been terrible national campaigns in the past, but the cause was always a candidate with little to sell running against a favored incumbent. Mike Dukakis never had a chance in 1988, so his people had few good choices. Bob Dole in 1996 was simply running to pad his obituary. He had no chance against Clinton, and he certainly knew it, but played the role anyway. Harris has the full support of official Washington and the political regime but is still losing.

Given the reality of our politics, this sort of ineptitude may seem trivial, but the Dunning-Kruger crisis is rolling out everywhere. It is why certain members of the economic elite are panicking about DEI at elite universities. They suddenly realized that their good deed installing someone like Claudine Gay as president of Harvard could come at a price to them beyond embarrassment. Handing power to entitled stupid people brimming with unearned confidence is playing with fire.

It is comforting to think that maybe the outbreak of incompetence among the elites due to the cult of diversity will cause them to pull back, but that is not the way to bet because of the religious fanaticism around the cult of diversity. If Harris loses next week, expect to hear endless cries of racism. If she wins, the resulting catastrophe will be blamed on the bogeyman. The Dunning-Kruger crisis ends only when the forces and people behind it come to an end.

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!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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One of the problems the world faces is that the dominant power on the planet has entered a period of incoherence. Joe Biden has come to symbolize the country he allegedly leads in that he is old, frail and not always understandable. This is how much of the world now sees the United States. What they see from Washington are people either trapped in a bygone era or divorced from present reality. It is as if the last several decades never happened.

You see this in this Financial Times post about what foreign policy could be like under a second Trump presidency. Keep in mind that the Financial Times is often used by the intelligence community to plant stories it wants to launder. The audience is not just the English-speaking world, but also Europe. The people quoted are all said to be associates of the Trump team. Their views may or may not reflect the thinking of Trump’s inner circle.

That aside, the first thing to note is that there is no acknowledgement of present reality in the story. For example, Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war. He says, “Trump could threaten to crash Russia’s economy by lowering the price of oil and gas.” According to Waltz, this will force the Russians to beg for peace negotiations. This policy makes sense if it is 1985 and Russia is still the Soviet Union with a brittle command economy.

For starters, the president cannot willy-nilly change oil prices. No amount of American production can drive down prices to a level where it would have an impact on the Russian economy. The “break even” point of Russian crude is well below that of the cheapest American production. Then you have the fact that it will take a decade to bring American crude production to the levels needed to crash prices. There is also the fact that Biden emptied the strategic oil reserve.

In other words, the big idea from the foreign policy experts is something they read about from the Reagan years that has no chance of working now. It is as if they are unaware of the sanctions war they launched two years ago that not only failed to crater the Russian economy but boomeranged back on them. The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas. Meanwhile, the Russian economy is booming.

Of course, there is the fact that these people can only think in terms of threats when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Congressman Michael Waltz is a neocon sock puppet who was an early cheerleader for Project Ukraine. He was also wrong about every aspect of it. In any other profession, being as wrong as Mike Waltz would be disqualifying, but here he is being quoted as an authority on Russia. This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote Fred Fleitz, a former John Bolton staffer and current foreign policy adviser at the America First Policy Institute, which promotes itself as helping shape Trump policy. With regards to Iran, Fleitz argues “The objective should be to bankrupt Iran again and to reinstitute maximum pressure.” Again? Has he not noticed that Iran survived sanctions for three decades? Is he not aware that Iran now has the support of China and Russia?

With regards to settling the war in the Ukraine, Fleitz says, “We freeze the conflict, Ukraine does not cede any territory, they don’t give up their territorial claims, and we have negotiations with the understanding there probably won’t be a final agreement until Putin leaves the stage.” Unlike Waltz, Fleitz has no clue as to why the Russians would entertain such a silly offer. Note that this idea was first floated by the neocons when the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed.

The jaw droppingly ignorant part of that post is the use of the term “Minsk-3” to describe the Trump strategy. The Russians correctly view the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. The reason they think this is Angela Merkel said this in an interview last year. Naming the Trump strategy after two prior efforts to trick the Russians is just a way to make sure there can be no negotiations between the Trump people and the Russians.

This is probably why this story was planted in the Financial Times. The hope is to poison the well, so to speak, for the next administration with regards to negotiating with the Russians. They may not be able to control what Trump does, but they can give the Russians many reasons to not trust any overtures. After all, Trump will be gone in four years, so if they can freeze the Russia situation, they have a chance to get back in power and resume their efforts to start a war with Russia.

What becomes clear in that Financial Times story is that the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face. The main reason for their incoherence is they seem to be unaware that these problems were caused by them. Compounding it is the toxic ideology of neoconservatism that has poisoned the foreign policy community. It is a cancer in the bowels of America’s most important institution.

It is what makes prospects for a sober minded and realistic approach to foreign policy under Trump unlikely. Trump’s instincts are good, as are those with many of the people around him, including JD Vance, but he will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is both stuck in the past and corrupted by a worldview that is inconsistent with the world as it is today and with the needs of the country. Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.

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!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Note: If you are interested in an hour of precise predictions about the upcoming election, then you are in luck. I was on the Coffee and a Mike show and you can listen to the recording of it here.

