The American Ideology

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One of the greatest tricks Americans have ever pulled is convincing themselves and the world that we are not ideologues. At worst, we are the defenders of Western liberalism, which is never described as an ideology. Unlike communism or fascism, it is seen as a set of obvious conclusions arrived at through reason. If anything, the American way is considered a practical antidote to the problems of ideology.

This has always been nonsense, but we have believed it for so long that no one thinks much about it anymore. The closest we get are critiques of liberalism from neo-traditionalists, as if we still live in a liberal age. In reality, America is an ideological state and has been for a long time. The ideology has evolved to suit the times, but the core features have remained unchanged since the 19th century.

This is one reason for the current crisis. The age of ideology is coming to a close, but the United States, especially its ruling class, remains trapped in the age of ideology—like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. While other major powers think and talk in practical terms about practical problems, the United States continues to think and talk in explicitly moral terms about abstract concepts.

That is the show this week. It is an exploration of American ideology and the factors that made it possible. This is a topic that could fill up several more shows, so this episode is just a quick summary of the material. I could easily do at least one show on how the two great industrial wars warped the American perspective. The Cold War could be at least one episode, probably two, so this is just a starting point.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Intro
  • American Protestantism
  • Nationalism
  • Progressivism
  • Judeo-Puritanism
  • The End Ideology

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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Car

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Last week the Chinese announced what could be a great leap forward in electric car technology when the Chinese firm BYD announced a five-minute charger. They claim their new technology, it is not just a charger but a battery system as well, will allow a driver to get a 250-mile charge in just five minutes. No one knows if this is true, as Chinese companies are almost as dishonest as American media. Even if it is an exaggeration, it could still be a big deal.

The reason this is viewed as a potential game changer is that it is assumed that the main obstacle to widespread adoption of EV’s is the long recharge. It is unreasonable to expect people to take an hour to recharge when on a road trip. Even a thirty-minute recharge time is unappealing. Decades of needing just a few minutes to fill the tank have conditioned people to expect it. Getting EV technology to this point, therefore, is assumed to be the final boss in the game.

That is not true, but the faithful believe it. The main problem with EV’s is that they do not solve a problem. They are a solution in search of problem and so far, the problems they claim to solve have proven to be either nonsense or grotesque boondoggles executed by the worst people in society. Making the weather potato happy is not motivating anyone to buy an electric car, especially when the total cost of ownership remains significantly higher than conventional vehicles.

The electric car is a lot like the electric book in that the engineering challenges somehow blind the proponents to the central problem. Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Electronic messaging has displaced written letters because the former is better, cheaper, and faster than the latter. If email came with a small risk of electrocution, we would still be writing letters. If every email cost a dollar to send, there would be no such thing as email.

That was the problem with eBooks. They were not better in any way that mattered to people, and they were not cheaper. There were some advantages, like speed of acquisition and the availability of obscure texts. You could also load up on out of copyright material at a pittance. The trouble is not many people need ready access to Summa Theologica, so these advantages made little difference. It is why the old-fashioned book remains dominant.

The same problem plagues the electric car. For ninety percent of drivers, the car is a practical way to move humans from one place to another. Current technology does that as well as anyone could need. Therefore, the new technology is simply trying to match what the old technology does. Outside of enthusiast and technologists, the electric car will always be pointless. Add in the expense and it becomes an expensive solution to a cheaply solved problem.

There are other reasons why the electric car will remain a niche item. The biggest is the cost, which can never be overcome. The cost of powering an electric car is about three times that of powering a normal car. This is despite the fact that we subsidize electricity in America, and we artificially increase the price of gas and diesel. Strip away the policy choices and electric cars have no market. Natural gas-powered cars would have far more promise as an alternative.

Then there is the cost of production and disposal. For generations old cars have been sent to the scrap yard to be stripped for parts and recycled. We have become amazingly good at recycling our cars. Electric vehicles require special handling due to the batteries. Of course, the cost of production is much higher, even with government subsidies all along the way. Then there is the added cost to the power grid that comes in once adoption reaches a certain point.

