Author Archives: thezman

Another Point Of No Return

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Thirty years ago, a Ryder rental truck full of explosives detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 167 people and injured hundreds more. According to the official truth, the van was parked at the site by someone named Timothy McVeigh. While he did not act alone, he was the only person in the truck when it was parked at the site. A total of four people were arrested and charged with the deadliest domestic terrorist attack to date.

At the time of the attack, the public naturally assumed there were many people involved, as such a thing should require a lot of hands. There was also the assumption that foreigners were involved. By 1995, the United States had been dropping bombs on Muslims for at least a decade. It was not unreasonable to think that some of those Muslims decided to get some payback. According to the FBI, that was not the case at all and the whole thing was done by four people.

It turns out that this may not be entirely true. At the time, there were news stories claiming that two people exited the Ryder truck. Security cameras captured the parking of the thing and the blast. There was even a manhunt of sorts for the guy they named John Doe #2, but he was never found. Later, the FBI said there was never another guy and there was no video footage suggesting such a thing. The media, as they always do, took that to mean they should drop it.

It turns out that the FBI was lying. This long piece in The Federalist chronicles the long saga of trying to get that information from the government. Why the government would be hiding any information about a domestic crime that occurred thirty years ago is a question that can only have one answer. It is not as if there could be top-secret information in such a case. According to the story, the main reason the FBI is hiding this data is they were lying all along about John Doe #2.

At the time, it was not unreasonable for people to accept that the claims about another suspect were simply a mistake. After all, whenever a big event happens, there are all sorts of rumors circulating in the media. Most people at the time accepted that the media was biased and sloppy, but they trusted the FBI. Thirty years on and no one in their right mind trusts the FBI or the media. Decades of lies and many examples of framing innocent people will do that.

Just as important, we now have lots of examples where the FBI used informants or embedded agents to entrap people by tricking them into committing crimes or talking about committing crimes. Under Obama, the FBI helped sell weapons to the Mexican drug cartels, who used those weapons to kill Americans. Under Biden they tricked a bunch of dupes into the Whitmer kidnapping caper. Of course, the FBI tried to overturn the 2016 presidential election.

Considering what we know now, reasonable people are reasonable to wonder if there was not something similar happening with the Oklahoma bombing. The initial reports of a second man in the truck, then the denials and now the maximum effort to conceal evidence of the second man look a lot like how the government handled the Ray Epps situation after January 6th. Given the pattern, John Doe #2 was most likely an informant or an embedded agent.

Another curious thing about this case is that McVeigh was executed quickly, which does not happen in the United States. His trial started in April of 1997, and he was executed in June of 2001, the first federal execution in 38 years. Terry Nichols has been squirreled away in the prison system. The media makes no effort to reach him. Michael Fortier agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols in exchange for a reduced sentence and immunity for his wife. They both went into witness protection.

The behavior of the Feds in this case also looks like their behavior in the Enrique “Kiki” Camarena case in the 1980’s. He was a DEA agent who was allegedly kidnapped by the drug cartels, but was most likely assassinated by the CIA, because he learned about the drug running and arms shipment to the Contras. It turns out that the American government was helping the Mexican cartel ship cocaine into the United States in exchange for help funding the Contras.

Of course, what we are seeing with the Oklahoma City Bombing case fits the pattern going back generations. The government is still fighting to hide Kennedy material, despite orders to release it. The Epstein material should have been released long ago, but it will never be released, mostly out of spite. Anything damaging to the government was destroyed long ago. In case after case we see that the government prefers to conceal rather than disclose, as a matter of policy.

There is that other pattern at work here as well. That is where the FBI creates crimes so they can then use them to promote their brand to the American public and extract more cash and privileges from Congress. At this point, it seems like the only thing the FBI does is lure people into criminal conspiracies. There are 38,000 people employed by the FBI and most of them are probably on social media trying to bait people into going along with a plot that the FBI can then solve.

It is why people are right to assume that the reason the FBI is blocking the disclosure of information about John Doe #2 is that like so many of their capers, this is one that spiraled out of control. McVeigh and Nichols were willing dupes that the FBI was happy to manipulate, but they also turned out to be clever and willing to actually go through with the caper before the feds could put the brakes on it. That is the generous interpretation of events. It could be worse than that.

