This Week’s Show
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This weekend is the official launch of summer in America. It does not feel like the first weekend of summer, but that is probably due to the weather. It has been cool and rainy here for most of spring. Even so, it is the start of the summer season. That means the A-list fabricators will be taking off, leaving the media mendacity to the second string for the next few months. The quality of lies will be low.
It will be interesting to see if the Trump admin maintains the pace. The last four months has been a whirlwind. This week we got the South Africa stuff, which is one of those things that no one thought possible six months ago. The Overton window is moving so quickly it is hard to keep up with it. Now that official Washington is heading off for the summer, it will be interesting to see if the admin takes a break
The other thing to watch for this summer is if the crazies get brought out of storage to riot somewhere. If you scan Bluesky, they are depressed. The money dried up and then the jobs dried up. Now they are left to trade scare stories to one another in the weird echo chamber that is Bluesky. If it is an Orange Man Summer, the fever swamp could be on suicide watch by August.
Normally there would not be a show this week, as the Friday before a holiday weekend is a good time for a break. I had some time to kill, so I threw something together that was light and not too taxing. It is a good time to relax and not think about the madness of this age, so the show is easy listening. I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and thank you for reading and listening.
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This Week’s Show
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For a while, it seemed like the human sciences might finally close the gap between metaphysics and morality that has plagued us for so long. The age of ideology has relied upon the blurry, unclear understanding of human nature to get away with moral systems that are objectively inhuman. If the sciences could clear up certain things about the human condition, then it would force the ideologues to rethink their claims about how humans ought to act and organize.
The ideologues had an answer to this and that was to declare much of the human sciences haram. The crazies were sent out to proliferate the term “race science” which simply means any science that contradicts the one true faith. The human biodiversity guys never got their head around it and as a result that scene has receded into the shadows of the internet. The people in the professional sciences took the path blazed by conservatives and bent the knee to the crazies.
Team science, in their shadowy warrens on the internet and secret gatherings within the institutions, takes solace in the belief that reality is that thing which does not go away when you stop believing in it. Eventually, the reality of the human condition, as understood by science, will prevail over the increasingly bizarre claims that we see from the ideologues. After all, math must eventually prevail over the people who think you are assigned a sex at birth.
That is most certainly true to a degree. The great snapback we are seeing in public attitudes on a range of issues is due to the excesses of the crazies. It is one thing for a man to put on a dress and parade around town in it. It is another for that man to insist everyone play make-believe with him. One of the truths about progressive values is they prevail only where they comport with general Christian values. When they collide with those values or physical reality, they crumble.
That is what we are seeing now. It was reasonable for the crazies to demand that normal people tolerate the guy in the dress. Tolerance has deep roots in Christian ethics to the point where it is a habit of mind for Western people. The crazies could appeal to that deeply held belief in favor of the pervert. When they demanded that the pervert in the dress have easy access to your kids, then things changed. In the fullness of time, it will be the lurch towards the kids that ended the woke terror.
This is not much help to team science, which remains in a defensive crouch, wondering if they will get a reprieve. The answer is probably no, at least not until the egalitarian ideology is defeated by other means. Intelligence studies, for example, are just about banned at this point and will remain so. If you want to do that work, you will find no funding and no support. The best you can do is bundle it up in another area of research that passes muster with the academic clergy.
It is a good example of how facts have no chance against feelings. Facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings are in charge. This has always been so and that is a fact that the fact-people never grasp. You get a sense of it in this hilarious thread by an old HBD guy on Twitter. You get the sense that he is completely baffled as to why people think he is the crazy one in the thread. Despite his “theory of the mind” pretensions, he has no idea how people think.
Another example is this post by Steve Stewart-Williams on the topic of homosexuality and its possible genetic causes. Since the dawn of time, humans have understood that some men are sexually attracted to men, rather than women. It was a problem to be managed, from a societal perspective. This remains true. The causes of homosexuality are not terribly important. Even if team science finally figures out the puzzle, no one will care because it is not important.
What is important, regarding homosexuality, is how society deals with it in the context of social health and fitness. Until recently, we had that worked out, so if science does crack the puzzle, the most likely result will be a eugenic solution to once again solve the homosexuality problem from a societal perspective. Couples will demand tools to make sure their child is not a homosexual. After all, no one has ever hoped their child would grow up to be a happy, healthy homosexual.
The reason science has lost every fight with belief since Galileo is that science is an unsatisfactory replacement for belief. Humans are believing machines, so if you destroy their current beliefs, they do not stop believing. They simply find something new to believe, often something ridiculous, like communism. This is something team science has never been able to grasp. Muttering “but it moves” does not help them and it did not help Galileo either.