Enthusiasts insist that all of this is wrong or can be addressed, but the point here is that the charge time is the least of their worries. If the EV was better, faster, and cheaper than regular cars, the charge time would be ignored. The truth is they are not better in any important ways, they are certainly not cheaper. The electric car is certainly faster, but outside the enthusiast niche, this does not matter and what we see is that it does not matter to the sports car enthusiast either.

Now, of course, there is a new problem. The electric car is not cool. It was never really a cool car, but the beautiful people embraced the idea, so that provided the necessary social proof for upper-middle-class white people. The trend setters are now vandalizing Tesla’s, so the cool factor is gone. In fairness, the novelty was wearing off before the kooks took aim at Elon Musk, but now the coolness is gone. The ridiculous looking cyber truck did not help either.

The bigger issue may be a social one. Cars in general, but electric cars, in particular, make the “owner” into a serf. Fixing your own car is now an expensive proposition, meaning you need to depend on the repair system. This is deliberate. Car dealerships make more profit from the repair of cars than the sale of them, so the game is to make the owner dependent on the dealer. Electric cars are the worst for this as they are terrifyingly dangerous to repair.

The most terrifying part is you may not even own the car. You pay for it and have the title, but features are increasingly dependent on the manufacture agreeing with your lifestyle and political choices. Tesla can disable your car remotely. Other car makers are going down this same path. Soon, features like heated seats will be software as a service, meaning you must get permission to use them. The electric car is the face of this dystopian future of man and machine.

None of this means the electric car is dead. There is a place for the technology, just as there is a niche for eBooks. The developers churning out corporate housing projects could install fast charging stations for the soulless automatons who move into these God-forsaken eyesores. Urban areas could be a good use for electric microcars that only go short distances. Young people could also benefit from cars that can be speed limited and tracked at all times.

In the end, the electric car is going to follow the path of other clever engineering projects in that its primary benefit is secondary. The quest for the electric car has made batteries much better. The hunt for new features to justify the cost premium has led to better electronics, information displays and safety features. The dangers of disposal have been a good lesson in reality. The cars themselves may be niche items, but the industry will have benefitted from the exercise.

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 Reasonable End

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Did cavemen feel guilt? Shame? It may sound like a stupid and pointless question, but it is a place to start when trying to understand the current crisis. While we cannot know if primitive man felt things like shame, we can guess. In fact, that is the point of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Shame and guilt were not natural to men until introduced by devilish forces. At least that is what the authors of the Adam and Eve story surmised when trying to answer those questions.

To feel guilt one must have a guilty mind when committing some act, which means you knew the act was wrong when you did it. You can also feel guilt for having unknowingly broken a rule but learning after the fact that you broke the rule and should have known you were breaking the rule. Shame works the same way. It is impossible to feel guilt for having broken a rule if you never know about the rule or you reject the legitimacy of the rule or the authority that made the rule.

Our cavemen therefore could only feel guilt or shame if in their group there existed a set of normative rules from a recognized authority. Given the simplicity of their life and the demands of it, they probably had few rules on individual conduct. Those that did exist were most likely related to the preservation of the group. Males had to be good hunters and not avoid pulling their weight in the hunt. Members had to sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. That was about it for their morality.

To answer the question at the start, the sense of guilt and shame was probably as primitive as the moral code that existed within the group. Given that early bands of humans were surely based on blood, as in they were extended families, not propositional collections of strangers, things like guilt and shame arose from the biological loyal that lies at the heart of man. We abide by the rules of our kind because they are our family, and we have a natural loyalty to them.

This works fine in small groups, but once small groups started to band together to defend hunting grounds and defensible shelters, something more was needed to extend that natural sense of loyalty to the whole group. The trading of women, which we know was a part of early man’s existence, was one solution. This binds the groups by blood and therefore tapped into biological loyalty. The human sciences tell us that the formation of larger human groups was biological.

