Author Archives: thezman

The Escapists

Posted on by

An iron law of the universe is the opposite law of liberalism, which states that whatever the left is saying, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. It is not a perfect rule in that the opposite is obvious or correct. It is just a good place to start when trying to figure out what they are doing. Projection plays a central role in the interior life of the progressive hive mind, so they inevitably accuse the enemies of the hive of doing what the hive is doing or has done.

An old example comes from the heady days of the Tea Party, which was a genuine populist and grassroots response to the cultural revolution. Normal, middle-class people started to organize against the Obama administration, but also the sissies of conservatism who were hiding under their beds at the time. Suddenly, people were turning up to protest and fight back against the gathering madness. It was a foreshadowing of what would come in 2016.

The response by the left was to accuse these people of being part of a conspiracy organized by the enemies of history. Nancy Pelosi famously said it was not a grassroots movement, but an AstroTurf movement. For those who do not know, AstroTurf is a genericized brand name or proprietary eponym for fake grass. Of course, what was true at the time and true to this day is the “grassroots” support of the left was bought and paid for by tax dollars laundered through the Blob.

It was one of those moments that revealed something about the sorts of people who end up in left-wing social movements. They always assume that the enemies of the hive operate as they do and will act like they would if given the chance. It is why they were sure Trump would trample your civil rights after he won in 2016. They knew that if they were in his position, that is what they would do. After the color revolution that toppled Trump and installed Biden, it is exactly what they did.

Now that Trump is back, we see the opposite rule kicking in as part of their coping strategy and effort to organize a response. The crazies are now free speech warriors, claiming Trump is going to start censoring people online. The very same people who chanted “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” as anyone with a sober thought in their head was evicted from Twitter are now carrying on as if they are Ann Frank, hiding in the attic from the MAGA police.

This story about how a handful of zombies turned up to yell at a Congressman is framed as a populist rebellion. These are people made angry by their television, so they show up on command at this event to be angry. A defining feature of these old, white progressives is they have no idea why they are angry. The person on their television is angry, so they are angry. They are the sort that started saying “keev” the weekend the war in Ukraine started, as if they always said it that way.

Of course, nothing about this is on the level. That is the great lesson of the populist rebellion that started with the Tea Party. Our politics have been entirely fake for decades, manufactured and controlled using government money. These efforts to repeat what worked in the past affirm it. Our politics for the last several decades have been pretty close to the opposite of what was beamed to us. “Our democracy” was absolute party control.

All ideologies rely on lies to fill the gap between their vision of the moral society and the reality of the human condition. This habit explains the violence that comes when the ideologues gain control. The lies are replaced by a program to fill the gap between ideology and reality. That gap is always filled with corpses, but it is never completely filled, so the lies return as the cost-effective option. In time, they become so comfortable with the lies that lying is the solution to everything.

We are seeing this in the “resistance” being rolled out in the media. It is not connected with reality but dreamed up by the same people who claimed they were defending democracy when they were harassing people for Facebook posts. The same narrative makers who swore all their failed schemes were working right up until it was obvious that they were not working are now busy imagining a scenario in which they are carried back to power on the shoulders of the people.

Things like the opposite rule are part of the essential appeal of ideology, which is an escape from reality. This is what ideology inherits from Christianity. The losers drawn to the new religion spreading around the Roman Empire were attracted to the promise of escape from this life. If they followed this new religion, they would one day stand shoulder to shoulder with the great men of this age in the sight of God. Ideology says the same thing but stops at the bit about God.

Libertarians imagine that one day they will be yeoman farmers, totally self-sufficient and liberated like the rich guys they admire. The antifascist imagines herself as a stunning and brave member of the committee, as respected as the men who never pay much attention to her. The conservative believes he will one day be rich like Donald Trump, but classy like Bill Buckley. The fascist imagines himself in a snappy uniform in charge of men, instead of a loser playing video games all day.

