The Consolidation – Disaggregation Cycle

A recurring dynamic within the ongoing technological revolution is the process in which the forces of centralization sweep up the various nodes within a particular area into a dominant organization or industry. Centralization follows the initial success of some new technology or use of a technology. Once a set of dominant players control a market, the forces of decentralization kick in and pick away at it. It is like the expanding and contracting of the universe.

In the early days of computing, you had big machines maintained by an army of engineers at special facilities. As more computers were created, the next step was to network them into the first distributed network. What followed was the age of the mainframe and midframe, which centralized all the users of an organization into one main computer, which they accessed via terminals. The original internet was a consolidation of these machines.

The PC started to nibble away at this structure. Instead of the user storing all his data on the central machine, he kept it on his local machine. He shared his data with others by copying it onto a disk and then walking it over to that user using what was eventually called sneaker-net. Soon, the local area network allowed the office to share resources and disconnect from the mainframe. The internet then allowed those offices to share data with one another in a distributed network.

Of course, the forces of centralization roared back as servers came to dominate the office network and then the organizational network. As quick as everyone had a personal computer, they were soon forced to make it fully accessible to the impersonal network and then make it little more than a terminal attached to the organization’s network of servers. This soon led to the return of the mainframe era, which was pleasantly renamed cloud computing.

This consolidation – disaggregation cycle is a pretty good model for the history of human civilization, so it makes sense that it plays out in technology. In the disaggregated world, there are those who see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in bringing the disparate parts under one roof. At some point in the consolidation process, there are those who begin to see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in breaking the blob into pieces or creating alternative pieces to the blob.

A good model for this is the internet community. The first “social media” was the BBS created in the early days of computing. The Bulletin Board System was modeled after the old-fashioned bulletin board. The main difference was that when someone posted something, others could post replies and then others could reply to those replies for as long as the topic required replies. Sites like 4chan are pretty much just the old BBS with a cheap graphical interface.

The problem with the BBS was that it did not take long before the topics grew too diverse to organize, and the users started to hate one another. Soon groups of users started to spin up new boards for their specific topic or to get away from a rival fraction they used to war with on the old board. The central board broke into a million bespoke boards organized around the tribal instincts of their users. It is not hard to see how humans spread around the globe once you understand this.

What we now call social media has been defined by the consolidation – disaggregation cycle that is the nature of humanity. Just as the centralized BBS splintered into many small communities, subsequent technology followed the same pattern. Big email groups eventually broke into small email groups. Usenet, a technology that aimed to solve the limitations of the BBS, went from a set of large channels into an impossible to track number of small channels.

The message board, which made it easier for the tens of millions of new internet users to be herded into communities online quickly followed the same pattern. The big forum for sports soon broke into forums for specific sports and then forums for specific teams and then rival tribes within the team fanbase. The main driver was always the inability of any group of people larger than the Dunbar number to interact with one another inside an internet community without conflict.

We are now seeing another round of this with microblogging. After the election, the doxers, deviants and lunatics that came to dominate Twitter in the pre-Musk age have jumped ship to something called Bluesky. They have all sorts of reasons ranging from technological to conspiratorial, but the main reason is they cannot face the reality of their moral turpitude, so they are seeking shelter among the like-minded, in a similar way described in the study, When Prophecy Fails.

In one of life’s amusing ironies, they can thank Andrew Torba for the opportunity to create their own fever swamp. The tireless efforts by Torba to keep Gab going, despite the relentless attacks by the crazies, was the first step in the disaggregation phase of the modern social media platform. Gab became a fun refuge for those excluded from Twitter, something like Alfred’s fort at Athelney, from which he waged his heroic resistance to the great heathen army.

Gab surviving and thriving in its inimical way was a proof of concept that opened the door to the coming disaggregation. Mastodon and now Bluesky are hoping to attract niche communities that seek an alternative to Musk’s Twitter. The people into “right wing” conspiracy theories first tried mastodon, but found it too challenging, so they have landed on Bluesky, which is easier for them to navigate. They can now share their conspiracy theories in a “safe” environment.

Twitter will remain the dominant player, owing to the fact it is owned by Musk, and he is besties with the new president. Advertisers are returning to the platform, so it will probably start to turn a profit or at least break even. The ascendent economic interests want one central platform, so they will support it, but those forces of disaggregation will keep gnawing away at it. Nature, at least human nature, does not like centralization, at least not the reality of it, so disaggregation always prevails.

That is the engine of history. Whether it is family dynasties, empires, authoritarian regimes or the unipolar world order, the desire to centralize and control always crashes into the rocks of disaggregation. The tribal nature of man, evolved over millions of years, has not been completely beaten out of after ten thousand years of civilization, so conflict and separation are baked in the cake of human organization. Separation, peaceful or violent, is always the end of the story.


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


Of Two Minds

Everyone in every time has thought that his time was crazier and less predictable than the times that came before him. Much of this is due to recency bias, but another cause is the sense that things were better in the past. This sense that the past was better is a part of the human makeup. There is not only a nostalgia for the our own past, but for the past we never experienced. That is because the past seems more certain than our present age and the near future.

People who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War looked back at those days with fondness. These were people enjoying 1950’s America reminiscing about one of the worst times in American history. Many even lost family members in the war, but those war years felt like the best of times. Our minds seem to have evolved in such a way that we cannot remember pain. That means what we can recall about our past is only the good feelings we experienced.

It also depends upon who you are at the time as well. If you were a black person in the 1950’s then it was a wild time to be alive. The civil right revolution was getting going and the role blacks were given was to riot in the streets. The typical white guy living in California was just enjoying his time. On the other hand, the war years were a good time to be black in America as the war economy needed labor. Millions of black people found lucrative work in northern cities.