That is not to say that science is bunk. Some of it is, for sure. The Covid revelations that are trickling out show how easily science is corrupted. The reason the HBD world is a bit of laughingstock now is they fell for the Covid nonsense. Science is a tool and like all of our tools, it will be used to make our world as we think it ought to be, for no other reason than we believe it should be so. If science is not the right tool for the job, then we find different tools and maybe hang the scientists.
As we enter the final phase of the last great ideology, it will not be the death of belief and the rise of reason. Instead, it will be the death of those old universal believes in favor of more practical and useful beliefs. Science will be a tool in the struggle, but it will not replace the dying ideology. This is not the future. The future will be what we make of it, and “we” will be those who win the great struggle for who rules. In the end, science tells us that it is always 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!
Note: On Tuesday nights, I participate in a Twitter space where we discuss spicier topics than you find in the news. The replay of last nights episode here
Generational politics is one of the cruder forms of politics as it generally reduces to members of one age cohort hurling slurs at other cohorts. Ironically, the origin of this form of politics is the baby boomer generation, who were the first group of Americans to form an identity around their birth cohort. Baby boomers have since been synonymous with the post-war cultural trends and the radical politics that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.
These days, of course, “boomer” has become an epithet due to their children using it to describe degenerate or materialistic culture. Boomers are selfish old people who only care about their stock portfolios and their lawns. They are the “greedy geezers” of this age, which is ironic in that the term first gained traction decades ago as the baby boomers started to take over politics. This is another example of how the universe has a sense of a humor and cruel streak.
Of course, thirty years ago when terms like “greedy geezer” were getting tossed around, the culture was undergoing a generational shift. The WW2 Generation was giving way to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton came to be seen as the typical boomer, ushering in a new set of morals and sensibilities to politics. For the last thirty years, baby boomer politics have been American politics. Now they are seen the out of date politics of a quickly fading era.
We are about to experience another generational culture shift as the children of the baby boom generation begin to push their parents over the side. This is why the term “boomer” has become an epithet. The derogatory use of the label is a signal that the user is not into conventional culture and politics. To reject “boomer politics” is to reject the old-fashioned dichotomy of left-versus-right, as is defined by cable news programs, talk radio and the mainstream media.
We are getting a glimpse of this in the Trump administration. Donald Trump is technically not a baby boomer. This must be said because otherwise you get six million messages explaining that the baby boomer generation starts with those born after noon on June 30th, 1946, and Trump was born on June 17, 1946. It is this sort of hairsplitting that makes generation politics so mind-numbingly stupid. It makes the blue pencil crowd seem stable minded by comparison.
That aside, Trump is emblematic of the politics and culture that we generally associate with the baby boomer generation. He is materialistic, hedonistic, and jarringly superficial in his politics. For example, his main interest in ending the Ukraine war is so we can do business deals with the Russians. The history and geopolitical import of what he is doing is never mentioned by him. For Trump, it often seems like that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of stuff.
Contrast this with J.D. Vance, the millennial man in waiting. His story is centered on his cultural journey from the underclass into the managerial class and then as a critic of the managerial system that made him possible. He is the most articulate critic of managerialism to ever hold office in Washington. It remains to be seen if he wins the White House on his own, but he is clearly setup as the heir to Trump. He will take the baton on behalf of his generation from the boomers.
Despite the millennial disdain for baby boomer culture, they are the results of it due to the fact they were raised in the product of it. Things like helicopter parenting and structured play time were boomer creations. Millennials are the first generations raised by people who used the word “parenting”, so it is no surprise that the millennials are the first to use the word “adulting.” They were raised to expect a highly structured and safe environment where everything is clearly labeled.
There is far greater cultural intensity with millennials than prior generations. For the boomers, generational politics was mostly about marketing cultural items like clothing, lifestyle choices, and music. For millennials, culture is tangled up in the structure of life, so they are more keenly aware of themselves as a cohort. They are the first generation to sense that their identity is entirely exogenous. Individually and collectively, they are who they are because of taxonomical reasons.
This shift in generational identity can be seen in how millennials react to generalizations versus how baby boomers react. Make a generalization about baby boomers and you get flooded with boomers telling you that they are not like that. Make a generalization about millennials and they will agree and amplify it. Because conformity has always been a part of millennial cultural awareness, conforming to generational stereotypes does not bother them. It is their normal.