This is what brings us back to the opposite rule of liberalism. The last ideology, like all ideology, requires the suspension of disbelief. Accusing the bad guys of doing what you have done or are currently doing is a way to escape the reality of politics. It is not a fight for power, but a great crusade between white hats and black hats. To think otherwise is to be back in the reality from which you are trying to escape. The “resistance” to Trump are not losers, but the heroes of a story they are now writing.

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 End Of Ideology

Posted on by

One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

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 Game of Chicken

Posted on by

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the blob, a post about big stupid trucks, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Last Wednesday was the kickoff of a show with Paul Ramsey, which you can watch on Paul’s channel. I also did an appearance on the Mike Farris show, which can be seen here.

The Trump administration’s opening of direct talks with the Russians setoff panic in Kiev and the capitals of Europe. The reason for that is Project Ukraine was centered on the acceptance that there could be no direct talks with Moscow, until the Russians surrendered their country to the control of the usual suspects. Trump’s call with Putin and then the meeting in Saudi Arabia violated this central assumption. First there was panic and now there is a game of chicken.

The Trump administration has concluded, after assessing the situation inside and outside the issue of Ukraine, that normalizing relations with Russia is in the best interest of the United States. One of the obstacles to that is the war in the Ukraine, so logically they are looking to wrap up the war as quickly as possible. The Russians have agreed to talks with Ukraine but insist on elections in Ukraine first. They point out that by the laws of Ukraine, Zelensky does not have the power to sign a deal.

Russophobes argue that this is a stalling tactic, but they are the ones demanding the unconditional surrender of Russia before any talks can start, so this is the usual projection that is a feature of the post-liberal West. The Russians, having been burned by the Minsk agreements charade, want the next deal to have teeth, so they are insisting that it be signed by the internationally and domestically recognized leader of Ukraine, which means new elections.

The Russians would probably drop this demand if the EU were willing to co-sign whatever deal is struck, but such an offer will never come. The reason is the whole project relies on never having direct talks with the Russians. This is the trap setup in 2023 to keep everyone committed to Project Ukraine. Ukraine passed a law forbidding direct talks with Russia in exchange for unlimited support. Europe signed on in exchange for unlimited support from Washington.

The reason the Biden administration expedited the remaining weapons and money allocated to this project was an effort to prevent the incoming Trump administration from rethinking these arrangements. They would not have time to do that, as Ukraine would immediately need more money and weapons. The assumption was that they would have no choice but to go along with more money and weapons, thus entangling Trump in the Ukraine trap.

The underlying assumption was that Trump would not walk away from Project Ukraine and risk the image of Russian tanks rumbling through Kiev. This is the assumption the Europeans and Zelensky are relying on as they deal with Trump. In fact, Zelensky is so confident of this that he is going out of his way to jerk around the Trump administration on the mineral rights deal. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are coming to Washington this week to set Trump straight.

Reportedly, Starmer and Macron will present a plan to Trump that has the UK and France putting troops into Ukraine, while the United States provides air cover from bases in Poland and Romania. In effect, the United States must create a no-fly zone over Ukraine and go to war with Russia if the Russians violate it. The madness of the scheme is so beyond the pale it is hard to accept as real, but the Europeans are operating in an alternative reality from the rest of us.

The Trump people see that the main obstacle to their plans for normalizing relations with Russia is Zelensky. Anyone who has dealt with a deadbeat knows Zelensky and the best way of dealing with this type is to get rid of them. Elections will remove him from the picture. The end of American support will also remove him from the picture, as the only reason for him to exist is as a facilitator of money and arms into Ukraine, mostly the money, which is stolen by Ukrainian officials.

The danger of pulling the plug on Ukraine is that it could be bad public relations, which is where the mineral rights dispute comes into play. The point of this is to make it appear as if Zelensky is unwilling to make a deal for more money and make it look like he is the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump’s team has figured out that Zelensky cannot sign the mineral deal, and he cannot agree to negotiations, so they are pressing on both in order to shift the blame to him.

What is setting up is a game of chicken. On one side we have Zelensky and the Europeans, who are sure Trump will never walk away from Ukraine. It is why they are getting bolder in their demands. They think Trump is bluffing. On the other side we have Team Trump who is sure the Europeans will fall in line, rather than risk a break with Washington, even if it means abandoning Ukraine. Zelensky is sure he has fooled everyone with his latest schemes.