This works with a federation of kin groups, but once human settlements reached a large enough size, this was no longer practical, so something else arrived. The solution to the limits of blood was religion, specifically gods. Distantly related people may not feel a great loyalty to one another, but those protected by the same god can feel loyalty to one another in service to that god. Guilt and shame over breaking god’s rules works just as well as guilt and shame over harming the family.

A crude way of summarizing this is we went from, “We are the sons of Grog and this is how the sons of Grog live” to “We are the people who live by this portion of the river, and this is how we live.” The next logical step was, “We are the followers of sky god, and this is how we live.” This allows for the group to expand, as new members merely must accept sky god and be accepted by sky god. It harnesses guilt and shame in the service of a group whose size extends beyond blood.

While the mental state of early man is a bit of a guess for us, we do know that humans organized around their gods. This was the state of the ancient world, about which we know a great deal. While what led to this stage of human development is a bit of guesswork, we know that mankind arrived at this point. By the time there are fully formed gods, there are fully formed moral codes attached to them that define large groups of people with a sense of identity.

That does not solve the puzzle of this age. We know that folk religions eventually gave way to universal religions. About ninety percent of humans belong to a universal religion, which means their religion is open to everyone. You do not have to be born into Hinduism to be a Hindu. Only a tiny portion of humanity sticks with folk religions like Judaism which have a biological component. Everyone else is open to people outside the blood, as long as they accept the moral claims of the faith.

Of course, universalist religion did not end human conflict. In fact, they probably made it worse as the base assumption of universalist religion is that there is only one way to live because there is only one moral authority. Once you accept that your god is the only god, it means the other gods are false. Worse yet, those gods are an afront to your god and they must be eliminated. The way to do that is to conquer the people who are offering up the false god as a challenge to the true god.

The modern West has complicated this further by removing God entirely from the Christian moral framework and replacing him with a mirror called reason. It is reason that tells us that there must be one way of organizing society. It is reason that tells us there must be one moral code. Therefore, it is reason that tells us that alternative ways of organizing society must be false. The same is true for alternative morality, which like a false god, is an afront to reason.

If you think about it, this iteration of the Great Awakening has been little more than the believers of one god attacking those who either reject their god or worship another God, like the God of the Bible. Not only do they hate your lack of guilt over violating their codes, but they also feel guilty for not imposing those codes on you. The followers of the god of reason ended up at witch burning as the solution to heresy. They seek salvation through the spilling of blood.

The crisis in the West is a crisis of reason. We have reasoned ourselves to a dead end where shame and guilt are tied to the assertion that there must be only one moral authority, and it emits only one moral code. Those who must have the warm embrace of faith now target their sense of guilt and shame toward their own kind, for the sin of not embracing what they believe is the only moral code. The rest are left to defend themselves and civilization from the true believers.

The question at the heart of the crisis is can the fury of these zealots be reoriented toward a folk religion or even a passive universalism? If the answer is no, then how can society defend against them? Another way of stating it is, can the cancer be put into remission or must it be removed? It is a terrible question that no one wants to face, but the West must face it. The god of reason is either reformed or removed along with her followers as that is the only reasonable thing to do.

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 Priestly Class

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One of the features of the first Trump administration was the endless litigation that was intended to throw sand in the gears of the White House. Much of it was irrational and did not hold up under appeal, but that was not the point. The goal was to kill the administration with a thousand cuts. We are seeing a replay of this in round two, but the administration seems prepared for it. There is both a legal strategy and a public relations strategy for dealing with the lawfare.

This lawfare is possible due to one of the many carryovers from the post-Cold War period in which the Washington class was allowed to run wild. The inferior courts where this lawfare is being waged are packed with friends of Washington. Half of the judges were nominated by Republicans and the other half by Democrats, but all were on the list because they are friends of the Blob. Time and again we see that the judges issuing restraining orders on the admin have family in the Blob.

