With the new Pope being installed, this week seemed like a perfect time to explain why Protestants are the cause of all our troubles. It is the Protestant revolt that led to the re-emergence of paganism in the West. That is paganism in the sense of multiple sources of authority, not the Zeus and Athena business. Aside from some posers in the current age, the old gods have not made a return.

The Christian revolution is a remarkable thing in the history of man as to that point there were a lot of gods and a lot of ways to relate to those gods. Two groups of people could share the same god, but have different ways of serving that god. Within a society, people could have a variety of household gods which informed how they lived and how they related to their fellow citizens.

Christianity revolutionized this with one God for everyone and having that God as the source of everything, including man. Once you have just one God and one metaphysics arising from that God, then it rationally follows that there is one correct set of rules governing how man should live. This is the road to a universal morality that applies even to those who are not believers.

When the universal authority of the Church was challenged, the universal morality began to fail. After all, if the Church was wrong about the structure of faith, it could also be wrong about the nature of God. Calvin’s understanding God was different than the Catholic conception of God. Once the conception of God changes, the morality and metaphysics begin to diverge as well.

The crisis in  the West stems in large part from this divergence. The managerial class has its gods, things like Gaia and Diversity, that it is trying to impose on the population, but the population has its own gods. The Bible-believing Christian who thinks he talks to Jesus every day, not only has little in common with the homosexual Episcopalian, but he has no choice but to reject the gods of his rulers.

That is the show this week. It is a topic that probably deserves a ten hour commitment, but maybe that is something for the end of the year. The focus for now is how the Protestant revolts in the 16th century set off this process by which we now find ourselves in a new pagan age. Zeus and Odin have yet to make their appearance, but maybe they just have different names and guises this time.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Paganism
• The Christian Challenge
• Catholicism
• Protestantism
• New Paganism

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If you have ever been to a concert where the acts are from the golden age of rock music, you probably noticed that they seem naturally good. They know their material and they know their audience. There is a high production quality to the show and the performers professionally do their best material. The reason for this is they have done it for so long, they know what works and what does not work. Old carnies seem so good because they have been at it for so long.

Successful comics will often talk about how they got some advice from an old comic that changed their approach and launched their career. The old comic, after years of trial and error, figured out the formula and passed it onto the young guy, who then avoided the trial-and-error part to produce a popular act. Experience is the best teacher, especially in the circus. It is why long-running television shows seem so much better in terms of production quality at the end than in the beginning.

You see this with Jordan Peterson. Here is a recent video of Peterson interviewing an up-and-coming political carny named James Lindsay. The difference between the two is striking because at this point, Peterson is an old hand. He has been doing his act for so long he no longer knows where the act ends, and he begins. Lindsay, on the other hand, is on his third act now, this one is something called “woke right”, so he is still working out the kinks in his performance.

Of course, it is possible that the reason Lindsay comes off as a crazy person is that he is suffering from some sort of mental illness. There are signs that he may be struggling to keep it together. The darting eyes and the facial tics suggest he is not entirely sure if what is coming out of his mouth is what he hears in his head. It does not help that it seems like his chin is retreating into his skull. He looks like a guy who spends far too much time with his model trains.

It is an interesting interview from the perspective of carny life. Usually, we get the stories of old carnies passing wisdom onto young carnies from the perspective of the old carny reflecting on his early career. In this video we get to be at the table as the old carny talks to the young carny, trying to help him out in his career. It is important to note that carnies are carnies all the time. It is a lifestyle choice. That means that even when they are talking shop, they are performing.

In the case of Peterson, his act is now familiar, and he has done it for so long that it feels completely natural. It is like how Kevin Costner no longer seems like a terrible actor because he has been doing the same act for decades. His robotic line reading is now part of the character we know as Kevin Costner. You see this with musicians like Bruce Springsteen, who are terrible singers, but their terribleness over a long period of time is now part of their appeal.

Now, if you look at Peterson when he was still working out the kinks in his act, you see the beginnings of the current act. There are the carefully considered facial expressions, the long contemplative pauses, and the endless word salad that his target audience naturally confuses with profundity. Of course, Peterson looks like he is still high from his weekend trip to Miami because he was probably taking drugs. This video was before he went to that mysterious Russian “detox” facility.

The comments in that old Peterson video are interesting. One commenter wrote, “I love how he´s always picking the water cup up but then becomes engaged in what he´s saying and ends up putting it down without having had a drink.” Peterson still does this bit when he has the prop available. Good carnies study their audience and that is what he is trying to tell Lindsay in that interview. The successful carny sticks with what works and drops the stuff that bombs.

James Lindsay is not Jordan Peterson and never will be. That is another thing about the successful carny. His act makes him a popular personality and it is his personality that becomes the main draw for the audience, not the act. The audience will tire of the bit eventually, but they will stick with a favored personality. Lindsay is simply too weird to have that sort of appeal. He is the guy who stands too close to you in the checkout line, not a guy you watch from the comfort of you livingroom.

In that interview, you see something else about carny life. Peterson is happy to bring on Lindsay because he knows Lindsay is a one hit wonder. Acts like his are props for the guys who have broken through and become established performers. Soon, people get bored of the “woke right’ nonsense. For now, old hands like Peterson can use the popularity of a guy like this in his own act. One of the cold hard truths about carny life is that there is no honor among carnies.

Another of those truths is that even the top acts in the circus run their course. Peterson is showing all the signs of a fading star. The culture is changing, so the old acts from the censorship era are not as edgy now. Peterson is an old crooner just as bands are growing their hair long and singing about drugs. The act is fine and still has its appeal, but it is no longer what the cool kids want. Another thing about carny life is that eventually, the dogs bark and the circus moves on.

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!

Western countries largely came into being after the Second World War in that their political and economic systems were formed up after the war. There was the aftermath of the war and the Cold War that shaped the political economy of the West. We still talk about “The West” in the 20th century sense of it, despite the fact that the Cold War is long over and many formerly communist countries are in the EU. The West is as much about political psychology as geography.

A part of that political psychology was a Marxist sense that the moral questions had been resolved, at least with regards to politics and economics. Social democracy was rebranded as liberal democracy in Europe and in the United States it was rebranded as democratic capitalism or free market capitalism. The mainstream political parties accepted the consensus on politics and economics but offered small alterations to it to distinguish themselves from the other parties.

In the United States, this meant that the two parties agreed on all the major items like dealing with the Russians but had different approaches to the same goal. In Europe, the main parties decorated themselves with things like environmentalism, socialism, and some cultural items, but they agreed on the most important items which were relations with the United States and anti-nationalism. The former was in response to communism and the latter was in response to fascism.