This is another thing with millennials that is different from boomers. They expect the systems they inherited to work as described on the box. The two sides of millennial politics are from those raised on the mother’s milk of post-Marx culturalism and those raised on civic nationalism. The former is perpetually angry that things are not fair, and the latter is determined to make things work as described to them. Vance versus AOC is a duel between competence and anxiety.
That brings up something else about millennial culture. It is focused on the present, but in the context of what was promised. This makes it backward looking. The Vance side is determined to remake things, so they are what he expected, rather than something new that is a break from the past. The AOC side is similarly determined to remake the present to fit the promise, but the promise came from the New Left politics that sunk roots in the culture when her parents were kids.
Generational politics can only take you so far in getting a sense of what lies ahead for the culture and politics. Reality is the great restraint, and the millennials are inheriting an enterprise in decline, while their parents inherited one that was at its peak. This is the heart of the millennial critique of the boomers. They see their parents as living off the profits of the past and they see themselves as tasked with cleaning up the mess after a long generational party.
This is why the millennial age could turn out to be quite conservative. Necessity will mean relegating luxury beliefs to the fringe. No one has time for the hysterical and childish politics of the AOC side when there is work to be done, debts to be paid and institutions to be restructured. Millennial politics could be the domination of the organizational men, who take pride in making the machine operate and have no tolerance for throwing sand in the gears.
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!
Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.
Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.
This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.
Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.
This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.
The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.
It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.
This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.
It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?
It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.
Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.
It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.
It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.
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 classic film, The Maltese Falcon, a post about my trip to the Old Glory Club, and no Sunday podcast. I got back too late on Sunday to do a show, but I will post something extra this week about the conference or maybe a second video. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.
One of the realities of the late managerial age is that the sorts of numbers managers love and therefore produce in volume, are increasingly unreliable and often manufactured to fit an agenda. Good data is usually too late to be actionable or is simply the accurate version of the previously reported fake data. Economic data is the most obvious example of this trend. It used to be central to the news cycle but has now become so corrupt the media will ignore it.
In the Biden years, much like the Obama years, it became popular with the reporting agencies to produce fake economic numbers and then come back at a later date to “revise” the previous data so they could pretend they were being accurate. It was always a cycle where new data contained information about how the previous data was revised in a way negative to the administration, but often made the new data look like the administration was doing a great job.
Peak managerial mendacity was Covid. The CDC stopped reporting deaths as a real-time number so they could report fictionalized accounts of bodies in the streets, always somewhere not where you live, which explained why you did not see the bodies in the streets, but they were somewhere! Old metrics that relied on hard data, like dead people showing up in morgues, were massaged to the point where you could no longer get the number of actual dead people.
We are getting a version of this now that Trump is back. His tariff plan has kicked off a new genre of managerial horror stories. These come in the form of economic reports that, like the bodies in the streets phenomenon, always focus on a part of the country where you do not live. Somewhere there are empty Walmart shelves due to the trade war with China. There are people you do not know who are shocked by the rise in prices, even though your prices have declined.
The cycle for management is always the same. First, they produce reliable numbers from trusted sources to measure their performance. Then they create models from those numbers to justify their continued employment. This is when they begin to reimagine how the old data is collected and before long, we have theories about how best to manage information, which always underscores the need for management to keep a tight control on the narratives.
Bankruptcy usually follows that last phase, or at least an economic crisis great enough to warrant restructuring. That is because reality is indifferent to the model makers and will eventually break every model. We are living through a version of this process in the twilight of managerialism. Since the Obama, years the choice has been between your lying eyes and the model of reality presented by management. Enough people picked the former and we are now undergoing a change in management.
For example, during the Biden years we were told that the economy was going great and those grumbling about egg prices were ingrates. Now that Trump is in power, the media say we are in a depression. Go on the roads right now and you will be confronted with miles of RV’s and campers. This week, which leads to Memorial Day weekend, the nation’s highways will be full of the things. So much so that massive traffic jams will be a feature of the weekend.
Why does this matter? RV’s and campers have long been a useful metric for the economy and the public perception of the economy. The more people hitting the roads for campgrounds and parks, the better the economy. In 2023, the industry went into a deep recession to the point where many companies shut down production. Then it started to slowly bounce back in 2024. Now it is undergoing a boom with the highways now flooded with happy campers.
This used to be a metric discussed in public, but like so many of these things, it fell out of favor in the Obama years. Management and its marketing department, what we call the media, decided that the customers really did not know best, so they scrapped those numbers in favor of metrics that flattered management. The reason they are in the jam that they currently find themselves is they started to believe their models of reality instead of facing reality. Now there is a hostile takeover underway.