Given what has been revealed just in the last ten years, the political class should be united in their desire to disband the FBI. There is no appetite for even mild reforms, as we see happening now. Trump put Kash Patel in charge, not because he will change the agency, but simply to prevent them from launching another coup against him like they did the first time. Trump’s “solution” to the FBI problem is to put thumbless idiots in charge of it.

Just as we saw last week with the financial markets in response to Trump’s very mild changes in tariff policy, the inability to address the problem with the secret police is another example of how it may be too late. The secret police were allowed to turn into this monster that is now bigger than its supposed master. Instead of the secret police serving the political class, the political class serves the secret police. This is another sign that we have blown past the point of no return.

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!

Is It Too Late?

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about Russell Brand and what his case suggests about the state of the law, a post about using AI as an editorial team for the posts on this site, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the questions rarely asked regarding the ongoing American crisis is whether we have passed the point where reform is possible. Few want to consider that possibility for obvious reasons. If reform through the regular political process is no longer possible, then only unpleasant alternatives remain. One of those alternatives is some form of collapse. Like Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, America may be headed over the cliff with nothing to prevent it.

Last week, we caught a possible glimpse of the answer. Trump rolled out his tariff regime, and the stock markets went wild. It was not just a global selloff; volatility was off the charts, which is worse than the decline itself. A steady selloff occurs during a correction when markets are overbought. A chaotic, erratic decline signals panic setting in among the algorithms. It means their code cannot interpret the conditions they are programmed to use for trading.

Just as things began to stabilize, the bond market started to “get the yips”, as Trump noted on Thursday. No one in the mass media understands this, so they kept claiming the bond market crashed, which is far from accurate. The issue was that market players were dumping treasuries. It is unclear why, for instance, the Japanese central bank was selling treasuries. This uncertainty is just as worrisome as the actual dumping, so everyone was spooked.

Typically, the reason for dumping treasuries is a liquidity issue, either in the system as a whole or in a segment of it. In this case, the consensus is that hedge funds were raising cash due to the market decline. That could be true, but it is also possible the basis trade was unraveling. This is when hedge funds bet on tiny changes in treasury yields—a major way they generate profits within the system.

Here is how it works: Imagine you believe the value of an asset like a treasury will decline over the next six months. You hold this asset, but it is collateral for another transaction. You cannot sell it now, so you agree to sell it in the future at the current price rather than the market price at that time. If the price surges, you lose potential profits when the contract expires, but if the price drops as expected, you are protected from those losses.

There is much more to it, but that is the gist, and this happens across markets for everything, even treasuries, which have been very stable. Even earning a tiny percentage on these transactions can net millions for a fund handling tens of billions in trades. In fact, the financial system relies on clever quants coding models to exploit these small discrepancies between current and future prices to generate wealth.

When Trump’s tariffs caused this system to go haywire, triggering a panicked demand for cash, he had no choice but to back off. It was not that the bond market revolted due to a philosophical disagreement with the policy. Rather, this massive system is a house of cards that cannot tolerate even minor disruptions. Trump’s tariff regime should not have caused chaos, but the fact that it did suggests even small changes are no longer viable.

That is not the end of it. The central bank could mitigate this by injecting enough cash to resolve the liquidity issue. In fact, it can inject enough to counter deliberate revolts. You cannot beat the Fed. This should have happened last week, but Jerome Powell either refused to act or was too inept to grasp the situation. He has been the worst Fed chair since Arthur Burns, so incompetence is a strong possibility.

That said, the Fed held an emergency meeting just before Trump announced his tariff plan last week, likely in response to it. Given the Federal Reserve’s composition and its attitudes toward the American public, it is possible they intended to undermine the process. The Bank of England toppled Liz Truss’s Tory government, so it is not unthinkable. The head of the Bank of England at the time was Mark Carney, who is now the dictator of Canada.

This would imply that normalizing the American economy is no longer possible, at least not through standard political processes, because the entrenched interests profiting from the system will not allow it. That is what we will discover in the next ninety days as the Trump team navigates this challenge. Bessent has suggested they will use this time to strike individual deals with countries rather than unilaterally imposing a tariff schedule.

Of course, they could also have Jerome Powell killed, thus sending a message to the parasite class that they must fall in line or else. They never take no for an answer, so this approach never works. The Russians had to execute a lot of oligarchs before the rest finally fell in line with the new program. Falling in line usually meant fleeing the country with their cash. Maybe it does not have to come to that with the bankers, but last week was not a positive sign.