One result of this is the ground floor of the federal judiciary is now the first line of defense for the Blob. Anyone challenging the regulatory state knows they first must make it through this minefield. It is one way to make the cost of challenging the regulatory state prohibitive. Almost all litigation against the administrative state would fail at the first step and then go to appeal. For most potential litigants, dealing with the hyper-politicized district courts was cost prohibitive.

Mostly, the district courts have become a weird form of patronage. These judges come from good schools but were not great private practice attorneys. Most found their way into a federal prosecutor’s office, where they could make friends with the political class to angle for a position on the bench. Once on the bench, they could then lever that into jobs for friends and family in the Blob. District judges are one of the many gatekeepers for entry into the Blob.

Here is where you see the social aspect of managerialism. These judges do not have to be told to oppose the Trump admin. They just know it is their role because everyone they know hates Trump. Judge Boasberg is not defending what he has always claimed to oppose because he is a hypocrite. He is simply putting the welfare of his friends and family ahead of political concerns. He is operating from class consciousness and the class he is defending is the managerial class.

Of course, the court system has been a mess for a long time. The Supreme Court that decided Brown simply invented a new moral code to be imposed on the American people by the judiciary. The court that invented the right to buy contraceptives and abort your baby was doing the same thing. When Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion stating that the right to marry is a fundamental right, he did so not as a legal scholar or defender of the Constitution, but as a secular priest.

The judiciary as a priestly class is always a risk because in a liberal political order the law is the manifestation of general morality. One reason we have so many laws in public government versus private government is the morally right choice for every conceivable action must be written down so the shamans in the court system have something to point to when making their declarations. That and it is the only way to overcome the traditions of the people regarding public morality.

It is how in 1985, US District Court Judge Russell Clark began a terror campaign against the people of Missouri. He took over the Kansas City, Missouri School District, forcing the people to pay billions in taxes to underwrite his madman effort to create paradise on earth. This terror campaign was allowed to go on for a decade until the Supreme Court finally got around to ending it. Two billion dollars were spent, and thousands of lives were ruined by a single lunatic judge.

What the district court system has become is a way for the managerial class to impose its morality on the rest of us, via the court system. Since there are over six hundred district judges, there is no escaping them. Every state government must act in the shadow of what is, in effect, an ideological enforcer for the Blob. The district courts are now an ecclesiastical court for the purpose of heading off any signs of apostacy before they gain public support.

In the short term, the only remedy for the Trump administration is to fight this weird priesthood in the court and the court of public opinion. Congress could help by stripping some power from the district courts, but Republicans are useless, so no one should expect that to happen. Chief Judge Roberts could step in, but he is clearly blobbed up, so that is unlikely. His behavior in the Obamacare case made clear he acted under duress to change his position.

In the long run, the solution is to make the district court position temporary, so it loses its value in Washington. Doing a turn as a district judge should be viewed as a resume builder for someone on partner track at a big firm or maybe as a career builder for a lawyer who wants to build his own firm. District judges were supposed to handle mundane administrative tasks to free up the superior court. Making it a steppingstone position would restore that function.

In the even longer run, normalizing the judiciary means the end of ideology, because as long as we remain an ideological state, there will be people who see themselves as priests tasked with enforcing the moral claims of the ideology. The death of ideology means morality is once against rooted in the traditions and customs of the people and the law has a process for that. It is called precedent. Since before Code of Ur-Nammu, this has been the basis of the law and an orderly society.

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!

Masters And Slaves

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Note #1: Behind the green door, there is a post about why deporting anti-Israel protestors is a good start, a post about the dangers of the Ukraine tarpit, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. I was also on the J. Burden show last week and you can listen here.

Note #2: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

One of the stranger things about the first months of the Trump administration has been the reaction of Europe to his peace initiatives. The European “leaders” are, on the one hand, horrified by his peace push, and on the other hand they have rallied themselves to various schemes to stop them. The latest scheme is to create a peacekeeping force that they will insert into Ukraine, something the Russians have repeatedly said is a deal breaker and perhaps even an act of war.