A cruder and more hilarious version of this process is the recent reporting of Joe Biden’s health and fitness. The data in this case was our eyes. Everyone not blinded by their own models of reality saw a frail, doddering old man. Management’s model, however, showed that he was a model of fitness and virility. Now that model is being revised to show he was actually suffering from dementia and has aggressive cancer. The new model is now converging with reality.
The Biden story is a version of the basis trade, which pits models of a point in the future and the models are continuously updated until the point is reached. It is a way for the model makers to think they can control the future, so it makes sense that the people running America Inc. would think in these terms. They just forgot about the part that says in the end, reality always wins. That is what you see on the road. America is happy with the state of things, so they are going camping.
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
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Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On Rumble
Full Show On Odysee
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01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners and readers. That was some of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is of course your significantly genial host John Derbyshire, with observations on the news at precisely the middle of May 2025. Fifteen days gone, fifteen still to go.
It sometimes happens, by sheer good fortune, that one week’s lead segment follows naturally from the previous week’s lead segment. That’s what has happened this week.
In last week’s podcast my lead segment was headlined “The decline of Jim Snow.” I defined Jim Snow as, quoting myself:
The social dogma on race that has prevailed since the 1960s … characterized by white guilt and favoritism towards blacks (a/k/a “affirmative action”) and by deference to what I have called “the romance of American blackness” — narratives about cruel leering white people beating up on helpless pleading blacks.
End quote.
My thesis was that the case of Shiloh Hendrix, the young white Minnesota lady who made a pile of money via crowdfunding following a heated exchange with a black man that the man posted on social media — that case, I argued, was yet further evidence that Jim Snow, as a social dogma, is losing its force.
I think one of the lead news stories this week may further reinforce that thesis; so that is my first segment today.
Before proceeding with it, I’ll just note as a matter of general interest, following on that segment from last week, that as I speak here on Friday afternoon the crowdfunding site for Shiloh Hendrix shows donations now up to $779,158. This time last week they were $759,786; so that’s a one-week increase of $19,372, damn near twenty thousand dollars. Continue reading
After finishing the show last week, I thought I left too much on the cutting room floor, so I picked up those scraps to make a follow on show this week. With next weekend being Memorial Day, there may not be a show on Friday, so I figured a sequel to the original while the ideas were fresh in my mind made some sense. If I do a show next week it will be on short topics, so send your suggestions.
The thing I wanted to get to last week, but spent too much time bashing the Protestants, is that we are in an age in which we not only have a fractured morality, but we also have a fractured metaphysics. The extreme example is we have some people who think their sex is assigned to them at birth. If they wish hard enough, they can change their sex and transcend the two-sex paradigm.
Crazy people are a part of every society, so while these people are fringe weirdos, they get support from a large and powerful segment of society. Many of our ruling class question the basics of reality. They are open to sex being imaginary because they are open to reality being a shared delusion created by the pale penis people to dominate the nonwhite population.
It is exceedingly difficult to have a society composed of people with differing opinions about how society ought to be organized and how we ought to live in it. If the differences are not too wide, then some compromise can be made. It is not possible to have a stable society when large parts of it have a different conception of reality from other parts of society, which is the present situation.
This new paganism is in some way an effort to create a new universal morality to replace the old one and use it to clear the decks of the alternatives. In another way it is an acknowledgement that the differences in how these different groups understand reality is too different to ever have a shared morality. Attempts to impose a new morality just highlight these differences in how we perceive reality.
The Gaia worshippers, for example, are not dealing in practical issues like the physical world when they demand sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. These are not real things that can exist in the physical world as most people understand it. Therefore, it is probably not possible for them to share the same society as those who think we should exploit our resources to advance our material existence.
The race issue is where the differences in morality and metaphysics make clear that the gaps are two large to traverse. If you think magic is why black people commit so much more crime than whites, you can never find a compromise with those who think behavior is rooted in biology. There can be no agreed upon ways to deal with black crime that are satisfactory to both camps.
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This Week’s Show
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Full Show On Spreaker
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Full Show On Odysee
The professional commentators and amateur experts have been highly critical of the Trump foreign policy, but despite his unorthodox approach, Trump seems to be making progress that those experts claimed was impossible. The recent trip to the GCC countries is the most recent example. Lost in the shuffle is Iran stating they are ready to do a deal with Trump on their nuclear program. Today, the Russians and Ukrainian will meet in Istanbul to talk peace.