What the events of last week show is that normalizing American economic policy is not going to be easy within the current process. It also suggests it may not be possible without radical approaches to implementation. We may have reached the point where even with enough coercion, the system cannot be reformed. We may have blown past the point of no return as far as the political and economic order, so what lies ahead is chaos no matter what is done.

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 April 11 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m51s VDARE fights on
  • 07m04s Lydia’s appeal
  • 17m50s Tariffs, uh
  • 23m25s Atheism news
  • 24m38s Fascists suppress voters
  • 26m32s Wonders of Nature
  • 27m30s Signoff with The Four Lads

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a snippet from Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played on the organ at Derby cathedral, and this is your combatively genial host John Derbyshire with some comments on the passing scene.

The format this week is somewhat different, the first two segments dominant.

I can already hear the grumbling. “Hey, Derb, you’re supposed to be a conservative. Why do you go messing up your format like this?”

To make a point, that’s why. The particular point I want to make is the sinister wickedness of state lawfare against private individuals and associations.

Sure, that point has been made often, including by me. It can’t be made often enough, though. Even with an enlightened administration in Washington, D.C. those individuals and those associations still face massed legions of left-wing and corrupt judges and state officials striving to extinguish our liberties. Fight! Fight! Continue reading →

Me And Ideology

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I thought I would take a break from the money game this week to address an issue that comes up in the email from time to time. That issue is my ideology. Whenever I comment upon ideology, almost always in a negative way, I get comments suggesting I should explain my ideology, rather than just criticize others. Certain nationalists take issue with being called ideologues for some reason.

The trouble with this is I am not an ideologue, but I thought that might make for a good show, so that was the plan this week. Then as I was recording it, I started having issues with my voice, like I am getting a cold. That threw me off my game and the show wandered around a bit. I would have scrapped it and started over, but I was not sure if the pipes would make it, so I stuck with the first pass.

Realism and pragmatism are much abused terms in American politics. The people we call the right often claim to be on the side of realism, but that is not so. They are just a slower version of those they claim to oppose. The people we call the left used to love the term pragmatism, despite being fanatics. There is a good chance they dust off that language in time for the next election.

Realism and pragmatism are not the opposite of ideology. Ideology does not have an opposite unless you consider the absence of ideology as the opposite. No society is devoid of a moral framework, which either turns up in the dominant religion of the people or as a set of customs and traditions. Ideology is an attempt to replace both religion and tradition with a new moral framework.

The realist understands that ideology is a shabby replacement for religion and tradition, no matter how muted the goals. Pragmatism demands that any political program operate within the limits of the organic moral order of the people. The realist sees things as they are and wonders why, while ideologues dream of things that can never be and demands we explain why not. He never accepts the answer.

That is the show this week. The first half is the problem with ideology, but specifically the American ideology. I even talk about the L. Ron Hubbard of the American ideology, Leo Strauss a bit. One of these days I will do a show on Strauss, but I do not find him as interesting as his followers find him. The rest of the show is why I think I naturally reject ideology. Not a great show, but you get what you pay for.

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
  • Ideology
  • Why I am not an ideologue
  • Realism

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Back To Work

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Warren Buffet famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” The point of this metaphor is that in economic downturns you learn who has been taking excessive risks. Another way of putting it is that in easy times, everyone can be a hero or a genius. This has been the case for the American financial system for over thirty years. As long as credit money kept expanding, everyone had a chance to look like a financial genius.

This explains the prevalence of people in the financial media who somehow get everything wrong but maintain their status as experts. The most notable of this sort is Jim Cramer who has made a career out of being outlandishly wrong. Paul Krugman wrote a column for years about the economy, despite never being right about it. These are two famous examples, but the commentariat is littered with these types. As long as the arrow kept going up, being wrong was good money.

The trouble is that the entire financial industry is built on this premise. Being wrong comes with no penalty, because wrongness rarely comes with a cost. Sure, the MegaBrain Capital Fund might not perform as well as random guessing, but because the arrow always goes up, even the bad bets pay off. This also means anyone spouting random gibberish can present himself as an expert. Tens of thousands of mortgage payments, maybe hundreds of thousands, rest on this assumption.

The main reason for this, of course, is the United States has been both the global mint and the global bank since the 1980’s. You can see it in the markets. From 1985 to the present, the DJIA has increased by about nine percent per year. That includes the many busts that were backstopped by the global bank. From 1965 to 1985 the markets suffered a long bear market, after the long twenty-year bull market that kicked off after the end of the Second World War.