For their part, the Russians are making the prudent bet. It costs them nothing to talk with the Trump administration and there is a good chance it leads to a positive outcome, so they will follow that route to the end. Similarly, the Chinese have made positive noises about the start of talks between Moscow and Washington. Like the Russians, the Chinese welcome the return of normalcy to Washington. China and Russia are open for business and ready to make deals.

It is too soon to know how this ends, but this game of chicken revolves around Zelensky being the ruler of Ukraine, which means the way to avoid a collision is to remove him from the equation. The Russians figured this out two years ago. The Chinese figured it out last year when they had talks with him. Now the Trump administration has arrived at the same conclusion. That leaves the Europeans and the bet in the White House right now is they will choose Washington over Zelensky.

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 February 21 2025

Posted on by

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 03m05s Snobs & Slobs, Euro style
  • 10m11s Trump trashes Ukraine
  • 15m12s The mystery of South Africa
  • 21m29s Don’t look up
  • 28m31s Scatter the feds!
  • 31m16s Fort Knox, wha?
  • 34m30s Return of Butch & Suni
  • 36m16s World Hippo Day
  • 39m05s Silly signoff

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! Greetings, listeners, from your stratospherically genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you some notes from the week’s news seasoned with wit, cynicism, and some bafflement.

Most of this week’s news has related to foreign affairs. That puts me at a slight disadvantage as I’m not really engaged with matters foreign. I often find them interesting, from a detached historical and anthropological point of view; and I have sympathies and unsympathies, both governed by my strong preference for civilization over barbarism.

Those are calm abstractions, though. I’m not engaged with foreign issues in the way that I see commenters on social media engaged, with deep feeling and strong commitment. I’m a Fortress America guy.

I want us to have lots of nukes. I’ve been telling the world that for more than twenty years. Actual quote from me in 2004: “You Can Never Have Enough Nukes.” End quote. I likewise want every kind of anti-missile defense we can devise, and state-of-the-art protections against anything a hostile power might hit us with: conventional, nuclear, chemical, biological, drones, … everything.

That attained, I want us to mind our own business while the rest of the world goes hang.

So I’m not really your go-to guy for news about foreign parts. They’re in the news, though, and we’re tangled up with them because of past stupidities; so I’ll do my best. Continue reading →

Mokita

Posted on by

In every human organization there are things that are true but for one reason or another, everyone agrees to ignore them. It may be that these things are just annoying, like the personal ticks of the boss. In other cases, they are things that would put the organization at risk if people tried to address them. Human systems often must ignore things that contradict the logic of the system.

The American political order as established by the Constitution has holes that the Framers chose to ignore because they had no choice. The final results were a compromise between thirteen states that often had serious conflicts on things, conflicts that could not be reconciled, so they were ignored. The most obvious one is the issue of slavery that was resolved at a later date.

The managerial system that is under assault by Trump was made possible by ignoring things that were essential to its existence. The creation of executive agencies and who controls them is a good example. For fifty years everyone in Washington pretended that these agencies were a fourth branch of government. Trump has stopped pretending and is challenging a core assumption of managerialism.

That is the show this week. It is yet another way of looking at how we got to this place and why Trump can do what so-called conservatives had promised for decades but were never able to do. At the heart of managerialism was mokita, things everyone knew were true but agreed not to discuss. Like a body, the truth can only be hidden for long until it bobs to the surface.

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
  • Mokita
  • The Political Mokita
  • The Constitutional Order
  • The Managerial Mokita
  • The Trump Challenge

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Old Think New Think

Posted on by

One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

Once you look at the war the way Trump has been looking at the war since it started, his approach makes perfect sense. He is doing now what he would have done if he were in the White House for a second term. He opened a dialogue with the Russians, and he minimized Zelensky. The reason for that is this war is not about Ukraine or some abstract concepts from the past century. It is about how conflicts between the great powers will be settled in the future.