The American civil war created an intellectual problem for both sides that was far more important than the issue of slavery. The 19th century was the age of nationalism and national liberation in Europe. These ideas made their way to America and fit in neatly with the American sense of self. After all, the United States was the result of a revolt against an empire in the name of national liberation. The war between the North and South, therefore, was also a war over nationalism.

By default, the South had the better claim. It was the South, after all, seeking to secede from the Union to create a new nation that would better serve the interests of the people of the South. The North was trying to prevent this from happening and willing to conquer the people of the South to do it. From a nationalist perspective, the South was the sympathetic side, even though they were also fighting for the right to maintain the institution of slavery.

A solution to this problem that evolved in the North was the argument that true nationalism was comprehensive. That is the nationalist loved all of his country and all of his people, so a nationalist government must serve and protect everyone. Since the South was not a different people and the Union was not abandoning them in the way the crown had abandoned the colonies in the runup to the Revolution, it was the South that was in violation of the nationalist ideal

Further, the evolving sense of Northern nationalism claimed that the national purpose of America from the start was to spread liberty around the world. America was the city on the hill, so to speak, that stood as an example of freedom craving nationalists around the world, so what the South was doing was a threat to that project and therefore a threat to the national purpose. American nationalism, unlike that of Europe, was a revolutionary nationalism to free all of mankind.

In fairness, these debates about the nature of American nationalism were not at the center of the dispute, but they played a role in shaping how the new intellectual class would define American identity after the war. Those arguing in favor of the war being a new founding are not entirely wrong. The country that emerged after the war was completely different from what existed prior to the war. It was not just free of slaves, but full of a sense of national purpose.

In his book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman describes the three forms of national identity that have prevailed in America. Goldman comes up with three national identities he calls the Covenant, the Crucible, and the Creed. The Covenant is the sense of national purpose. The Crucible is the old melting pot story popular in the 20th century after the war. The Creed is the idea of America being a set of ideas, rather than a physical place or people.

It is a good book that offers a useful way of framing the main ways in which Americans have tried to create a unitary identity. Goldman does observe that it is the covenantal aspect of American identity that has been the most powerful, but he does not get into how this Puritan sensibility evolved in the 19th century during the Civil War to become a civic religion for the ruling elite. He does not mention how the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam blended into this as Jews took up posts in the elite.

This understanding of American identity, or the best effort at forging one, is essential to understanding the current crisis. For over a century, since Woodrow Wilson, America has been on a mission to heal the world. The ruling class has asked, often demanded, that the people put aside their regional and local concerns for the good of one great cause after another. It has become so ingrained in ruling class thinking that they seem incapable to thinking about the state of the country.

Strip away the panic, the hysteria and the outlandish claims and the coming election is about whether we care more about the fate of Mongolian transgender lesbians or the fentanyl epidemic in Appalachia. Do we care more about the abstract concept of climate change or addressing the slow collapse of our infrastructure? What counts for more as an American? The health of your neighbors or the plight of migrants? Will we sacrifice everything in a vain attempt to save the world?

All these questions stem from a growing doubt in this sense of American identity that has been with us since Gettysburg. Americans are increasingly wondering not only if the cost of saving the world is worth the effort, but if it makes any sense at all for us to stand astride the world, balances in our hand. Maybe the people who demand we do this do not have the right to judge the world. Maybe these people lack the moral standing to stand in judgement over us as well.

Fundamentally, the current crisis is about the covenant. If our national purpose is to be the city on the hill, then we must ensure that the city is not full of vagrants and racked with crime and corruption. If our national purpose is to heal the world, then we must first heal ourselves. On the other hand, maybe our national purpose was to avoid falling for these claims and instead focusing on creating a society in the wilderness, away from the entanglements of the old world.

No matter how one seeks to frame it, the struggle today is over our national purpose, a struggle between those who stubbornly cling to the last century and those looking ahead to the next century. The question is whether America will collapse in a heap, exhausted from trying to save the world or will we pull up, realize our folly and return to a sense of purpose rooted in simply being an example to the world? Will we attempt to heal ourselves with the same zeal with tried to heal the world?

It could also be that all these efforts at national identity have failed and what comes next is the great disaggregation. Perhaps it was always impossible to forge an American identity that could permanently hold the people together. Maybe in the end, we learn that the true American identity is no identity at all. We are simply a diverse collection of people who agree to cooperate, when necessary, but otherwise we prefer to leave the world alone and be left alone.

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!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the latest drama in the latest version of the new right, a post about how the Battle of Agincourt helps explain why politician die in office and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

We are eight days from the most important election ever, which is what they say about every presidential election. This one could actually turnout to be pivotal as part of the collection of presidential elections that define the Trump era. The results next week, or the following week if we get more shenanigans, will determine which way the political process goes the next decade. Like him or hate him, Trump is the most consequential political figure of this century so far.

The next week could be wild, if the past week is an indication. Trump is scheduled to do a rally in New Mexico and in Virginia, two states no one thought would be in play a month ago, but now may be up for grabs. Harris is coming off one of the worst weeks in politics, but her campaign keeps finding new ways to stumble, so this week could bring fresh idiocy to the race. Over the weekend she was booed at an event in Philadelphia, a thing that is becoming a thing for her.