On the surface this looks insane. There are about twenty million Ukrainian refugees in Europe with more trickling in daily. Social welfare rolls are now littered with refugees, who do not speak the local language, so they cannot work. Of course, the EU has been shipping Ukraine billions of Euros plus all its military gear. The war has become another factor eroding social trust and most importantly, trust in the political elite that insists the war must go on forever.

None of this makes any sense until you think about what it means to be in the European political elite in 2025. It means a lifetime of having been very good at winning favor with America or winning favor with the politicians close to America. The dominance of the United States since the war, but especially since the end of the Cold War, has turned the European elite into a slave class. They are the house slaves, who defend the master’s prerogatives against the field slaves.

The surest way to getting yourself exiled in European politics is to speak poorly of the Americans in favor of European interests. Even now, when they all agree Trump is a big meanie, they are obsessed with getting his attention in such a way that it reasserts their position as the loyal house slave. With respect to Ukraine, they feel like they have been sent out of the room as the master talks to another master. They all have their ear to the door, hoping to hear what is being said.

What we are seeing is the result of long subjugation. When one people come to dominate another people, the subjugated will inevitably look to survive and that means finding leaders who are good at currying favor with the master. After the war, Europe was a mess and needed the United States to stave off communism and rebuild the economy of Europe. After the Cold War, the United States was the lone superpower, and Europe became its chief flunky.

It is why there will be no European Donald Trump anytime soon. The idea of such a character terrifies the typical European, who has been conditioned since birth to look up to the house slave. Since a Donald Trump like figure must come from the field slave population, this sort of figure is not just feared by the European house slave population but despised by the field slaves of Europe. They would rather been hacked to death by a machete wielding African than taste freedom.

This also explains the absurdity of the European political class. It is a freak show of carnival acts rather than people with some idea how the world works. You see the same thing in the United States among the black population. Every black congressional district has a ridiculous person as the representative. The newest version is Jasmine Crockett, a representative from Houston, who had to learn how to sound like a ghetto queen in order to rise up the ranks.

The reason Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers had to hire the actor Barry Soetoro to play Barak Obama was that the black community is not able to produce such a figure, so they had to manufacture one. The reason Obama has so quickly disappeared from the conversation is that he was always just an actor playing a role. The show ended and he left the stage. Like a typecast actor, he can only play this role and no one has much interest in the character, so he has sunk into obscurity.

We seem to be seeing something similar with other minority communities in the United States, despite the demographic changes. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is a fast-rising Asian politician, but she is also an Asian version of Maxine Waters. The reason anyone knows her name is she is willing to perform in front of the cameras, aping the most absurd politics of upper middle-class white people. She is the East Asian version of the Sambo, dancing for her primarily white audience.

A main difference between the minority populations in America and Europe is the United States is actively trying to set Europe free. If Trump could do it, he would leave Europe entirely but he will settle for a reduced role. No one is seriously thinking about creating a black homeland or Asian homeland in America. The Trump administration actively talks about Europe standing on its own two feet again. This is why the current European elite is in such a panic. They do not want to leave the master’s house.

The question with regards to Europe is can it regain itself and do so in a way that does not require the great powers to supervise it? The glimmer of hope is the nationalist parties emerging, but they are often as clownish as the establishment. That or they exist to prevent an alternative elite emerging. Nigel Farage is an entertaining political clown whose main role is to prevent any sort of organized resistance to the nation-wrecking policies of the UK political class.

The answer may be that Europe will have to go through a dark age, so to speak, before it can produce a genuine alternative elite. Given the current demographic trends, what would emerge would be non-European. Alternatively, the nationalist movements gain power and simply ruin the existing political elite and their slave mentality. There is a period of chaos, like the end of communism in Russia, that provides the conditions for a new elite to emerges to rule Europe.

What we see in Europe and America is a good example of how success sets the conditions for decline. Conquering people makes them into dependents and eventually, their dependency becomes too much to carry. The United States is about to cut the Europeans loose for this reason. What suffering comes from the newly liberated house slaves of Europe will seem unfair to them, but three generations of dependency are the cause, not their impending liberation.