Another way to think about it is the American stock market boomed by about ten percent per year when the rest of the world was in rubble. Europe was literally in rubble after the war. Much of it was controlled by communists. China was a feudal, agrarian society trying to implement Marxist-Leninism. Japan only stopped glowing after that long bull market ended. In other words, the American economy and the equities markets had a great run when there was no global competition.

Somehow, as if by magic, equities had a run like the post war decades, despite the hollowing out of the economy. The run has also been longer. The twenty-year post-war boom ran out of steam even though Asia was not online yet, just because Europe was starting to recover. We have experienced a forty-year run while at the same time the American economy transitioned from inventing things and making them to driving each other around in Ubers.

It turns out that if the mint can make as much money as it likes, being the only mint on earth anyone values, and they give what they mint to the only banking system anyone values, the people in this system can do no wrong. For decades it has been like being at a casino with an endless line of credit. Not only that, but the dealers would also occasionally give you some insider information on the decks. It is not hard to look like a genius when you are playing with house money.

That world is coming to an end. The shock therapy we are seeing is not just a bluff to get better tariff deals. It is in anticipation of the fact that the world is shifting from where the dollar dominates all global trade to one where local currency arrangements will often be preferred over the dollar. If you want to buy from China, it will mean doing so in their currency, not dollars. The same is true for other major trading countries. The Russians have been the proof of concept for this approach.

This does not mean the dollar collapses or people revert to carrying sacks of gold while riding to town on their donkey. The primitive use of shiny bits of metal as currency only comes back if we enter a dark age. What is happening instead is a change in how the world views dollars and more importantly, dollar denominated debt. That means the days of unlimited credit money is coming to a close. The dollar and dollar denominated debt will reconnect with the American economy.

This is all bad news for the flim-flam men who dominate the financial services industry as it means being wrong once again comes with risk. The bad bets from MegaBrain Capital Fund no longer just mean a lower return. Those bad bets now put the firm in jeopardy and get the smart guys fired for making those bad bets. Swimming naked will now come with the risk of the tide going out and staying out. Like the fox in the hen house, risk is returning to the money game.

What is about to happen to the financial sector is like what we see happening with the government sector. The tens of thousands of people who do not do anything necessary will be let go, and that includes the experts in the media. In a world where risk is real, no one will tolerate a television clown dispensing bad advice, unless he is in a fright wig and wearing floppy red shoes. The clowns will back in the circus while the serious men do the serious work.

This is the end of America’s long holiday from reality. Playing make believe in government, finance or the media is no longer possible. Making money will not be about finding clever ways to get that sweet sweet credit money, but about inventing things, improving things and making things. That will not leave a lot of room for diversity experts or chattering skulls. Those people can be put to work in the new factories and repair shops, perhaps sweeping the floors.

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 Wilderness Of Lies

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One of the many things to spring forth from the political froth over the last decade is the level of coordination in the mass media. It was often clear that media activists were coordinating to create their preferred spin, but only with the help of conservative chattering skulls like Rush Limbaugh, who would create montages of media outlets repeating the same catch phrases. Social media now provides this service as the algorithms aggregate the stories and the repetition is too obvious to ignore.

Another thing that was not obvious is that many of the opinion makers, now called influencers, are in on the scam too. Often, they are paid by marketing companies to promote a viewpoint. The recent “soda money” scam where the soda industry paid a bunch of Twitter influencers to promote the health benefits of carbonated sugar drinks is an egregious, but typical example. The truth is, much of what the influencers do is paid for by marketing companies.

This is not just about moving product. The Israel lobby tried to secretly assemble a collection of right-wing influencers for a session with Bibi Netanyahu. Guys like Tim Pool were brought in so they could ask questions and be given instructions. Instead of paying them with cash, they get rewarded with access. This is an old trick that has worked on the media since forever. Look for Tim Pool and other famous influencers to sound remarkably like the ADL.

Payola is nothing new. In the golden age of popular music, record companies sent bagmen to big radio stations so the disc jockeys would play their songs. In the golden age of conservative politics, pens for hire were everywhere. Ben Domenech, one of the founders of The Federalist and RedState, was caught taking money from Malaysia to promote the interests of that country in his columns. Many other conservative pundits were caught up in that scandal.