The handicappers, even those who want Harris to win, are slowly lining up behind the idea of a Trump victory. Everything seems to be breaking his way right now, while everything is going wrong for Harris. Poll after poll in key states move in Trump’s direction and now, we have three new states in the toss-up column. New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia are now in the gray zone. Whether Trump wins any of them is still in doubt, but it is the movement that matters.

Of course, all of this is against the backdrop of 2020, where a tidal wave of fraud made it the least trusted result since 1960. Even if you reject the fraud claims, it was an election that featured many never-before-seen anomalies. For example, Arizona, another swing state, saw a 38% increase in voter turnout. In 2016, Trump won 1,252,401 votes and in 2020 he got 1,661,686 but still lost. Overall, the 2020 election saw the biggest spike in turnout ever and no one asks why.

We are already seeing signs of shenanigans aimed at adding enough new ballots to the Harris pile to overcome the Trump increase. Authorities in Lancaster County Pennsylvania unearthed a vote fraud scheme. Ballot harvesting is a form of fraud in which runners are given pre-filled out ballots and walking around money to then get signatures by registered voters in ghetto areas. It starts with first getting a voter registered, whether the voter exists or not.

What we saw in 2020 is not just about that election and the claims surrounding it, but about understanding subsequent elections. Polling, for example, depends on models of the electorate, which are created using past election data. If the 2020 data is riddled with unexplained and potentially unexplainable anomalies, how can a polling company build a reliable model of the electorate? The answer is you cannot, and they have no way to poll the fraud shops producing fake ballots either.

That means there are two angles to the polling. The one angle is figuring the margin of fraud in each of these states, then adjusting the polls accordingly. In Pennsylvania, Trump needs a two- or three-point margin to cover the fraud. In Wisconsin, the margin of fraud is about one point. The other angle is the polls themselves may have to be adjusted to account for the fraud they are including in their models. Trump consistently outperforms the polling. How much will he outperform this time?

This is the high cost of official corruption. When it is people trying to undermine the rules and the authorities working to stop them, the general public can trust the results, even accepting some problems. When it is the authorities subverting the rules for their own gain, then no one can trust anything. This is because you have no basis of comparison, as the base condition is assumed to be corrupt. We may never trust our elections again due to the 2020 shenanigans.

All of that aside, you would want to be Donald Trump right now, as far as the election, rather than Kamala Harris. An honest look at the polls, adjusting for shenanigans, puts Trump at 262 electoral college votes and Harris at 209. The states that are too close to call as of this writing are WI, MI, PA, VA and NV. If New Hampshire and New Mexico are in play, then it is worse for Harris. That means Trump needs one win to regain the presidency, and Harris needs to run the table.

Then there is the energy. The Trump campaign is resembling the 2016 election with Trump barnstorming the country drawing massive crowds. He was just in New York City doing an event at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Harris is forced to announce fake concerts to trick people into showing up at her events. She got booed vigorously at that Houston event as a result. The energy around the Harris campaign is all negative energy, which is never a good thing.

There is a strong Howard Dean vibe to the Harris campaign. She has never won a competitive race. She was handed the senate seat by the Democratic Party machine in California because she was highly controllable. Of course, she famously flamed out in the 2020 presidential primary. She was handed the nomination this time when they pushed Biden over the edge. Her entire existence as a political figure rests on a mass media operation to conceal the reality of her support.

Of course, there is the other shenanigans. States like Michigan and Pennsylvania rely on the party machine to “get out the vote” for the Democrat. Both states have Democrat governors with eyes on the 2028 nomination. If Harris wins the election, then the political career of Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro come to an end. They will be too old and too forgotten in 2032. There are also forces in Washington who would like to be rid of Harris and her people too.

That is why Trump is the bettering favorite right now. The betting markets have Trump with a 62% chance of winning. All the things people look at to determine the shape of the race favor Trump, other than the shenanigans. This may be why the billionaire owners of the LA Times and Washington Post told their editorial staff to cancel the Harris endorsements. Maybe the oligarchs are sending a message to the political class that they want to see Trump win.

The English-speaking world is sure the Chinese have a curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” The Chinese have no such curse, but we assume they should, so we insist on it anyway. Regardless, we live in an interesting time and the next two weeks, assuming more election shenanigans, promises to be very interesting. In the fullness of time, we may look back and say this was the most consequential election in history or the last election in our history.

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!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• How Low Will They Go?
• A Consequential Endorsement
• Republics And Empires
• Certifiable Lunacy
• Miscellany
• Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.    And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, one and all, from your inclusively genial host John Derbyshire, here to bring you reflections on the week’s news.

Ten days to the general election and the anti-Trump rhetoric is heating up. Did you know that Trump is a Hitler Hitler Hitler, Nazi Nazi Nazi, fascist fascist fascist? In case you didn’t, all sorts of Ruling Class front men have been stepping up to tell you: John Kelly, for example, Trump 45’s Chief of Staff, and Bob Woodward, one of the hack journalists who helped bring down the great Richard Nixon fifty years ago.