Here is where you see the two class of people. Zelensky is operating from the old model where moralizing about world affairs was the rule. It was about those old 20th century ideas of good guys and bad guys. Trump is operating from the new model where everything is about business. Project Ukraine is bad business, so it must end and there is nothing more to say about it. Zelensky is the project manager who thinks the project is about something other than business.

Zelensky is not alone in this. His friends in Europe are also trapped in the past, thinking that they are skillfully playing the old game, when in reality they are soon to join Zelensky in the room of formerly relevant figures. The British figurehead Keir Starmer is coming to Washington next week thinking he is going to explain things to President Trump with regards to Zelensky. In reality he is going to be sat down by Trump subordinates and told he has been demoted.

Trump signaled as much when a reporter asked him about Starmer announcing his trip to Washington last week. Trump casually said that Starmer wanted to visit, but he was unsure of when he was coming. He treated it like the pool guy called and said he had to do something about the algae. That should have been a signal to the Brits that Starmer will not be welcomed as an equal, but like everyone else in Europe, they are struggling to come to terms with the new world order.

The same thing is happening locally. Scan many conservative sites or their accounts on Twitter and they are carrying on like it is 1985. Granted, this has been their act since 1985, but it is clearly not 1985 now. They are still doing the “If we use our power then the we are no better than the Democrats” act. The dumbest ones are still singing from the neocon hymn book. Dissidents have often joked that conservativism is a museum to the Reagan years, but now it is painfully true.

In fairness, the dancing partner of the conservatives are struggling as well. This tweet from a progressive chattering skull is emblematic. He is working from the old playbook that says the “left” calls out the “right” about not following the rules and the “right” then uses that to fink on their voters. The people operating in the new way of things just shrug at this stuff. The whole point of the present moment is to flip over the tables in the temple of politics and usher in a new age.

This is not just a struggle for the establishment. Old think is a problem for people who claimed to be dissidents. The people called “right-wing influencers” are struggling to maintain an audience because their act is suddenly irrelevant. Many are now becoming Trump critics because it is the only way to get attention. It turns out that they were never for anything, just against things. Remove those things they oppose, and they are left with a gaping hole in their act.

Where all this leaves us is we have two classes of people now. There are those who are embracing the new way of doing things, even if how it all works is not all that clear, and then there are those who wish to remain in the past century. Perhaps this will be the new political spectrum. The left will be the dead-enders who continue to look backward, and the right will be those facing the future. Regardless of the labels, the future will belong to those who embrace it, leaving the past in the past.

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

The New Deal Bookend

Posted on by

The assault on the Blob has taken up most of the attention in Washington, along with the reproachment with Russia, but the biggest item on the Trump agenda is the restructuring of the American economy. If you listen to what Trump says when asked about what has been happening thus far, it often circles back to the economy and how he imagines it to be after his changes. The thing is no one in the media follows up on it so Trump is never asked about that end goal.

There were some hints in the Russia coverage. One of the participants from the Russian side was the head of their sovereign wealth fund. This is something Trump has said he wants to create for the American government. A sovereign investment fund is a state-owned investment fund that does the same things a private investment fund, except it also has an eye on policy. A sovereign wealth fund acts as an additional level in both foreign and domestic policy.

This is not a thing you typically see in the West, as the Western economic model is built on the assumption that the government should not meddle in markets. This is a big lie, of course, as Western governments regulate everything. The thing is the regulations are dictated by the market makers through the miracle of regulatory capture, so the political class has limited control of the regulations. A sovereign wealth fund would put the political class on an even footing with the market makers.

That brings us back to the administrative state and the Blob that has consumed it over the last thirty years. In theory it regulates the economy in the interests of the people, but in reality, it has been a conduit so that the parasites within the blob can suck the blood, as in money, from the system. That money is used to maintain control of the host and launch projects abroad. Trillions are sent into the system, but what comes out does not make any sense to anyone, even the people inside it.