This feature of the media exploded with the proliferation of digital media and the dominance of social media. It is also much easier to spot. The other day, a company hired by Ukraine did the soda money gag. This time it was a bunch of paid Ukraine supporters on Twitter repeating word for word the same erroneous claims about Chinese soldiers fighting on the side of Russia. The campaign was quickly suspended when it was too obvious to ignore.

It is not just the new school internet chattering skulls taking what used to be called payola, but also the old school types. This post by Victor Davis Hanson regarding the war in Ukraine has all the marks of pay-for-post. It has the typical neocon claims about the Russian army on the brink of collapse and the Russian economy in tatters, two stock bits of the neocon marketing campaign since 2022. Anyone paying the least bit of attention can easily spot those lines as agitprop.

The big tell that this is possibly paid opinion making is the claim that the proposed peace plan will create a DMZ along the border and the Russians will be forced to retreat back to their old border. Not only is this a fabrication, it is total nonsense. There is no such peace proposal and the only people claiming so are the neocons. They have been floating this idea since their 2023 offensive ended in catastrophe. Rather than accept defeat, they want a break to rebuild and rearm.

There are other neocon talking points sprinkled around the text. The claims about Russian losses are the most obvious. There is the crazy claim that Putin is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Union. There is also the mandatory criticism of Trump “art of the deal” negotiating style. Imagine Bill Kristol as a pinata and once he is busted open, what tumbles out are the main neocon talking points. Kids then took those and assembled them into that post for Mr. Hanson.

The Ukraine war has been highly useful in understanding the manipulation that lies behind the opinion makers. Whenever you see the phrase “full scale invasion of Ukraine”, you know you are dealing with a pundit paid by neocons, who are convinced this is powerful rhetoric. “Putin’s invasion” is another example. Normal people working at honest analysis do not use that language. These phrases are emotive signals to the neocon cult indicating a fellow traveler.

In fairness to Hanson, he is getting up there in years and he probably relies on an assistant to write his posts. American Greatness does not pay its writers, so no one can blame any of them for doing the minimum. It is a common practice for bigshot writers to rely on staff. Many of their books are written and assembled by assistants. The bigshot writer acts as the supervising editor. This is how Doris Kearns Goodwin got in trouble over plagiarism claims in one of her books.

That may be the case here. The person tasked with writing these posts simply relied on the copy provided from the neocon email list. On the other hand, Hanson has always been tight with the neocons. He has parroted their propaganda for years, so he could simply be doing the same in that post. That is the point though. In this age of zero trust, no one can be sure if it is honest error, ideological derangement, payola, or sloppy work from an old man nearing the end.

That is the world created by decades of media mendacity. As citizens trying to be as informed as possible, we find ourselves in a wilderness of lies. The “objective reporting” is all narrative storytelling to promote an agenda or a set of moral claims. Much of it is invented out of whole cloth. Analysis is often just payola, but much of it is part of a hidden agenda or a conspiracy. In a world where you cannot accept a man’s opinion as his opinion, you cannot trust anything.

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 Bell Ringing At The Top

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In the fullness of time, we may look at the sale of the NBA franchise, the Boston Celtics, as the bell that rang at the peak of the financialized economy. The team sold for a record-breaking $6.1 billion to a group led by billionaire William Chisholm, the managing partner of Symphony Technology Group. That firm has nothing to do with music or technology. It is a private equity firm. The deal still must be approved by the league and must go through the usual legal process.

The team is one of the crown jewels of the league, so it makes some sense that it commands the highest value. Since the beginning of the NBA, the Boston Celtics have been something like the New York Yankees—winning numerous titles and featuring some of the game’s greatest players. Wyc Grousbeck, whose family leads the ownership group that bought the team in 2002 for $360 million, made, on average, thirteen percent per year on his investment in the franchise.

By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about six percent a year on average, accounting for several crashes along the way. Median home prices in the United States have increased at about the same rate over that time. Some areas, like the Washington, D.C. area, have seen even larger jumps. Given that official inflation numbers are roughly half that figure, it shows that assets, even common ones like houses and equities, have experienced a steady increase.

Now, a golden rule of life is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it, but value is supposed to be linked to reality. The value of a business, for example, is tied to the value of its assets, its cash flow, and future profitability. A buyer expects to recoup his investment over a specific period, which means the business either has profits or assets that can be sold for a profit. The Boston Celtics are a business, so does that mean the business is worth $6 billion?