That is something to keep in mind while watching present events. It certainly seems like it is a crazy time to be alive. The whole Trump thing is wild, just from the perspective of American politics. People also seem nuttier. This was evident during the Covid panic when millions of otherwise normal looking people revealed themselves to be bitter paranoid cranks. Now the anti-Trump loons are going into hiding, by which they mean the latest alternative to Twitter.

It is not just the usual suspects losing their minds over the election. The British tabloid The Guardian has announced on Twitter, oddly enough, that it is stomping off in a huff, presumably to set up shop on the alternative to Twitter. They claim it is because of the “far-right conspiracy theories and racism.” That means a publication that traffics in conspiracy theories about the imaginary far-right and racism is abandoning the one place they are sure such things exist.

Even putting aside the natural bias described at the start, this is crazy behavior that did not exist just ten years ago. The crazy times ten years ago were both sides meeting in the streets to point fingers and maybe scuffle a bit. More important, the people we call the left had institutional support, so they controlled the battlefield. This fact has been true for as long as anyone has been alive, so seeing them abandon the battlefield and go into hiding qualifies this as a crazy time to be alive.

Of course, the reason this is happening is the big election victory of Donald Trump and the temporary ascendency of his party. It was not just a big win for Trump on Tuesday, but also a big win for the movement that made him possible. The reason that movement exists is the growing insanity of the people we call the left. In other words, we probably do live in a crazy age, even when people have the ability to step back and look at it from a distance. This really is a crazy age.

The thing about this crazy age is that not much is happening. The exciting times a century ago revolved around the Great War. The mobilization of America for war in Europe was unprecedented. The war itself was unprecedented, and its aftermath was also unprecedented. Enormously important things were happening. In this present age, everything happens on the internet and slightly affects events outside the digital space, but only in superficial ways.

Put another way, we live in a crazy time because this new virtual reality we created called the internet has sucked into it many of our least stable people, empowering them to unleash their craziness in this virtual realm. Imagine a version of the past twenty years in which the crazy people were denied access to the internet. Imagine if all the foreign policy debates since the Cold War had been conducted online by people like John Mearsheimer rather than crazies from the Kagan cult.

What makes this a crazy time is we are living in a unique period and what makes it unique is this virtual realm we call the internet. Everyone is forced to one degree or another to live with two minds. There is the mind that exists in the virtual realm and then there is the mind that exists in the physical realm. Note that you rarely discuss with people in the physical realm your life in the virtual realm. These are two distinct worlds that require two distinct minds.

On the other hand, the growth of this new virtual world has had the effect of collapsing the two minds for some people. The crazies online are made crazy, in part, by the invasion of the private space by the public space. Prior to the internet, these people could only do politics by participating in it publicly. Most just avoided politics and remained privately nuts, but free of public politics. Plugged into the internet, the public rushes into the private and the private becomes public.

This may explain the phenomenon of the seemingly stable person heading off into crazy land as they get increasingly online. People like James Lindsay or Keith Olbermann are good examples of people who started out a bit odd, but not so odd that you questioned their sanity. They steadily evolved into crazy people online. When there was separation between their public and private mind, we did not see the madness, because it existed outside of public view.

In the fullness of time, people may look at this time and think it was the calm waters before the terrible rapids. Maybe they look at this is as a gentle adjustment period between the Cold War and whatever comes next. it is also possible that it is the crazy time when people had to adjust to the two-mind problem. The growth of the virtual realm created a need for an entirely novel mode of thought, the mind you activate when inside the internet, along with a way of isolating it from the other mind.

It may be that we arrive at a new way of judging people. At the top of the hierarchy are those who master both minds, deftly balancing them to be high status in both the material world and the virtual world. At the bottom are the people who allow the virtual realm to take over their mind entirely, making it seem that they are as crazy in real life as they seem online. In the middle are the vast majority who struggle to balance their internet mind with their material mind.


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


The Restoration

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the weird noises coming from the regime after the election, a post about the odd quiet that we are seeing after Trump swept the field and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.


Legend has it that at the start of the trial of English King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell saw the king approaching Westminster Hall and realized he had a problem. He quickly warned his fellow parliamentarians that the king would ask a very straightforward question at the opening of the trial. He would demand to know upon what authority was he being brought to a trial. This is, in fact, what happened. Charles refused to enter a plea on the grounds the court had no authority over him.

The drama about Cromwell seeing the king’s approach and then suddenly seeing his problem is apocryphal, as the parliamentarians had been debating this issue since the end of the Second English Civil War. According to English law, the king could not be tried for breaking the law. Logically, the king was the law. The king was the sovereign and therefore the embodiment of the nation and its laws. Putting the king on trial was putting the system itself on trial.

Cromwell and his pals got around this problem by simply wielding the power they had, which was the force of arms, to override objections from members of parliament, the House of Lords and the king himself. When Charles asked “I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful authority”, the parliamentarians decided that “the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern.”

In other words, the long-held principles both sides claimed to support, over which they fought two bloody wars to that point, gave way to political expediency. Cromwell and the New Model Army had power, and they were determined to keep it, which meant killing the king and what he represented. If it meant trampling a thousand years of tradition and the law itself, they were prepared to do it. The trial proceeded as if the Charles confessed his guilt, and he was soon executed.

The French Revolution gets all the attention when it comes the crisis of liberalism, but it is the English Civil War that presents the problem plainly. By what authority can a parliament rule over a people? The answer always given is the people, but by what authority do the people have to pick their rulers? Where is it written that the people are the moral arbiter of society? Modern people think the answer is obvious, but for most of human history people thought the opposite.

The reason we have that story about Cromwell looking out of the window of Westminster Hall and suddenly realizing his dilemma is because people at the time understood the power of authority. The king was just a man, but what he represented was earthly dominion over man. No one looked at the king as just a man because he was the final authority, the one man who was an exception to the law, while being the embodiment of the law. He was the sovereign.