Take the Department of Education, for example. It was organized under Jimmy Carter for the purpose of housing all educational programs under one agency. Today it has a quarter trillion-dollar budget and employs 3900 people. Now, that does not mean those employees have a sixty-million-dollar salary. Most of the money gets sent to the states via grants and subsidies. Put another way, a tiny number of people in Washington dictate education policy to the country through this agency.

Trump has ordered its dismantling, but it is not about the money. Pell Grants, for example, are not going away yet. They would be shifted to another agency and eventually either automated or killed off by Congress. The reality is things like Pell Grants are a subsidy to colleges and universities, not students. All government subsidies end up in the pockets of the industry getting the subsidy. If you create grants for buying BMW’s, then BMW raises its prices by the amount of the grant.

From the Trump perspective, the federal government meddles in the economy far too much, but even worse, it meddles in the wrong things, while at the same time it ignores the big things that it should be managing. The federal government spends hundreds of billions subsidizing colleges and universities but ignores the bizarre trade relations we have with Canada and Mexico. In other words, Trump-o-nomics is not rebranded conservatism or libertarianism. It is a radical reordering of priorities.

One way to think of what Trump has in mind is the corporate model, but the start-up variety rather than the late stage decline model. American Inc. is an aging company like IBM that is bogged down in old rules and old thinking. It survives, not on making new and better products, but on the proceeds of past success. If you were to revitalize IBM, you would strip out the good stuff into a new company and hand it to smart people and leave the old stuff to the investors.

That is the goal of the Trump program. The new model for American Inc. is to be like a startup where the people running it, the Executive branch, set the general goals and the broad operational outlines, but the people inside of it, the states, business, and the people, are left to figure out the rest. Things like tariffs, global trade deals and the sovereign wealth fund are tools for setting the broad agenda and correcting imbalances that arise inside the economy.

Anyone familiar with startups or growth companies knows that the enemy of growth and innovation is management. In the 1990’s, for example, ambitious people would see the hiring of human resources people as a sign to move onto the next startup, because they understood that human resources were the death of innovation. The assault on the Blob, therefore, is like the termination of the human resources, diversity, and training departments of a struggling corporation.

There is much more to this, but the thing to take away is that what is happening is just the small setup parts for a larger reshaping of the economic order. Those meetings with the Russians are more about economics than war. In fact, you already hear the change in language regarding Ukraine away from ideology and to economics. For Trump and America Inc., Ukraine is a bad business deal. The goal now is to bring it to a quick close and claw back some of the money.

In this regard, the Trump era may one day be seen as the bookend to the New Deal era that gave rise to the managerial state. It has been lost to the need to recast the New Deal to fit modern narratives, but the FDR people were inspired by what was happening in Europe at the time. This is what gave Burnham the inspiration to write the book, The Managerial Revolution. The irony of the man they swear is Hitler bringing to an end a system partially inspired by Hitler should not go unnoticed.

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 Post Of Judgement

Posted on by

For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.

On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.

The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.

Ever since, the name of the game in politics has been to make sure you manage the media, which meant hiring an army of media consultants. Often, these people came out of the media. Of course, the media was an extension of the managerial class, so this new relationship created good jobs at good wages for people long on credentials and short on practical talent. This peaked under Obama when hundreds of media members got jobs in his administration.

This is why politics shifted from backrooms and onto the pages of the media, where narratives, narrative management and narrative collapse became the defining features of the public debate. The point of politics was to create a story, in which the hero defeated the villain and everyone clapped. This was to herd the managerial class into the hero side and paint the enemies of the managerial class as the villain. Politics was all about good guys and bad guys, as determined by the media.

In the end, American politics was like a Greek drama. The players on the stage were cast in their roles not by their actions, but by the commentary provided by the chorus, which was the media. It reached the point where in the Obama years, people truly thought “healthcare” was a thing that existed in unlimited quantities, but needed to be freed from the grasp of the monster called the insurance companies. Healthcare reform was a bizarre pantomime for the entertainment of Washington.

