As I was recording the show, news broke that one of the DOGE kids was doxed by an Antifa working for the Wall Street Journal. This is a bit ironic in that the crux of the USAID scandal is the nexus between the government, the vast network of not-for-profits, the media, and the activists. The money flowing around this system is what has made the last decade of domestic terrorism possible.

To emphasize the point, the activist in question was an employee at USAID before they literally paid for her to go to graduate school at Columbia. How exactly that worked is unclear, but that is what people on Twitter have unearthed. Such an arrangement would not be shocking, given the amount of money being pumped into the Radical Industrial Complex through the federal budget.

The fact that the Wall Street Journal is engaging in this behavior is another reminder that “conservatism” was part of the fraud. The kabuki theater of right versus left in our politics was always a fraud on the public, particularly the white middle-class, who were and remain the backbone of the country. The theater of democracy was intended to keep them bought in while they were dispossessed.

It also reveals that what we call the left is entirely artificial. Without the hundreds of billions from your pocket, it would barely exist. Like the progressive programs of the past, this system has cultivated generations of welfare queens to the point where they literally cannot exist without the system. Break the flow of cash into this system and it will collapse and take it bizarre faith with it.

While the week’s news has been both amusing and frustrating, it is important to remember that this is the final struggle for civilization. If the Musk team can break up the money flow, the crazies will be defeated, and society can be rebuilt. If they fail and the crazies win, then at best we get tanks in the streets. The Radical Industrial Complex is Skynet, and the only way forward is for it to be destroyed.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Origins Of The Blob
• The Not-For-Profit Revolution
• Managerialism Meets Charitable Activism
• How The Blob Works
• The Attack On The Blob
• What Comes Next

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One of the things that is becoming clear to everyone as the USAID scandal unfolds is that much of what has been presented to us over the last several decades, as far as politics, has been an illusion created by the blob. The media was part of the blob, underwritten by the government and cultivated with government access, so they presented a version of political reality that favored the blob. Even the debates over policy were staged by the blob.

That is what is clear in the release of the CBS tapes of the 60 Minutes interview of then candidate Kamala Harris. Calling it an interview is an assault on the language because it was nothing like an interview. It was one part screen test, one part coaching and one part editing to produce what was presented as an interview. Everyone involved knew it was fraud and said nothing. In other words, what we have been seeing is not media bias, but an orchestrated fraud on the public.

As an aside, the corruption was so deep and so normalized that it appears that most people in these media companies were unaware of much of it. The staff at Politico only became aware of who was actually paying their salaries when the USAID money was halted, and Politico could not make payroll. How many people at the BBC knew that USAID was the second largest source of funding to the BBC? Did anyone at the Financial Times know that management were on the pad?

Putting that aside, everyone in Washington certainly knew what USAID was doing, and they remained silent. There is not a single “reporter” in Washington unaware of the fact that the main source for Ukraine news has been an operation run by the Kagan family with funding from the government through various proxies. They all knew it and they played along because their paycheck demanded it. In effect, all of Washington was enlisted as participants in the manufactured drama of politics.

That is probably the biggest part of the scandal. Most political scandals involve a small number of people breaking the rules. Their undoing is the old Benjamin Franklin line about how three can keep a secret if two are dead. What we are seeing is that Ben was wrong about that as tens of thousands were keeping a secret until now. It speaks to the poisonous culture inside Washington that no one dared mention publicly what all of them knew was happening.

This raises another question. What else have they been faking? Think about something mundane like television ratings. They used to be a big topic, but the proliferation of subscription services and cable fees changed the revenue models. Even so, they are still used to gauge the popularity of shows. The more popular a show is, the more likely new people are to give it a go. In the modern sense, it means more people are going to sign up for a Netflix or Disney subscription.

An iron law of life is that if something has value then there will be people trying to steal it or to fake it, so faking ratings has always been a thing. This video from the Critical Drinker where he and his friends discuss the ratings of various bits of bugman content just screams organized fraud. When you are talking about “minutes viewed” rather than actual people watching, it is safe to say you are trying hard to prove the old maxim, “Figures do not lie, but liars figure.”

You can probably look around and find dozens of things that are used as measures or standards that we take for granted but are probably fake. Will the upcoming Super Bowl really break viewing records for the fiftieth straight year? Is the pop star cast to perform at the halftime show as popular as they claim? Is the game itself on the level or is it also a manufactured drama? Speaking of which, how come there are no gambling scandals in sports? Did everyone suddenly get honest?

You can get carried away with this, of course, and begin to question your own grasp of reality, but we are on the cusp of a great questioning. Once the enormity of the fraud begins to sink in, people will naturally start to wonder if what is being presented to them is not part of an ongoing fraud. We already see this with medicine because of the many frauds perpetrated during Covid. Now we are about to see the same process rumble through the rest of society.

In a way, the events of the last three weeks are like what happened in the transition from communism to chaos in the old Soviet Union. On the one hand, there was the mass realization that much of what had been told to the public was an organized lie, but on the other hand an understanding that it was a necessary step to exit the world of lies and enter the period of reform. The American empire is now getting its form of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (transparency).

This should not suggest that success is assured. The blob will fight back, and it has many tentacles, so the fight has just begun. The vast amounts of fraud in the economy support millions of mortgage payments and college tuition bills, so the people benefiting from the organized fraud will not go quietly. With every window that is opened, more sunlight rushes in to expose the corruption. If the blob is to be defeated, it will be through the sorts of transparency we have seen this week.

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

One of the side issues with regards to the USAID scandal is the fact that it was part of a system that has dominated the world since the Cold War. During the Cold War, this same system came to dominate the West, both as a whole, but also within the discrete parts of each member country. In fact, what happened at the end of the Cold War is this system sought to fill the void left by communism. The system was not liberalism, but rather a form of minoritarianism, minority rule.

Minoritarianism is a term coined by political scientists to describe a condition in which a minority has control of key decision-making processes. For example, the U.S. Senate requires a supermajority for certain things, which gives the minority party the power to veto these issues. This is the filibuster that the Democrats complain about whenever they need to placate their voters. In the case of the Senate, this system is to prevent the majority from abusing the minority.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been official American policy to control the politics of the rest of the world. The endless yapping about “our democracy” is always about imposing Western systems on the rest of the world. After all, we have reached the end of history and there are no more debates about the morally correct way to organize a society, so everyone needs to fall in line. Even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s people disagree, the minority demands it.

This is where programs like USAID and NED are used. Their job, in many cases, is simply to sow chaos in targeted countries. Once it is determined that the majority is unlikely to get onboard with liberal democracy, Western aid programs go in to stir up trouble in the name of helping the poor or promoting rights. It is why they love sponsoring things like women’s rights in Muslim countries. The point is to undermine the unity of the majority in the country.