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!

Radio Derb March 21 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 02m19s Foreigners behaving badly
  • 09m28s Our anti-Trump judiciary
  • 17m36s The shock troops of lawfare
  • 25m38s Separation of powers 2025
  • 34m02s The genocidal St. Patrick
  • 36m01s YouTube kowtowing?
  • 38m05s TDS and MIM
  • 39m40s Signoff  with Gracie

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played on, of course, the piano; and this is your contritely genial host John Derbyshire with commentaries on the week’s news.

Before I commence commenting, just a short housekeeping note. I have been remiss in keeping my personal website properly tended.

If you go to the home page at johnderbyshire.com you will see in the “Navigation” box over at the right-hand side there an entry for “Recently published.” Clicking on that will send you to a page listing everything I have published, in print or online, for the past three months, with links to the individual publications.

That “Recently published” page relies on me adding items to it as I publish them — or, in the case of most print items, after a decent interval to let the print outlet get printed, distributed, purchased, and read.

I have been forgetting to do that, so that the “Recently published” page has been getting out of date. Some readers rely on it for access to my output, and they’ve been grumbling.

I am sorry. I shall strive to do better. The “Recently published” page is now up to date. Continue reading →

Buckley On Sobran

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Joe Sobran is arguably the first person hurled into the void in a process that eventually was called cancel culture. His primary sins were skepticism about Israel as our greatest ally and suspicions about the motivations of the neocons. It was the neocons who successfully campaigned to have Sobran branded a heretic and run out of the conservative movement.

Looking back four decades on, you see all the ingredients for what became a widespread form of domestic terrorism in the last decade. Interestingly, all of it is in what Bill Buckley thought was his best book. It is a collection of his essays on the topic of antisemitism, as well as his famous finking on friends like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan at the request of his new benefactors.

Reading Buckley’s version of the Sobran affair, what comes through is that all politics in a democracy are theater. Buckley felt he had to debase himself, his friends and even his own family in order to remain on the stage. The reason for that is the stage managers had an agenda that agenda was anathema to the human spirit and traditions conservatism allegedly represented.

In the show I take a much tougher tone with Buckley, but upon reflection I do not think he was a soulless political operator. Even though he treated Joe Sobran horribly, Sobran thought well of Bill Buckley until the end. It is a good reminder that you can think well of someone in the whole, even though they have done you wrong, in your view, over a particular issue. Even the best men have terrible flaws.

All that said, it was Buckley’s decision to cancel Sobran that gave us this now familiar model for controlling the public square. Even today, public officials feel they must publicly swear loyalty to Israel for fear of being cancelled. This noxious effluvium even hangs over the tribe we call the left. The great terror that haunts public discourse got started with Buckley hurling Joe Sobran into the void.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Intro
  • The Past Is Prologue
  • Joe Sobran
  • The MacGuffin
  • Bill Buckley & Antisemitism
  • The Cancel Process
  • Sobran The MacGuffin

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Fading Pop

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If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.

For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.

The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.

Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.

Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.

Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.

This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.

There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.

What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.

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!

Robed Radicals

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One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.

Reforms in the late Soviet period undermined the core logic of the Soviet system, resulting in poorer outcomes. We see the same thing in America. The response to Trump in 2016 by conservatives and their party only served to sap the legitimacy of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Trump started as a vanity candidate, but by January of 2016 he had become the champion of the party voters against the ossified party leadership.

Similarly, the behavior of the media cratered trust in the media. Their efforts to cajole, convince and intimidate people into going along with the managerial class eroded all trust in the media. By the end of Trump’s first term, trust in the media had collapsed to the point where only regime toadies trusted it. The same could be said for the people it was defending. Trump won in 2024 because the main tools of his enemies had been delegitimatized by his enemies.

