Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Blackrockistan

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Note: Tonight at 8:15 EDT, I will be on with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow and Harrison Smith from Infowars to talk about remigration. I may also announce, with a great flourish, that I am officially off the Trump Train. Tune in here.

A question that is never asked in official circles, or even much in unofficial ones, is why Western leaders seem so desperate for war? For the last three-plus years, they have been scheming to start a direct war with Russia. The rhetoric has been so crazed it suggests they have a death wish. It is not just Russia. They want war with China and Iran, which would mean a regional war in the Middle East. The one thing the West seems sure about is the need for a big war.

Of course, given the increasing separation between official narratives and reality, many are sure they are at war. The current Prime Minister of Britain is telling his party that the country is now at war and must mobilize the country. Emmanuel Macron has spent the last year flitting about the continent as if he is leading Europe in a war against Russia, despite the fact the official position of his government, and NATO, is they have no direct role in the Ukraine war.

There is a Little Rascals quality to Europe at the moment. None of these countries have an army capable of fighting beyond their borders and many could not defend themselves against a well-armed militia. Europe has relied on the American military for so long most have forgotten how to fight. Instead, like the old television program, they dress up like big boys and girls and put on a show. Watching the girl bosses of the EU make threats is as absurd as the old television show.

That does explain one reason for the rhetoric. To be a European head of state is to be powerless, other than the power to put on a show. France, for example, relies on the EU to control its economy, trade policy and immigration policy. NATO decides what France can do with its shrinking military capability. The typical American governor has more sovereign authority than the head of France. While not entirely ceremonial, this is the direction for the “leaders” of Europe.

If you are allowed to do only one thing after reaching the highest office in your country’s political system, that is the thing you will do, and with gusto. Keir Starmer, for example, understands that the Bank of England overthrew the Tory government and put Labour in charge of parliament with a minority of public support. Every EU leader knows the EU rigs elections and overthrows governments. Every European “leader” knows he is an actor hired to play a role, so they play the role.

That gets to who is doing the hiring. Starmer is in office because the Bank of England saw him as a suitably complaint puppet. Macron remains in power, despite losing the last election, because Blackrock wants him in power. Germany’s new puppet is in charge for the same reason. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager controlling more than nine trillion dollars. That means it has real power, the power to pick who wins elections and who controls public policy.

Blackrock invested billions in Ukraine prior to the war, because it believed Ukraine would fall into the Western orbit, which would mean Blackrock would control trillions in natural resources. The reason the Republicans were suddenly desperate to get sixty billion in new money to Ukraine after the 2022 midterm victory was to get Blackrock and others some of their money out of Ukraine. The proxy war with Russia was sold to the bankers as an opportunity to loot Eurasia again.

Now that the war has turned against the West, the rhetoric has become shriller for political reasons, but also as a way to sell arms. Blackrock and other massive private asset holders have large stakes in companies like Raytheon, Lockheed, Rheinmetall and many other arms makers. Another reason the political class of Europe is carrying on as if Genghis Khan is about to cross the Dnieper is they think it builds popular support for rebuilding their militaries.

There is another element to this. The Western oligarchy is based on the assumption that the United States is the global bank and the global mint. It performs this dual role by controlling the global reserve currency, which is made possible by controlling the most important global assets. To this point, that was made possible by controlling oil via the petrodollar agreement with OPEC. If energy must be priced in dollars, the demand for dollars can never be challenged.

The technological revolution, which is largely responsible for creating this new oligarchical class, has also undermined this arrangement. There are now other things in great demand to meet the needs of technology. Simply skimming from the oil trade is no longer enough. America needs computing power and that means energy production, which means a massive increase in energy consumption, along with the consumption of other natural resources needed for big computing.

The trillions in natural resources underneath the Donbas were seen as a quick and easy answer to the Western hunger for natural resources. Of course, it was just the first domino in the eventual exploitation of the rest of Eurasia. The technological revolution has turned the West, particularly America, into a ravenous beast that must find new sources of food to maintain itself. Big Tech and Big Finance have created a vampire economy that is always looking for a new neck.

They say all wars are banker’s wars and this has been true since the spread of popular government in the 18th century. Once who controls the assets is divorced from how those assets are used, there is no longer any control over how those assets are used by the political system. We see that in the modern West. The people vote, politicians are picked to fill the offices, but policy is made by those who own the assets because the Golden Rule states, the men with the gold make the rules.

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!

Asabiyyah

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the death of college athletics, a post about building a workbench, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

If you were to imagine the ideal human community, you would probably assume “ideal” meant peaceful and cooperative. There may be people who think the ideal society is one that it is something like a prison exercise yard, but most people think of the idyllic society as one in perfect harmony. Everyone cooperates with one another in order to overcome the natural challenges that come with human society. Disagreements are worked out through the free exchange of ideas and compromise.

Everyone understands that even on a small scale, such a thing is not possible, but it has always been a useful metric. We often measure society against this standard of what we conceive of as the ideal society. It is why every year there are studies posted listing the happiest countries or the least corrupt countries. These are ways to see how the country stacks up against that ideal. Happy people have less crime and corruption than people in quarrelsome, uncooperative societies.