In the digital age, it went beyond the parlor games of the political class so that media power became the tip of the spear in the cultural revolution. Every activist declared herself a journalist and dedicated her life to finding heretics. Her job was to “report on the heretic” but her hope was that major media would pick up her “reporting” and have the heretic hurled into the void. Like every political terror in the ideological age, what started with the politicians was visited on the people.

This is when ideological and theological fevers break. People can suspend their disbelief and accept even the most bizarre moral framing, when it is limited to the action on the stage. They know it is just entertainment. Even when in the form of a lecture or sermon, they believe they can take from it what they will. When the directors of the moral drama begin dragging the people onto the stage, or off to the gulag, then the people can no longer suspend their disbelief.

The natural questions of all moral disputes then begin to appear. Those questions are “Who says?” and “So what?”. These questions crept up on the managerial class over the last ten years and they were never able or willing to answer them. This became obvious in the runup to the election. The media kept screaming, “Trump is evil!” and the people kept wondering, “Who says?” When they yelled about his alleged crimes and indictments, the response was, “So what?”

A great man once said that you will know that the revolution is upon us when a conservative waddles onto the stage muttering about the various “isms” and “who we are” and the audience remains silent. Then someone giggles, then another laughs and suddenly a wave of laughter sweeps the room. The great preference cascade is unleashed as everyone all at once seems to realize that everyone else thinks what they think about these ridiculous fools.

It is what we are now witnessing. Team Trump has started smashing up the managerial system in ways thought impossible. The media rushed to their pulpits to give their sermons, but the audience just laughed. The Wall Street Journal did the point and shriek at one of the DOGE kids and the audience not only laughed but turned “Big Balls” into a hero of the cause. The Vice President now goes on Twitter and mocks reporters who do the point and shriek.

There was a scene in the movie Braveheart in which William Wallace kills a group the king’s soldiers in an effort to free his wife. The last of them is the magistrate, who had killed Wallace’s wife. Wallace initially lowers his eye when he confronts him, then looks him straight in the eye and slashes the man’s throat. It is a great scene because it reflects the reality of power. The man had power over Wallace, as long as had moral authority, but he had squandered it.

That is what is happening in the United States. The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade. Their excesses not only damaged their credibility but also discredited their moral claims. They are now on the same level as the rest of us and we are cheering as the DOGE kids put them against the post.

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 New Sea People

Posted on by

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the clash between the formal and informal rules in Washington, a post on the new world order, a video from the new studio and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

This week Marco Rubio will meet with Russian officials to kick-off what Western media is calling Ukraine peace talks, but should properly be called normalization talks, as in the normalization of relations between Russia and America. The topic of Ukraine will be a part of the process, but not the focus of it. This is something that both sides have said regarding the hour-long talk between Trump and Putin. It was about much more than the war in Ukraine and how to end it.

This is what gets missed in Western media coverage. They are still operating by the old system where everything revolved around Ukraine. It was the lens through which all diplomatic relations were conducted. The new way of doing things is for the major powers to have a framework within which they can work out issues of common interest and settle issues where they are in dispute. For that to happen they must rebuild diplomatic relations between the major countries.

This is why Europe is not included. The EU is not a real place. It is a vague concept that has no sovereign authority. Ursula von der Leyen imagines herself as the empress of Europe, a managerial version of Napoleon, but in reality, she is a bureaucrat who failed up into a position that probably should not exist. As for the major powers of Europe, they will eventually play a role in the new security architecture, but they need to join everyone else in the 21st century before that can happen.

There is another reason the Europeans have been shut out from the talks. It is clear that they do not want anything to change. For them, the new world order is an existential threat so they will do what they can to booger up the process. Amazingly, the Trump people anticipated this. That was one reason for the one-two punch delivered by Hegseth and Vance last week. It has the Europeans reeling, and they are unprepared to do anything about the meetings between Russia and America.

This is right out of the Trump business handbook. The Trump organization was infamous for operating like a whirlwind. Once they got into a deal, they moved so fast and in so many directions, the rest of the parties had no choice but to go along with what they were doing. Not every Trump deal was a smashing success, but all of them were Trump deals and Trump got what he wanted from them. That is clearly what they are doing with regards to the Russia talks.

The other thing you see here is the deliberate minimalization of Ukraine dictator Zelensky by the Trump people. They do not treat him like an equal or even as a European head of state. Instead, he is being treated like a subordinate. He flew to Qatar thinking he could weasel his way into the talks in Saudi Arabia but was told that he would not be invited. Someone might call him if the Trump team felt the need to inform him of anything that happened in the talks.

This is part of the process of minimizing Ukraine. Instead of it being the top priority of the American government, it is now one of many issues that must be discussed between the great powers, once there is a process in place. It may be why the Brits have started to blame Zelensky for squandering the weapons given to him. It has dawned on them that for Trump, Ukraine is not going to be a priority. Now it is time for the political class in the UK to catch up and get with the new program.

Of course, the Russians are clearly uninterested in changing course in Ukraine without resolving the root causes of the war, so they will fight on, even as they are working with the Trump people. The Russians are old school and look at the battlefield as part of the negotiating table, so something like a ceasefire is for the end of the process, not something to be traded away in the middle. This means every day the situation for Ukraine grows worse and thus better for Russia.

That may not be so bad for Team Trump. If Zelensky were to suddenly turn up dead or deposed, replaced by a new ruler free of past errors, the Trump team would have more options as far as working out a peace deal. It is why they keep insisting on elections as soon as possible. Everyone knows that elections mean the end of Zelensky, so the sooner there are elections, the sooner the world is free of the little green man who has held the West captive for three years.

Another fascinating aspect of this revolution in global arrangements is the usual suspects have been marginalized. The attack on the financial superstructure is one reason for it. You cannot rent a mob to make loud noises in front of the media if you no longer have billions from the blob to pay for them. More important, the assault on the administrative state has the media spinning, so they are ignoring the usual suspects, leaving them to complain amongst themselves.

What knits it all together is the Trump whirlwind. The reason there has been so much progress in a short period of time is there are so many things happening in so many places, the “resistance” does not have time to figure out what is happening to them, much less organize to defeat it. The first month of Trump 2.0 has been the most exciting period in politics since FDR’s first one hundred days. It is like the Sea People swarming the brittle empires of the Bronze Age.

That is, perhaps, the way to look at this. Over the last thirty years the troubles for the managerial regime built up to the point where they were facing a tidal wave of enemies, but thought they had them under control. Once the walls were breached, those enemies are flowing in, and they are not interested in having a meeting of the executive steering committee to plan meetings for how to proceed. Like the Sea Peoples, the enemies of the managerial state just want to dismantle it.

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

Radio Derb February 17 2025

Posted on by

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 02m53s Healthcare gets a new boss
  • 03m49s Healthcare horror Down Under
  • 05m33s Immigration enforcement gets real
  • 09m55s Why are politicians so rich?
  • 13m05s Healthcare:a history
  • 26m43s Signoff with a medical melody

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! Greetings, listeners. This is your feebly genial host John Derbyshire with our weekly survey of the passing scene.

My choice of adverb there was reluctant but accurate. For the past few days Mrs Derbyshire and I have been afflicted with a nasobronchial disorder of the lesser sort, not serious enough to raise our temperatures or justify a doctor’s visit but leaving us enervated and operating at half speed.

The podcast will therefore be shorter than usual, for which I apologize. The commentary on current affairs will be thin gruel. When you’re feeling unwell it’s hard to concentrate on anything other than how unwell you’re feeling.

There will also be a healthcare theme to the podcast. Not a personal one: there is nothing more boring than listening to other people talk about their health issues, unless you’re a doctor and getting paid for it. I shall therefore not impose on you with accounts of our own ailments. I shall, though, later on give you a segment on health in general, in social and historical context.

And yes, of course, we both know there any many worse afflicted than ourselves, often in solitude. We at least have the consolation of feeling miserable together. With noses red from sneezing and throats hoarse from coughing, she is still my Valentine, and I am hers. God bless you, my Valentine.

OK: First let me do what little I can do with the week’s news. For symmetry, I’ll start with some healthcare-related items. Continue reading →