The answer is no, not in the conventional sense. Most sports franchises are break-even businesses, with many losing money. They often have negative cash flow due to player salaries, which means they carry a lot of debt. The NBA is experiencing a sharp downturn in its popularity, with television ratings down 60% from the peak. The Celtics do not own their arena, so they lack that asset to supplement their business. Most likely, the franchise is a money-loser by conventional standards.

Of course, the new owners do not care about the business side. They are billionaires who want to be in the billionaire club. It is as much about status as it is about business, but the business side still matters. They no doubt look at the massive inflation in franchise values and think they will have no trouble flipping this property for a nice profit once they get bored with it. In other words, they assume the asset inflation we have seen since the 1980s will continue.

This makes sense in the context of the current American economic model, the one Donald Trump is determined to replace with a new model. The economy that emerged in the 1980s is based on unlimited, cheap credit money that gets plowed into assets like equities, startups, and frivolous things like modern art and sports franchises. William Chisholm is a billionaire, despite never having invented or built anything, because he is highly skilled in the legerdemain of modern finance.

Another aspect of the new economy explains why certain assets, like sports franchises and some tech sectors, have outperformed houses and stocks. The NBA is financed, in large part, by taxes it levies on every household. These taxes come in the form of cable and television bills. If you have a television service, you are paying for all those games you don’t watch. Channels like ESPN are bundled into the bill, and they are a significant part of it. That money subsidizes the NBA.

If, tomorrow, everyone could simply pay for what they watch, like software as a service, sports channels like ESPN would go bankrupt within a month. Right behind them would be all the sports leagues. The reason? Sports networks would lose about 80% of their revenue. That means ESPN could not spend billions on live sports content, and without that revenue, the leagues would collapse. That $6 billion sale of the Celtics would look like the worst bet in history.

The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. The NBA is one example where the quality of the product has been disconnected from its financial success. In a true market economy, the owners of the Celtics would struggle to give it away, because the NBA, as an entertainment product, is in steep decline.

If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.

That is why the sale of the Celtics may be the bell ringing at the peak of the massive asset bubble that is the American economy. The absurdity of it should offend even the most zealous believer in the transactional economy. In a country with serious problems that require elite investment, watching rich parasites plow billions into a human flea circus brings revolutionary thoughts to mind. It may be the last grotesque gesture of an economic model that has run its course.

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 Great Transition

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about an old post I did on Vladimir Putin as the antidote to Peter the Great, a post about the Amazon series The Bondsman, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Trump stunned the world by following through on what he has been promising since he came down the escalator in 2015. He imposed across-the-board tariffs on every country in the world—except Russia. The reason Russia was excluded is that they are already sanctioned to the maximum. The tariff knob does not go past one hundred, so they were not on the list. Every other country was hit with a tariff, even Israel, which should cause some people to rethink things.

This set off the Great Trump Stock Market Crash, which promises to continue this week as the rest of the world responds to the new world order. The old trading models no longer work, so the default fallback in these conditions is cash. The quants were working feverishly last week to update their models in order to find the bargains that will inevitably be sitting there, waiting for the lucky. The smart money thinks the floor is a twenty percent correction, followed by stability.

The yesterday men and the crazies are sure this is the Great Depression, because their history of the world starts in the 1930s. It is a stylized history, such that every modern event can be jammed into the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1980s. Since they are sure Trump is secretly Hitler, this must be the 1930s—even though we have witnessed many stock market corrections in the last thirty years. The COVID crash, the mortgage bubble, and the dot-com bubble are easy examples.

In reality, what we are seeing is the long-overdue return to normalcy, where American economic policy is aimed at benefiting the American people, rather than abstract concepts from economics departments. If Canada has tariffs on American goods, then the United States should have tariffs on Canadian goods—unless it can be shown that the American people benefit in some way from the imbalance. The same is true for every other country in the world.

One of the weird things about decades of American trade policy is that it has created the same sense of entitlement as government racial policy. Just as nonwhites think they are entitled to be near white people without conditions, the world thinks it has a right to access the American market without conditions. This is most obvious in Europe, which has taken this lopsided arrangement for granted. They have also assumed they are entitled to American defense, while doing nothing in return.

The logic behind this arrangement has always been nonsense—but people love to believe in nonsense, especially their own. We see this with the free trade crowd, who are claiming tariffs will only harm the American people. If that were true, then the rest of the world should have been miserable for the last thirty years. Further, if that were true, then the rest of the world now has a chance to usher in a golden age for their people by eliminating their tariffs instead of raising them.