This is not a Christian concept as many assume. People have noticed since the ancient times that societal health correlates with cooperation. Aristotle talked about the concept of philía, which roughly means friendship or affection. It is the glue that holds a people together, which is a requirement of the polis. It is the natural desire to cooperate with others, not just from personal interest, but for the sake of the polis. The “politics” of a society, therefore, arise from friendship and affection.

The 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun wrote about this thing he called asabiyyah, which is something like social cohesion or group solidarity. It is the natural desire to cooperate that arises from family and the tribe, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex social structures. The more asabiyyah a society possesses, the more it is able to accomplish. This, Khaldun noted, is also why complex societies inevitably collapse.

The thing that makes it possible for one people to dominate other people is that which eventually erodes their social cohesion. It is social cohesion that facilitates cooperation, which increases the prosperity of the society. That prosperity then brings expansion and the incorporation of new people, who begin to drain that social cohesion. The cost of acquiring new people is the loss of social cohesion. This then raises the cost of governing the society, which further erodes asabiyyah.

There are many famous theories as to why human societies rise and fall, but all must contend with this central truth of human society. It can only exist when people are able to trust and cooperate with those outside their kin group. The greater the distance from that kin group, the more it costs to maintain cooperation. The reason empires always fall is they end up including people so distant from one another that they are unable to form any sort of cooperative relationship.

Look around the West and you see two things. One is the cost of the state is spiraling upward as it becomes increasingly incompetent. An unsaid truth of many American cities is they lack a genuine police force. The police are just a state sponsored gang that keeps the less organized gangs in check in order to maintain some safe areas for the elite and the tourist areas. Parts of cities like Baltimore can no longer be included in the concept of “civilized society.”

European cities are struggling with the same issue, but for different reasons. Instead of an unassimilable population from an old economic model, they imported millions of people who are genetically distant from the native population. Many of these people are hostile to other people imported into Europe. This alone has eroded social cohesion, but the efforts to maintain order are also eroding social trust. Every man jailed for speech crimes is a loss of European asabiyyah.

This may explain the sudden lurch in elite opinion in the United States away from unlimited immigration to what may be open hostility to it. Every day the window on the issue seems to move from the long-held position of open borders to what is now called remigration, the return of migrants to their homelands. The State Department has announced it is opening an office of remigration to facilitate this. A year ago, uttering the word “remigration” in many places could get you jailed.

This change is elite driven, which is what matters. Instead of an elite responding to public opinion, it is the elite now trying to drive public opinion. When the CEO of JPMorgan Chase speaks dismissively about immigration, as he recently did on the left-wing cable channel CNBC, something big is happening in the clouds. Conventional wisdom among the elite on immigration has swung to the opposite side. There is a reason for it, and it is not a sense of shame.

This gets back to those old concepts about what makes society possible and how best to measure the prosperity of a society. Decades of mismanagement due to the needs of the American empire have drained the West of its asabiyyah. As a result, the cost of maintaining order in the West is reaching a danger zone. All one has to do is look at the budgets of Western governments and then look at the condition of society. In many places, no government at all would be an improvement.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is the money men who are the first to sense something is seriously wrong in the West. They may not understand the cultural issues, but they see the gap between the cost and the results. The world’s richest man was not tasked with finding trillions in waste by accident. With $19 Trillion in debt rolling over in the next year, the money men are right to be worried that they have drained the last drops of asabiyyah from the Western world.

While it is tempting to see this sudden realization as a positive, Ibn Khaldun was not optimistic about a society’s ability to rebuild its asabiyyah. This is a theme with all writers who examined societal decline. Once a society hits that inflection point, it no longer has the capacity to reform itself. Social cohesion is not something that can be rebuilt, not even through shared struggle, as it is something that naturally occurs. Once it is drained it is gone and the society it produced is gone with it.

Perhaps this is a necessity as the West finally escapes the age of ideology. The decline of the West will open the ground for new social cohesion to form organically among the European populations that remain in Western lands. The new, post-ideological societies, growing up in majority-minority lands, will place social cohesion and asabiyyah at the top of their social hierarchy. The new asabiyyah will grow out of the wreckage of the ideological society.

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

The Return Of Elites

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Note: This is the five year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, peace be upon him, so I will be part of a Twitter space discussing the life and legacy of one of our nation’s greatest heroes. You can listen here.

This is the time of year when entertainers, politicians and famous rich people are asked to deliver commencement speeches. Inevitably they deliver tirades against normal people and in favor of the latest trends. This season, the popular chant with this sort is the “rule of law” which is ironic given that the people chanting it spent the last decade obliterating the concept. The question that is rarely asked is why is it that rich people are so eager to support this stuff?

It is not just the ditzy actors who are prone to this. A part of getting rich in America is adopting the politics of the rich, which is hostile to normal things. Rich people, until very recently, were solidly behind open borders. They backed the street violence and chaos of the last decade through donations to the thicket of not-for-profits. The billionaires underwrote the entertainment content that preached the bizarre social theories at the root of their deranged politics.

On the surface, it makes little sense. If you are a rich person, you should not want to undermine order, as it is the rules that make you rich. You got your wealth because of the system, so the system is your friend. Think a little further, however, and you can see why the rich might want to make the rules more opaque. It is a form of pulling up the drawbridge behind them so new schemers cannot get in on the action. They got theirs, so it is time to keep you from getting yours.

In this regard these strange opinions about how we ought to act and how we ought to organize society function as a selection mechanism. The rich use the willingness to adopt these opinions as a test of your willingness to obey. This is very clearly how they select politicians. The more suggestable the person, the more likely they are to find success in politics. No master has ever wanted a slave who thinks outside the box or is willing to question authority.

That said, many of our rich people believe in this stuff. For actors, the answer probably lies in the fact that merit plays a small role in their success. Pretending to be someone else, singing a catchy tune and being funny are not uncommon skills. Restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are full of people capable to being good at those things in movies and television. Taylor Swift does not possess skills uncommon in her trade, but she is a megastar and everyone else sings for their supper.

Randomness plays an enormous role in carny life. Hollywood is full of stories about women who were spotted by a talent scout and turned into a star. Then you have the many actors who landed a role in a film that turned out to be a huge success, despite the studios thinking otherwise. Sally Field hit it big in Smokey and the Bandit, for example, despite the studio not wanting her or the film. Carny life is more about random chance than talent and hard work.

In a world where success and failure are random chance or perhaps decided by hidden forces unseen by the players, it is no surprise that these people are in the sort of paranoid politics that define carny life. It is not a huge jump from thinking shadowy figures behind the scenes determine your fate as an actor to thinking that an invisible army of Hitler fans secretly control society. Their lived experience tells them that the rules are a facade for the real power structure.

Randomness explains carnies and politicians, but what about the oligarchs? Why are so many of them fond of these paranoid politics? The last ten years of woke madness would not have been possible without the support of the oligarchs. In fact, the story of Trump’s return to power cannot be understood without noticing how the nation’s richest men lined up behind him. Most opposed him just five years ago, but then they changed teams and now support his reform efforts.

Here is where we see chance again. Look at the oligarchs and what you rarely see is people with unique talents for anything other than exploiting a bottleneck or monopoly that was often the result of chance. The PayPal mafia, the fifty or so people who founded PayPal, got super rich by exploiting special access to the banking system in order to facilitate online payments. Many went on to exploit new bottlenecks and monopolies to get even richer.

This is not a novelty of this round of oligarch formation. The oligarchs that emerged in the industrial age were similarly fortunate. A common story of that period was one where the guy who got super rich from a new idea was not the guy who came up with the idea, but the guy who bought the idea and then exploited it. The industrial oligarchs were good at gaming the system of the time, much in the same way that the modern oligarch was the product of gaming the system.

One of the truths about capitalism and market economics is that it does not select for virtue or even talent in the conventional sense. It selects for the ability and willingness to find gaps in the rules and the ability to ruthlessly exploit them. The tech barons found a gap in property laws, for example, that allows them to steal your information and then sell it to government and business. Without this loophole, the giant social media platforms collapse overnight.

The result of this system that randomly awards people with opportunity and then lavishly regards those who are willing to ruthlessly exploit the opportunity is an oligarchy composed of sociopathic lottery winners. The weird social politics that defines the attitudes of our elite are both a defense against similar lottery winners lurking below and a justification for their position. They are not just lottery winners, but members of an elect, fated to hold positions in the elite.

It has been noted that the creation of new oligarchs of the industrial era ended in the early 20th century. This came with the rise of managerialism, but also with a narrowing of the economic class. The overclass faded from the scene, retreating into philanthropy and public service roles. From the perspective of the typical American, the gap between the rich and poor narrowed and the middle-class came to dominate. Getting rich came to mean doing slightly better than middle-class.

This current revolt against managerialism led by some of the oligarchs is coming when the fruit of the technological revolution has been harvested. There are no new billionaires being minted from new technology. Similarly, the financial sector that experienced a parallel boom has consolidated as well. The one exception may be AI, but this is why the current oligarchs are desperate to wrestle control of it from the managerial class.

What we may be experiencing is another period of consolidation similar to what happened after the industrial revolution. The weird social politics are no longer useful as a defense of the oligarchy, so they are seeking to reorder the managerial system to lock in their positions and marginalize the sorts of politics that come with the boutique beliefs that define the woke phenomenon. They are tapping into populism as a useful way to pressure their fellow oligarchs into compliance.

The bulk of the 20th century was determined by elites who acted like elites and operated from the shadows. That was peak America, from the perspective of the typical American in this age. There was strong family formation and a strong middle-class that defended moderate morality. A nation full of normal middle-class people happy with the rules is not going to cause any trouble for the elites. Perhaps that is what the current elites are trying to recreate in this age.

This could explain the growing war on credentialism. The managerial class is festooned with people with little practical knowledge but festooned with credentials that they think make them a genius. This is why they think they can tell the rich guys what to do and where to do it. Breaking the spine of the managerial class will necessarily mean breaking their belief system. The sudden anathematization of woke culture is an effort to kill their gods and therefore their sense of authority.

In the end, the thirty or so years of bizarre social politics that have proliferated among the elites may be ending due to the consolidation of the oligarchy. Whatever benefit there was to these luxury beliefs has been consumed. What is left is a rallying point for members of the managerial class who refuse to bend the knee. Restoring normal social order is another step in shoring up the position of the oligarchs by removing any of the remaining threats to their position.

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!

Science Fiction

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a post about conservative corruption, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.

Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.

Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.

That is why Back to the Future is not science fiction. The time travel business is just a way for the main characters to be funny in unusual situations. The point of the film is to make people laugh, not challenge their views of humanity or technology. Time travel is a MacGuffin, which is a thing or event that moves the story along. The point of the time travel business is to put Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in wacky situations so they can be wacky and funny together.

Similarly, Star Wars is not science fiction. This has become a controversial statement because the adult children who consume the modern iterations of the franchise like to imagine themselves as science geeks. George Lucas has always described the franchise as a space opera, because it is space opera. Star Wars is consciously melodramatic and formulaic. It could just as easily be set in the Middle Ages or the Old West, but he chose to set the story in space.

In fairness, the Star Trek franchise can also be called space opera. The stories in the television series are the definition of melodramatic and formulaic. While the original series tried to think about the impact of interstellar travel on humanity, subsequent series were standard televisions dramas set in space. The main appeal of the original series was the relationship of the three main characters. That could just as easily have been done on a pirate ship in the 17th century.

That goes to what Heinlein said about science fiction. It has to try to  project scientific progress into the future in a plausible way. We can assume we solved the problems of humans in space, for example, but it must do so in a way that is plausible. For example, we figured out how to shield spacemen from radiation and mitigate the effects of zero gravity on his muscles and bones. That means the humans still struggle with limitations, just different limitations than current humans.

This is why the girl boss phenomenon has killed modern sci-fi. The demand that the main character be a girl boss who never has to struggle to get what she wants and is never allowed to fail defeats the whole purpose of the genre. If science makes it so that girls can beat up men three times their size and they are able to solve every problem with minimum effort, there is no story worth telling. The girl boss turns the genre into a lecture on gender set in space.

That comes to the other part of the formula. It is not enough for the science to make some sense, leaving humans in a familiar conflict. The story has to be compelling. It is why Blade Runner can be called great sci-fi. The science is compelling as it suggests that material progress does not guarantee human happiness. It also delves into the question of what it means to be a human. The ambiguity of Deckard’s true nature and how his story plays out is gripping storytelling.

Of course, films have another aspect and that is the visuals. World building with the written word depends heavily on the reader. With movies, the maker has to do all of the work in order to get the viewer to suspend disbelief. This is another area where the girl boss ruins the project. By definition, girl boss lives outside the physical constraints of the world created for her. This makes that world absurd and pointless. The film becomes a study of girl boss rather than storytelling.

The visuals are why films like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey are always at the top of these lists. The science is great, and the fiction is great, but they are also visual masterpieces that have come to define the genre. Many of the common things in space shows were invented by Kubrick. A film about a dystopian future will always mimic the visual sense of Blade Runner. It is why Star Wars works. The look and sound are great, despite being formulaic drama.

One final piece of the puzzle is what the stories are telling us about the current mood regarding science and culture. When Kubrick make 2001: A Space Odyssey, America was optimistic about space on the surface, but also anxious about the ramifications of technological advance. By the 1970’s, that anxiety had subsided only to return in the 1980’s when the microprocessor revolution hit normal Americans. Good science fiction holds a mirror up to the age in which it is produced.

In the end, what matters most is that Star Wars is not science fiction and anyone who argues otherwise should be sent to a camp. Further, there is a debate as to whether Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey is the best science fiction film, with some room to argue for Alien. The argument against Alien is that it is also a monster movie, so there is a category dispute. Otherwise, your choices for the greatest sci-fil film are down to two and there is no point in debating 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!

The Banality Of Biden

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Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.

Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.

This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.

Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.

This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.

The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.

It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.

This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.

It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?

It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.

Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.

It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.

It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.

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

The Ukraine Game

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The professional commentators and amateur experts have been highly critical of the Trump foreign policy, but despite his unorthodox approach, Trump seems to be making progress that those experts claimed was impossible. The recent trip to the GCC countries is the most recent example. Lost in the shuffle is Iran stating they are ready to do a deal with Trump on their nuclear program. Today, the Russians and Ukrainian will meet in Istanbul to talk peace.

This meeting is remarkable mostly because a key element to Project Ukraine from the start was that there could be no negotiations with Russia. Without saying it, the Biden admin and the Europeans would only accept the unconditional surrender of Russia and even then, the terms would be harsh. The Ukrainians were happy to say the quiet part out loud, going so far as to declare it unlawful to deal with the Russians. In a few months Trump has them talking in Turkey.

It may be dumb luck that has got Trump to this point. A week ago, the Europeans were scheming with Zelensky on a set of ultimatums. The Russians either surrender and withdraw from Ukraine or else. On top of that, Keith Kellogg was peddling his scheme to insert Western troops into Ukraine as part of a peace keeping force. The Russians offered to meet with the Ukrainians in Istanbul and Trump seized on this to pressure Zelensky to agree to talks with the Russians.

Again, it may be dumb luck, but success is mostly about making the most of the available opportunities and Trump took advantage of the Russian offer to get something that everyone agreed was never happening. Again, not talking to the Russians has been a central pillar of Project Ukraine. It is the key to keeping the project running and that pillar has been toppled. Even if the talks do not produce much of anything immediately, this meeting changes everything.

The main thing it changes is it forces Zelensky and his European backers to abandon their maximalist position. Once you agree to negotiate, you have to be willing to offer something in return for what you want. Zelensky, of course, cannot concede anything because of the internal politics of Ukraine, so the new framing of the war is one side, the Russians, willing to make a deal, and the other side, the Ukrainians, unwilling to negotiate in good faith to end the war.

Zelensky understands the problem. He has now been put into a very dangerous position, which is why he chose to lead the delegation to Istanbul. He is not there to make a deal, but to orchestrate some way to blow up the process. His life literally depends on keeping the war going in such a way that the West remains engaged and supportive of Ukraine. He cannot reject talks outright, but he cannot engage in them in good faith, so he needs to find a third way.

The Europeans understand this as well, but they also have the added problem of the reality on the ground. The Ukrainian army is in serious trouble right now. They are steadily being pushed back while losing men and material at an alarming rate, one that is not sustainable for much longer. This write-up on the condition of the Ukraine army is about as positive of a spin as you will get before going into fantasy land and the author gives the Ukrainians six months to a year.

This is why Keith Kellogg, and the Europeans programmed Zelensky to demand an immediate ceasefire before negotiations. The plan is to get the ceasefire and then drag out talks while the Ukraine army is reorganized and reequipped for what they hope is the next round of the war on Russia. It is also why the Russians have rejected the idea and instead offered the talks in Istanbul. One way or the other they plan to finish Project Ukraine within the next year.

This is why Trump wisely jumped at this opportunity. No doubt his people are telling him how things are for Ukraine. If Trump can broker a peace deal, any peace deal that avoids images of Russian tanks in Kiev, it is a win for him. He will declare himself the savior of Ukraine. On the other hand, if Zelensky and the Europeans prevent a negotiated settlement, then Trump can lay the blame for those Russian tanks in Kiev on Zelensky and the Europeans.

What Trump has managed to do, perhaps without realizing it, is wriggle free from the trap left for him by the prior administration. He was left with two choices. One was continuing the proxy war by sending money and arms to Ukraine and take the blame when Ukraine finally capitulated. The other was to end the support for Ukraine and get blamed for “losing Ukraine” to the Russians. Now that he has brokered peace talks, he can shift the blame to others when Ukraine capitulates.

Again, much of this may be luck, but serendipity plays an enormous role in human affairs, so it is always part of the result. The reason for the expression, “Chance favors the prepared mind” is for exactly this reason. In order to succeed, it often means being prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. When the Russians offered direct talks with Ukraine last week, it was a rare chance for Trump to change the order of things, and he jumped on it.

All of this now signals the start of the end game for Project Ukraine. What Trump has wanted from the start is to end the war and withdraw from this proxy war with the Russians and now he is one step closer to his goal. The question now is whether it is an orderly end or a disorderly end. If it is the latter, then the question is who gets the blame and judging by the maneuvering, the White House is betting it will be a disorderly end and so they are maneuvering to lay the blame on Europe.

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 Progressive Formula

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American progressivism in its current form can be summarized as an ideology that claims, “we must do A or B will happen.” The A in this formula can be just about anything and often flips from positive to negative. There are times when doing A reverses and the warning is to stop doing it. On the other hand, the B factor is always a negative consequence of the first term. Usually, it is a vague suggestion that it is not just bad but the end of civilization as we know it.

The obvious example is the weather. On the grand scale, the first term will be something like driving cars or heating our homes, while the second term is climate change, which means climate disaster. If we keep driving cars the climate will change in such a way that earth dies. They never make that second term explicit, but the extinction stuff is assumed. After all, climate changes all the time and has often been to our benefit, but that just muddies the waters.

That gets to the other aspect of this formulation. The person or people involved assume that their normative evaluation of both terms is correct. They may be justifying their prejudice against A on the grounds that it leads to B, but they always assume that B is a bad thing that moral people should seek to avoid. You see this with climate change, which is recast as a moral condition, rather than an observation. It is a bad thing not a simple observation of earth’s behavior.

The Gaia worship stuff is easy, but it turns up everywhere, even in mundane things like foreign policy. For a few decades now the American foreign policy establishment has been warning that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, then it will be a disaster. It is in the title of this post at one of the Claremont sites. The post is a veiled argument in favor of going to war with Iran on behalf of Israel. The post is in response to another post on the subject that dismisses this progressive formulation.

What we see with Iran are two variations of the same theme. One is “If we do not do A then B will happen.” The other is “If they are able to do A, then B will happen.” Sometimes they are linked together to get something like, “If we do not do A then they will do B and then C will happen.” The point of this formulation is to avoid examining the second term. The debate must center on the first part, what we ought or ought not do, while accepting the general badness of B.

Again, the Gaia business is an easy example. Every debate on climate policy centers on that first term and never debates the second term. It is always assumed by all sides allowed in the debate, that climate change is bad. In fact, a condition of getting into the debate is that you accept that climate change is morally bad. Your reason for accepting Gaia as your lord and savior may be different from others who accept Gaia, but accepting Gaia is the only way into the debate.

Note that Spivak in his response to Dobson spends a lot of his time smearing Dobson as immoral or otherwise out of bounds. One point of the Spivak post is to anathematize Dobson and anyone who dares question B. Central to the claims of Spivak is that everyone must accept his normative claims about Iran going nuclear. That way, the debate is reduced to the ways to prevent it, since a nuclear Iran is assumed to be a disaster for the world.

It is the natural way progressives control public debate. This is the heart of the debate between those two posts on Iran. Dobson, the author of the post at the start of the exchange, is questioning the veracity of B. He is correct that there are no arguments to support the claim. The evidence we have says that if Iran gets the bomb, they will become even less aggressive toward Israel. We see this with India and Pakistan where nuclear weapons keep the peace.

Spivak, on the other hand, simply cannot accept Dobson’s questioning of B in the well-worn formulation, so he repeats all of the ways people have said, “If A then B” over the years regarding Iran and nuclear weapons. The reason for this is that any change in B invalidates the formula. Suddenly, A does not necessarily lead to B, which then causes a revaluation of the set of choices in A. It also removes the necessity of the person warning, “If we do not do A, then B will happen.”

If there are a set of conditions in which Iran gets the bomb, but like all but one other nuclear country, does not use it, then the debate over American relations with Iran shift from various forms of war with Iran to include peaceful relations with Iran. Suddenly, the war mongers move from being one voice in a choir preaching some form of war, to being war mongers in a room with people calling for peace. They lose their moral high ground and become the high-risk position.

In this regard, progressive ideology inherited the basic formula from Christianity but stripped it of all Christian references. Heaven is just the assumed destination if we follow the progressive formula. If we follow the tides of history, then we will reach the egalitarian paradise. On the other hand, if we do not stop doing a long list of things that meet the requirement of A, then some version of Hell awaits us. The reason our politics is so preachy is that it is dominated by preachers.

Progressivism is secular Christianity of the Protestant variety, which is why all progressive arguments reduce to “Repent or burn in Hell!” You must ride a bike to work, or you will burn in Hell for angering Gaia. We must make war with Iran, or we will burn in Hell for letting her get the bomb. The madness of America stems from the fact that all doors now lead to Hell. There are no choices in the first term that do not lead to the second term and the second term is always Hell.

It is why the antidote to progressive polemics is not facts and reason. Those facts neatly arranged in a chart do nothing to alter the basic progressive formula. Instead, the solution is a revaluation of the values contained in the formula. If the value of B is open to debate, then there is no debate over A. If any part of A is morally questionable, then B ceases to be a consideration. You do not defeat moral claims with facts, but with the dismissal of those moral claims by challenging the underlying assertions.

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 Slaves Of The South

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about progressive echo chambers, a post about old televisions and old ways to watch them, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the paywall side, there are now weekly videos, which are getting better, for those who like video. Subscribe here or here.

A topic that comes up regularly is why the Southern states produced so many terrible Republican politicians. Many of the most perfidious elected officials in Washington come from states that are solidly Republican. The most obvious is South Carolina, which seems to have a political class as corrupt as Massachusetts. Lindsey Graham might be the slimiest politician in America. Now Thom Tillis of North Carolina is making a run at Graham’s crown.

The voters in the South are some of the most conservative in the country, but they elect most of the unreliable pols in the GOP. If elections worked as people insist, a guy like Graham would not exist. Instead, the state’s senators would reflect the majority of the state’s voters, which are very conservative. The South Carolina delegation would be the fire-eaters of the Republican Party. Alabama and Mississippi would be working hard to set the edge in Republican edginess.

Last week, Thom Tillis finked on the President by pulling his support for Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney in DC. Maybe Tillis took a bribe, which happens so often in Washington now that it is the new normal. More likely, he simply agrees with his friends in the Democratic Party. He agreed to be the Republican who finked on the base this time, taking one for the team so to speak. Next time, another Southern Senator will suddenly decide his principles require him to be a fink.

In states dominated by the left-wing crazies, the pols tend to be even more fanatical than the typical voter in the state. Oregon politicians, for example, are reliable spear catchers for the far-left. One of their Representatives is now living in El Salvador to protest Trump’s deportation of MS-13 gang members. Ocasio-Cortez is now calling for violence against federal immigration officials. In progressive states, the elected officials are always to the left of their voters.

In so-called conservative states and districts, the opposite is true. The defining feature of Republican pols from the most conservative states is their willingness to bend their knee to the people they claim to oppose. They live in fear of being called one of the scary words the crazies use to control their conservative pets. Thom Tillis would urinate himself in public if he were ever called a mean word, so he makes sure to be ahead of all of these things, which means surrendering on every issue.

The main reason for this is the local elites in the South live in shame of their heritage and of the white people they represent. Like booshie people everywhere, they want nothing more than to be invited to the cool kid’s table. Since Gettysburg, the cool kid’s table has been where the progressives sit. The winners get to define what is and what is not cool and that remains true to this day. The United States is a Yankee imperium, and the South is a conquered land.

It is a good example of how control of the centers of cultural production can alter the behavior of the people. The managerial elite is not going to gaslight people into thinking a man in a dress is normal or trick people into embracing black sociopathy, but they can set the cultural tone for the elites. If you want to be popular in the centers of power, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, or Silcom Valley, you better conform to the cultural norms of the trend setters who control those power centers.

It is why Patrick Buchanan once quipped that when Southerners send one of their own to Washington, he quickly goes native. He goes from being his district’s representative to Washington to being Washington’s representative to his district. If you look around at the biggest finks of the Republican Party, they fit that role perfectly. Lindsey Graham hates the people he represents. They are not his people. It is his burden that he was born in such a backward state as South Carolina.

The question is why the voters tolerate it. People like to blame the voters, but when your choice is Graham and a guy with a bone in his nose, you cannot be blamed for voting for Graham. That is the other side of this master – slave relationship. For his loyal service to his friends in Washington, they make sure he never has a serious primary challenger or a serious general election opponent. The loyal colonial official, like Graham, gets the protection of his lord.

It is not just the machinations of the parties that account for this. There are enough white people in the South who are ashamed of themselves to make forming a majority of the proud impossible. The same cultural pressures that make a Thom Tillis ashamed his people work on the locals. Fashionable people in the provinces always ape the ways of those in the big city. Many booshie South Carolinians are as revolted by Southern culture as the typical Manhattanite.

William Faulkner described a South undergoing a transition, where the old elite with roots in the antebellum South, the Compsons, was giving way to a new class, the rapacious, vermin-like Snopes clan. The old elite had a natural superiority about them, but they were ill-suited for the new South. The new elite, on the other hand, was without virtue, so perfectly suited for the new age. They were willing to say anything and sell anything to get an advantage.

Faulkner’s description of the Snopes clan is exactly what you would expect from the ruling elite of a conquered people. They exist not as a genuine elite but as way to prevent the formulation of a genuine elite. The conqueror always wants the conquered to remain conquered and the most efficient way to do that is to make sure their leaders are loyal to the conquerors. Just as the house slaves keep the field slaves from revolting, Southern elites keep the South pacified.

In a democracy, this process is subtle and natural. No one in Washington worries about a revolt against the Yankee imperium. They only have to make sure that the politicians in the provinces are their sort of people. The same sorts of selection pressures that exist in the high school cafeteria exist in official Washington. The social pressures are all one way and as a result, the compliant representing Southern states have long careers, while the difficult drop out of politics.

It is why remedying this at the ballot box is impossible. Efforts to depose Lindsey Graham always fail, because he is the product of a system that is designed to not just defend his kind but produce them from the raw material of popular resistance that might get lucky and beat him in a primary. A populist who beats Graham will go to Washington, and before long he will go native. He will sound just like the other house slaves who serve their masters in the Yankee imperium.

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!

Carny Life

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If you have ever been to a concert where the acts are from the golden age of rock music, you probably noticed that they seem naturally good. They know their material and they know their audience. There is a high production quality to the show and the performers professionally do their best material. The reason for this is they have done it for so long, they know what works and what does not work. Old carnies seem so good because they have been at it for so long.

Successful comics will often talk about how they got some advice from an old comic that changed their approach and launched their career. The old comic, after years of trial and error, figured out the formula and passed it onto the young guy, who then avoided the trial-and-error part to produce a popular act. Experience is the best teacher, especially in the circus. It is why long-running television shows seem so much better in terms of production quality at the end than in the beginning.

You see this with Jordan Peterson. Here is a recent video of Peterson interviewing an up-and-coming political carny named James Lindsay. The difference between the two is striking because at this point, Peterson is an old hand. He has been doing his act for so long he no longer knows where the act ends, and he begins. Lindsay, on the other hand, is on his third act now, this one is something called “woke right”, so he is still working out the kinks in his performance.

Of course, it is possible that the reason Lindsay comes off as a crazy person is that he is suffering from some sort of mental illness. There are signs that he may be struggling to keep it together. The darting eyes and the facial tics suggest he is not entirely sure if what is coming out of his mouth is what he hears in his head. It does not help that it seems like his chin is retreating into his skull. He looks like a guy who spends far too much time with his model trains.

It is an interesting interview from the perspective of carny life. Usually, we get the stories of old carnies passing wisdom onto young carnies from the perspective of the old carny reflecting on his early career. In this video we get to be at the table as the old carny talks to the young carny, trying to help him out in his career. It is important to note that carnies are carnies all the time. It is a lifestyle choice. That means that even when they are talking shop, they are performing.

In the case of Peterson, his act is now familiar, and he has done it for so long that it feels completely natural. It is like how Kevin Costner no longer seems like a terrible actor because he has been doing the same act for decades. His robotic line reading is now part of the character we know as Kevin Costner. You see this with musicians like Bruce Springsteen, who are terrible singers, but their terribleness over a long period of time is now part of their appeal.

Now, if you look at Peterson when he was still working out the kinks in his act, you see the beginnings of the current act. There are the carefully considered facial expressions, the long contemplative pauses, and the endless word salad that his target audience naturally confuses with profundity. Of course, Peterson looks like he is still high from his weekend trip to Miami because he was probably taking drugs. This video was before he went to that mysterious Russian “detox” facility.

The comments in that old Peterson video are interesting. One commenter wrote, “I love how he´s always picking the water cup up but then becomes engaged in what he´s saying and ends up putting it down without having had a drink.” Peterson still does this bit when he has the prop available. Good carnies study their audience and that is what he is trying to tell Lindsay in that interview. The successful carny sticks with what works and drops the stuff that bombs.

James Lindsay is not Jordan Peterson and never will be. That is another thing about the successful carny. His act makes him a popular personality and it is his personality that becomes the main draw for the audience, not the act. The audience will tire of the bit eventually, but they will stick with a favored personality. Lindsay is simply too weird to have that sort of appeal. He is the guy who stands too close to you in the checkout line, not a guy you watch from the comfort of you livingroom.

In that interview, you see something else about carny life. Peterson is happy to bring on Lindsay because he knows Lindsay is a one hit wonder. Acts like his are props for the guys who have broken through and become established performers. Soon, people get bored of the “woke right’ nonsense. For now, old hands like Peterson can use the popularity of a guy like this in his own act. One of the cold hard truths about carny life is that there is no honor among carnies.

Another of those truths is that even the top acts in the circus run their course. Peterson is showing all the signs of a fading star. The culture is changing, so the old acts from the censorship era are not as edgy now. Peterson is an old crooner just as bands are growing their hair long and singing about drugs. The act is fine and still has its appeal, but it is no longer what the cool kids want. Another thing about carny life is that eventually, the dogs bark and the circus moves on.

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!

Time Will Tell

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Western countries largely came into being after the Second World War in that their political and economic systems were formed up after the war. There was the aftermath of the war and the Cold War that shaped the political economy of the West. We still talk about “The West” in the 20th century sense of it, despite the fact that the Cold War is long over and many formerly communist countries are in the EU. The West is as much about political psychology as geography.

A part of that political psychology was a Marxist sense that the moral questions had been resolved, at least with regards to politics and economics. Social democracy was rebranded as liberal democracy in Europe and in the United States it was rebranded as democratic capitalism or free market capitalism. The mainstream political parties accepted the consensus on politics and economics but offered small alterations to it to distinguish themselves from the other parties.

In the United States, this meant that the two parties agreed on all the major items like dealing with the Russians but had different approaches to the same goal. In Europe, the main parties decorated themselves with things like environmentalism, socialism, and some cultural items, but they agreed on the most important items which were relations with the United States and anti-nationalism. The former was in response to communism and the latter was in response to fascism.

This is a highly simplified model of post-war reality, but useful in understanding the psychology of voters and the political class. The consensus and faith in it are what shaped politics until the current crisis. Politicians did not have to worry about policies or ideology, as the ideology was settled, so they just had to select from platforms that had been approved within the consensus. The voters showed their displeasure by voting against the incumbent or their satisfaction by voting for him.

Even in the multi-party system of Europe, voting was a binary thing. If the economy was good, then the parties that were associated with the status quo did well, but if the economy was bad, then those parties were punished. In the United States, you had the added aspect of party fatigue. Even in good times, a party that had been in power for too long would lose an election because the voters wanted a new look. Bill Clinton won in 1992 mostly due to this reason.

This worked fine if the public was satisfied with the consensus and no one was permitted to question the consensus. The fear of nuclear war solved the first part during the Cold War and credit money handled it after the Cold War. While there is always discontent, no matter how good things feel, it was never enough to cause any serious doubt about the status quo. The populist rumblings since the Cold War were marginalized by the media and political class.

That is where the second part of the model is important. The political classes in the West became increasing narrow after the Cold War. The seriousness of the situation in the Cold War required serious debate about the issues of the day, so the debate was open to a broader range of ideas. After the Cold War, triumphalism and the economic boom narrowed the range of tolerated opinion. The uniparty concept we see everywhere in the West is a product of this.

This is how the West has reached the current crisis. As the public has grown unsettled about public policy and the fruits of it, they find themselves with no reasonable options at the ballot box. The mainstream parties all hold the same views. This is especially obvious in Europe where parties that are allegedly polar opposites form governments, often as a way to exclude popular outsider parties. Germany and France now have governments without popular support as a result.

The root cause of the crisis in the West is that old Marxist line about once morality is settled, there is no need for politics. The Western consensus was a moral consensus, which means the politics within the consensus were performative. Since the end of the Second World War, the West did not have much in the way of politics, because everyone agreed on the important moral questions. After the Cold War, the moral consensus narrowed, and dissent was exiled.

The current crisis is due to elite moral consensus narrowing to a set of beliefs at odds with the sensibilities of the public. The moral consensus has collapsed with regards to the elites and the public. What the Cloud People believe is not only different from the beliefs of the people over whom they rule, the Dirt People, but it is hostile to the interests of the Dirt People. It is how the shuffling zombie that is the UK Prime Minister can boast about favoring aliens of British subjects.

It is why there is no solution within the democratic process. That process evolved to give the Dirt People choices approved by the Cloud People. There will never be an option to get rid of the Cloud People on the ballot. The point of the democratic process is to confirm to the Cloud People that they are the Cloud People. We see this with Trump, who is like a giant set upon by a massive swarm of bees. The democratic system will defend its master at any cost.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is the fact that the West has reached this crisis because the defenders of democracy are daring the people to do what is necessary for the will of the people to be respected by the state. The smug, soyish faces of the male politicians and the schoolmarmish demeaner of the females, reeks of contempt for the voters. They see the people as weak and contemptible for not doing what they should, in response to the elites.

Time will tell if this holds. The election results increasingly show that the public in the West do not like their options. As they search for alternatives, the system seeks to eliminate those options. Maybe the people will run out of excuses and rise up to do what they should have done long ago. Maybe Trump succeeds enough to destabilize the system to the point where it falters and is replaced. Maybe we just keep voting ourselves into civilizational collapse. Time will tell.

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!