How will it all end up? I don’t know any better than you do, but I’ll speculate.

Before I get to speculating, though, just my weekly reminder that my website johnderbyshire.com is there for your reading and listening pleasure with links to my entire print and online output all the way back to 1966.

On the cover page of that website are instructions on how you can help keep me afloat using snail mail, PayPal, or crypto, or via Zelle direct to my bank, or with a tax-deductible donation by a check earmarked with my name and mailed to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you for your help.

02 — How low will they go?     The main takeaway from this week’s developments on the election front is, that our nation’s ruling class is worried. It’s dawning on them that they screwed up in giving us Kamala Harris as a candidate. It’s this anxiety that is driving their media stooges to all the Hitler Hitler stuff.

If they thought a bit more about it, which they probably won’t, they’d realise why they screwed up. They screwed up because foisting a weak candidate on the electorate worked so well back in 2020. They surely knew that Joe Biden was a weak candidate, a joke figure to anyone who’d followed politics the previous forty years. They figured they’d get away with it, and did get away with it, by keeping Biden out of sight under cover of the COVID panic and just screeching TRUMP BAD! TRUMP BAD! TRUMP BAD! through the media. And it worked!

If Biden 2020 was a weak candidate, Harris is even weaker; and there’s no excuse this time to just hide her in a basement. I think I’m a fairly open-minded guy; but summoning up all my resources of open-mindedness, I can’t believe anyone finds Kamala Harris inspirational.

I doubt she’s a bad person in any way, but inspiring? Nah. She’s someone with whom you might have a brief chat about the weather while waiting in a supermarket line, but by the time you’d got back to your car you’d have forgotten her, except perhaps for that off-putting cackle. On a long and close acquaintance, she might exhibit some virtues and perhaps stir some affection, but as President in the White House? Nah.

That the ruling class is worried is itself worrying. What might they do? How far — how low — might they go? They of course will do all they can to rig the vote — that’s already under way. I’ll come back to it in a minute. Will that be enough, though, with no COVID pandemic this time to hide the vote-rigging in a cloud of mist?

Might they try to take Trump out, you know … physically? Either before November 5th, if the polls get even worse; or, if Trump wins on the 5th, before the January Inauguration?

Until a few days ago I’d have dismissed such talk as nutty conspiracy theorizing. There is of course a nonzero probability of Trump being assassinated — heck we’ve already seen two attempts. As best I can judge those were both lone-wolf jobs, though, not regime-sponsored.

To us math geeks, the adjective “nonzero” encompasses very tiny numbers — one in a trillion, perhaps. So yes, if you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago about a regime-sponsored assassination of Trump, I’d have replied, “Yes, a nonzero probability,” in that sense.

If you asked me today, I’d replace that “nonzero” by a different adjective: probably “nontrivial.” In math-geek-speak, “nontrivial” is still small, but big enough to be worth your attention. Not one in a trillion: perhaps one in two hundred, something like that.

My advice to Trump would be to hire himself some really first-class private security and not rely on government employees. Even such precautions might not be enough, though. They don’t have to shoot the candidate. Trump’s doing appearances all over, presumably flying private jet from one to the other. Bringing down a plane isn’t that hard, and needn’t be obvious. You don’t need a hypersonic missile, just a pair of willing hands in the maintenance hangar at the airport.

Dark thoughts. Stay safe, Mr President, please.

Setting aside such dark thoughts, let’s hope for a Trump victory. Not just for a victory, mind, but for a landslide. A close result comes with some unpleasant prospects of its own; not lethally unpleasant, like an assassination, but unpleasant enough for us to devoutly wish it doesn’t happen.

Veteran British political journalist Andrew Neil explained why in a good column at the Daily Mail on Thursday. A close result could, warns Neil, drag America into a full-blown crisis. Sample quotes, comparing this year’s election to 2020, quotes:

The difference this time is that, if Trump wins narrowly, then Team Harris will almost certainly resort to the same legal guerrilla warfare Trump used in 2020. Both Democrats and Republicans are already lawyered up to the hilt in anticipation of a post-election day standoff.

Both sides have hired hundreds of expensive lawyers, backed by thousands of volunteer lawyers, to contest any close results. Team Trump is already far better organized and funded than it was four years ago to mount legal challenges on a grand scale if the election doesn’t go his way …

If Trump enjoys only a narrow victory, it seems more than likely that the assembled Democratic army of lawyers would quickly be transformed into an offensive force to undermine a Trump victory. Former President Obama has already issued an appeal for even more lawyers to rally to the Democratic cause.

So, in the days after November 5, whether it’s Trump or Harris that is thought to have just scraped over the winning line, that will not be the end of the matter. As the lawyers have their many lucrative days in numerous courts, the final result could be weeks away from being determined.

End quotes.

Neil points out that if those weeks drag out all the way to, and past, the Inauguration date, we’d have a Constitutional crisis on our hands.

Bottom line: We don’t just need a victory here, we need a landslide.

03 — A consequential endorsement.     Radio Derb of course endorses Donald Trump for President. There have of course been much more consequential endorsements.

Here’s one I watched on X earlier this week. The endorser here is Elon Musk. I should note that while I greatly admire the man, he is not a good speaker. In the audio you’ll hear a great many ums, ers, ahs, and y’knows. I have edited them out for the text transcript.

[Clip:  Well, as I said, I really would prefer not to be in politics at all, and the, the reason that I have stepped into the political arena this time is because I think the stakes are extremely fundamental.

I think democracy is on the line, I think the Constitution is on the line, and I fear that if Trump does not win we’re gonna have a single-party state and it’s going to be like California, but actually worse than California because, the one thing that keeps California from going even further than they do go is that people can move out of California and still be in America. But if you got no place to move then it’s going to be much worse than California.

And that’s the danger that we face: sort of an oppressive totalitarian state that has extreme restrictions on freedom of speech, that continues extreme over-regulation, but just basically makes government even bigger than it is today and takes away the liberty of the people.

So it was not something I wanted to do, but I felt it was critical to do it, or America’s not going to be America.]

Thank you, Sir. I agree with every word — I mean, other than the ers, ums, and ahs. If things go seriously awry, as I pondered last week, I look forward to seeing you on the triumvirate.

Although, concerning that, an old friend has emailed in to suggest I replace Vivek Ramaswamy with Ron DeSantis as a better choice for the position of competent government technocrat.

I see his point. The Governor of a state has experience as a political Chief Executive, which Ramaswamy hasn’t. Still, I’m reluctant to let go of Vivek and his manifold talents. Could we perhaps, when the coup takes place, come out of it with a quadrumvirate?

04 — Republics and empires.     As a footnote to my closing sentences there, and to Andrew Neil’s gloomy prognostications of a Constitutional crisis, I’ll just add that parallels to the collapse of the Roman Republic have been going on for a while this election cycle.

Eli Lake had one at the Free Press back in September, comparing Trump with the second-century-b.c. Gracchi brothers, a bit implausibly in my opinion. Sample quote:

You probably know about last year’s trend of American men confessing on TikTok how often they think about the Roman Empire. I’m a bit different. I’m obsessed with what preceded the empire, Rome’s republic. Empires are a dime a dozen in human history. They rise and fall, from Babylon to the Soviet Union. But republics — a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the people — these are orchids: rare, precious, and fleeting.

End quote.

I’m with Eli Lake on that, at least. The Roman Republic fell apart at last from internal contradictions, but it had a pretty good innings — nearly five hundred years. If we just do as well as that with our republic, we won’t crumble until the middle of the 23rd century. Hey!

I wouldn’t be so sniffy about empires, though. They can of course be despotic and cruel, but they are not necessarily so. I’m a fan of the Habsburg Empire, for example — in its later days called Austria-Hungary.

Nor am I the only one. Here’s historian Krishan Kumar in his 2017 book Visions of Empire, Chapter 4, quote:

Of all the empires discussed in this book, the Habsburg Empire is the most tortuous, treacherous, and protean. There are even, as we shall see, difficulties and disputes about what exactly to call it, how to name it. But at the same time it is also — if such a thing is permitted of empires — the most lovable. All empires inspire a certain degree of nostalgia after their demise. In the case of the Habsburgs, this can border on the clinical.

End quote.

Let’s not forget also, in this context, that as messy and violent as the fall of the Roman Republic was, it birthed an empire that lasted five hundred years — fifteen hundred if you count its successor, the Eastern Empire, and well over eighteen hundred if you then also count the Holy Roman Empire, which you probably shouldn’t. All three of those empires made major contributions to Western Civilization.

I of course don’t want to see this election bring down our republic. In the sorry event that happens, though, good may yet come of it at last.

05 — Certifiable lunacy.     Browsing social media the other day, here was a post on X that returned an echo from my bosom. The poster is Michael Arouet, October 20th.

Most of the post is taken up by a headline from some unidentified news source above a picture of some generic ivy-walled old university. Headline: “Saying ‘the most qualified person should get the job’ is a microaggression, Britain’s top universities insist.” End headline. Above that is Michael Arouet’s comment, thus, quote:

Do you share my opinion that the Western world has collectively lost its mind and is on a straight line into misery and poverty?

End quote.

Judging by the three hundred-odd comments on that post, a great many of us do share Arouet’s opinion.

I share it myself. In crude polemic of course, words like “crazy,” “insane,” “lunacy,” and so on are thrown about very carelessly; but I think any person not infected by current mind viruses has sometimes found himself thinking that key institutions of Western Civilization, like the universities, have departed altogether from reason and sense.

I had found myself thinking that just before Arouet’s post. Last weekend the Mrs and I took a trip out of state to be at a friend’s birthday party. Also at the party was Jared Taylor, proprietor of American Renaissance, which describes itself as, quote, “the Internet’s premier race-realist site.” End quote. I’ve known Jared for more than twenty years, and it was pleasant to chat with him in person.

We asked after each other’s children. Jared has two daughters. The younger lives in England. He would like to go visit her, but he can’t. The U.K. authorities consider Jared to be such a threat to their nation’s peace and security, they will not give him a visa.