This is a highly simplified model of post-war reality, but useful in understanding the psychology of voters and the political class. The consensus and faith in it are what shaped politics until the current crisis. Politicians did not have to worry about policies or ideology, as the ideology was settled, so they just had to select from platforms that had been approved within the consensus. The voters showed their displeasure by voting against the incumbent or their satisfaction by voting for him.

Even in the multi-party system of Europe, voting was a binary thing. If the economy was good, then the parties that were associated with the status quo did well, but if the economy was bad, then those parties were punished. In the United States, you had the added aspect of party fatigue. Even in good times, a party that had been in power for too long would lose an election because the voters wanted a new look. Bill Clinton won in 1992 mostly due to this reason.

This worked fine if the public was satisfied with the consensus and no one was permitted to question the consensus. The fear of nuclear war solved the first part during the Cold War and credit money handled it after the Cold War. While there is always discontent, no matter how good things feel, it was never enough to cause any serious doubt about the status quo. The populist rumblings since the Cold War were marginalized by the media and political class.

That is where the second part of the model is important. The political classes in the West became increasing narrow after the Cold War. The seriousness of the situation in the Cold War required serious debate about the issues of the day, so the debate was open to a broader range of ideas. After the Cold War, triumphalism and the economic boom narrowed the range of tolerated opinion. The uniparty concept we see everywhere in the West is a product of this.

This is how the West has reached the current crisis. As the public has grown unsettled about public policy and the fruits of it, they find themselves with no reasonable options at the ballot box. The mainstream parties all hold the same views. This is especially obvious in Europe where parties that are allegedly polar opposites form governments, often as a way to exclude popular outsider parties. Germany and France now have governments without popular support as a result.

The root cause of the crisis in the West is that old Marxist line about once morality is settled, there is no need for politics. The Western consensus was a moral consensus, which means the politics within the consensus were performative. Since the end of the Second World War, the West did not have much in the way of politics, because everyone agreed on the important moral questions. After the Cold War, the moral consensus narrowed, and dissent was exiled.

The current crisis is due to elite moral consensus narrowing to a set of beliefs at odds with the sensibilities of the public. The moral consensus has collapsed with regards to the elites and the public. What the Cloud People believe is not only different from the beliefs of the people over whom they rule, the Dirt People, but it is hostile to the interests of the Dirt People. It is how the shuffling zombie that is the UK Prime Minister can boast about favoring aliens of British subjects.

It is why there is no solution within the democratic process. That process evolved to give the Dirt People choices approved by the Cloud People. There will never be an option to get rid of the Cloud People on the ballot. The point of the democratic process is to confirm to the Cloud People that they are the Cloud People. We see this with Trump, who is like a giant set upon by a massive swarm of bees. The democratic system will defend its master at any cost.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is the fact that the West has reached this crisis because the defenders of democracy are daring the people to do what is necessary for the will of the people to be respected by the state. The smug, soyish faces of the male politicians and the schoolmarmish demeaner of the females, reeks of contempt for the voters. They see the people as weak and contemptible for not doing what they should, in response to the elites.

Time will tell if this holds. The election results increasingly show that the public in the West do not like their options. As they search for alternatives, the system seeks to eliminate those options. Maybe the people will run out of excuses and rise up to do what they should have done long ago. Maybe Trump succeeds enough to destabilize the system to the point where it falters and is replaced. Maybe we just keep voting ourselves into civilizational collapse. Time will tell.

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 term “deep state” remains a popular way for newly awakened normies to think of how their government operates. It is not the people on the ballot at election time who are running things, but a shadowy cabal of people who operate outside the bounds of the political system. Whenever something goes wrong, they naturally assume it is the work of the deep state. The problem is that the deep state, as most people imagine it, does not exist. It is a useful fiction.

The dismantling of USAID is a good example. The reporting on it in the unofficial media made it seem as if this entity was controlling large swaths of the government, when in fact it was just a money laundering scheme. Instead of cleaning cash acquired through illegal means, it put government cash in the hands of media activists, lobbyists, not-for-profits, and policy shops tied to permanent Washington. It was a clearing house and networking hub for permanent Washington.

In a way, the economy of permanent Washington is something like the economies of ancient city states. Those city states operated what is called palace economies where agricultural products flowed into the palace of the ruler and were then distributed back to the populace as needed. Farmers, craftsmen, and traders maintained their own economy, but a substantial portion of their economic output flowed into the palace to be redistributed as the ruler saw fit.

That is how USAID functioned. It got tens of billions from Congress and used some of that to draw in tens of billions more from other sources in the government and private donors, which it then directed to friendly sources. This was not a formal scheme where they sat around in a hollowed-out volcano figuring out how to use the money to further their evil agenda. It was more like an extended network of friends who networked within this large community, underwritten by tax money.

Imagine if the Church of Scientology had infiltrated the government. Members got positions in the administrative state and the political system. They then directed money to organizations run by fellow cult members. Those organizations then used some of the money to lobby for more money from the system in the form of government contracts, but also by influence peddling to private actors. They would then organize these resources to control public policy.

That is the nature of the “deep state.” The people in it do not think of themselves as part of the deep state. From their perspective, they are just normal people working in the media, government, politics, and policy. Everyone they know is a normal person working in one of these areas. This is how they know they are normal and the people talking about the deep state are not normal. All the normal people they know agree with them that the deep state is a conspiracy theory.

As an example, look at the LinkedIn profile of Maggie Mitchell Salem, the current Executive Director of something called IRIS. That stands for Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services. It is an open borders not-for-profit located in Connecticut with a fifteen-million-dollar budget. According to the organization’s website, “IRIS inspired and is one of the seven organizations implementing a new national resettlement program, Welcome Corps.” They want your town full of Somalis.

Now, if you scan down Mx. Salem’s resume, you see that open borders is a new advocation for her. Five years ago, she was the Executive Director of something called the Qatar Foundation International. According to their website, they promote learning the Arabic language, using donations from the Qatari government. That is nonsense, of course, as its real purpose is to buy influence in Washington. They hire people like Mx. Salem to put their money in the right hands.

We know this from a story in the Tablet. According to that report, Mx. Salem was writing anti-Saudi stories for a man named Jamal Khashoggi, who was supposedly a Saudi journalist working for the Washington Post. He was a dissident, in that he did not like new ruler of Saudi Arabia. The Qataris do not like the Saudis, so they paid Mx. Salem to handle Mr. Khashoggi to place anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, the Washington Post.