This meeting is remarkable mostly because a key element to Project Ukraine from the start was that there could be no negotiations with Russia. Without saying it, the Biden admin and the Europeans would only accept the unconditional surrender of Russia and even then, the terms would be harsh. The Ukrainians were happy to say the quiet part out loud, going so far as to declare it unlawful to deal with the Russians. In a few months Trump has them talking in Turkey.
It may be dumb luck that has got Trump to this point. A week ago, the Europeans were scheming with Zelensky on a set of ultimatums. The Russians either surrender and withdraw from Ukraine or else. On top of that, Keith Kellogg was peddling his scheme to insert Western troops into Ukraine as part of a peace keeping force. The Russians offered to meet with the Ukrainians in Istanbul and Trump seized on this to pressure Zelensky to agree to talks with the Russians.
Again, it may be dumb luck, but success is mostly about making the most of the available opportunities and Trump took advantage of the Russian offer to get something that everyone agreed was never happening. Again, not talking to the Russians has been a central pillar of Project Ukraine. It is the key to keeping the project running and that pillar has been toppled. Even if the talks do not produce much of anything immediately, this meeting changes everything.
The main thing it changes is it forces Zelensky and his European backers to abandon their maximalist position. Once you agree to negotiate, you have to be willing to offer something in return for what you want. Zelensky, of course, cannot concede anything because of the internal politics of Ukraine, so the new framing of the war is one side, the Russians, willing to make a deal, and the other side, the Ukrainians, unwilling to negotiate in good faith to end the war.
Zelensky understands the problem. He has now been put into a very dangerous position, which is why he chose to lead the delegation to Istanbul. He is not there to make a deal, but to orchestrate some way to blow up the process. His life literally depends on keeping the war going in such a way that the West remains engaged and supportive of Ukraine. He cannot reject talks outright, but he cannot engage in them in good faith, so he needs to find a third way.
The Europeans understand this as well, but they also have the added problem of the reality on the ground. The Ukrainian army is in serious trouble right now. They are steadily being pushed back while losing men and material at an alarming rate, one that is not sustainable for much longer. This write-up on the condition of the Ukraine army is about as positive of a spin as you will get before going into fantasy land and the author gives the Ukrainians six months to a year.
This is why Keith Kellogg, and the Europeans programmed Zelensky to demand an immediate ceasefire before negotiations. The plan is to get the ceasefire and then drag out talks while the Ukraine army is reorganized and reequipped for what they hope is the next round of the war on Russia. It is also why the Russians have rejected the idea and instead offered the talks in Istanbul. One way or the other they plan to finish Project Ukraine within the next year.
This is why Trump wisely jumped at this opportunity. No doubt his people are telling him how things are for Ukraine. If Trump can broker a peace deal, any peace deal that avoids images of Russian tanks in Kiev, it is a win for him. He will declare himself the savior of Ukraine. On the other hand, if Zelensky and the Europeans prevent a negotiated settlement, then Trump can lay the blame for those Russian tanks in Kiev on Zelensky and the Europeans.
What Trump has managed to do, perhaps without realizing it, is wriggle free from the trap left for him by the prior administration. He was left with two choices. One was continuing the proxy war by sending money and arms to Ukraine and take the blame when Ukraine finally capitulated. The other was to end the support for Ukraine and get blamed for “losing Ukraine” to the Russians. Now that he has brokered peace talks, he can shift the blame to others when Ukraine capitulates.
Again, much of this may be luck, but serendipity plays an enormous role in human affairs, so it is always part of the result. The reason for the expression, “Chance favors the prepared mind” is for exactly this reason. In order to succeed, it often means being prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. When the Russians offered direct talks with Ukraine last week, it was a rare chance for Trump to change the order of things, and he jumped on it.
All of this now signals the start of the end game for Project Ukraine. What Trump has wanted from the start is to end the war and withdraw from this proxy war with the Russians and now he is one step closer to his goal. The question now is whether it is an orderly end or a disorderly end. If it is the latter, then the question is who gets the blame and judging by the maneuvering, the White House is betting it will be a disorderly end and so they are maneuvering to lay the blame on Europe.
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President Trump has wrapped up his trip to Saudi Arabia and the Western media is trying hard to ignore it. The main reason is they hate Trump, of course, but a secondary reason is they do not understand the importance of the trip. To them, it just looks like another foreign trip by a president. In reality it is a glimpse of how the large share owners of America Inc. are restructuring the company. The deals signed in Saudi Arabia are the first step in that restructuring.