Jared, I will attest from my twenty years’ acquaintance, is a model American gentleman: generous, thoughtful, patriotic, exquisitely well-mannered, scrupulously law-abiding, well-educated, fluent in at least three languages. He wishes no harm to anyone; and, to the best of my knowledge, has never done any harm to anyone.

Jared’s opinions on race are those expressed by Abraham Lincoln when that President addressed a delegation of free blacks at the White House in August 1862. Lincoln was hoping to persuade the free blacks of the benefits of resettling themselves in Liberia or the Caribbean. Quote from Honest Abe.

You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.

End quote.

Yet Jared — this intelligent, calm American gentleman, is forbidden to enter the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile — day after day, month after month, year after year for seven years now, lawless invaders have been pouring in to the U.K. across the English Channel from France — nearly thirty thousand this year already. They are placed in pleasant hotels, given free meals, healthcare, smartphones, and plenty of opportunities to work untaxed.

All of these invaders are laughing at British law; a good proportion are gangsters and psychopaths. Stories about British citizens being assaulted, robbed, scammed, raped, or murdered by these so-called “asylum seekers” appear daily in the British press.

Yet a quiet, law-abiding American will not be granted a visa to visit his daughter.

Do I share Michael Arouet’s opinion that the Western world has collectively lost its mind and is on a straight line into misery and poverty? Yes, I do. How could I not?

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

Imprimis:  Some suspicious spirits are still surmising that Joe Biden is intent on hobbling Kamala Harris’ chances. It’s a bit late in the day for suggestions, but here’s one from me.

If our President really would like to undermine his Vice President, he could stage a replay of Dwight Eisenhower’s little gaffe in the 1960 campaign. At that point Richard Nixon, running for President, was in his eighth year as Ike’s Vice President. From John Farrell’s biography of Nixon, Chapter 15, quote:

But just before Labor Day, Nixon fell victim, once again, to Eisenhower’s thoughtlessness. When asked at a press conference to name an important contribution that Nixon had made to a presidential decision, Ike replied: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

End quote.

Item:  I’m going to quote from myself at some length, if you’ll permit me, kind listener. These quotes are from a piece I published in Chronicles magazine following the 2020 election. Quotes:

My strongest impression from the U.S.A.’s 2020 general election is that the process by which we record and count votes is an unholy mess, wide open to fraud. Counting was suspended for hours without explanation; great tranches of mail-in votes appeared out of nowhere; vote monitors were denied access; counting continued for days. We are a First World nation with a Third World voting system.

In fact that may even be a slight on the Third World. India, which has four times our population but only one-eighth our per capita GDP, with vast regional differences in language and religion, held a general election last year. The final tally of the 614 million votes cast began at 8 a.m. on May 23rd; results followed just hours later …

Australia, although a constitutional monarchy, has a federal structure not unlike our own. Elections there are supervised by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), a federal body. All registered candidates can nominate “scrutineers” to be present throughout the polling and counting at every voting place. Voting is compulsory, with fines for defaulters. Absentee voting is strictly limited; and the limits have not been much affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We don’t have to adopt all of Australia’s rules, but Australia does show us that a federal nation is quite capable of operating a system cleaner, more efficient, and far less prone to manipulation than our own. Congress should exercise its constitutional powers to federalize our elections.

End quotes.

Meanwhile, in the united chaos of electoral America, the federal Justice Department is suing the state of Virginia for denying noncitizens the vote.

And at the same time a judge in the state of Georgia has struck down a rule that requires that ballots be counted by hand, and two other rules that had to do with the certification of election results.

Not to worry, though. The election’s only eleven days away now. I’m sure the ballots of all who voted, citizens and noncitizens both, will all have been certified, counted, and collated just a few weeks after that — or perhaps a few months — and we shall be notified of the results.

Let India and Australia do as they please with their absurdly simple, unsophisticated voting systems. This is the U.S.A.: we do things properly here.

Item:  In my September 27th podcast I reported on an unfortunate slip of the tongue by Rich Lowry, my old boss at National Review, speaking on The Megyn Kelly Show. I hope Rich has fully recovered from that tiny embarrassment.

In case he hasn’t, here to cheer him up is a similar story from across the Pond, just to illustrate how easy it is to flub your syllables.

This was a routine news’n’chat show called Good Morning Britain. There are three people in the story. Two of them, Richard Madeley and Susanna Reid, are on-screen behind a desk, hosting the show. The third, not on-screen, is roving reporter Andi Peters. The topic the three of them were reporting on was the return to British TV of Barney the Dinosaur after 14 years absence.

Here’s the slip of the tongue, Richard Madeley speaking about his colleague Andi Peters. Listen carefully and catch it as it flies past; it’s at just four seconds into the clip.

[Clip:  (Female host laughing) … Back to the future. Speaking of dinosaurs, er, Andi Penis … Andi Peters, he’s been around almost as long as the dinosaurs have been gone.]

In the Radio Derb transcript I’ve given a link to the actual video. It’s worth going there just to watch Susanna Reid trying to control her face.

Item:  All enlightened people know of course that there are more than two sexes … I’m sorry: genders. There are more than two genders. Those who think otherwise are of course hateful people full of hate and are probably plotting acts of violence against persons who do not conform to their narrow, bigoted outlook.