If you scan down further in Mx. Salem’s resume, you will learn that she started out in life as a foreign service officer, stationed in Tel Aviv. You will note that technically, USAID was under the supervision of the State Department. Mx. Salem used her government job to cultivate friendships in the Middle East and in Washington, so that one day she could get one of those good jobs at good wages in the deep state. By all accounts, the Qataris are very generous with their American friends.

Eventually, the Saudis grew tired of seeing anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, so they kidnapped Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul and then chopped him up in their consulate. One of the reasons the Saudis are planning for a post-America world is they have grown weary of the perfidy of the deep state, which will fink on anyone for money. This is a feature of managerialism. Everyone is for sale, so anyone can buy what they want from the deep state.

This level of bungling by Mx. Salem in the dreaded private sector would have resulted in termination and banishment from the industry, but in the deep state where everyone knows your name, it is a minor bump in the road. She bounced over to the immigration rackets before getting a job in the Biden years running a not-for-profit in Tunisia and then back into the immigration rackets. The lines between the government and those who lobby the government are never very clear.

What you see in this one example is how the managerial state operates like a community that rules over the country. It is why voting does not matter, as the people running the thousands of entities that make up the system are always going to be people who have as their top priority the preservation of their class. It is not a deep state so much as a broad state that overlays everything. Every silo of power is controlled by people who believe the same things.

This is why the first bullet out of the Trump barrel this time was at USAID. It is also why they are attacking elite colleges like Harvard. These are important nodes of a system that organized the antibodies against him the first time. It is why they have systematically broken up the media connections within the government. The point is to destabilize and dismember this broad community of people who operate as the unofficial government of the American empire.

It sounds like an impossible task, given the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who make up this blob. The Khashoggi story, however, points to something else about this system. It is has grown increasingly incompetent and corrupt since the end of the Cold War. Hard times breed hard men and easy times breed perfidious women incapable of maintaining the structures of power. Trump is a symptom of a system that is collapsing in on itself.

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

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the film Raging Bull, a post about the old sci-fi series Babylon 5, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side, there are now weekly videos for those who like video. Subscribe here or here.

The story of Shiloh Hendrix has brought to the surface things that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. The most obvious is the general fatigue with regards to race among white people. The media is doing the usual point and shriek, expecting the lynch mob to chase after this woman, but instead money is flowing into her fundraising account with messages of support. The white population is using this event to make a point about race in America.

For most white people, this is not a moral issue. It is a practical issue. They wonder why we have Somalis in Minnesota. No one campaigned on bringing tribes of Somalis into the country and dumping them into white communities. No one was organizing pressure groups demanding the importation of Somalis. The people who made this decision never mentioned it to the public and the public was never consulted. Suddenly, we have this new problem, and we are expected to adjust to it.

Even putting aside the immigration issue, why are white people expected to adjust to black behavior at all? The core assumption of our racialized society is that it is the duty of whites to adjust to the other races. No one ever demands that the other races try to act white, as saying such a thing has been declared immoral. On the one hand whites are expected to venerate nonwhites, while on the other hand nonwhite are encouraged to harass and assault whites.

If you are white, a central part of your life is navigating around nonwhites. Maybe it is knowing where the black areas are, so you avoid crime. Maybe it is teaching your children about dealing with the nons in their school, so they do not get jammed up by the morality police. Maybe it is educating the old people in your life on how to spot Indian scammers. Of course, the background noise of the public square is the endless drone of race talk.

The question is how did it get to this? Like the Somalis in Minnesota, the public was never asked about any of this. The people who decided on the new rules never campaigned on them or asked for public support. They just did it. They kept doing it one court case, one new law at a time. The place to start is the landmark Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kramer, where the court declared that restrictive covenants violated the 14th Amendment.

In 1945, a black couple named J.D. and Ethel Shelley attempted to purchase a home in a white neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. The property was subject to a restrictive covenant that prohibited nonwhites from occupying the property. This was a deliberate setup to get another case in the system on this matter. McGhee v. Sipes was a similar case out of Michigan. This is a common trick by the usual suspects to help fast track a case to the Supreme Court.

Of course, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the blacks, declaring that while restrictive covenants do not violate the rights of the parties to the contract, any enforcement of these covenants violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In other words, homeowners are free to make any rules they like about who can live in their community, but no court will enforce those rights if they discriminate on race.

What the court did is shift from a position where it enforces private contracts to a position where it decides if the contract is acceptable. In one decision we went from a world where private parties were free to make contracts with one another for whatever reasons they liked to a world where private parties must seek permission from the state before entering into a contract. If the court could selectively enforce contracts, as in the Shelley case, then they could do it with every type of contract.

This marked the beginning of the general shift away from a rights-based society where the state is a neutral arbiter in disputes between citizens to a permission-based society in which the state regulates the behavior of citizens to achieve goals never imagined or considered in the Constitution. Ten years after Shelley, the Court sealed the deal with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, where they enshrined this entirely new moral paradigm into law.

Brown took the basic concept of Shelley, where the courts get to decide which contracts to enforce, and extended it to the law. Specifically, they declared that any law or private action that discriminates is assumed to be unconstitutional. Any law or behavior that furthers an open and inclusive society is assumed to be constitutional. This has been the moral framework of race communism ever since. The reason Shiloh Hendrix is famous now is because of this moral framework.

The great frustration that white people sense in that clip of Ms. Hendrix using colorful euphemisms is the result of the American false consciousness. We are regularly told we live in a rights-based society, that we are free to live our lives as we see fit, but in reality, we live in a permission-based society. If anything you do or say is deemed to be discriminatory by the courts or someone empowered by the courts, you can find yourself in a jungle of moral contradictions.

It is a good example of how reform within the rules is probably impossible. To fix the race issue it would require tearing down this moral edifice erected by the courts that now dominates the old Constitutional arrangement. That means removing the moral authority of the courts entirely. To do that would require a revolution in the law where lawyers cease to be a secular clerisy. Such a revolution in the law will require a revolution in the streets.

That aside, the tension between how we want to act and how we are told to act is why Ms. Hendrix blew her top in the park. She does not want to live in a world where she and her children are harassed by Africans. She thinks she has the right to not be harassed by Africans. She does not live in that world as the people in charge think she should be harassed by Africans. That video exists because we are about to find out who shall overcome whom.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 03m05s The Time Travelers
• 11m20s O Canada
• 19m04s England votes
• 28m00s Granny Groomers
• 30m46s Profitable parole
• 33m49s The cat killer
• 35m44s Signoff with The Bee Gees  

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Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers, from your vernally genial host John Derbyshire with news and views from the week just passed.

Yes, it’s springtime. Walking Basil yesterday morning, May 1st, was a delight. The sky was clear, the sun bright, flowers in the gardens, blossoms on the trees. Not much birdsong; but I walk him early, so perhaps the birds were still asleep.

It was a marvellous awakening from dull, chilly February and March and even, this year, April. If you’ll forgive me a flight of metaphorical fancy, it brought to mind the political transformation of our nation this past three months.

It’s only been that long since the Biden Presidency, and the contrast is all too plain. We’ve gone from the sinister grim faces of Inner Party apparatchiks like Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland to the easy fresh openness of Marco Rubio and Pam Bondi; from the President answering five questions from reporters in nine open press cabinet meetings across his entire term in office to the President answering nearly a hundred questions from the press during just his first three such meetings; from brazen lies like “we can’t reduce illegal immigration until Congress passes new laws” to plain talk about the need to deport illegal aliens.

All right, my metaphor’s a bit of a stretch. It was inspired by Kamala Harris this Wednesday night beseeching her fellow Democrats to act like elephants, I forget why.

I shall get my feet back on solid ground shortly and discuss the elections we’ve seen this week. First, though, while I’m still floating free in the rhetorical sky, a segment about  time travel.

02 — The Time Travellers.     The contrast I touched on there, between how politics at the highest level in our public life was presented to us just a few months ago and how it is being presented today, came to me again yesterday evening after I watched two video clips.

The first clip concerned the SAVE Act — that’s S-A-V-E, SAVE, stands for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” — passed in the House of Representatives April 10th, now waiting on a vote in the Senate.

The SAVE Act seeks, and here I quote the Act itself, quote:

To amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require proof of United States citizenship to register an individual to vote in elections for Federal office, and for other purposes.

End quote.

Imagine that! — a law requiring voters in federal elections to prove they are citizens — exactly the kind of thing Adolf Hitler would have pushed through the Reichstag, amirite?

As I said, the SAVE Act will come up for a vote in the Senate. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Party leader in the Senate, had words to say about that.

[Clip:] On the one side, Donald Trump recently issued an Executive Order that will coerce states to prevent millions of Americans from voting. On the other Republicans in Congress are pushing the SAVE Act — one of the most destructive, dangerous voter-suppression bills in recent memory. It is very reminiscent of Jim Crow.

That’s what Republicans want to do. They want to restore J… not only restore Jim Crow in the South: they want to have Jim Crow spread from one end of this country to the other.

It will not happen! It. Will. Not. Happen. Let me be clear: I will not let this noxious bill — the SAVE Act — become law. Every Senate Democrat, every single one of us, is united against it. They need sixty votes: the SAVE Act is dead on arrival.

I’d like to say it louder so my friends in the House and in the Right Wing over here can hear. The SAVE Act is dead on arrival.]

As so often nowadays, I found myself wondering whether perhaps Schumer is a time traveller from the past, accidentally dropped into the year 2025. “Restore Jim Crow in the South”? It’s been long decades since there was any significant political momentum to do that (and, by the way, the people pushing to do it back then were all Democrats).

It was like hearing a politician here, now, in 2025, talk about the Missile Gap, or prayer in public schools, or fluoride in the water supply, or telling us how much he’d enjoyed that Doris Day movie. Where, I found myself wondering, does Chuck Schumer stand on Free Silver, or Prohibition, or the Neutrality Acts?

Where this current SAVE Act itself is concerned, the feds are lagging behind the states. Proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting are being debated and enacted in state legislatures all over — most recently in Wyoming. You know Wyoming: that hotbed of nostalgia for Jim Crow, where Doris Day movies still play to crowded theaters.

I get that same time-traveller vibe any time I hear someone refer to this or that mild-mannered Congresscritter or entrepreneur as a fascist or a Nazi. There seem to be large numbers of my fellow-citizens who don’t know of any political horror shows that have taken place in the world since 1945. Or are they also time travellers?

That’s how politics at the highest level in our public life is all too often presented to us by those hostile to the current administration. I mentioned that as one side of a contrast I’d noted after watching two video clips.

The first clip was that one of Chuck Schumer fretting about the return of Jim Crow. (Concerning which, I recommend for further listening or reading my ruminations on July 30th 2021 under the heading “Is Jim Snow worse than Jim Crow?” If you prefer to listen rather than read, they start 1m13s into that podcast.)

All right, that Chuck Schumer clip was one side of the contrast. What was the other?

It was actually part of a TV program, Jesse Watters Primetime at Fox News, aired last night, May 1st. Jesse sat down with Elon Musk and the entire DOGE crew to hear about what Musk’s people do and how they do it. It’s a nearly half-hour clip (the first 27m33s here), but I promise it won’t try your patience.

President Warren Gamaliel Harding described his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as, quote, “the smartest gink I know,” end quote. I feel sure that the great Harding, if he were among us today, would bestow that praise on Elon Musk. Perhaps Donald Trump already has.

So here was Musk, and here were Musk’s people. I counted sixteen of them around the conference table in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building — yes, including Big Balls — who, we have now learned, is just nineteen years old.

They were all smart, cheerful, and well-spoken; and they were all at pains to tell us that the federal workers they were engaged with were mostly honest, industrious, and keen to help the DOGE project. Sure, said Musk, there were conflicts: but it was like how, when you read history, it’s the wars that stand out, yet most history is not wars.

I strongly recommend that you catch that second clip, of Jesse Watters, Musk, and DOGE. Just don’t watch it too soon after the Chuck Schumer clip, or the latest Kamala Harris speech, or any videos of any principals in the previous administration — Mayorkas, Garland, Blinken, or Biden himself. The contrast will throw you across the room, you might break a bone.

03 — O Canada.     Elsewhere — I mean, outside the U.S.A. — it’s a season of elections. Yesterday, May 1st, there were local-government elections in England. Tomorrow, May 3rd, there is a general election in Australia. Next Wednesday, May 7th, the College of Cardinals meets in Rome to elect a new Pope. It’s elections all over.

The election most in the news this week has of course been the one conducted on Monday in Canada.

Canada’s legislative system is parliamentary, on the British model. There’s a lower chamber, the House of Commons, with 343 members. Whichever member’s party has a majority, or can cobble one together with smaller parties, that member becomes the Prime Minister, essentially Chief Executive. There’s an upper house, the Senate, but its members are not elected. They’re appointed, in effect if not in precise constitutional language, by the Prime Minister.

So on Monday our neighbors to the North voted to fill those 343 seats in Parliament and so, by implication, to choose the next Prime Minister of Canada.

Which party won this election? No party. As often happens with parliamentary systems, no single party got a majority of those 343 seats. The smallest possible majority would have been 172. The incumbent party, the Liberals, came close with 169; their main challenger, the Conservatives, got 144; the remaining 30 seats went to fringe parties, one or more of whom the Liberals will have to woo into a coalition.

This election was newsier than the average for Canada, although to be sure that’s not saying a lot. The winning incumbent party, the Liberals, had been limping along badly for a couple of years under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, culminating most recently with resignations and some scandal. With an election coming up, the Conservative opposition looked set fair to win easily, perhaps in a landslide.

Things got so bad for the Liberals that in January this year Trudeau announced that he’d resign from the Party leadership and the Prime Ministership, and wouldn’t run for a Parliament seat in this week’s election. In mid-March Mark Carney won the party leadership election and became Prime Minister.

Wait a minute. If the Liberal Party was in such dire straits just a few weeks ago, how come they defeated the Conservatives on Monday? OK, they didn’t exactly get a landslide win, nor even a clear majority. They got 25 more seats than the Conservatives, though; and to add insult to injury, the Conservative Party leader lost his own seat, which he’d held for twenty years. What brought about such a reverse?

It wasn’t a what, it was a who. Donald Trump and his policies un-nerved the Canucks. His tariffs on Canadian goods were a negative for the anemic Canadian economy, but it was likely his repeated suggestions that we might annex Canada as our 51st state that turned off more voters.

The Conservative Party guy who lost his seat was no Trump, but he was Trump-ish, certainly way more so than the Liberal chap.

I must say, I always thought that notion of Canada as our 51st state was seriously dumb. Leaving aside the feelings of Canadian voters, why on earth would we want a state that big? Canada’s not just fourteen times as big as our current biggest state, it’s actually slightly bigger than the entire U.S. of A. — one and a half percent bigger. Population-wise, we’d be taking in more people than there are currently in California, our most populous state. What a stupid idea!

It would have made more sense — not much more, but more — to propose adding Canada’s ten provinces and three territories separately to our fifty states, getting us up to sixty-three.

Or perhaps we could just pick up one or two. There has been some talk of Alberta Province, which was solid for the Conservatives, seceding from Canada. Hey, we’ll take ’em. We might take British Columbia, too, if we could exclude Vancouver.

If you ignore the regions with hardly any population — which in Canada, means a lot of territory — the country breaks into snobs and slobs not unlike the U.S.A.

The eastern parts — Ontario, Quebec, much of the Maritime Provinces — is loaded up with woke urbanite snobs: Trump-haters yearning for a green economy, open borders, and probably — I admit I haven’t researched this point — sex-change operations on teenagers. So is a wee fragment of the far West, the bit called “Vancouver.”

Vancouver aside, though, west of Lake Winnipeg are a million or so square miles inhabited mainly by slobs — normies who’d prefer fossil fuels, demographic stability, and teenagers left the way God made them.

So my advice to our President would be: Cut out the stupid b-s about a 51st state bigger than the current fifty. Just do some gentle wooing of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and B.C. (neglecting Vancouver). There’s gold in them thar hills — there actually, literally is, and a whole lot of oil and natural gas, too …

04 — England votes.     Thursday this week — yesterday, as I speak … there were local elections in England. Not in Scotland, Wales, nor any part of Ireland, so far as I know: this was England only.

And it wasn’t a general election, for politicians with national authority. These were local elections. The structure of local government in England is complicated, and I won’t inflict a description of it on you. If you’re curious, three or four hours’ browsing on the internet may clarify the matter somewhat.

Just to give you the flavor, I note that yesterday’s election was for people to govern in fourteen county councils, eight unitary councils, one metropolitan borough council, and the Isle of Scilly.

You know what counties are, of course. We have counties here in the States. I live in Suffolk County, New York. What the heck is a “unitary council,” though? If you really want to know, here’s the definition from Wikipedia, quote:

In England, a unitary authority or unitary council is a type of local authority responsible for all local government services in an area. They combine the functions of a non-metropolitan county council and a non-metropolitan district council, which elsewhere in England provide two tiers of local government.

End quote. Got that? There’ll be a quiz period afterwards.

The Isle of Scilly? Don’t ask.

Anyway, there were these local elections, with almost no consequences for the balance of power in the U.K. government. I have to say “almost” because, folded in with the strictly local contests, there was a special election for one seat in Parliament, the member for that seat having resigned after being found guilty and sentenced to ten weeks in jail for beating up one of his constituents.

Local as all the other contests were, they excited much interest because most of the candidates advertised their affiliation to one or other of the national parties. The vote counts therefore offered a snapshot of public feeling about those parties, most particularly the two big ones: the Labour Party, which won last July’s general election; and the Conservative Party, which had held effective power for fourteen years under five Prime Ministers prior to that election.

The Labour Party, as I said, won last year’s general election and came to power under its leader, Sir Keir Starmer. This was widely understood to be a negative vote, though: not so much a vote for Labour as a vote against the Tories — that is, the Conservatives — who, in those fourteen years of power, had conserved nothing at all.

If that is right, then Labour came into power already unpopular, just less unpopular than the Tories. These local elections yesterday, with some due allowance for a lower turnout than in general elections, are being scrutinized for signs as to the relative current popularities. Have the Tories recovered some of their support? Has Labour lost some of theirs?

And, perhaps most keenly, what about the Reform Party? This is the populist-nationalist party headed by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage — the nearest Britain has to a Donald Trump. Reform came out of last year’s general election with five seats in Parliament, its first seats ever won by election. (One Tory member had switched to Reform prior to the 2024 campaign.)

Reform went through some stumbles and some squabbling later last year, but it seems now to be shaping up as a robust contender for power. That’s my impression: did yesterday’s local-election voters see it the same way?

It looks as though they did. Friday afternoon as I record this we are still getting a scatter of late results, but it’s clear that — I’ll just quote here from the London Independent, quote:

The party has taken overall majority of Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Kent, and Nottinghamshire councils, which were all previously Tory-run. Reform has also taken control of Durham and Doncaster councils, where Labour was previously the biggest party.

End quote. Derbyshire — hey!

For a crowning triumph, Reform also won that special election for a seat in Parliament. True, the Reform candidate won it by only six votes after a recount, but the winner last July, Mike Amesbury of the Labour Party — the fellow who beat up one of his constituents — had a majority of over fifteen thousand votes back then.

If Reform can rein in the Third-Party hedging and squabbling, they may reduce the Conservatives to a fringe party — a well-deserved fate after fourteen years of almost nothing. It would have been absolutely nothing had they not acted on the Brexit referendum: but they managed to turn even that into a pile of dog poop.

And heaven help the Brits if Sir Keir Starmer stays in power much longer. There is no mistaking his hatred for his own people. So keen is he to speed up their replacement, he has launched a scheme to pay landlords — anyone with a house to let — full rent from government funds (which is to say, from taxpayers’ pockets) guaranteed for five years if they will take in illegal aliens.

This, at a time when young English couples struggle to find a rent they can afford and have given up all hope of buying a house.

And the numbers of illegals coming in across the English Channel continues to swell. The number arriving in 2025 passed the ten thousand mark April 28th; last year it did not pass that mark until May 24th. Sir Keir makes occasional noises about “smashing the gangs,” by which he means the gangs smuggling the illegals over, but nothing happens.

Perhaps, like his four predecessors as Prime Minister, Sir Keir has no idea what to do about the invasion; or perhaps he has gone full Mayorkas, quietly rejoicing to see it happen. Neither thing will win him any popularity, except among those who wish to see England destroyed.

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

Imprimis:  By now I think we have all heard about the “grooming gangs” of Britain: gatherings of immigrant Pakistani Muslims gang-raping young English girls — sometimes pre-teens — they had lured into their apartments.

That was the descriptor favored by the British media: “grooming gangs” — as if they were teaching these children the right way to do their hair and nails. It helped to minimize the atrocity of the thing, and minimizing it was what the authorities wanted.

If the truth about the rape gangs became generally known, that might incite Islamophobia — which is, as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has repeatedly told us, the worst thing in the world.

Something similar is going on in Sweden; but the victims here are from a different age cohort. Spiked Online reports that helpless old women all over that country have been sexually assaulted by those assigned to care for them.

There, too, there’s been an effort to cover up the horrors. Why? asks Spiked. Lack of respect for the elderly, they suggest. Then, edited quote:

But there’s another equally troubling reason. And that is the fact that some of the carers accused of abuse and rape come from migrant backgrounds. It seems more than plausible that too many have been wary of bringing the cases to light out of fears of stoking a racist or anti-immigrant backlash among the public.

End quote.

Always eager to help, I have a suggestion for the Swedish authorities and media. Following the British example, they should address the issue in soft, unthreatening language.

Don’t describe the perps here as “rapists,” or — heaven forbid! — mention their national origins or religion of preference. Just call them “Granny Groomers.”

Item:  It is of course a feature of modern Progressivism, a.k.a. “woke,” to favor criminals over law-abiding people wherever possible. After all, it’s not a criminal’s fault he’s a criminal; it’s something society did to him — something our shamefully white, Christian, male-dominated, heterosexual, over-policed society did. The so-called “criminal” is in fact a victim.

Here’s a little photo-montage to make your blood run cold: fourteen of the sixteen members of New York State’s Parole Board. Eight of the fourteen are female; six are black or mulatto; over-representation in both cases.

These parolers have a strong tendency to be way out on the far Left, like the New York State governors who appoint them. Sample quote concerning the current New York Governor, from the Daily Mail story I’m reading, quote:

Hochul has filled five seats and the board is still not at max capacity. Some of her appointees were denied for being too [inner quote] “closely associated with the system we seek to reform,” [inner quote] a caucus said at the time.

End quote.

Members of the New York board are each paid $190,000 a year for their services. There are some side rewards, too: One current board member, name of Tana Agostini, married a murderer while he was incarcerated and then pressured the board to release him, which of course they did.

I vented my disgust with and loathing of the parole system online back in 2009. People emailed in to tell me that parole varies by state and that some states — he named Virginia — had abolished it altogether.

That was 2009. I don’t know the current state of play. I hope more states have abolished parole, and that yet more will do so in future. Perhaps one day all states will have abolished it. I feel sure, though, that New York will be the last. Grrrr …

Item:  On an theme somewhat related to the previous item, I just read a post about the cat-killer of Santa Ana in California.

This guy, name of Alejandro Mayorkas … Sorry! I got my Alejandros mixed up: This guy, name of Alejandro Acosta Oliveros, lures cats with offers of food; then, when they get close enough, stomps them to death. He’s known to have murdered a lot of cats, and went to jail for it; but local Progressives got him released.

Yes, it’s a horrible story; but at least he’s just one crazy guy. Back in 2014, as a reminder that some aspects of human nature have improved across history, I quoted the following passage from Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Re-quote:

In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, [inner quote] “The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” [End inner quote]

End quote.

It’s sometimes hard to believe, I know, but we have improved.

06 — Signoff.     That’s it, listeners and readers. Thank you for your time and attention, and please allow me to remind you yet again that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to Chronicles magazine, who publish my work. Thank you!

Signoff music? May 1st? The BeeGees, of course.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

Something that has gone largely unnoticed is that the people who used to litter the streets screaming “racism” have disappeared. They have not gone away, but they have suddenly been marginalized. They spend their days on sites like Bluesky wondering why no one seems to care what they have to say anymore. The sites that used to pay for them to be pests are no longer interested in their material.

One possible reason for this is that racism may have run its course. This novel moral concept that emerged a century ago may have finally burned itself out in the last great moral panic. White people are no longer concerned that their observations of the world may be at odds with the morality of these strange people who demanded we worship a violent drug addict like George Floyd.

It is hard to imagine, given that racism as a sin has been with us since anyone can remember, but it is a novel concept. A century ago, few people would have understood the word at all, much less incorporated the concept. Even fifty years ago it was possible to dismiss the idea. In the long history of human civilization, this weird idea is nothing more than a strange middle-class fad.

The fad may have come to an end. Trump whacking away at things like affirmative action and disparate impact, with little howling from any one could signal something bigger than the death of the racism concept. It may signal the end to the long experiment to overcome the natural diversity of man. The search for racial equality, like the search for bigfoot, may be a fool’s errand coming to an end.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• Race & Racism (Link)
• 20^th Century Racism
• Civil Rights
• Conservatives (Link)
• Race Communism

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

If you are a Twitter user, one of the things you may have noticed is that the site is increasingly difficult to use as intended. The “slop accounts” fill the site with posts intended to game the payment system. It is also infested with “influencers” who, like the slop accounts, seek to gain attention, but instead of doing it for money, they do it for the “clout.” As a result, many popular accounts have reduced their activity on the site, which magnifies the problem.

This is not just a Twitter issue. YouTube suffers from the same problem as artificial intelligence makes it easier for slop merchants to churn out content. They use AI to create a slideshow and voiceover about a topic. It is not a video in the conventional sense, but it is close enough for their purposes. If you watch a video on your favorite historical figure, you will be flooded with artificial intelligence slop videos in your recommended feed. If you are not careful, you end up awash in these slop videos.

Like the slop on Twitter, the slop on YouTube is mostly about gaming the payment system, and most of it originates from India. Even a small amount of money from slop farming goes a long way in a land without indoor toilets. The advance of artificial intelligence might end Indian call centers and coding shops, but it will come with the proliferation of Indian slop centers. The big social media platforms will be swamped by this content unless they figure out how to stop it.

The Google search engine experience suggests it is unlikely that the big social platforms will effectively combat the slop. For the most part, Google is a useless search engine now because they had to implement so many filters to combat the scammers, that the outputs often make little sense. The reason they had to do this was the scammers were finding ways to get their scams at the top of search results, rather than the legitimate results.

It was not helped by Google’s attempt to ban unapproved opinions during the latest spasm of progressive madness. Ironically, you now need artificial intelligence to find things you used to use Google to find. The Brave browser search engine now provides an AI answer at the top of the search results. Most of the time, the AI response is close enough, unless the question is on the list of banned ideas. Even AI has been rigged by our progressive theocrats.

It is not just Indian scammers that are ruining the public square. A strange phenomenon on YouTube is the reaction video. Video makers with no talent create videos of themselves reacting to other videos. They make goofy faces and add inane commentary to reach the required length to monetize the video. The point is to attract the attention of people interested in the primary content. It is a way to exploit the fair use doctrine to steal the work of others for private gain.

Now that reaction videos have proven successful, a new genre has emerged where the YouTuber makes a reaction video to a reaction video. Suppose a home cook makes a recipe video, and a professional chef then makes a reaction video to it. The new “reaction to the reaction” YouTuber then makes a reaction video to the chef reacting to the original video. It is not hard to see where this is heading. It will not be long before it is reaction videos all the way down.

All of this relies on systemic theft. The Twitter slop merchants steal content like images and videos and then use it in their slop posts. If you are at a public event and video something amusing to post online, you can be sure that an Indian slop farmer will steal it, remove any references to you, and then add it to their slop stream. This is why so many video clips now have highly intrusive watermarks. It is an effort to combat the Indian slop farmers.

Ironically, the deluge of slop that promise to swamp the internet was made possible by what made social media possible. The big platforms made their billions stealing information from their users and then selling it to marketing firms and governments. Free email was about harvesting the user’s private correspondence. Your search and browsing history were used without your permission. Big tech ushered in the collapse of personal property, and now they are the victims of the same theft.

The bigger problem is the tragedy of the commons. The internet is the largest public common in human history. While it is not entirely free to access, it is effectively free to use. The Indian scammer does not have to pay for each scam text message he sends to your grandmother. He does not have to pay for each slop tweet he posts on Twitter. The cost to him as a scammer is the same as for you and every other person accessing the digital public common.

The infrastructure providers have an interest in their part of the internet, but they do not have a stake in the public square. The social media firms have an interest in their piece of the common, but their reason to exist is as an open forum for all to enter, so walling it off is against their interests. The public square portion of the digital commons is like an orchard owned in common. Everyone has a reason to take from it, but no one has a reason to protect it.

We will probably end up with a private internet for the same reason we have gated communities, concierge healthcare, and homeowner associations. The open society benefits only those with no stake in it. They take what they want and then move on to the next host. The only defense is the closed society in which admission is determined by private interests. The great democratization of the public square will end with a great feudalization of it.

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!

A recurring feature of human society is the class of people who set themselves apart from the rest of society to function as the keepers of public morality. They usually set themselves apart through self-denial, which is a way of showing themselves to be purer than the rest of the lot. It is thought that the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, for example, is a way to set the Jewish people apart from the rest of the people by abstaining from what was considered a dirty animal.

This is why every religion has both dietary laws and prohibitions on certain types of common behavior. It may be that these only apply to the holy men, as was common in the pre-Christian world. They can also be standards against which people measure themselves, as in the Christian world. The ancient shaman was someone expected to sublimate his urges as a sign of his purity. Christians, of course, have many rules that are guides for adhering to Christian ethics.

In the post-Christian age, the priestly class follows a similar pattern. The people we call the managerial elite and their performative proxies in the media have many ways of demonstrating their purity. In fact, we have the phrase “purity spiral” to describe when a group of these people engage in a competition in which they try to prove they are the purest of the bunch. Many of the moral panics over the last decades have been the result of purity spirals that spun out of control.

The public act of piety is another feature of human society. The great man may not be in the priestly class, but he could show his piety by supporting them in some way or by engaging in a public ritual directed by the priestly class. Scipio Africanus was famous for his public acts of piety, which he used to inoculate himself against claims of civic impropriety and corruption. In the Christion era, great men would build cathedrals and monasteries to demonstrate their fidelity to the Church.

We see the same thing in this age. Public figures kneeling in front of the cameras, allegedly in solidarity with the blacks, was no different than the ancients sacrificing a bull to the gods. When they forced their employees to kneel, it was another way of signaling their virtue to each other and the rest of us. The Covid panic, in many respects, was nothing more than a purity spiral among the managerial elite. It is why it had so many outward symbols of obedience to the god of Covid.

Another aspect of this is that the people performing these rituals in public or setting themselves apart through self-denial is that they probably do not think too much about the truth of this stuff. The kneelers did not think much about it at all. They just assumed that they had to show their fidelity to that which everyone else in their class was now sure would provide forgiveness. They were kneeling in order to gain forgiveness on behalf of the sinners called the masses.

You see it in this strange clip of the newly elected leader of Canada. His first public statement after the election is about Gaia. “We have an enormous opportunity to bring climate change into the heart of every financial decision.” After some meaningless managerial drivel, he then promises, “We can deliver the net zero world that you’ve demanded, and that our future generations deserve.” He is saying that he will lead his people to the promised land of salvation.

Of course, his faith is not in God, in the Christian sense, but in people like himself who show themselves as our superior by believing in boutique ideas like climate change and a “net-zero world.” In the ancient world, the priestly class would identify themselves with ornaments on their person. In the Christian age, the priest has an easily recognizable costume. In this age, the priestly class sets itself apart from the rest of us by babbling about nonsense things like climate change.

Note that in this age, the pointlessness of the belief is important. Jews not eating fish or seafood had some practical benefit. Cleanliness had utility. The rituals of the Christian churches provided a way to bind the people to one another in a common ethical framework and common purpose. Other than setting the believer apart, the boutique beliefs of our self-declared priests are pointless. The sanctification of George Floyd appealed to our betters because of its absurdity.

Another reason why holy men find ways to set themselves apart as purer, cleaner, and less human than the rest is they have an underlying contempt for man. The shaman is always warning about the dangers of enjoying life. The priest is always looking for a sinner to torment. The modern clerisy is always seeking some way to display their contempt for the pleasures of regular people. They set themselves apart by setting themselves above that which they despise, their fellow man.

It is why the modern priests are more lethal than those of the past. They inherited the Christian distain for this world and the joys within it. Then they bolted onto it a class consciousness based in contempt for the people over whom they rule. Add in the minority’s natural paranoia and the result is a ruling class that seems to be hellbent on pulling the roof down on Western society. It is not that they hate you. They hate everyone, but they really hate you.

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 Trump administration has reached the one-hundred-day point, an historically important point in every presidency. For Trump it is uniquely important as his second term is something of a do-over of his first term. Trump 2.0 is supposed to be a better, improved version of the original, having had a break to learn from the mistakes of the first term and having spent four years under assault from The Blob. This one-hundred-day mark is one of the most important since FDR.

Roosevelt is a good comparison, as what Trump is trying to do is usher in a new period for the country that closes the books on the managerial era that started under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. It is Roosevelt that gave us this concept of the first one hundred days as a measure of a president. Roosevelt was the new model President for the new model age, one that was active and ambitious, using all the powers of the executive to effectuate change for the people.

There are a lot of parallels between the MAGA and New Deal era, but there is a crucial difference and that is The Blob. Whether they understood it or not, the Roosevelt project was about laying the foundation on which The Blob would be built. The Blob being the vast managerial state that operates outside government and that has subsumed the political system. The army of experts Roosevelt brought to Washington to deal with the Depression created the managerial state.

In contrast, MAGA is about swinging a wrecking ball through the managerial state to remove its tentacles from the throat of the American people. The subtext to the MAGA movement is that this collection of people is responsible for the decline and removing them will restore the conditions in which the people can flourish. While FDR promised a new framework in which the people can flourish, Trump promises to tear down that framework so the people can flourish.

Therein lies the major difference between Roosevelt and Trump. The former did not have an established organized system to obstruct him. The old order was disorganized and discredited. It was ready for a new beginning. Trump, in contrast, has a paranoid and highly organized old order that sees Trump not as an agent of renewal but as a threat to its existence. The Blob views the strong executive, any strong executive, as a threat to its existence, so it will fight to the death.

Unlike FDR, where the rules were being written as needed, Trump is dealing with a system so laden down by rules that even the most skillful manager in the system can only hope to know a part of them. This is the primary defense mechanism of managerialism, a system of rules that operates as defense in depth. Even if one can figure out how to get around and through the rules toward a goal, the rules reform around you like antibodies. You are simply assimilated.

You see this with immigration. The Trump people are appealing to an old law to expeditiously remove criminal aliens. On the surface this is a clever use of the existing rules to achieve a goal contrary to the whims of the system. The court system, however, has now wrapped its tentacles around the Trump people, dragging them into the swamp of endless litigation, court cases, appeals and re-appeals. The clever end run using an old law has led to a new thicket of rules and process.

This raises another parallel for Trump. From the perspective of Washington, Trump is something like Jugurtha, the Numidian king who was a thorn in the side of Rome from 160 BC to 104 BC. Numidia was in North Africa, which was not controlled by the Romans at the time. Jugurtha was unusually skilled at exploiting the moral weaknesses of the Roman elite to get what he wanted from Rome. He came to symbolize what was wrong with the Roman system.

For example, after his first war with Rome, Jugurtha offered to settle things peacefully and walked away with a highly favorable deal from Rome. Bribery was assumed to be the cause, so the local Roman commander was summoned to Rome to face corruption charges and Jugurtha was invited to give testimony. Jugurtha bribed Roman officials who then vetoed the whole thing. In other words, Jugurtha bribed Roman officials to get out of a bribery scandal.

What Jugurtha represented was not an external threat to Rome in the conventional sense, but an existential threat. His existence suggested an irreconcilable flaw in the Roman system. As a result, the Romans determined to eliminate Jugurtha and the tool they used was a man named Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. Known to us now as Sulla, he was a gifted general who beat Jugurtha at his own game, by getting one of Jugurtha’s allies to turn on him.

Sulla was also a key figure in the long political struggle between the optimates and populares factions at Rome. The former were the Cloud People of the day, while the latter were the Dirt People. This dispute was due in large part to the corruption among the Roman elite. Sulla eventually revived the office of the dictator to purge the elite of corruption, reform the Roman constitutional laws, restore the supremacy of the senate and, interestingly, limit the power of the consuls.

This is the fork in the road for Trump. He can be like Jugurtha and continue to try and exploit gaps in the managerial system to get what he wants, or he can take on the system itself through the use of hard power. In the modern sense, this means defying the courts and using the law to drive off the people who think litigation against Trump is a proper use of their time. In other words, Trump must become the sort of dictator his opponents claim, to restore republican rule.

Historical comparisons are never perfect, and Trump is certainly not Sulla, but the underlying comparison still works. If there is any hope of saving the United States from plunging into the eternal darkness, the problems created by the discredited managerial system must be quickly addressed. This mean rapidly clearing out the alien population, restoring normal economic policies and withdrawing from the many outposts of the Global American Empire.

These are not things possible within the rules because the rules are designed to prevent such an outcome. This means these changes must not only happen outside the rules, but in direct contradiction of the rules. There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do, which is the core motivation of the people called the right. The results we see and hate are the point of the system, so the system must change.

That can only happen against the will of the system, because the people in the system have anchored their lives to assumption that the system will never change. This is the problem Sulla faced and the problem Jugurtha was able to exploit. Within every corrupt political system there is a Jugurtha and a Sulla. The question is which one emerges victorious, and this is the question at Trump’s 100th day mark. Will Donald Trump be forgotten as Jugurtha or will be he remembered as Sulla.

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