It is why after Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored. Despite it all, Cromwell was never able to answer the question posed by Charles at his trial. The authority of Parliament is in the law, but the authority of the law is in the king. Without a king, those in control of Parliament were left with force as their authority. It is easy to see why Mao famously said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The question of authority has haunted the world since that famous trial.

We are getting a glimpse of this with the election of Trump. Fifty years ago, the managerial class staged a coup against Nixon. Like the Rump Parliament that deposed Charles I, they acted extrajudicially but claimed to be doing so in defense of the law, which is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. They rid themselves of the imperial presidency, reducing the office and the rest of the political structures to committees controlled by the managerial class.

Then as now, the central question in the crisis is who says? Much of what constitutes the crisis of the American empire is people shouting from screens, demanding you must do this or must stop doing that. Everywhere you turn is a digital preacher, waging her bony finger at you and lecturing about your sins. The Roundhead ascendency that began with Watergate climaxed with men in dresses calling normal people sinners, but always the question remained. Who says?

The restoration of Donald Trump is an answer of sorts. Whatever his faults, Trump is a man who commands attention and respect. When he enters a room, the room changes because he is larger than life. He persevered over the last four years of official persecution through force of will. He returns to Washington as the leader of the victorious side in the cold civil war that has gripped the country. He also returns with an agenda and a mandate to execute it.

None of this is to say that Trump is the monarch or our moral authority. The point of the comparison is that the executive exists to replicate that role in a democratic system that lacks a moral authority. Without energy in the executive, the president cannot play the role the system requires to function. The last fifty years has seen the rise of rule by committee, and no one builds monuments to committees. Just as Parliament needed the king, Washington needs Trump.

It still leaves open that question. Monarchy solved the problem by making the king the sovereign and the answer to who says? In America, Christianity was assumed to be the answer most of the time. The exceptions required a strong executive to make the hard decisions and force the legislature to act. First the melting away of Christianity then the toppling of the strong executive left us with rule by committee and the fanciful chants about democracy to answer the question of authority.

Trump will not reign forever, so the question will return. Perhaps the managerial elite sees the problem and supports the return of the imperial presidency as a solution to the internal contradictions of managerialism. Maybe the economic elite supports the strong executive as a proxy for their supremacy over the managerial class, much in the way the king was the leader of the aristocracy. Maybe Washington falls into chaos again, as managerialism reaches its end.

In the end, political systems rise and fall on the question of authority. The moral questions in every society are either answered by the gods or by the people though their traditions and customs. Centuries of experience in self-government says we simply cannot accept “because we say so” as an answer. You either have a strong executive with the power to impress or you have a shared religion that answers all the important moral questions. Managerialism has neither.


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


The Signs Of The Next Times

One of the weird things about how the American empire operates is that there is a long waiting period between the presidential election and the installation of the winner, if the winner is not the incumbent. In most countries with elections, the transition happens within a week or two of the election. In America, the new president has months to wait for his turn at the wheel and the outgoing administration has months to do their worst, often with the goal of hobbling the next president.

The latter was on full display after the 2016 election. The last months of the Obama administration were used to set up the Russian collusion hoax, along with other schemes to prevent a smooth transition. The Trump administration was crippled right out of the gate, forced to go through the absurd theater of a special counsel to investigate what everyone knew was a political dirty trick. Between November and January, the fate of the Trump administration was sealed.

That is something to keep in mind this time. Like 2016, the political class was sure they had fended off the invisible army of orange Hitlers, only to find that their blue wall had crumbled once again. Unlike 2016 there was no way for them to claim it was fraudulent or illegitimate, since the results were conclusive. This may explain the relative quiet this time compared to 2016. By the standards of presidential elections, this was a trouncing in both the electoral college and popular vote.

It is possible that the energy has run out of crazy land. People want to think the madness set in during the 2016 election, but it started way back in 2000 when the people we call the left went nuts over the Florida recount. It has been a steady decline into madness for over two decades. That is a long time to sit in the pumpkin patch waiting for the conspiracy theories to be proven true. Perhaps they got tired of waiting and are making their way back to the fringes of sanity.

It is impossible to know, primarily because it is impossible for the non-ideological to understand the mind of an ideologue. The former group tends to the practical, while the latter tends to the fanciful. Most people think half a loaf is better than no loaf, while the ideologues look at such a compromise as a conspiracy against the tides of history and a justification for violence. It is why normal people are always surprised by how the ideologues react to events.

The best we can do is look for clues around the issues of the day. Project Ukraine, for example, has been central to the usual suspects for a decade. Trump is no fan of this project, and he is no fan of Ukraine. People tend to forget that Ukraine was central to his first impeachment. The people responsible for Project Ukraine are the main players in the anti-Trump stuff going back to 2016. They are also something like a drug-resistant virus that never stops trying to kill the host.

At the moment, what we are getting is the usual stuff from the usual suspects laundered in regime media as news and analysis. This Wall Street Journal story tries to frame the Trump plan as a choice between Russia surrendering or Russia giving Ukraine time to regroup and restart the war after Trump. This is the same narrative they have been shopping in one form or another for a year. In other words, the usual suspects may not have a scheme ready for Trump 2.0.

Another place to look for clues is in the antiwhite subculture. They have been weirdly muted for the past year. One reason is the backlash to DEI that took down a few prominent people. These were financed by members of the economic elite, which might mean money is drying up for the antiwhite bigots. This tweet from New York Times rage head Ida Bae Wells reads like a resignation letter. In 2016 these bigots were enraged by Trump winning, but this time they are despondent.

The antiwhite race rackets are worth billions, so there is no reason to think their relative quiet this time is a sign that they are about to fold up their tents and get jobs down at the local Home Depot. It is worth noting that crying “white nationalism” has lost all its punch over the last few years. In other words, their muted response could be part of a longer downward trend or simply part of a regrouping. Like the neocons, how these people respond over the next months will provide some clues.

Another area to watch to get a sense of what is happening is the media. Crazies like Rachel Maddow were slightly less nutty this time, but other nodes on the media rage machine were strangely sober. Again, the decisive victory this time might be the issue as there is no easy bogeyman for them to blame. On the other hand, the Biden debate performance and the aftermath may have broken whatever spell had kept these people within the narrative.

It feels like a lifetime ago, but the night of the Trump – Biden debate, it was clear that the chattering skulls were stunned to see that desiccated husk of Joe Biden drooling on himself and staring into the nothingness. It is possible that there was some sort of awakening among some parts of the media. These people are sociopaths, so no one should be optimistic, but how they react over the next months will provide some clues as to what is happening behind the scenes.

There are plenty of other places to look, but the reason it feels like there is an eerie calm over the battlefield is everyone expected the orcs to keep fighting, despite the results of the election. Instead, they have retreated over the hill and are murmuring amongst themselves. The thing to accept is they never quit. They will be back, so the question is in what form will they return? What path back to perfidy will they take in the coming months to continue the fight?


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


Ivy Day Thoughts

If you were to ask an American to name a corrupt country, he would most likely pick one from what we used to call the third world. To a great degree, this is how we now define the term “third world”. It simply means corrupt. First world countries have transparency and the rule of law, while third world countries are opaque, and the rules are not always clear to the citizens of those countries. These days it is not unusual to hear Russia or China called third world, for example.

This is one of those legacy ideas from the 20th century that evolved with the times rather than following the Cold War into the history books. As a result, our rulers tend not to think much about the corruption in American society. It is just assumed, as it was in the Cold War, that Western countries are largely free of corruption, mostly due to the honesty of Americans, while the rest of the world is riddled with corruption. It is a form of the old good guy – bad guy view of the world.

The thing is you can quite easily make the case that America is one of the most corrupt countries in the world now. Today is election day and most Americans assume the vote counts will be corrupted with fake votes generated by the people who support things like mail in voting, drop boxes and ballot harvesting. In popular government, voting is the key to its integrity, but in the world’s greatest democracy, most people assume the vote is as corrupt as anything that happens in the third world.

The countries that holds elections, even the ones we still call third world, require voters to cast their vote in person and show that they are a citizen. The burden of proof is on the voter to show they are entitled to vote. In America, this basic safeguard has been corrupted through many schemes like mail-in voting, drop boxes and bans on voters showing their government identification. Anyone who questions the integrity of the vote must prove their case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Of course, the reason for that is the court system is now stuffed with judges who make up the rules based on their ideological whims. A judge in Virginia tried to stop the state government from purging foreigners from the voter rolls. The state had to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. It was not a unanimous decision in their favor, because the three progressive fanatics sided with the foreigners. Courtrooms are now lotteries due to ideology, which is the definition of corruption.

It is fair to say that two pillars of “good government” in the liberal sense of the concept are free and fair elections and the rule of law. In present day America, we have thoroughly corrupt elections, and the rule of law exists only for the rich and those lucky enough to get a judge who is not driven mad with ideology. If what we see in present day America was happening in a South American country, the media reports would make corruption a center piece of their coverage.

That brings up a third part of the good government concept, a free press. The media in America is entirely controlled by the ruling class. Access journalism has been the norm for decades now. On top of that the media is staffed by people who are animated by ideological fervor. The result is a mass media that is so thoroughly dishonest it would have made the Bolsheviks wince. If you want to know what is not happening in the world, trust American media.

It is not that they are mere propagandists. The American media actively conspires with shadowy figures to deceive the public. The last decade should probably be called the age of media hoaxes. Many of them are so outlandish that it suggests we are living in a computer simulation run by drug takers. The mass media spent years covering a claim that Vladimir Putin used mind control to elect Trump in 2016. If Trump wins today, it will be more years of this insane conspiracy theory.

It is not just soft corruption, the stuff driven by ideological fervor, that has become normalized in America. Good old-fashioned bribery is the norm now. Look at the elected leaders of the two parties and what you see is they entered politics penniless and will exit as multi-millionaires. The reason for this is the elected officials who play ball get insider access to sure thing investments. The reason they are a sure thing is those same elected officials make sure of it.

In fact, it is fair to say that the American economy as a whole is as corrupt as the post-Soviet Russian economy controlled by oligarchs. Silicon Valley has been abusing the basic rights of American for years, with the full support of the state. The banking industry is nothing more than an industrial scale skimming operation. We used to put gangsters in jail for doing this with casinos. Now the gangsters have the state try to put you in jail if you question the ethics of our economic model.

It is hard to find anything in America that is on the level. Even benign stuff like social science data is corrupt. The government had to admit this year that they had been faking employment numbers. The FBI finally confessed that they had been faking crime figures, even the murder stats. Homicide numbers used to be the gold standard of crime data because it was assumed you could not fake them. Turns out in highly corrupt societies, you can fake anything.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, it was assumed it would take a few generations for the culture of distrust to subside. It did not take quite that long, but thirty years on and social trust remains low in modern Russia. It is rising quickly, but people still remember when you could not trust anything from the state or its supporters. Trust is one of those things that is easily squandered, but difficult to establish. Russia may never be a high trust society due its history.

This may be the fate of America. The average American, especially older Americans, still trust the system, even if they no longer trust the people running it. At some point, practical necessity forces people to stop thinking this way. You see this in the younger generations who are comfortable in a scamocracy. Add in demographic replacement and the ingredients are all in place for America to descend into the depths of kleptocracy and corruption associated with low-trust societies.

This is not to say we have decades more of this until the break. Historical analogies are not about stuffing the present into our model of the past. The point is to use a model of the past to gain insights into the present. In this case, the end was near for the Soviets when no one, not even government officials believed the official lies. By the 1970’s cynicism was the defining feature of the culture. The state lied, the people pretended to believe the lie and the state pretended the lie worked.

We may be reaching such a point. Today’s election is about a man who has been vilified, physically attacked and prosecuted by the state and their media agents for close to a decade. It is not about Harris. She is simply the face of a regime that people increasingly find odious and corrupt. Trump may be our Boris Yeltsin, a flawed but essential figure to facilitate the transition from the low-trust ideological regime of the past into something human and honest.


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


Time On The Cross

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the proliferation of rage heads who can only communicate in emotions, a post about how we have become a nation of liars and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.


The British conservative party, known as the Tories, finally settled on a new leader after they were nearly zeroed out in the last election. The pick to lead the party is a Nigerian woman calling herself Kemi Badenoch. Her official name is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, but that is far too British these days, so she has shortened it to a single word “Kemi” like pop stars do. She is now the face of the party that is supposedly the face of traditional English people.

The absurdity of this is obvious to most people, but not to everyone. The people running the Tory party are over the moon with this. Many of them are snickering into their sleeves about how the Labour party is “pale, stale and male.” Other are sure that it will take a Nigerian princess to restore British honor and finally confront the multicultural forces that have turned Britain into a zoo. This is their version of “Mexicans are natural conservatives”, popular with American conservatives.

The ridiculousness of this does not stop there. Look at the career of Kemi Badenoch through a traditional lens and her resume is a baffling mix of things that have no connection to one another or fit into a clear theme. She bounced from one thing to another, never accomplishing much but then suddenly she became a hot property among the consultancy class. That is where she was discovered by the political class and turned into a Yoruba version of Barak Obama.

The parsimonious explanation for Kemi Badenoch’s shambolic rise to the top of the Tory party is something John Derbyshire observed about Barak Obama when he suddenly burst on the scene. What appears to be a random walk preceding the meteoric rise is the result of the warm thermals created by white guilt over race and the desires and projects to seek forgiveness. The idealized black flits about until finally catching the sharp upward gust into the clouds.

Upper and middle-class whites in the Anglosphere seem to be driven to do these things, in part, by a desire to be ruled by Africans, who just happen to agree with them or “hold their values”, as they prefer to state it. There is also the desire to be punished by Africans, but not so much as to cause them real harm. They prefer the harm to fall on the bad whites. Then there is the strong undertow of salvation. These whites believe that this process will lead to their salvation.

This explains the weird exultation we see from these whites when a chosen one turns up to confirm the prophesies. The mania over Barak Obama was so bizarre people compared it to the cult of personality seen in places like North Korea. The Obama fans could tell you almost nothing about him, but that did not matter as simply being in the mobs worshipping him provided the religious experience they desired. You see the same look among the Tory members regarding Kemi Badenoch.

It is easy to mock this, but this behavior is driven by strong cultural and spiritual forces, and it is having a real impact. This phenomenon is mostly a product of the United States, exported around the West. The desire to build a city on a hill evolved into a sense of shame coupled with a desire to heal the world. The result is something approaching idolatry, with the well-behaved black person being treated like an emissary of God, who must be allowed to perform his miracles.

It is not an accident that the script writers for Barak Obama had him say things like “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Many people dismissed it as emotive nonsense, but the line has African origins. For the intended audience, white, educated and upper-middle-class, the line struck like a thunderclap. They were the elect and the proof of this was their presence in the cult of Obama. Not only was the promised land near, but salvation was also at hand.

Salvation never came and the result was a decade of madness. It is not an accident that the street violence and other engineered destruction of the basics of society started in the middle of Obama’s last term. At that point, it was clear to all that salvation was not coming, so they had no choice but to search for a villain. This sort of cult like behavior never turns to self-reflection in the face of disconfirmation. Instead, the energy in search of salvation channels into the search for the devil.

It remains to be seen if this is the process in Old Blighty. The Tories are in the political wilderness for a few more years. Labour, which won the last election, is as popular as rectal cancer and faces nothing but bad options. Britain is much closer to economic and social collapse than anyone in power appreciates. Throw in the fact that Black Jesus is not supposed to come from what passes for the right and it seems unlikely that Kemi Badenoch will follow the Obama arc.

Instead, what this looks like is what we see all over the West these days and that is a reboot of an old classic but done by ham and eggers. The Tories, like their American counterparts, have reached the logical end of what has passed for conservatism since the middle of the last century. The only remaining constituency for conservatism is the economic elites who seek to keep the old dialectic going. In the end, this gambit will fail to change their political fortunes.

There is more to it though. This unsatisfied desire for forgiveness that lies at the heart of this worship of Africans in the Anglosphere is not going away, because there is no mechanism to achieve it. Christianity, from which this desire was inherited, had mechanisms for forgiveness of sin. It also had a logic to address those things for which forgiveness in this life was not possible. The secular ideologies that rose up to replace Christianity have no such mechanisms.

Each turn of the wheel has led to a more reckless pursuit of salvation, because “more of the same” is the only possible answer to the inevitable failure. It is why we have gone from the reasonable extension of legal protections to former slaves to a world of unlimited non-white immigration and the erasure of white people from the cultural spaces, like movies, television and advertising. The burning desire to cleanse their souls of this sin has led to the desire to burn it all down.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what is killing the West is something that will lead the people to come down from their cross of ebony and embrace a new moral framing which gives them a purpose that elevates their people, rather than sacrificing them in search of forgiveness. That is unlikely to be found in the past. Instead, it will be found in the rubble of decline. At some point, even the fanatic must submit to reality or at least be overcome by it and those who rise from 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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


The Dunning-Kruger Crisis

Much has been written in these parts about the crisis of competence that is creepy up on all aspects of life like the fog. Every day, competent people are aging out and being replaced by people who lack the competence. A complimentary problem, one also driven by demographics, is the Dunning-Kruger crisis. This the problem of incompetent, but highly confidence people, getting elevated into positions for which they are unqualified, simply due to the new ethics of the elites.

The difference here is that the crisis of competence is somewhat correctable, as the unqualified millennial replacing the retiring boomer, has some hope of learning what he needs to learn to do the job. He and his organization will have to suffer through the learning curve, but there is hope he will become competent. Alternatively, the race to supplement or even replace the incompetent millennial with technology offers the alternative of a robot competently doing the job.

The Dunning-Kruger, in contrast, offers no such hope. The person elevated into the position to satisfy the needs of the new morality has no chance to ever become competent at the task. Replacing them with technology is impossible, because it would undermine the whole point of the process. Instead, the system is simply expected to adapt to these new islands of confident incompetence. Every organization is being loaded up with crosses to bear as a form of contrition.

You see how this works with the Kamala Harris campaign. Regardless of the result, it will be remembered as one of the most inept operations in modern history, perhaps rivaling the 2004 Howard Dean campaign in Iowa or even the 1988 Mike Dukakis presidential campaign. After the initial media gaslighting, it has been one unforced error after another, all stemming from the fact the people running the campaign are sure they know everything, but in fact know nothing.

One small example is the Joe Rogan flap. Rogan is the biggest carnival act in so-called new media, so doing his show would be like doing Johnny Carson back in the 1970’s or the Rush Limbaugh show in the 1990’s. It offers a unique setting in front of a huge audience, which itself will attract an even bigger audience. It is the sort of platform a candidate needing attention craves. You take the gig, hope for the best and prepare for the explosion of post-show media coverage.

The Harris campaign never understood this. Instead, they tried to strong arm Rogan into rolling over for them, even leaving his comfy studio to meet them at a hotel somewhere to record a one-hour interview. They should have known he had no reason to take that deal, but stupid people lack second order thinking. Their unearned confidence in themselves compounded the error by carrying on as if they were doing him a favor by entertaining the request.

Rogan, who never liked Trump, did the shrewd thing and invited Trump on his show and Trump happily accepted the millions in free media. The resulting program broke the internet and further humanized Trump. The theme of his campaign this time is that he has dropped the sharp edges, having learned from the past. Hamming it up with Rogan, who was a smitten kitten the whole time, underscored this theme. Team Dunning-Kruger handed Trump a huge win as a result.

This one incident among many is a microcosm of the growing Dunning-Kruger crisis we see unfolding everywhere. It is not just that these people lack the required talents or experience for the task. It is that they lack the innate ability for the roles and the self-awareness to recognize it. Stupid people who realize they are outmatched can be managed, but stupid people who think they are geniuses are a danger to everyone and everything they touch. Invisible stupidity is lethal.

Look at who is running the Harris campaign, and the problem is obvious. The campaign boss is named Julie Chávez Rodriguez. She has three names because her only reason to exist in politics is she is the granddaughter of Cesario Chavez. Her qualifications for politics are that she is female, brownish and related to a famous brown guy. She has parlayed that into a career doing busy work, so that the nice white ladies could put her face on the organization brochure.

Julie Chávez Rodriguez no doubt looks in the mirror each morning and sees a world bestriding figure, when in reality she is a hapless simpleton. She is in this role because of her long relationship with Kamala Harris, another strong diverse female who is brimming with confidence despite having done nothing on her own worth noting, other than being a concubine of Willie Brown. The Harris campaign operates like the marketing pitch for the Christopher Rufo project.

There have been terrible national campaigns in the past, but the cause was always a candidate with little to sell running against a favored incumbent. Mike Dukakis never had a chance in 1988, so his people had few good choices. Bob Dole in 1996 was simply running to pad his obituary. He had no chance against Clinton, and he certainly knew it, but played the role anyway. Harris has the full support of official Washington and the political regime but is still losing.

Given the reality of our politics, this sort of ineptitude may seem trivial, but the Dunning-Kruger crisis is rolling out everywhere. It is why certain members of the economic elite are panicking about DEI at elite universities. They suddenly realized that their good deed installing someone like Claudine Gay as president of Harvard could come at a price to them beyond embarrassment. Handing power to entitled stupid people brimming with unearned confidence is playing with fire.

It is comforting to think that maybe the outbreak of incompetence among the elites due to the cult of diversity will cause them to pull back, but that is not the way to bet because of the religious fanaticism around the cult of diversity. If Harris loses next week, expect to hear endless cries of racism. If she wins, the resulting catastrophe will be blamed on the bogeyman. The Dunning-Kruger crisis ends only when the forces and people behind it come to an end.


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


Trump’s Foreign Policy Problem

One of the problems the world faces is that the dominant power on the planet has entered a period of incoherence. Joe Biden has come to symbolize the country he allegedly leads in that he is old, frail and not always understandable. This is how much of the world now sees the United States. What they see from Washington are people either trapped in a bygone era or divorced from present reality. It is as if the last several decades never happened.

You see this in this Financial Times post about what foreign policy could be like under a second Trump presidency. Keep in mind that the Financial Times is often used by the intelligence community to plant stories it wants to launder. The audience is not just the English-speaking world, but also Europe. The people quoted are all said to be associates of the Trump team. Their views may or may not reflect the thinking of Trump’s inner circle.

That aside, the first thing to note is that there is no acknowledgement of present reality in the story. For example, Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war. He says, “Trump could threaten to crash Russia’s economy by lowering the price of oil and gas.” According to Waltz, this will force the Russians to beg for peace negotiations. This policy makes sense if it is 1985 and Russia is still the Soviet Union with a brittle command economy.

For starters, the president cannot willy-nilly change oil prices. No amount of American production can drive down prices to a level where it would have an impact on the Russian economy. The “break even” point of Russian crude is well below that of the cheapest American production. Then you have the fact that it will take a decade to bring American crude production to the levels needed to crash prices. There is also the fact that Biden emptied the strategic oil reserve.

In other words, the big idea from the foreign policy experts is something they read about from the Reagan years that has no chance of working now. It is as if they are unaware of the sanctions war they launched two years ago that not only failed to crater the Russian economy but boomeranged back on them. The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas. Meanwhile, the Russian economy is booming.

Of course, there is the fact that these people can only think in terms of threats when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Congressman Michael Waltz is a neocon sock puppet who was an early cheerleader for Project Ukraine. He was also wrong about every aspect of it. In any other profession, being as wrong as Mike Waltz would be disqualifying, but here he is being quoted as an authority on Russia. This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote Fred Fleitz, a former John Bolton staffer and current foreign policy adviser at the America First Policy Institute, which promotes itself as helping shape Trump policy. With regards to Iran, Fleitz argues “The objective should be to bankrupt Iran again and to reinstitute maximum pressure.” Again? Has he not noticed that Iran survived sanctions for three decades? Is he not aware that Iran now has the support of China and Russia?

With regards to settling the war in the Ukraine, Fleitz says, “We freeze the conflict, Ukraine does not cede any territory, they don’t give up their territorial claims, and we have negotiations with the understanding there probably won’t be a final agreement until Putin leaves the stage.” Unlike Waltz, Fleitz has no clue as to why the Russians would entertain such a silly offer. Note that this idea was first floated by the neocons when the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed.

The jaw droppingly ignorant part of that post is the use of the term “Minsk-3” to describe the Trump strategy. The Russians correctly view the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. The reason they think this is Angela Merkel said this in an interview last year. Naming the Trump strategy after two prior efforts to trick the Russians is just a way to make sure there can be no negotiations between the Trump people and the Russians.

This is probably why this story was planted in the Financial Times. The hope is to poison the well, so to speak, for the next administration with regards to negotiating with the Russians. They may not be able to control what Trump does, but they can give the Russians many reasons to not trust any overtures. After all, Trump will be gone in four years, so if they can freeze the Russia situation, they have a chance to get back in power and resume their efforts to start a war with Russia.

What becomes clear in that Financial Times story is that the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face. The main reason for their incoherence is they seem to be unaware that these problems were caused by them. Compounding it is the toxic ideology of neoconservatism that has poisoned the foreign policy community. It is a cancer in the bowels of America’s most important institution.

It is what makes prospects for a sober minded and realistic approach to foreign policy under Trump unlikely. Trump’s instincts are good, as are those with many of the people around him, including JD Vance, but he will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is both stuck in the past and corrupted by a worldview that is inconsistent with the world as it is today and with the needs of the country. Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


A New American Identity

Note: If you are interested in an hour of precise predictions about the upcoming election, then you are in luck. I was on the Coffee and a Mike show and you can listen to the recording of it here.


The American civil war created an intellectual problem for both sides that was far more important than the issue of slavery. The 19th century was the age of nationalism and national liberation in Europe. These ideas made their way to America and fit in neatly with the American sense of self. After all, the United States was the result of a revolt against an empire in the name of national liberation. The war between the North and South, therefore, was also a war over nationalism.

By default, the South had the better claim. It was the South, after all, seeking to secede from the Union to create a new nation that would better serve the interests of the people of the South. The North was trying to prevent this from happening and willing to conquer the people of the South to do it. From a nationalist perspective, the South was the sympathetic side, even though they were also fighting for the right to maintain the institution of slavery.

A solution to this problem that evolved in the North was the argument that true nationalism was comprehensive. That is the nationalist loved all of his country and all of his people, so a nationalist government must serve and protect everyone. Since the South was not a different people and the Union was not abandoning them in the way the crown had abandoned the colonies in the runup to the Revolution, it was the South that was in violation of the nationalist ideal

Further, the evolving sense of Northern nationalism claimed that the national purpose of America from the start was to spread liberty around the world. America was the city on the hill, so to speak, that stood as an example of freedom craving nationalists around the world, so what the South was doing was a threat to that project and therefore a threat to the national purpose. American nationalism, unlike that of Europe, was a revolutionary nationalism to free all of mankind.

In fairness, these debates about the nature of American nationalism were not at the center of the dispute, but they played a role in shaping how the new intellectual class would define American identity after the war. Those arguing in favor of the war being a new founding are not entirely wrong. The country that emerged after the war was completely different from what existed prior to the war. It was not just free of slaves, but full of a sense of national purpose.

In his book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman describes the three forms of national identity that have prevailed in America. Goldman comes up with three national identities he calls the Covenant, the Crucible, and the Creed. The Covenant is the sense of national purpose. The Crucible is the old melting pot story popular in the 20th century after the war. The Creed is the idea of America being a set of ideas, rather than a physical place or people.

It is a good book that offers a useful way of framing the main ways in which Americans have tried to create a unitary identity. Goldman does observe that it is the covenantal aspect of American identity that has been the most powerful, but he does not get into how this Puritan sensibility evolved in the 19th century during the Civil War to become a civic religion for the ruling elite. He does not mention how the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam blended into this as Jews took up posts in the elite.

This understanding of American identity, or the best effort at forging one, is essential to understanding the current crisis. For over a century, since Woodrow Wilson, America has been on a mission to heal the world. The ruling class has asked, often demanded, that the people put aside their regional and local concerns for the good of one great cause after another. It has become so ingrained in ruling class thinking that they seem incapable to thinking about the state of the country.

Strip away the panic, the hysteria and the outlandish claims and the coming election is about whether we care more about the fate of Mongolian transgender lesbians or the fentanyl epidemic in Appalachia. Do we care more about the abstract concept of climate change or addressing the slow collapse of our infrastructure? What counts for more as an American? The health of your neighbors or the plight of migrants? Will we sacrifice everything in a vain attempt to save the world?

All these questions stem from a growing doubt in this sense of American identity that has been with us since Gettysburg. Americans are increasingly wondering not only if the cost of saving the world is worth the effort, but if it makes any sense at all for us to stand astride the world, balances in our hand. Maybe the people who demand we do this do not have the right to judge the world. Maybe these people lack the moral standing to stand in judgement over us as well.

Fundamentally, the current crisis is about the covenant. If our national purpose is to be the city on the hill, then we must ensure that the city is not full of vagrants and racked with crime and corruption. If our national purpose is to heal the world, then we must first heal ourselves. On the other hand, maybe our national purpose was to avoid falling for these claims and instead focusing on creating a society in the wilderness, away from the entanglements of the old world.

No matter how one seeks to frame it, the struggle today is over our national purpose, a struggle between those who stubbornly cling to the last century and those looking ahead to the next century. The question is whether America will collapse in a heap, exhausted from trying to save the world or will we pull up, realize our folly and return to a sense of purpose rooted in simply being an example to the world? Will we attempt to heal ourselves with the same zeal with tried to heal the world?

It could also be that all these efforts at national identity have failed and what comes next is the great disaggregation. Perhaps it was always impossible to forge an American identity that could permanently hold the people together. Maybe in the end, we learn that the true American identity is no identity at all. We are simply a diverse collection of people who agree to cooperate, when necessary, but otherwise we prefer to leave the world alone and be left alone.


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!


Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.


The Kazan Catastrophe

Back in the ancient times, if you wished to buy product from someone you arrived at their location with money, or they arrived at your location with product. The product was inspected, and the money was inspected. Once both sides were satisfied, the exchange was made, and the deal was done. It did not take long for a class of middlemen to turn up who brokered such deals. They inspected the goods, arranged transportation and safeguarded the product and the money.

World trade has not changed much since the ancient times. Middlemen still facilitate most of the trade. They are called banks, insurance companies, freight brokers, shipping companies and so forth, but they are all part of this vast and essential middleman economy that makes it possible for the local Walmart to have shelves stuffed with goods from Asia. It is what makes it possible for the Chinese company selling dog food to get paid by Walmart.

One thing to note about this setup is the two greatest seafaring nations in the history of the planet, the United States and Britain, do very little shipping. Instead, they control the flow of goods around the world through control of the insurance markets and the financial system used in global trade. If you are involved in global trade, you are certainly using the American financial system and either directly or indirectly the British maritime insurance system.

The dollar being the world’s reserve currency has been to this point the main driver of the explosion in global trade. The buyer in South America can do business with a seller in China, because his bank is connected to the American financial system through his country’s central bank. He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.

This is about to change with the launch of an alternative payment system that was announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan Russia. The Russians and the Chinese have been working on creating an alternative to SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is the platform that networks the world’s banks to facilitate the flow of money around the world. The new system seeks to replace SWIFT for trade among the BRICS countries.

For most people this is an eye-glazing topic, but in the fullness of time it could be an event that generations of historians study as an inflection point. What the BRICS countries are seeking to do is wrest control of the global financial system from the West, specifically the English-speaking countries, at least for the members of BRICS and those countries willing to trade with BRICS. By extension, it is an effort to reduce the power of the dollar and thus the power of the American empire.

What this new system proposes to do is make it easier for participating countries to conduct business in the currency of other participating countries. Instead of China needing dollars to buy oil from the Saudis and therefore preferring dollars from other countries for Chinese goods, the Chinese will be able to buy oil in RMB and the Saudis will be able to buy Chinese goods in whatever currency they possess. The new system would handle the conversion and exchange rates instantly.

As an aside, that last part is interesting. In the United States, a business does not get paid by the credit card company for a few days. Often, the delay is longer. Of course, there are fees for taking credit card payments. In Russia and China, the movement of money is instant. The system is treated as a public utility, so fees are relatively small compared to what we see in the West. This is owing to much better and newer technology and a different attitude toward banking.

That aside, the significance of this proposal is enormous. The BRICS countries represent half the world’s population. The Arab oil countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, are onboard for this new system. The Saudis let expire the fifty-year-old deal with Washington that established the petrodollar. China, India and Russia are the driving force behind this new arrangement and represent three of the most important economic powerhouses in the world at the moment.

What this means for the West is far less influence over the rest of the world through the control of the financial system. The main reason China, Russia and India have pushed for this new system is they have grown weary of Washington abusing its position to bully the rest of the world. The sanctions war unleashed by Washington against Russia in 2022 was the final straw. If Washington would use the dollar to try regime change in Russia, it would do it to anyone, especially China.

What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington. Ten years ago, it was inconceivable that these important countries would come together to create a parallel financial system, as all of them were committed to the dollar and the Western system. They were committed to the “rules-based order” because they assumed it served their interests, but decades of abuse by Washington has convinced them otherwise.

What this means for the West is clear. What we see forming up is a trading and cooperation block that includes all the countries outside the West, representing the bulk of the world’s population and the majority of economic activity. Add in the fact that the West has let its manufacturing base shrivel and seems to be at war with its agricultural base and you can see the problem. Economies based in providing services tied to the financial system are facing a cliff now.

For the United States, this could not come at a worse time. Debt is already at staggering levels and is accelerating. The productive and innovative portion of the population is aging, while the unproductive portion is exploding. Add in decades of infrastructure neglect, the demographic and cultural catastrophes, and now is not a good time for a decline in the dollar. America is an empire that debased its currency via the perfidious subversion of its own rules.

Contrary to some claims, the dollar is not about to collapse, but what Kazan signals is the steady decline in the dollar. As the rest of the world begins to trade outside the dollar, it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market. This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation. This means the cost of borrowing dollars must go up and stay up in anticipation of declining dollar demand

The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, baring a revolution in Washington. Being the world’s mint and banker only works if the world accepts what you are minting. A rentier economy reliant on skimming from every transaction is only possible if you control the currency. The parasitism that has become a feature of our economy is going to become more obvious. That will bring political consequences as well.


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