We don’t often get to see the full list of genders, though. Michael Anton says he found a source listing sixty-three, but I can’t find it. I did recently, though come across a news story from Scotland listing twenty-four.

Scotland, although a component of the U.K., has its own partly autonomous government. As guidance to employees of that government when gathering information about sex and gender, quote, “for operational, statistical and research purposes,” end quote, the Scottish Government has issued a list of all 24 sexes … sorry! genders.

Here is that list, courtesy of the Daily Mail, October 21st.

• Cisgender
• Trans man
• Trans woman
• Non-binary
• Trans — not otherwise specified
• Agender
• Trans Masculine
• Trans feminine
• Genderfluid
• Genderqueer
• Questioning
• Intersex
• Assigned female at birth — not specified
• Assigned male at birth — not specified
• Pangender
• Bigender
• Autigender
• Androgynous
• Gender non-conforming
• Detransitioned
• Neutral
• Demigender — female
• Demigender — male
• Demigender — not otherwise specified

There you are, listener. As a conscientous good citizen you should commit that list to memory. And take care not to get the categories confused. “Genderfluid” refers to “a person who does not identify as having a single unchanging gender.”  “Genderqueer,” on the other hand, means “a gender identity that is other than male or female, or a combination.”

Keep it all clear in your mind so that, should you find yourself in the employment of the Scottish government, you will not suffer embarrassment or confusion when a Campbell or a Cameron, a Macpherson or MacLeod tells you his gender.

Wait a minute … his gender? His? Her? Xis? Their? Zeir? … Ah, the hell with it.

Item:  Two of the most outrageous, appalling miscarriages of American justice in recent years were the trials and convictions three years ago of the Brunswick Three: father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael and their neighbor, Roddie Bryan.

That’s “trials” in the plural, as the Brunswick Three were subjected to both state and federal prosecutions in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, in jeering indifference to the principle of Double Jeopardy. Arbery was black and the Brunswick Three are white; otherwise there would certainly not have been two trials, and probably not even one.

There are some fine details in the sentencing, but basically the Brunswick Three got two life sentences each. It was, I repeat, a gross violation of justice against three decent, upstanding citizens.

Thursday this week attorneys for the Three appeared before the state trial judge again to argue for a new trial. They appealed the federal verdicts back in March.

I don’t know what the chances are for these appeals. The original trials were conducted in late 2021 and early 2022 when our country was still in the poisonous shadow of the George Floyd hysteria. The prospects for sane rulings might be better now. I wouldn’t bet on it, though: the Romance of American Blackness — evil, leering whites assaulting meek, innocent blacks — is too deep ingrained in the national psyche.

Greg McMichaels’ wife Leigh maintains a website, mcmichaeltrial.com, with information about the case and updates about the Three. It also has a link to a GiveSendGo page where you can donate to the legal costs for the appeals. I urge you to do so, and to pray for the eventual freedom of these three innocent men.

07 — Signoff.     That’s all I have this week, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, your encouragement and support.

I mentioned my math geekery back there, and my opinion that we math geeks are more careful with terms like “nonzero” and “nontrivial” than is the average citizen.

That got me thinking back to my early childhood, when I already found numbers more interesting than words. I developed particular fixations on the words “few” and “several.” I heard adults using them all the time, but without precision. Researching the matter and thinking deeply about it, I came to the conclusion that “few”  should really be a synonym for “seven,” while “several” should be a synonym for “sixteen.”

Those conclusions have somehow stuck with me across the decades. Still today, if I hear someone say “a few” when the assembly in question has more than seven or less than seven members, I felt uncomfortable about it …

And if you still don’t think my number fixation is a little weird — harmless, of course, but weird — let me just tell you that today, as I record this on October 25th 2024, today is my twenty-nine thousandth day on earth, counting the day of my birth as Day One. Happy 29,000 to me!

To play us out, a little Baroque music, one of Vivaldi’s violin concertos. Yes, Vivaldi did compose other stuff besides the Four Seasons. This is actually the closing allegro of Concerto No. 12 in E major, played here by the Concerto Italiano under Rinaldo Alessandrini.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

One of the reasons it feels like the wheels are coming off society is that we seem to be at the end of things. By things I mean cycles. These are cultural, intellectual, historical and economic cycles. Some have played out over generations while some are playing out in a single lifetime. The result of so many things ending at once is something like the confluence of several rivers.

Probably the biggest thing coming to an end is the idea of America that everyone was raised to believe. If you remember the Cold War, then you probably recall people talking about the difference between America and the world. It was not just the free world versus the communists. Europeans would talk about how America was the envy of the world for our freedom and love of individuality.

We put people in jail now for having the wrong opinions. Our institutions are so corrupt no sane person trusts anything that comes from them. The only difference between America today and the Soviet Union of the 1970’s is that we have vast material prosperity, but that is bought on credit. The American economic system is a ticking timebomb just waiting for someone to cut the wrong wire.