The same approach is applied to regime change. In Georgia, for example, the majority of the people wanted a patriotic government that would strike a balance between East and West, but that was bad for the people running American foreign policy, so USAID was dispatched to regime change the place. What followed was a year of protests and unrest, until the government kicked out the foreign aid workers. Once the USAID money dried up, the protests dried up.

The funny thing about the regime change operations is they rarely result in a stable government, but that is not seen as a bad result. If Slovakia falls into chaos after toppling the Fico government, that is fine. That is viewed as a better result than having a pro-Slovak government. The goal is always to prevent a majority from forming anywhere, whether it is inside a country or among a group of countries. The goal of minority rule is to keep the majority in chaos.

This makes a lot of sense from an American perspective. The United States is a small population compared to the rest of the world. If the rest of the world, or even a section of it, united against the empire, it would be big trouble. This is why both Israel and the United States work to keep the Arabs fighting each other inside their countries as well as among the countries of the Arab world. As much as Israeli and American politicians talk about peace in the region, they prefer the chaos.

We can probably date the birth of minoritarianism as an essential part of popular rule to the post-Civil War period in America. The ruling elite of Yankee New England became the ruling elite for the new country that was formed up after the war. That became even more explicit with the progressive revolution in the late 19th and early 20th century, culminating in the New Deal. Suddenly, the people making decisions would be educated experts from the best schools, all of which exist in the Northeast.

The story of 20th century domestic politics in the United States is one of discord and friction over race, region, and religion. Over and over one group is pitted against another preventing a majority forming up against the ruling class. Conservatism, for example, evolved so it could prevent a white majority forming up against the social policies preferred by the ruling elite. The many progressive causes were promoted to keep the coalition of fringes under control.

Everywhere there is turmoil there is the crisis of minoritarianism. Europe is in crisis because the big important countries have no role in decision making. Instead, you have girl bosses at the EU calling the shots. Estonia has more say in decision making than France, Italy, and Germany. Of course, the crisis was precipitated by the Ukraine war, which is the result of Ukraine being ruled by a non-Ukrainian with the support of the ultra-nationalist who make up ten percent of the population.

There is something to say in favor of minoritarianism. Most people are average to below average in their abilities. Collectively they are not magically above average. This has always been the fatal flaw in democracy. In fact, the majority tend to operate below the average of the whole. You need the smart fraction to run things, but the smart fraction needs to act in the interest of the majority. Otherwise, you get chaos, which is what we have seen over the last thirty years.

What we may be seeing now is the end of minoritarianism. The rest of the world is figuring out how to defend against it. This is why the American empire is beginning to withdraw from the frontiers. The American economic elite seems to be seeing the danger, which is why they have backed Trump and his plans to dismantle the managerial state. Even the minority, or at least enough of it, is figuring out that they must act in the interest of the majority.

The curse of the eighth decade is an observation that Israel becomes unstable in the eighth decade of its existence, in whatever form it takes. The first Jewish kingdom, led by King David, lasted for 80 years. The kingdom of the Second Temple lasted roughly eighty years before it was conquered by Rome. The modern state of Israel was formed in 1948, which means it is reaching its eighth decade. The current troubles in the Levant are rooted in the growing instability of Israel.

Perhaps something similar is happening to American minoritarianism. In his book, The Jewish Century, argues that the modern age is the Jewish age, by which he means the post-war world created by America. That is a good starting point for when minoritarianism became the defining feature of America. Eight decades of turmoil later and we are reaching the end of minoritarianism. The curse of the eight decade is now coming for the organizing principle of the American empire.

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

The most surprising and most consequential event of the President Trump sequel has been the USAID scandal. No one thought that part of his revenge tour would be a direct assault on one of the main centers of the foreign policy hive. Until now, few people had any knowledge of this entity. Now it is in the center of the news because Trump has shut it down and put Musk and his whiz kids to the task of auditing the organization while the staff paces outside in the streets.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was sort of created by Congress in 1961 as a way to regulate foreign aid. Congress did not actually create an organization to do this. It directed the White House to create an organization, which is how the independent, not-for-profit entity called USAID came into existence and how it has operated ever since. It gets money through the State Department for its various programs, but it also raises money on its own.

To this point, there has been no oversight of USAID. It has been free, for example, to give money to George Soros organizations that do things like back candidates for state prosecutor in the United States. That seems like an odd use of foreign aid, but it really is the tip of the iceberg, which is why Trump is closing it down. That lack of oversight plus decades of existence created an organization that was operating like a government outside the government that financed it.

Of course, much of its activity was aimed at foreign governments. USAID backed the failed color revolution in Georgia last year. It was through the many local operations it supported that it was able to get people into the streets. The reason they did this is the Georgia parliament passed a law banning foreign money in politics. Georgia did not want to be the next Ukraine. The 2005 Orange revolution in Ukraine and the 2014 Maiden coup in 2014 were both underwritten by USAID.

It is why in the Biden years people started tracking the whereabouts of Samantha Power, the then head of USAID. Wherever she turned up, say Hungary before its elections, bad things happened for the local patriots. If you look up the career of Power, it reads like a road map to a position in permanent Washington, but also as a skeleton key for how the deep state operates. The people who actually run things jump from one node to another inside an informal network.

Powers was not running USAID in the Biden years because she brought an expertise in running a large enterprise. She got the gig because she was a trusted member of this informal group that runs foreign policy. She had been at the right stops at the right nodes and been vetted by the most trusted people in the system. She was plugged into the hive mind of this system. Its thoughts were her thoughts. Therefore, she would run this $50 billion dollar entity according to its wishes.

This is what the normies on Twitter fail to grasp. They think this about the money given to characters like Bill Kristol through one of his operations called Defending Democracy Together. Normie thinks in terms of money because he thinks in terms of the stuff he can buy with money. People like Bill Kristol think about the ways they can advance their people’s agenda with that money. As you would expect, the neocons are dug in like ticks in the network supported by USAID.

There is another aspect of the USAID scandal. One of the organizations it funds is called National Endowment for Democracy, which like USAID is an independent not-for-profit that was created by the National Security Decision Directive 77, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. The alleged purpose is to spread democracy, but in reality, it is just another wealthy node in the informal network of formal and informal nodes that make up the shadow government.

Half of the budget of NED is allocated to the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (AFL–CIO), the Center for International Private Enterprise (Chamber of Commerce), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Democratic Party), and the International Republican Institute (Republican Party). If you are curious as to why Joni Ernst tried to block Pete Hegseth’s nomination, check out the board of the International Republican Institute.

There you see how this thicket of not-for-profits and quasi-government institutions not only control foreign policy, but domestic policy. Hundreds of billions flow out of the Treasury through the budgets of the government agencies into this massive ecosystem that uses that money to control domestic politics. If you want to know why voting has had no bearing on public policy for decades, there is the answer. What matters to the politicians is this massive ecosystem, not your vote.

This is why the elected officials in Washington have been relatively quiet about what is happening not far from their offices. The party sent out some extras and understudies to perform in front of the USAID building, but otherwise they have remained quiet because they imagine Musk digging through the files, seeing things that they would prefer remain out of the public eye. USAID is just one problem. The DOGE team is analyzing every penny going out the door at Treasury right now.

It is also why the activists are going crazy over this. Most of them had no idea that their paycheck was coming from the government. They got grants and jobs at not-for-profits with important sounding names and “independent media outlets” run by people “passionate for the cause.” It turns out that most of it was underwritten by operations like USAID, which used government grants and corporate donations to control this vast ecosystem of radical activism.

When Trump halted all funding payments from USAID, for example, ninety percent of “independent media” in Ukraine had to close. Most of the pro-Ukraine accounts on Twitter suddenly fell silent. This is just one example, but it points to the enormity of the corruption centered in these quasi-government organizations. Much of what has been presented to the public as “democratic politics” has been theater staged by this swarm of not-for-profits and non-government-organizations.

One of the least surprising aspects of this is the realization that the people endlessly yelping about “our democracy” have been part of a system that works to prevent the will of the people. Similarly, it is no surprise that the lunatics screaming about fascism in the streets were underwritten by a network of organizations funding by the government and corporate donors. USAID was big into “gender” politics, for example. It was all a show, but also a massive fraud on the people.

Time will tell if DOGE is able to dismember this network. It appears to be a top priority for Trump, owing to the fact that it was this system that derailed his first term and nearly got him killed. At the same time, a lot of mortgage payments and ideological projects rely on that system. There will be a counterattack. The glimmer of hope here is that the oligarchs are backing the war on the blob. The blob controls billions, but the oligarchs control trillions and now they control the blob’s billions.

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!

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When Trump first appeared on the scene as a politician, a brilliant observer compared him to a character in the Asimov novels called The Mule. This was a character called the “destroyer of worlds” because he literally destroyed whole worlds, but he also destroyed the conception of the world. In fact, his very existence was a threat to accepted understanding of the universe, because the universally accepted conception of the universe precluded the existence of The Mule.

This has been the issue since Trump arrived on the scene. The people atop the post-Cold War world and the post-Cold War world itself, were all based on the assumption that a political character like Trump was impossible. The days of populist, nationalist and picaresque political actors was done. The present and future belonged to the Davos persons, the boys and girls who were produced by and benefitted the most from the managerial ideology that dominated the West.

What Trump’s success in 2016 represented was the nullification of the managerial order because according to the logic of managerialism, men like Trump had no place in the system, so they could never be a threat to the system. Instead, they were marginalized to the fringes of managerial life, the place where things are made, fixed, and created to keep the mechanics of the world going. They had no place in the world where decisions were made by the great and the good.

It is easy to forget that the best and the brightest smirked at the very idea of Trump running in the Republican primary. They were sure he was just another foolish businessman from the fringes, who thought he understood how things worked, but would quickly learn he was in over his head. Instead, the destroyer of worlds first destroyed the Republican primary. and the conservative ecosystem that controlled it, then he destroyed the system itself.

Like all monster movies, the story of this monster had that period where the good guys think they finally killed the beast, only to find out that it was still alive. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the regime was sure they were done with Trump. Then he reappeared, determined to run again in 2024. It turns out that the destroyer of worlds can never be destroyed because his mere existence depends entirely on his fulfilling his mission as the destroyer of worlds.

Thus, we have entered the final chapter of The Mule. The first two weeks of Trump’s return to Washington have been revolutionary. Things not thought possible are happening on a daily basis. The latest happening is the assault on the financial structure of the neocon war machine. Right now, members of Elon Musk’s team are combing through the records of USAID, the hive mind of the NGO collective that has controlled American foreign policy for decades.

Few appreciate the enormity of what is happening right now with the vast not-for-profit network held together by government entities like USAID. Suddenly, their very existence is threatened due to the suspension of funds from the American government, but also by the revelations to come about what they do with that money. There is a reason Elon Musk is posting about USDAID being a criminal organization. They were doing much more than keeping the Kagan family in donuts.

The vast informal network of formal and informal power centers that make up the real government, the shadow government, is now under assault. This is something that could never happen according to the logic of managerialism. With the owners of American society marginalized and the workers under control of the synopticon, who could possibly challenge this system? The answer is The Mule, the figure who should not exist in the managerial system.

It is hard to imagine it possible, but this is the calm before the storm. The tariff war with Canada and Mexico is just getting started. The system of free trade created forty years ago, which benefitted the ruling elites of all three countries, but was paid for by the people of all three countries, is now under direct assault. It turns out that the great sucking sound Ross Perot warned of thirty years ago was not a sucking sound after all, but an early warning of something terrible to come.

Team Trump is moving quickly to dismantle the post-Cold War world and the understanding of it. Marco Rubio is out giving speeches about how the unipolar world was an anomaly and we are returning to a multipolar world. On the domestic front Trump’s team is quickly working to dismantle and anathematize the bizarre social fads inflicted on the people by the managerial class. When the president blames diversity for a plane crash, the world has truly changed.

It is a bit ironic that the concept of The Mule was created by a man who was the creation of a world that emerged in the 20th century America. The post-national, post-liberal world that arose with the American empire was only possible with the evolution of the managerial ideology. Progressivism evolved to give managerialism moral agency, and together they made the American empire and for a while, came to defined the post-Cold War world, but now that is coming to a close.

What we are seeing is the long-anticipated end of the 20th century. Russia and China have moved into the 21st century, but America and the West have remained moored to the prior century, convulsively resisting any attempt to abandon it. That world, however, is gone and now, thanks to The Mule, it is being destroyed. For now, the destruction is the show, but soon, what comes next is what will matter. Everyone needs to remember that The Mule is the destroyer of worlds, not the creator of them.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m37s The smack of firm government (cont.)
• 05m13s Déjà vu all over again
• 09m13s The ratchet effect?
• 16m43s Diversity catastrophe?
• 20m03s A science geek, not a law geek, for HHS
• 28m57s Work for Trump, Bukele, and Milei
• 30m34s Brexit + 5
• 32m55s Be nice to the French!
• 36m08s Signoff with the èrhú

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Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your intensely genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from a National Conservative point of view.

Well, we are now twelve days into a new Presidency — one that, Progressives warned us, would put an end to democracy in our country, led by a man who is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

Yet so far there has been no declaration of martial law, no attempt to suspend the Constitution, and — so far as I can tell — no preparations to invade Poland.

Could it be that all those elite Progressives — academics, jurists, media talking heads — were mistaken? Hard to believe. Well, it’s still early days; we’ll see.

02 — The smack of firm government.     It sure is nice to hear what a great British newspaperman once called “the smack of firm government.” Just to reprise a few.

• Birthright citizenship canceled. At any rate the President has done what is in his power to cancel it. What he did will of course be challenged, and the issue, which is how the Fourteenth Amendment should be interpreted — will end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. If they strike down the President’s ruling, there’ll be clamor for a Constitutional Amendment. At any rate, there’ll be clamor from Radio Derb; I can’t speak for the rest of you. I shall definitely be clamoring.
• Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran who believes that the military exists to fight wars, confirmed as Secretary of Defense.
• No more federal money for child sex-change operations. Good! I don’t know why these operations are allowed at all; but that’s probably a matter of state laws.
• Federal employees ordered back to their offices. Mixed feelings about that. They might do less harm at home playing World of Warcraft.
• A big house-cleaning at the Justice Department, deep-staters involved in anti-Trump lawfare reassigned to issuing and inspecting fur-trading licenses in the Aleutian Islands.
• Pardons for January 6th protestors who were outrageously overcharged for petty nonviolent offenses.
• Eight thousand members of our military who’d been discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine now restored to their previous ranks with back pay and full benefits.

And best of all, of course:

• Mass deportation of illegal aliens.

For the first time in years I am actually enjoying reading the news.

Yes, I’m enjoying it all just as much as you are; and I’m just as pleased as you are to see — it’s very plain to see — that Donald Trump learned important lessons from his first Presidency. He’s staffing up his administration with people who agree with him!

For all that, I cannot shirk my duty as National Conservatism’s leading pessimist. I’m the author of a book titled We Are Doomed, remember? So permit me, please, to throw a wet blanket over all the jubilation.

03 — Déjà vu all over again.     I’m actually experiencing political déjà vu.

This is not the first time I’ve rejoiced to see a feeble, ineffective government dominated by Progressive ideologues voted out of power to be replaced by a different party under a leader who voices commonsense truths clearly and firmly, delivering — yes! — “the smack of firm government.”

That leader was of course Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of the U.K. for the last few months of the 1970s, all of the 1980s, and the first few months of the 1990s, total eleven and a half years. I was a big fan. To this day my Margaret Thatcher commemorative mug has pride of place among the glassware in my living-room cabinet.

For a sample of Mrs Thatcher’s common sense and a reminder of her firm, straightforward diction, here she was addressing the House of Commons on the subject of illegal immigration.

[Clip:  Those who are genuine refugees — and that is determined again by the United Nations — will not be returned. Those who are illegal immigrants … those who are illegal immigrants will be returned, and it is customary international law for countries to receive their own immigrants back into their country. And if the Right Honourable gentleman is suggesting that we ever get to a position where you cannot return illegal immigrants to their country of origin, then he is … he is proposing international chaos.]

Mrs Thatcher actually became Prime Minister on May 4th 1979. I had returned to Britain a couple of weeks before after three months abroad. I was somewhat out of touch with U.K. politics, although I knew enough to cheer when Thatcher won.

My sister and most of my British friends, by contrast, were Labour Party supporters — Progressives. They weren’t as hysterically crazy as today’s Trump-haters, but there was definitely a mild Thatcher Derangement Syndrome going round.

I remember watching TV coverage of the election results at the house of Progressive friends. They were scowling and shaking their heads in dismay. As the recipient of their hospitality I tried to curb my jubilation, but it wasn’t easy.

So yes: these past few days I’ve been experiencing déjà vu all over again. Since the previous episode was forty-some years ago, however, I can recall how it all worked out in those following years, and legitimately wonder whether this Trumpian counter-revolution will follow a similar path.

So how did Thatcherism work out in the long run? Not well, is the sad answer.

04 — The ratchet effect?     That’s the long, long run I’m speaking about. In the early years of her administrations — of which there were three: she was re-elected in 1983 and 1987, with big majorities both times — in the early years her brutally realistic economic policies cost her some popularity with people who lost their jobs or benefits.

There were some balancing policies that kept her afloat. My personal favorite was the selling-off of public housing to tenants. My parents had lived for over thirty years in a house owned by the local town. Thanks to Mrs Thatcher I bought it for them at a rock-bottom price. I sold it ten years later for not much more. I should have kept it: similar houses in that neighborhood today sell for about thirty times what I got. Shoulda, coulda, woulda …

The Falklands War of 1982 really swung the country behind Mrs Thatcher and fixed her, even in the minds of Chinese peasants, as the Iron Lady. That flush of popularity was then fortified when she survived an assassination attempt two years later, followed by financial deregulation leading to a boom in the securities markets.

Then in the late 1980s she got tangled in some conflicts with colleagues and unpopular policies on property taxes. She resigned as Prime Minister in 1990; but her party, the Conservative Party, remained in power — which is to say, in control of Parliament.

What followed was seven years of Thatcherism Lite: not so much the smack of firm government as the gentle pat of neoliberal consensus.

British voters got tired of it. In 1997 they sent the Conservatives packing and put the Labour Party in power under Prime Minister Tony Blair. They did not know that Blair was a demon sent up from Hell by Satan to destroy their country, but they soon found out.

It was Blair’s keen co-operation in George W. Bush’s missionary wars that woke them up; but even before that Blair had thrown Britain’s borders wide open, “to rub the Right’s noses in diversity,” as one of Blair’s speechwriters explained.

Thence inevitably to the Britain of today: a poor, failing, unhappy nation, the streets of her once-noble old cities taken over by ululating mobs of fanatical foreign savages, her schoolchildren taught to feel guilt and shame that their ancestors had attempted to civilize half the world, her public services barely functioning.

Mrs Thatcher herself spoke of “the ratchet effect.” Political history, she thought, proceeds like a wheel with a ratchet. When the Left are in power they can advance the wheel in their preferred direction, towards ever more cultural nihilism and civilizational destruction. When the Right are in power we can only apply the ratchet — halting the leftward movement, but never really accomplishing any rightward shift.

The political history of Britain this past 46 years seems to illustrate the ratchet effect. Starting from a triumph of the Right 46 years ago, that nation is how sinking deep into the Leftist swamp.

And that raises the question: Shall we, the U.S.A., follow a similar trajectory from here to 2071 — from joyful triumph and satisfaction to the loss of all we cherish in our nation?