The truth of the matter is that all economic policy is about trade-offs—especially in global trade. This is why it is called trade, rather than “free.” Having a tariff-free relationship with Canada could make sense if the Canadian government could be trusted, as the American and Canadian economies are so similar. The same is not true for Mexico or Bangladesh. Trade is never just about money—it is also about culture and the national interests of the trading countries.

Of course, what we are seeing is not really about trade so much as it is about getting the American financial house in order. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary and architect of the Trump economic policy, has made this clear. Normalizing American trade relations is just one arrow. Another is the mass reorganization of government that kicked off in January. For the first time in the life of anyone reading this, the size and scope of government will be reduced.

Another arrow is the changes in the tax code that are slowly working their way through both houses of Congress. The Senate passed its version of spending and tax cuts, so now it is on to the House. What is shaping up is a two-pronged approach: one is to put into law the cuts made by the DOGE boys, and the other is a radical revamping of the tax code to reflect the new economic approach. Removing taxes on tips and overtime, for example, is part of the Senate model.

What we are seeing is the most radical alteration to the American economic model since the 1980s. The reason for it is that the old model is unsustainable. As Bessent pointed out, there is a limit to borrowing. For a long time, the American model relied on creating unlimited credit money in the banking system and massive federal borrowing. We have reached the limits of this model. Now, that model threatens the integrity of the American economy, so changes must be made.

More important are the changes in how we think and talk about the economy. For the longest time, the economy has been treated as a god. Americans were expected to tolerate anything to please it. If the economy demanded Haitian cannibals in your town, you had to accept it. If the economy demanded that the quality of your hand tools decline, you just lived with it. If the economy required you to work two jobs to make ends meet, then you did it. The economy was a remorseless god.

This sort of thinking makes sense to an alien overclass that sees the United States as an opportunity to be exploited. It does not make sense if the ruling elite feels a connection and obligation to the people. Shifting from the old transactional model of economics to a nationalistic model requires a new language. Simply pointing at a graph that trends upward is no longer enough. The political class will now have to possess some economic literacy.

It is too soon to know if these changes can make it through Congress. The winners under the old exploitative model will not go quietly. No one knows if the American public will tolerate the pain that must come with the transition. It is not all bad news, though, so the pain may be limited. Energy costs are falling—crude is under sixty dollars a barrel. This could tame inflation enough for the Fed to cut rates. Low taxes and cheap energy will go a long way toward cushioning the transition.

In the end, Bessent is correct. America cannot continue to create credit in the financial system and borrow trillions to hire government workers. We either have an orderly transition back to a normal economy, or we have a disorderly transition. The name for that is collapse—and that is vastly worse than a stock market correction. This is the reason the economic elites are backing this move. They know that the people who suffer the most from failure are the elites.

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Radio Derb April 04 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m04s Jared spreads terror
  • 06m04s Atheism goes woke
  • 16m53s Lawfare all over
  • 22m13s Human rights lunacy
  • 32m59s The Scopes centenary
  • 33m52s Civil war? Nah
  • 35m18s It is so flat!
  • 36m27s Signoff with Maria

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Transcript

01 — Intro.    And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 in the big band version, and this is your sensitively genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

To begin with, a couple of segments on the culture.

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The Great Z Death

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One of the downsides of writing and talking about the current scene is that you often want to kill yourself or kill someone. There are only so many stories about a crazed judge issuing an equally crazed rulings you can read before you want to spit on your hands, raise the black flag and start slitting throats. To paraphrase the late comic George Carlin, there are a lot of people who need to be killed.

It is why it is a good idea to look away from the daily car wreck that is the public square from time to time. It is why I quit Twitter. I will post links to my work there, but otherwise it is on mute. The most popular figures on that platform exist to irritate everyone else, so being active on that site is like inviting people into your home so they can break things and urinate on your carpets.

It is also why this week’s show is deliberately lighthearted. I randomly selected questions from big book of questions and answered them without preparation. I am not sure how many I got through, but it is probably about twenty. The book has three hundred questions in it, so I will probably revisit this format in the future when I feel like raising the black flag and slitting throats.

I have not read all of the questions. For the show I started at the first one and kept going until I ran out of time. I skipped some of them because they were not interesting to me, but that still leaves plenty of material. The interesting thing about the ones I cover in the show is that they have no link to current events, but they relate to things far more important to daily life.

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
  • Anger Management
  • The Book Of Questions
  • The Questions

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Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee