Prudentialism

Posted on February 12, 2025 by thezman

One of the many interesting aspects of the Trump era has been the collapse of what was called conservatism in America and the rise of a new coalition to replace it as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Most pundits have been happy to call it Trumpism or MAGA, as they hope it is temporary. Others have tried to jam it into the populist bucket, despite the fact it is not a populist movement. Beyond these superficial attempts at labeling, not much has been said about it.

Not everyone in the coalition is thrilled by what they are seeing. Many older conservatives, the paleo variety, are happy to see Conservative Inc. head off to bankruptcy, but they are a bit uncomfortable sharing a pew with people like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard. They wince when Tucker Carlson gets along with old school lefties like Jimmy Dore or Aaron Maté. They spent their lives on the opposite side of these people and now they share the same movement.

In fairness, it is even more difficult for the old school lefties, because for them, politics defines their life. That means they are now faced with supporting that which they were sure was evil until not so long ago. It also means their conception of evil may have been wrong, which means their conception of themselves was wrong. This is why it is difficult for an ideologue to adjust to new evidence. Unlike the non-ideologue, such adjustment requires a reexamination of their soul.

That aside, the issue everyone is struggling with is that our political buckets, like so much of the past, have been a fiction. The left-right framing was never two groups opposing one another, but two groups negotiating with one another. It was Team Fast versus Team Slower, both agreeing on the destination. The “conservatives” were never interested in conserving anything but their sinecures, while the liberals were hellbent on sweeping liberalism into the dustbin of history.

For as long as anyone has been alive, the consensus in American politics has been the radicalism at the heart of progressivism. Egalitarianism, universalism, and the blank slate are the three legs of this ideological stool. What motivates and justifies using this stool to smash up American society and go abroad to smash up other cultures is the intense belief that they are commanded by history or history’s God to impose this ideology on the people of the world.

This is how we arrived at this odd time where John Derbyshire and Paul Gottfried share a pew with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. The excesses of progressivism, unconstrained by the necessity of the Cold War, have put everything at risk, thus calling forth an old force that has been dormant since Gettysburg. That force is prudentialism. The thing that lies at the heart of Western conservatism is a set of precautionary principles that act to avoid unknowable negative consequences.

If you listen to what RFK Jr. says about medicine, for example, it generally boils down to restoring prudence to the field. The drug makers operate on the assumption that they must rush everything to the market, which often causes new harms while having little impact on the thing they are trying to mitigate. The Covid vaccine is a great example of the recklessness of medicine. Even a little bit of prudence would have avoided this easily avoidable error.

Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard’s main reason to exist is her skepticism of the military industrial complex and the foreign policy community. For the last thirty years, we have staggered from one ill-conceived conflict to the next, never stopping to ponder if what we are doing will have negative consequences down the road. No one seems to be able to think beyond the first move. The main thrust of Gabbard’s critique is that a tiny bit of prudence could have prevented many of these debacles.

The reason these two are attracted to Trump’s movement is that fundamentally, Trump is the great champion of prudence. He would rather not spend money than spend it, not because he is cheap, but because he knows that spending it has consequences and unless you put those consequences in the balance, you are recklessly spending money and that is not prudent. Trump’s foreign policy is motivated by a desire to not create new problems which will lead to new conflicts.

If Team Slower had not abused the word “conservative” for so long, what we are seeing could be easily labeled “conservatism.” Decades of verbicide have left us with a poverty of language to describe what we are seeing. It is why Trump never uses the old labels when talking about politics. He did not call the people running USAID “leftists” or even “radicals” but instead called them “lunatics.” In the current context, it is both the appropriate word and the accurate one.

Even so, Trumpism is the return of prudence to our politics, and it is the necessary precursor for the return of a genuine American conservatism. To paraphrase Michael Oakeshott, “Trumpism is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

The boys and girls in conservative sinecures are hostile to Trumpism because it casts light on their project, revealing it to be nothing more than the sidecar to the radicalism they claimed to oppose. For the neocons, Trumpism is a mirror, revealing their lack of a soul and exposing the vampirism that animates them. For others, it is an uncomfortable calling home of the prudent into a disposition that has defined their lives but never defined their politics.

For lack of a better way of stating it, what we are seeing is the forming up of a new prudentialism, that in the fullness of time may be able to rehabilitate the term “conservative” but for now must settle for Trumpism or MAGA. It is not running around trainyards yelling stop. It is a great rolling back of the progressive project, not driven by superficial romanticism, but by prudent necessity. To make America great again, we must sweep away progressivism and its reckless implementations.

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 Chesterton’s Fence

Posted on February 11, 2025 by thezman

One of the things lost in the excitement of the first month of the Trump administration is the pending reform of the FBI. When Kash Patel was grilled by the Senate, he repeatedly made clear that reforming the agency was his top priority. This is one reason Senate Democrats are stalling his nomination. This paramilitary wing of the Blob is calling in every favor to preserve itself. That lawsuit seeking to prevent the DOJ from getting the names of the J6 agents is a similar move.