I wouldn’t rule it out. Following Trump’s election last year, Progressivism is taking a break to lick its wounds. It remains a formidable beast, though, with strong control over key areas of our public life.

Remember those surveys that come out periodically of professors at our universities: how many are Democrats, how many Republicans? I pulled one up at random from the College Fix, 2022. They found that half of all university departments had no Republican professors at all.

Possibly that’s changed some in the last three years, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. The rising generation of intellectuals, schoolteachers, media folk, doctors, and perhaps worst of all, lawyers are being indoctrinated by Progressives.

Yes, Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential election. His popular-vote edge over his opponent, however, was only one and a half percent. Seventy-five million Americans cast their vote for Kamala Harris — for Progressivism.

So cherish the hour, listeners; but remember, please, that an hour is, in the grand scheme of things, not a very long span of time.

05 — Diversity catastrophe?     Leading the news this past couple of days has been the appalling catastrophe Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., when an Army helicopter collided with a commercial passenger plane, killing all aboard both — 67 souls in all — and throwing their corpses, and all the wreckage, into the Potomac River.

In the commentary on this dreadful event there has been a theme — voiced by President Trump among others — speculating that pressure for race and sex diversity in hiring for federal agencies, like the one that supervises Air Traffic Controllers, might have been a factor, reducing the general level of competence among those Controllers.

My instinct is to take a cautious approach on issues like this, where there is so much human grief involved. I did, though, recall reading about lowering of standards in Air Traffic Control some years back in the Obama administration. So I started in on some research, to see what I could dig up.

Then, browsing on X, I came across Jared Taylor’s 15-minute video recounting his researches. I immediately abandoned my own inquiries.

Jared’s video is a little masterpiece of investigative reporting. I can’t even attempt anything half as good. Jared is Mozart; I’m Salieri.I urge you to set aside fifteen minutes — actually fifteen and a half, I see — to watch the whole thing.

After a jihadist went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood Army base, Texas, in 2009, killing thirteen people and wounding 29 more, Army chief of staff General George Casey famously remarked that, quote: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” End quote.

Are there people in positions of authority in the federal government today who feel the same way about Wednesday’s disaster? I have not the slightest doubt that there are; although whether any of them will be brazen enough to say it out loud like General Casey, I doubt.

06 — A science geek, not a law geek, for HHS.     Second in the news is the continuing interrogation of President Trump’s cabinet nominees by the relevant Senate committees. The one that’s been getting the most coverage has been Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I knew very little about RFK, Jr. I remembered him being in the news last year as a candidate for President, until Donald Trump somehow persuaded him to drop out and endorse the Trump ticket.

From before that I had even dimmer memories of him occasionally being in the news for something or other. I couldn’t have told you of any specific things he was in the news for, but they’d left me with the overall impression that he’s a nutty conspiracy crank.

Striving for fairness again, I looked him up. What kind of education did he have? Let’s see.

• Undergraduate degree: B.A. in American history and literature from Harvard.
• Postgraduate degree one: J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
• Postgraduate degree two: Master of Laws from Pace University.

OK, so pretty well-educated … but not really in the way I’d want in my HHS Secretary. No science.

I’m not saying the HHS Secretary should hold degrees in nuclear physics; but there should be some sign in his educational record that he has an empirical, quantitative cast of mind and a curiosity about the natural world — a generally scientific cast of mind.

I want my HHS Secretary to know the difference between median and mean, between bacterium and virus, between false positives and false negatives. Does RFK, Jr. know basic science stuff like that? Somehow I doubt it.

My morning newspaper, the New York Post, didn’t do anything at all to turn me towards a more favorable view of RFK, Jr. Very much the contrary. They’ve been running opinion pieces under blistering headlines hostile to the nominee, headlines like these:

(Jan. 28th)  Senators, vote ‘nay’ to a Health hazard like RFK

(Jan. 29th)  JFK kid: ‘Predator’ RFK Jr. ‘unqualified’

(also Jan. 29th)  RFK JR. ANTI-VAX STANCE A ‘SCAM’

(yet again Jan. 29th)  RFK? No Way!

(Jan. 30th)  POLS STICK IT TO BOBBY   Rip into Trump HHS nom’s vax double-speak

(Jan. 31st)  RFK JR. STANDS BY VAX DOUBTS Won’t deny autism link in Senate grill

(I took the headlines and dates there from the print newspaper; the online versions sometimes differ.)

Sample quote from the first one there, longish quote:

On the eve of his hearings, Kennedy now claims he’s not “anti-vaccine,” that he simply wants there to be more “transparency.” But RFK Jr.’s idea of transparency is whatever helps his trial lawyer friends.

He has made a career in litigation out of pointing out a rare side effect, which there often are, then claiming the whole thing is faulty for profit.

The job of the health secretary and the Food and Drug Administration is to put the many first — how do we help the most people with a treatment? RFK exploits the rarity. All it takes is one person with a symptom — that maybe isn’t even associated with the drug or vaccine — and you have a lawsuit. He wants to give conspiracy theorists and legal opportunists material to twist to his own ends.

And RFK Jr. will continue to make money off this, having stated he won’t stop taking payments from his ambulance-chasing lawyer friends even as health secretary.

End quote.

The article I’m quoting there is an unsigned editorial, by the way, so if there is anything false in it, JFK, Jr. has a strong case for a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper. Which he would jump on, because … he’s a lawyer.

And yes: for an unscrupulous lawyer, I can see that vaccine lawsuits are a fertile field. Sure: a vaccine may harm you, or even kill you. But then, so might the thing you’re being vaccinated against. It’s a balance of risks, like so much else in life.

That’s the mindset of a science geek, though; and as I’ve observed, there doesn’t seem to be anything of the science geek in RFK, Jr. He’s a law geek, looking for a lawsuit. Different mentality.

I understand, of course, that Trump’s nomination of him is entirely political. As tiny as RFK, Jr.’s voter base surely was, it might have pulled enough votes away from Trump to give Kamala Harris a victory. He did Trump a favor by dropping his candidacy and endorsing Trump. Trump wants to return the favor. I understand.

I just seriously doubt that HHS Secretary is the right reward for this particular guy. Surely there’s some place he could do less harm, and stand a better chance of surviving the Senate confirmation process?

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

Imprimis:  George Canning was an early 19th century British statesman who served two spells as Foreign Secretary. For diplomatic and commercial reasons to do with Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal he strongly supported the independence of the rebellious Latin-American colonies. He explained it all to the House of Commons in 1826 in a sentence he is famous for, quote: “I called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old.” End quote.

Today, with Britain and the European countries — including France, Spain, and Portugal — all in the doldrums, perhaps it’s time for us in the New World to again redress the balance of the Old.