We are now seeing another phase of this as district judges claim authority over vast parts of the executive branch. The last month has seen these inferior court judges claim to have power over the hiring and firing of personnel, the budgets of executive agencies and the conduct of foreign policy. A judge just ordered the military to enlist mentally unstable people. To stop the future, the managerial class is now destroying the credibility of the courts.

Public trust in the courts was already at a nadir because of the abuses we saw in the Obama years and then the Biden years. When the court ruled that mandating medical insurance was right there in the constitution, the rule of law took a sharp turn into absurdity, but when the Supreme Court ruled that two men sharing rent and bed is the same as your parents, then trust in the law was in free fall. It only got worse in the Biden years with the lawfare against Trump supporters.

What we are seeing from the courts now is the breaking point. No one would dare poll on it, because they fear the result, but there is certainly a majority in favor of the Trump administration telling the courts to pound sand. The whiffs of Sulphur the usual suspects are always sure they detect are not real, but rather they are the floral aroma of Caesarism in response to the reckless behavior of the courts. When the rule of law fails, the people always choose the rule of men.

While this may feel like a positive omen, there is another lesson from the end of Soviet Russia to keep in mind. Russia at the end of communism was a poor country, but a lawful country. It had rules that the people tried to respect. It then entered a period where it was a poorer country and a lawless one. When trust in the system collapsed, trust in the rules collapsed with it. It was only when a new elite emerged to impose a new system and new rules that lawfulness returned.

In other words, this dip into lawlessness we are seeing could very well portend a general descent into lawlessness. Like post-Soviet Russia, we could very well be entering a period where we get poorer as the rule of law collapses. Unlike Russia, America is not a homogenous society with a thousand years of history. America is a diverse country which is a polite way of saying it is a collection of people who would just as soon not share a country with one another.

If the elites backing Trump’s reforms wish to avoid a terrible end to their reform effort, they are going to need to deal with these hothouse radicals on the bench who cannot grasp the danger of their actions. The challenge, as with all reforms, is in dealing with the problem while not undermining the legitimacy of the system. These judges think they are heroes defending the system against the monster, when in reality they are a cancer threatening the last functioning part of the system.

It is not an easy task, which is why most reform efforts fail. In the end, it turns out to be easier to scrap the old and replace it with something new, but the problem is no one can predict who will win and who will lose in that process. It is why the reform is always the safe choice, despite the dismal record. It promises predictable winners. If today’s reformers want to be winners, then these judges need to be made into losers, without making the rule of law a loser as well.

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!

Attritional Drone War

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Prior to the start of the Ukraine war, it was assumed that the Russians, if they desired, could quickly smash the Ukrainian army. Russia is a big country with a big army and Ukraine is not as big, but few understood that it had a big army. At the start of the war, it had an army of 350,000, with a similar number in reserve. Fewer anticipated the hundreds of billions in NATO weapons and money. Everyone, including the Russians, expected a short war, but instead it is a long war.

One main reason for this is technology. The Russians badly miscalculated how the war would unfold, but they also failed to adapt to new technology, specifically the use of drones in frontline battles. Their first taste of drone warfare was the Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by the Turks to the Ukrainians. This is a medium-altitude long-endurance vehicle that allowed the Ukrainians to precisely aim their artillery at Russian formations, as well as directly attack those formations.

The Russians have proven to be quick learners. They rushed to embrace the new technology and have now taken it in directions few anticipated. First person video drones are now the primary weapon in the Russian arsenal, used to not only attack Ukrainian men and material, but used to shape the battlefield. This new use of drones came to the fore in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, which concluded last week with a stunning Ukrainian defeat.

The “Kursk incursion” as the Ukrainians called it, was an attack across the Russian border to gain control of the nuclear facilities in the Kursk region. There is a nuclear power plant there and a storage facility for nuclear weapons. It is unclear what weapons, if any, are stored there, but Ukraine wanted to gain control of it as well as the power plant for the purpose of nuclear blackmail. The Russians would either surrender or Ukraine creates another Chernobyl.