There is little questioning the underlying premise of the reform cause. The FBI has lost all credibility with the public after a string of scandals. Framing people is a terrible thing but creating elaborate traps for not-so-bright people, as we saw in the Michigan kidnapping hoax, is monstrous. Most people do not know this has been common practice for decades, but many people know it. Of course, you have the outlandish behavior of the FBI during the first Trump term.

The topic of reform starts with looking at how an organization reached the point where reform is required to save it. That is where the FBI is now. Many people think it might be best to just close it down entirely. The few necessary things it does could be transferred to other agencies or maybe to a new agency with a severely limited portfolio, something like an FBI-lite. When forty percent of the agency was used to go after the J6 people over the last four years, the agency is rotten to the core.

The number one reason the FBI is a mess is that it, like most police forces in the country, was turned into a paramilitary unit. After the North Hollywood shootout, where two heavily armed bank robbers tried to shoot their way through a police cordon, every police department has been transformed into a paramilitary unit. They got money for military grade weapons, body armor and tactical training. They also tapped into the military for equipment and the sort of men who enjoy military life.

The result is the police now function like British soldiers patrolling Northern Ireland during The Troubles or American Marines patrolling Afghanistan. No law enforcement organization group has been deformed more than the FBI by this. Years of selection pressure has resulted in agents who not only look at the general public with contempt, but look forward to confrontations with them. They arrive in full battle gear and have a hostile attitude to arrest mothers holding their children.

It is not an accident that the things the FBI is supposed to do have not gotten better over the last thirty years. Whenever some well-known crazy goes nuts and shoots up a public place, we always learn that this person was “known to the FBI.” We also learn they did nothing about it. Over the last thirty years, the FBI has been transformed from the nation’s top law enforcement agency into a heavily armed gang of thugs who only care about pushing around the average citizen.

You see this in the collapse of standards for FBI agents. A common video online is two portly agents, dressed like they are going to watch their kid’s t-ball game, paying a visit to a citizen over a social media post. The grotesque lack of professional standards jumps off the screen. People now expect higher standards from building inspectors and parking attendants than from FBI agents. The ones not playing soldier are slovenly couch potatoes with the disposition of a postal clerk.

The image of the FBI is a good example of the interplay between the aesthetic and the spiritual that we used to understand. The poorest man used to have a suit for going to church and for when he was buried, because the formal things in life were the important things in life, so it was reflected in your appearance. The Medieval scholar Erasmus, paraphrasing Quintilian wrote, “To dress within the formal limits and with an air gives men, as the Greek line testifies, authority.”

This is where to start with reforming the FBI. The first thing that should happen is every agent must pass a physical test, controlled for their age and sex, within the first ninety days or be fired. At the same time, the agents start wearing suits and the corresponding for female agents. Get rid of the casual clothes and you get rid of the casual attitudes they have toward their jobs. For most, showing up to work dressed like an adult will be terrifying, but maybe they should find other work.

Along the same lines, there is no reason for FBI tactical units. Agents get a standard sidearm that is locked up at their office when they are off duty. The automatic weapons, body armor, flashbangs, etc. all go back to the military. The guys who signed up so they can bust down doors will not like it, but they need to think about either going back into the military or signing up with an international security contractor. Free people do not tolerate paramilitary units operating in their society.

Of course, this will result in most agents leaving the FBI. The PT will eliminate a good chunk of them and the new dress code will filter out many more. The goons playing soldier will find the new culture intolerable. That opens the door for the next reform, which is a return to the old education standard. It used to be that the FBI required a degree in accounting. Then it is expanded to computer science. Now the ranks are littered with criminal justice majors.

In this age, the role of the FBI is to investigate technical crimes, like computer trespass, electronic fraud, corporate crimes, and other crimes that require intelligence. You not only need smarts to do this work, but you need technical skills. Reestablishing educational standards, like bringing back the dress code, is as much about fixing the culture of the organization as raising the quality of people in it. Smart people who take pride in their work tend not to beat up old ladies.

In the end, the problems of the FBI are a microcosm of what has brought managerialism to the brink of collapse. They simply stopped caring about their core function and stopped caring about their own standards. This opened the door to mischief and the sorts of people who feed on mischief. It turns out that those old standards had a purpose after all. The lesson here is Chesterton’s fence. The reform of government starts with revisiting all the old, abandoned rules.

The Great Reckoning

Posted on February 10, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the importance of enjoying the moment, a post on urban dependency culture, a video from my creek and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

As expected, the lawsuits are quickly piling up as the regime tries to buy time to regroup after the initial attacks from the Trump administration. There are multiple cases involving the Treasury, all aimed at preventing Trump appointees from doing their jobs, at least without permission from the court. There is one case involving the FBI, where the judge is asked to stop the Justice Department from looking into J6 cases. There is at least one case challenging the buyout system.

All these cases have been launched by activists trying to halt the Trump agenda, but they all have something important in common. They revolve around a set of core questions about these executive agencies. Who controls these agencies, by what means do they control them and by whose authority? The activists are challenging the Trump admin on the claim that these are independent agencies. They do not report to the President, so he cannot take these actions.