I can think of several New World leaders who might do useful work on that: Donald Trump of course, but also Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, and Javier Milei, President of Argentina. All three guys are very good with the smack of firm government …

Item:  Today, January 31st, at 11pm Greenwich Mean Time, marks the fifth anniversary of Brexit, when Britain officially left the European Union.

Brexit has to go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in history. If Britain had been led by people of courage and imagination, she could have recovered her national independence, as those who’d voted for Brexit supposed she would.

Unfortunately the country was led by mediocre seatwarmers with about as much collective imagination as a cage full of parrots. Their idea of national independence was kowtowing to the European Court of Human Rights, which is a lawyers’ ramp, just like everything else with “Human Rights” in its name.

If only Maggie Thatcher had been in charge! Or Donald Trump, or Nayib Bukele, or Javier Milei.

The Gen Z cohort over there — that’s young people aged 13 to 27 — would scoff at that as unacceptably tame. They want dictatorship, according to a study that’s causing some worried comment over there.

Sample quote from the London Times:

Fifty-two per cent of Gen Z … said they thought [inner quote] “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.” [End inner quote.] Thirty-three per cent suggested the UK would be better off [inner quote] “if the army was in charge.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

Item:  Just one more on the Brits. They’re building a new battle submarine for the Royal Navy. Planning and construction has been under way for some time, back to when Queen Elizabeth was still alive.

Royal Navy ships’ names have to be approved by the monarch. For this submarine, the Navy suggested HMS Agincourt. That’s the name of a battle that took place in the Hundred Years War between England and France back in the fifteenth century. It was a great and glorious victory for the English against superior numbers, and for King Henry V, who led them into battle. Someone wrote a play about it, but I forget the details.

Queen Elizabeth approved the name Agincourt. Then she died, and her son Charles became King.

Last week we learned that the submarine’s name has been changed. It won’t be HMS Agincourt, after all. It’ll be HMS Achilles. Britain’s Ministry of Defence was apparently worried that Agincourt might offend the French, reminding them of that defeat six hundred years ago.

The BBC says King Charles was involved in the decision somehow. He certainly must have approved the name change.

When Brits — including even a British monarch — worry about hurting the feelings of the pouting, primping, frog-eating French, Britain is definitely finished. Perhaps those Gen Z-ers are on to something …

08 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks as always for your time and attention, your encouragement and support. May you enjoy good health and prosperity in the Year of the Snake.

Yes, Wednesday was Chinese New Year’s Day. Tuesday evening we had a family banquet. There were eight around the table: Dad, Mom, Son, Daughter, grandson, Son’s girlfriend, and an older couple we’ve known for years: yet another English native married to yet another Chinese lady. The unmarried received gifts of money from the married in hóngbāo red envelopes, according to tradition.

Family and old friends: a warm, convivial evening, with proper deference to tradition and more food than we could finish. Life is good!

On behalf of the VDARE Foundation, which is still a going concern with plans for the future, please permit me to remind you that Peter Brimelow now has his own Substack account, which of course you should subscribe to. You can support the Foundation itself by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking the check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website. VDARE thanks you and I thank you!

Just to record this being the first week of a New Year on the traditional Chinese calendar, here’s a bit of traditional Chinese music. The title is 月夜愁, which translates as something like “Moonlight Melancholy.”

The Chinese Wikipedia tells me that there’s a whole family of songs with that title, going all the way back into traditional Taiwanese folk music. Taiwanese pop star Jody Chiang had a hit with one such song twentysome years ago: there’s a link in the Radio Derb transcript, if you’d like to listen to it.

For signoff I’ve gone with an older instrumental version, the principal instrument here being an èrhú, which is a two-string Chinese fiddle — a longtime favorite of mine. Furthermore, I’m giving you the least melancholy passage in the recording — the allegro, as it were. I don’t think they could dance to this even in West Virginia.

If Allah wills it, there will be more from Radio Derb next week.

A bit of a weird show this week. The post on Wednesday got me thinking about how I would explain to someone what I think is happening in Washington. That post relied on people understanding a lot of things that would not be familiar to most, so they would need a quick background before getting to the meat of the topic. Thinking about how to do that led to the idea of doing a show on it.

One of the things that you see with people who arrive on this side of the great divide is they often go through a crash course learning all the stuff that was excluded from their education and political understanding. Condensing that down into easily digestible bits is probably a good project for someone, given that we are seeing millions turn up on the edge of the great divide, looking for a lift over to this side.

That really is something to savor. Trump gave a presser after the chopper collided with the passenger jet in Washington and he put the blame on diversity. It is not the first time he has said something like this since he was inaugurated, but it is still shocking to hear a public official say what had been prohibited a year ago. This administration is saying things that got you booted from Twitter before Musk.

This is why the corporate takeover model works. Every company has a culture, and that culture is reinforced by management. Inevitably when new owners come in it means changes to the culture. To outsiders it does not seem that important, but to the people inside it is shocking. Our political system is being overhauled in the equivalent of a hostile takeover, like greenmailing. Instead, it is orangemailing.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Origins Of Managerialism
• The Growth Of The Managerial Class
• Nixon
• Reinventing Government
• The Shadow Government
• The Greenmailers
• The End Game

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services were yesterday and they offered some interesting insights into how the world has changed over the last few years. In many respects, it was a blast from the past, with the more ridiculous performers dusting off their old routines. Elizabeth Warren, for example, did her angry chicken dance in the hallway after she did her raging old crone routine in the committee room.

Warren and the other senators who took the opportunity to make fools of themselves for the cameras during the hearing were a reminder not only that things have changed, but why they have changed. Warren’s act was just an act. It was clear at certain points that she did not understand the words she was reading from her script, but it was clear she practiced delivering them with the correct angry face. If her handlers had required it, she would have accused Kennedy of colluding with Bigfoot.

That is one reason why we are here. The public, at some point over the last few years, began to turn on this sort of performative politics. According to recent polling, the Democratic Party has its lowest approval rating ever. Meanwhile Trump is enjoying his highest approval ratings. The reason for that is Trump, whatever you may think of him, is a candid and sincere form of politics. People like Elizabeth Warren are just paid performers who will say anything for a buck.

Of course, the fact that Kennedy was there at all is remarkable. Not long ago, Kennedy was a fringe character trafficking in “conspiracy theories.” At least that was the accepted narrative around him. Most people no longer accept that narrative. For many, if not most people, he is now part of this general questioning of those narratives. No one benefitted more from Covid than RFK Jr., because all the trusted sources for public health abrogated that trust, thus validating Kennedy’s critique.

Once you start questioning the official narratives, you inevitably start questioning the people responsible for those narratives. In the case of Kennedy, that means the public health establishment, which plays an enormous role in life. In fact, it is one of the key pillars of the managerial system, right there with “first responders.” There have been libraries full of televisions shows and movies about the glories of the public health experts saving the day. People are now questioning those claims.

If you looked closely, you could see it in the hearing. One of the Senate performers mentioned the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease.” Kennedy has been open to the possibility that it turned up fifty years ago as the result of a lab leak. Not far from where it first made its presence was a military laboratory that specialized in using insects to carry infectious diseases. That is the connection at the heart of the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease”, which should sound familiar.

Up until a month ago, the “lab leak theory” regarding the Covid panic was a conspiracy theory, one that can still get you banned from YouTube. Now it is the official position of the United States government. Just a few years ago, being open minded about the causes of Lyme disease would have been disqualifying, but it was overlooked entirely in this hearing and Kennedy was even allowed to point out several so-called conspiracy theories that have turned out to be true.

This hearing was possible because the world has changed. Suddenly, as if someone flipped a switch, it is cool to question the narratives. A big reason for that is Donald Trump, who survived one conspiracy after another, including one involving a would-be assassin who just happened to be in a Blackrock commercial. One thing Trump proved is that there is a limit to how many coincidences people can tolerate before they start thinking about alternative theories.

That aside, what the Kennedy hearing reveals is that the moral authority of the people behind the official narratives is crumbling. Elizabeth Warren can carry on like a crazy old church lady all she likes, but no one believes her. In fact, no one believes any of these people because they have lied too much. It turns out Lincoln was right. You cannot fool all the people all the time and once you set off down that road, it leads to a place where you cannot fool anyone at all.

Perhaps one day when the AI historians are writing us stories about the American empire, one narrative will be about how the body of lies necessary to maintain the managerial system simply became unsustainable. It moved from condemning those questioning the more outlandish claims from the authorities to condemning anyone who questioned anything, even when their doubts were confirmed. In such a world, no one can trust anyone and the system collapses.

What probably comes next is asking what else about the past is a lie? Did the CIA sell drugs in the United States to fund covert operations? People like Maxine Waters were condemned for making the claim. It is most certainly true, by the way. They worked with the Mexican drug cartel in the 1980’s to fund the Contras. Here is an interview with a former high ranking DEA agent on that subject. Amazon also did a much longer treatment of this topic last year.

What all this points to is that we are heading into one of those clearings of history in which we exit one forest of lies and must evaluate that time, before we can enter a new forest of lies. The Russians went through this after the Cold War. There was a great reexamining of what had happened under communism. The United States did not have this period after the Cold War but is about to have it now. To close the door on the past, you must revisit the body of lies that is the past.

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

One of the early features of Trump 2.0 is that it is nothing like the first version of Trump and nothing like what his adversaries imagined. Despite the evidence that this version of Trump would be different, his antagonists inside and outside the regime were certain he was the guy they imagined. Therefore, his victory was a shock, but they were sure what worked the first time around would work again. The weird silence from regime outposts is due to having been wrong yet again.

This version of Trump is a very different thing from the original version. We are seeing this in the realm of foreign policy where Trump 2.0 has been executing a plan rather than doing battle with the hydra that is the foreign policy community. It turns out that his refusal to have any dealings with the foreign policy community as a candidate, and his decision not to use government resources for the transition, has provided him with the element of surprise upon taking office.

You see that with his initial appointments. Marco Rubio was an out of the blue pick for the State Department. It seems to have been a shock to Rubio as well. Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon is another bolt from the blue. In the case of Rubio, he is an easily controlled lieutenant running an agency in need of radical reform. Hegseth comes to the job with his own radical ideas about reforming the Pentagon. The semi-permanent staff at the top of both agencies are now in a crisis.

Then you have Trump’s peculiar moves regarding the Ukraine war. He appoints Keith Kellogg as his personal envoy on the issue, but Kellogg is in no big hurry to get the ball rolling on Project Ukraine. He initially set up a tour of Europe and meetings with Kiev but then cancelled all of it. Trump has answered some questions about the Ukraine war but has not had any discussions with Europe about it. In fact, no one in the Trump administration has talked to the Europeans about the war.

At the same time, there is a purge underway of certain parts of the foreign policy establishment with some novel tools. For starters, Trump is cleaning house of neocons by assigning them to new positions intended to encourage their departure. This is an old corporate trick. He has frozen spending on just about everything, pending a review of how the money is being spent. Since all of government exists to spend money, it has thrown the usual suspects into a panic.

What this move is aimed at is the shadow foreign policy community that exists outside of government but is funded by government. These are the think tanks and research shops that live off government grants. They are full of former government officials and future government officials. Their job is to prevent whoever is in the White House from changing the direction of foreign policy. It is in the offices of these places that his first impeachment was organized.

These covens of mischief that were prepared to do their old tricks now find themselves in a crisis as their income is frozen and under scrutiny, while at the same time their friends and collaborators are being forced out of government. It is hard to plot the next regime change operation against Trump when you are struggling to make payroll, which is the point of this funding freeze. It is also a clear signal that Trump 2.0 is prepared to deal with these people.

This extends to the thicket of NGO’s, charities and think tanks that operate internationally, in coordination with the shadow government. Trump had Rubio freeze all work at these operations by freezing their money. The people who make regime change possible through their color revolution schemes are now starved of cash. If they cannot pay “independent media” and “opposition leaders” then those entities cannot organize “spontaneous” rallies against the government.

What Trump 2.0 is doing is attacking the vast shadow government that has evolved to be resistant to electoral politics. The Kagan family, for example, have plied their trade regardless of who is in the White House. They were able to do this because so much of what ends up as a foreign policy item on the president’s agenda is created by entities operating outside of government. Victoria did not retire when she quit the State Department. She continues her work in the shadow government.

Foreign policy is just one example. The chaos of immigration is due in large part to the vast network of not-for-profit entities that make millions facilitating the wholesale abrogation of immigration laws. These entities survive on grants from the government, much in the same way we see with foreign policy. The freeze and review of these programs is part of bringing them to heel. When J.D. Vance mentioned Catholic Charities role in immigration, it was a deliberate warning.

This is why the media response to Trump 2.0 has been so weird. Much of what they produce is handed to them by this thicket of extra-government entities who shape the media narratives around public policy. That extra government ecosystem now finds itself under direct assault by a new administration that did its homework and is now executing a plan of attack on that ecosystem. Compounding it is the fact that the donor class seems to be backing the Trump plan.

What has happened over the last several decades is that the official government of the United States was enveloped by this vast collection of extra-government entities that produce good jobs at good wages for the managerial elite. Since the number of government posts is small, relative to the number of credentialed people who think they deserve them, this network of entities has grown to serve an ever-growing collection of people who cycle in and out of government.

Since these people not only think they deserve the plumb assignments, but they think they know better than the voters and their politicians, the result has been a slow shifting of policy outside of official government into this shadow government. Foreign policy is most obvious, but this process has happened everywhere. No one can say who banned normal light bulbs, for example, because the policy bubbled up from the network of extra-government entities of environmentalism.

It remains to be seen if the Trump effort to defang this shadow government will succeed, but it helps that he has support from economic elites. The shadow government does not live only on government handouts. It also thrives by selling indulgences to powerful people and business sectors. Having friends in the shadow government is better than having friends in politics, because politicians come and go, but the shadow government is permanent.

One reason for the swing to the side of Trump by the economic elites could be that they have grown frustrated with this arrangement. People who think they are smarter than the voters are going to think they are smarter than the donors. Like a business run into the ground by management, the large shareholders are now stepping in with the support of the small shareholders, to clear out old management. Trump is like the old greenmailers; except this time the target is Washington.

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!

Imagine a society made up of farmers who produce what they need to live but also trade extra to one another for things they do not produce. This is not the most efficient society, but as long as everyone is self-sufficient, it works. At the minimum, each farm produces enough food for the family, even in lean years. Perhaps like the Amish, they voluntarily come together on larger projects that are shared by everyone and individual projects that require a lot of hands.

One day, someone comes along with an offer to one of the farmers. Instead of that farmer trading with the other farmers, this stranger will buy the excess for what the farmer wants in trade. He makes this deal with other farmers and before long he makes his living as the middleman. He does the trades between the farmers, keeping a little extra for himself in the process. Before long there are others doing similar and they all live in what they call town.

Now, imagine all the farmers decide to quit farming altogether and move to town to be traders and merchants. Obviously, that cannot work as now there are no farmers to produce the things the traders are trading, and the merchants are selling. Some of the farmers can quit, but not all. Additionally, some can begin to specialize to the point where they are no longer self-sufficient. They now rely on the traders and merchants in town to get the things they need to live.

In other words, the original model works just fine, but it is not efficient. The farmers are all just above the sustenance line. The introduction of middlemen makes for more efficient use of farm labor, so everyone can do a little better. Specialization in farming and in trading increases productivity. Somewhere in this model there is a mix of farmers, traders, merchants, and specialization that attains the maximum amount of productivity for this society.

That productivity, however, must benefit everyone. Otherwise, we get the problem of the farmers looking at the townspeople and deciding they would prefer to be a trader, rather than a farmer. There also must be a balance with regards to specialization, as this could make the productive class overly dependent upon the middlemen, who can then maximize their profits from the productive class. A society with a small number of people controlling all the profit is inherently unstable.

Therein lies the problem Trump inherits in terms of the economy. Starting in the 1970’s with the microprocessor revolution, the American economy has been hellbent on maximizing efficiency. Wherever technology can increase the output from labor, it has been done, often overdone. In fact, the data shows that efficiency has gone up far faster than wages, so we tipped past the happy balance long ago. While the overall economy continues to grow, it grows only for a minority of citizens.

On top of that, we long ago blew past the balance between producers and middlemen described in that prior scenario. A couple of generations of Americans have been trained to work in the middleman economy, often doing busy work related to boutique beliefs like diversity of climate change. Meanwhile, the productive sector atrophied or was shipped off to other parts of the world. The American economy is more like a global counting house now, rather than a self-sufficient economy.

The global bank model has run its course. The rest of the world, for various reasons, is disconnecting from the American model. The rest of the world is unwilling to do like the farmers in that model and turn everything over to the middlemen. That town full of merchants and middlemen is noticing that the farmers are not coming to town to trade their goods as much they did in the past. Suddenly, the skim from the work of the farmers is getting too small to sustain the townsfolk.

It is not a perfect way to think about it, but it helps understand the economic problems Trump inherits as president. It is why he is convinced that shifting from a tax system focused on labor to one focused on trade is a winner. It will help shift labor from busy work in cubicles back to doing productive things because the cost of imports will rise relative to locally produced items. Foreign producers will adjust by investing in production inside America.

The practical problem Trump inherits is the American economic model evolved to favor the middleman over the producer. Over time it led to the imbalance we see between producers and facilitators. It also led to a narrowing of profit to a shrinking number of players in the economy. In some ways, the American economy has become a digital version of the Bronze Age palace economies in that everything flows through financial and information centers that operate as skimming houses.

Fixing the imbalances within the rules of the system is impossible. This post by an economist calling himself Jack Rasmus explains how the tools available to government no longer work to address the practical imbalances. The people controlling Joe Biden poured almost four trillion in extra money into the system, but it did nothing to mitigate the problem of shrinking middle-class budgets. Prices keep rising while wages remain static, which means most people are getting poorer.

The only way out of the current trap is through systemic changes. That is why Trump is fixated on tariffs as an economic and policy tool. On the one hand this brings costs back in line with prices, so the market regains some coherence. If the real cost of an item is in the price of the item, then people will reward the genuinely lower cost items. In the current model, the cost of cheap goods turns up in the loss of social capital, delayed family formation and, of course, high crime.

A simple example is prepared food. These are cheap for the consumer but are packed with hidden costs. The refrigeration units used to be made in America, but those plants were shipped abroad by the miracle or tariff free trades deals. Of course, the plants are often staffed with cheap foreign labor, the cost of which turns up in your property taxes, the crowded schools, and the healthcare system. That frozen pizza turns out to be vastly more expensive than the price on the box.

Multiply this out all over the economy and it is easy to see the problem. Fifty years ago, middle-class families could get by on one income. Today, it takes two-incomes which is why there are far fewer families. Ours is an economy that looks prosperous on the outside, but the internals are littered with hidden costs. The only way to remedy this is to bring the costs back to the front of that frozen pizza and that can only be done through systemic change.

There are three challenges. One is the small number of people profiting from the current model will fight reform. That is not insurmountable. Trump having some of the richest men on earth in his corner will help a great deal. The bigger problem is the transition cost, which will come in the form of recession. There is no escape from it. The early 1980’s were the cost of transitioning from the productive economy to the middleman economy, so expect similar as we transition back.

The biggest challenge in this project is a dysfunctional managerial class that sees any change as a challenge to their position. The middleman economy was very good for the sorts of people who have a long list of impressive sounding credentials but view tangible accomplishment as a disqualifier. The army of managers in the managerial state cannot survive a transition out of a middleman economy. Like the aristocracy in 18th century France, they will not go quietly.

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