People struggle to accept that old America is dying, and this remains a primary obstacle to changing the trajectory of society. The answer to the ongoing madness from the people we call the left is some form of “We just have to go back to…” that can never happen, so we continue to swirl in the churn of decline. This is often the dynamic with the other things entering their end phase.

It is why we are cursed with backward thinking. Everyone is obsessed with rummaging around in the past, like a person searching around for a lost item, as if there is an answer in the past that will prevent the inevitable future. One reason no one talks about what comes next is fear of what comes next. It means closing the door on the past and those past ideas. The future is a terrifying idea for America.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Cycles & Super Cycles
• The Rope Of History
• The End Of Things

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Back in the ancient times, if you wished to buy product from someone you arrived at their location with money, or they arrived at your location with product. The product was inspected, and the money was inspected. Once both sides were satisfied, the exchange was made, and the deal was done. It did not take long for a class of middlemen to turn up who brokered such deals. They inspected the goods, arranged transportation and safeguarded the product and the money.

World trade has not changed much since the ancient times. Middlemen still facilitate most of the trade. They are called banks, insurance companies, freight brokers, shipping companies and so forth, but they are all part of this vast and essential middleman economy that makes it possible for the local Walmart to have shelves stuffed with goods from Asia. It is what makes it possible for the Chinese company selling dog food to get paid by Walmart.

One thing to note about this setup is the two greatest seafaring nations in the history of the planet, the United States and Britain, do very little shipping. Instead, they control the flow of goods around the world through control of the insurance markets and the financial system used in global trade. If you are involved in global trade, you are certainly using the American financial system and either directly or indirectly the British maritime insurance system.

The dollar being the world’s reserve currency has been to this point the main driver of the explosion in global trade. The buyer in South America can do business with a seller in China, because his bank is connected to the American financial system through his country’s central bank. He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.

This is about to change with the launch of an alternative payment system that was announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan Russia. The Russians and the Chinese have been working on creating an alternative to SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is the platform that networks the world’s banks to facilitate the flow of money around the world. The new system seeks to replace SWIFT for trade among the BRICS countries.

For most people this is an eye-glazing topic, but in the fullness of time it could be an event that generations of historians study as an inflection point. What the BRICS countries are seeking to do is wrest control of the global financial system from the West, specifically the English-speaking countries, at least for the members of BRICS and those countries willing to trade with BRICS. By extension, it is an effort to reduce the power of the dollar and thus the power of the American empire.

What this new system proposes to do is make it easier for participating countries to conduct business in the currency of other participating countries. Instead of China needing dollars to buy oil from the Saudis and therefore preferring dollars from other countries for Chinese goods, the Chinese will be able to buy oil in RMB and the Saudis will be able to buy Chinese goods in whatever currency they possess. The new system would handle the conversion and exchange rates instantly.

As an aside, that last part is interesting. In the United States, a business does not get paid by the credit card company for a few days. Often, the delay is longer. Of course, there are fees for taking credit card payments. In Russia and China, the movement of money is instant. The system is treated as a public utility, so fees are relatively small compared to what we see in the West. This is owing to much better and newer technology and a different attitude toward banking.

That aside, the significance of this proposal is enormous. The BRICS countries represent half the world’s population. The Arab oil countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, are onboard for this new system. The Saudis let expire the fifty-year-old deal with Washington that established the petrodollar. China, India and Russia are the driving force behind this new arrangement and represent three of the most important economic powerhouses in the world at the moment.

What this means for the West is far less influence over the rest of the world through the control of the financial system. The main reason China, Russia and India have pushed for this new system is they have grown weary of Washington abusing its position to bully the rest of the world. The sanctions war unleashed by Washington against Russia in 2022 was the final straw. If Washington would use the dollar to try regime change in Russia, it would do it to anyone, especially China.

What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington. Ten years ago, it was inconceivable that these important countries would come together to create a parallel financial system, as all of them were committed to the dollar and the Western system. They were committed to the “rules-based order” because they assumed it served their interests, but decades of abuse by Washington has convinced them otherwise.

What this means for the West is clear. What we see forming up is a trading and cooperation block that includes all the countries outside the West, representing the bulk of the world’s population and the majority of economic activity. Add in the fact that the West has let its manufacturing base shrivel and seems to be at war with its agricultural base and you can see the problem. Economies based in providing services tied to the financial system are facing a cliff now.

For the United States, this could not come at a worse time. Debt is already at staggering levels and is accelerating. The productive and innovative portion of the population is aging, while the unproductive portion is exploding. Add in decades of infrastructure neglect, the demographic and cultural catastrophes, and now is not a good time for a decline in the dollar. America is an empire that debased its currency via the perfidious subversion of its own rules.

Contrary to some claims, the dollar is not about to collapse, but what Kazan signals is the steady decline in the dollar. As the rest of the world begins to trade outside the dollar, it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market. This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation. This means the cost of borrowing dollars must go up and stay up in anticipation of declining dollar demand

The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, baring a revolution in Washington. Being the world’s mint and banker only works if the world accepts what you are minting. A rentier economy reliant on skimming from every transaction is only possible if you control the currency. The parasitism that has become a feature of our economy is going to become more obvious. That will bring political consequences as well.

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