For fifty years, the United States and Saudi Arabia had an agreement primarily centered around oil trade and the use of the U.S. dollar. The formal part of the agreement committed the Saudis to investing their profits from energy into U.S. Treasuries in exchange for American military commitments. The result was the Saudis priced everything in dollars, which led all other OPEC members to work in dollars, thus establishing the petrodollar concept.
The reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is it is backed with energy, the one thing everyone needs. The gold bugs like to say the dollar is “fiat currency” and is just colorful bits of paper, but that was always false. The dollar, like all real money, represents power. From the 1970’s to the present, the dollar represented the power of the United States and the power of hydrocarbons. Instead of money backed by shiny bits of metal, the dollar was backed by energy.
Another consequence of this arrangement is it provided an unlimited demand for dollar-denominated debt, especially treasuries. Because that debt is created within the American banking system, it made the United States the global bank. In effect, the petrodollar arrangement made the United States the world mint and the world’s banker, with the oil producing countries as the miners. With only one mint, it meant that the United States also controlled the mines.
This system has been under great pressure of late for a few reasons. One is the abuse of the system by the neocons in their foreign policy schemes. No one cared that much about using the financial system against small, nuisance countries like North Korea, but when the system was turned against big countries like Russia, one of the important mints, then people did care. The rise of BRICS as an off-dollar trading system was a response to the abuse of the system.
Another reason for the faltering dollar scheme is the Saudis decided to let the fifty-year-old agreement lapse. One reason for this is the abuse of the system by the neocons during the Biden years. The neocons were deliberately trying to destabilize the region in their war against Russia. This is not what the Saudis want. The other reason is the world is changing, and the Saudis need to adapt. They cannot continue to be a gas station in the desert. They need to diversify.
The biggest reason for the pressure on the petrodollar system is it hollowed out the American economy. It is not just the decline in manufacturing, which gets most of the attention, but also the decline in the nation’s infrastructure. This is becoming acute as the demand for electricity climbs. Artificial Intelligence may be oversold, but it is a real thing that will spike demand for electricity. Without trillions in new investments, the United States will not keep up with the world.
That last bit is the what the Saudi deal addresses. The Saudis are not going to plow their profits into treasuries, but into direct investments in the United States, while the United States provides support for Saudi Defense and infrastructure. This means the Saudis will be investing in American companies that are doing work inside the United States to build factories and infrastructure. The Saudis are not just a mint serving the American bank, but an investor in America Inc.
That is another thing easily missed about this trip. In the past, presidents went to Saudi Arabia to talk about military cooperation and the local politics. Business was delegated to Treasury and Commerce. The Treasury Secretary might make a trip to the region and meet his counterparts to discuss money. When a president visited these countries, money was not on the agenda. It was politics and the military situation in the places where America had stationed soldiers.
Notice on this trip that Scott Bessent was on the trip. Notice also that Bessent turns up in all of these foreign policy events. He led the charge on the so-called mineral deal with the Ukrainians. For the first time in a long time the bankers are now part of the foreign policy discussion. In fact, Bessent is involved in everything. He is part of the effort to root out some of the massive waste in government. What we are seeing is the return of political – economy to America Inc.
For several decades, at least, the managerial class has separated economics from politics, leaving the latter to the elected officials. Economics was too important to let the politicians get involved, so it was handled by experts. The result has been the perversion of economic policy. Instead of economic policy that benefits the people of the nation, we got policy that satisfied the theorists and the tiny minority that was able to arbitrage their access to the experts.
What this trip to Saudi Arabis represents is the return of political-economy where political decisions, including foreign policy, is measured against the standard of the national interests. Trump made that clear in his speech. He declared that foreign policy would no longer be about nation wrecking but about making deals that benefit the American people. Much as economics is being dragged from the abstract to the practical, foreign policy is being brought back to reality.
This trip also symbolizes the return of American Inc. The United States has never been a country in the traditional sense. It was always a business, something like a conglomerate containing many regional companies. The post-Cold War years were a monopoly phase, where managers stopped worrying about profits and focused on pet projects and social schemes. That time is done, and the company needs to be radically reformed to become competitive again.
Like all corporate restructurings, this one will fall far short of the dreams of the reformers, but whatever the result, it must be better than the alternative because the alternative is bankruptcy. In the case of empires, bankruptcy usually ends with the shareholders swinging from trees. The oligarchs of American seem to get this, which is why they are backing Trump and his turnaround team. Time will tell if American Inc. re-emerges as a strong company or a failed experiment.
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!