The Russians managed to stop the Ukrainian offensive, but instead of it becoming a stalemate or requiring the Russians to spend men and material to keep the Ukrainians bottled up, it became a killing field for Ukraine due to the Russian use of drones to police every square meter of the region. The air over the Ukrainian formations was full of drones twenty-four hours a day. Any effort to move men and material at any scale was detected and attacked by drones.

To understand how drones are now used by the Russian army and to a lesser extent the Ukrainian army, this Turkish YouTube channel provides video of drone attacks with a AI generated voice over. There are three things to notice. One is that the drone operators can fly these things into the tightest of spaces. This allows them to hunt for assets inside of buildings and hidden in wooded areas. These things are like a swarm of birds that have cameras and explosives.

The other thing is they can now operate at night. This is a Russian innovation that Ukraine has not matched. Russian FPV drones have night vision and infrared cameras, so they can spot men moving around at night. The “solution” to constant drone surveillance during the day was to move men and material around at night, but now there is no hiding from the drone swarms after dark. In Kursk, the Ukrainians were under twenty-four-hour surveillance and attack.

The third thing is the drones are essentially networked together either through the tether to the drone operators or through the over-the-air system. Fiber optic drones rely on a fiber optic cable to communicate with the operator. The operator is then connected to the Russian command and control system. The effect is that the drones in the sky have created a twenty-four-hour-a-day information space over the battlefield. This massive data collection system is then used to anticipate changes.

These parts of the evolving use of drones all came together in the stunning rout of the Ukrainians in the Kursk region last week. The Russians could accurately predict where Ukrainian men and material will be at all times, so they could plan the stunning move through the gas pipelines to put troops behind the Ukrainians in Sudzha. They could also be ready for when the Ukrainians reacted to hit them with drones and drone-controlled artillery and glide bombs.

Kursk has become a model for drone attritional war. Filling the sky with networked suicide and surveillance drones is the first step. This prevents the enemy from gathering their forces for an attack. Instead, they are required to spread out and hide everything from the ever-present drones. The next step is to use the drones to shape the activity of the enemy in order to create an opportunity. The final step is to use the drones as part of combined arms assault on the enemy.

Of course, the same rules apply to the attacker. Even though the Ukrainian drones are not as good and numerous as the Russian drones, they still have lots of them, which means the Russians must disperse their resources as well. The battle for Kursk quickly turned into two armies spread thin across a wide area in order to avoid becoming an easy target for drones. This is why it took seven months for the Russians to dislodge the Ukrainians from the area.

To understand how this changes war, imagine if two armies are only equipped with long bows and crossbows. One the one hand, the longbowman can attack any grouping of men on the other side and vice-versa. Everyone must hide in buildings and underground bunkers. On the other hand, small assault groups of crossbowmen go out to hunt the enemy in close quarter assaults. Once they secure an area, more men come into to take up positions.

This is the battlefield in the drone age. Tanks and armored personnel carriers still operate, but they are easily spotted by drones. Even those equipped with electronic warfare countermeasures are vulnerable. Often, they are simply used to transport men on a one-way trip. As soon as the vehicle is disabled by the drone, the men scatter before the drones finish off the machine. Armor is often just an expensive delivery mechanism for small groups of men.

This is why the Ukraine war drags on. On the one hand, the Russians are unwilling to lose men and machines on big assaults due to the threat of drones. On the other hand, they have adapted the new technology to slowly hunt small groups of Ukrainians and individual pieces of equipment. Since Ukraine is fixated on holding territory, this attritional drone war lumbers along at a snail’s pace. In Kursk, the Ukrainians lost about four hundred men a day to these small-scall attacks.

We are, of course, at the cusp of drone war, but it is not hard to imagine how this could change the nature of war. At the start of the technological revolution, technology was the great dis-equalizer. It gave America a massive edge over the rest of the world in terms of military power. Now, at the end of the technological revolution, technology is becoming a great equalizer. Cheap drones are turning expensive, high-tech weapons into liabilities and returning war to a battle of men and wits.

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!