The trouble with that is there is nothing in the Constitution defining a fourth branch of government under which these agencies are organized. At best, it is a bit of make-believe Washington has indulged since Nixon. The mythology of Watergate says Nixon used these agencies to terrorize his political opponents, so he was driven from the temple of the people. Ever since, permanent Washington has waved around the bloody shirt whenever they did not like what a President was doing.

There is something more important behind this. Watergate was the triumph of the managerial class over the political class. For fifty years, an unelected and unaccountable class of experts has been left to run the administrative state, only indulging the President when it comes to appointing agency heads. In most cases, the appointees were from the managerial elite. These people took turns circulating between government and the Blob.

In his first three weeks, Trump has launched a big arrow offensive on this system and the underlying logic of it. Once these cases get to Supreme Court, administration lawyers will point out that there is no fourth branch of government and that these agencies are part of the executive. While Congress maintains the power of the purse, it does not run these agencies. That is left to the executive branch, which means the President and whomever he appoints to do it.

This seems rather straight forward, but the courts are as corrupt as the rest of the managerial system, so there are plenty of judges who will issue crazy rulings to stop the Trump agenda. While the Supreme Court only has a few ideologically deranged judges, it may not be eager to get involved. This is fundamentally a political dispute, and the court prefers to stay out of those. At the minimum, it may wait until they can choose a clean case to make a clean ruling.

The people filing these suits seem to be banking on the courts dragging this out and never getting to a final decision. They think if they drag it out and make it an issue in the midterms, they can win the House and Senate, then impeach Trump. You can already see hints of this in their rhetoric. While this may sound insane, given the public response thus far, these people live in a bubble. That and they have no other options, given what Trump is doing.

Team Trump seems to be prepared for this. In fact, part of the overall reform agenda is to get one of these cases in front of the Supreme Court to argue for the unitary executive theory, which says the President of the United States has sole authority over the executive branch. Even if the Court rules that Congress plays a role in how these agencies are administered, it will be a massive win. It means the administrative state returns to the control of the political class.

Why is this important?

For the last fifty years, these agencies, along with the media, the academy and the vast network of not-for-profits has operated independent of the President. Further, they have used their capture of the regulatory mechanism and the political finance system to control both political parties, thus controlling the legislative branch. USAID used its billions, in part, to control more billions in the budgets of the agencies, which it directed into its political projects, foreign and domestic.

The reason elections have had no impact on public policy is that the people making public policy were not subject to the voters. The political system became a theater to keep the people distracted. It is why the politicians have become increasingly frivolous and absurd. When Congressman and Senators are furniture, props in the theater of democracy, they tend to be theater kids. No serious person wants to subject himself to the humiliation rituals required of elected office.

The hammer blow delivered to USAID was aimed at shattering the financial structure of the Blob by removing the mechanism the Blob used to circulate money. If they are no longer underwriting the vast network of non-for-profits and regime media outlets, those entities will struggle to control the discourse. The DOGE boys examining every disbursements from Treasury is about starving the Blob of money. The restructuring of the agencies removes their power over the political class.

The reason the economic elite is backing this is because they see that the Blob is threatening their interests. It is out of control. When a girl boss judge in Delaware can crater the state’s economic model, and threaten the country’s financial model, the system that makes her possible must be destroyed. A million girl bosses armed with taxpayer money have set fire to the country for the last decade. What we see now is an effort to put out the fire and eliminate the fire starters.

In the end, we are in one of those momentous times when the fundamental questions of every human society are in the balance. Who decides, by what means do they decide and by whose authority do they decide? The Constitution answers all these questions, but it has been ignored for at least fifty years. Trump wants to restore that old political order, while the Blob seeks to bury it forever. Every civil war and revolution have been fought over these questions, so the best is yet to come.

Here Comes The Sun

Posted on February 6, 2025 by thezman

One of the things that is becoming clear to everyone as the USAID scandal unfolds is that much of what has been presented to us over the last several decades, as far as politics, has been an illusion created by the blob. The media was part of the blob, underwritten by the government and cultivated with government access, so they presented a version of political reality that favored the blob. Even the debates over policy were staged by the blob.

That is what is clear in the release of the CBS tapes of the 60 Minutes interview of then candidate Kamala Harris. Calling it an interview is an assault on the language because it was nothing like an interview. It was one part screen test, one part coaching and one part editing to produce what was presented as an interview. Everyone involved knew it was fraud and said nothing. In other words, what we have been seeing is not media bias, but an orchestrated fraud on the public.

As an aside, the corruption was so deep and so normalized that it appears that most people in these media companies were unaware of much of it. The staff at Politico only became aware of who was actually paying their salaries when the USAID money was halted, and Politico could not make payroll. How many people at the BBC knew that USAID was the second largest source of funding to the BBC? Did anyone at the Financial Times know that management were on the pad?

Putting that aside, everyone in Washington certainly knew what USAID was doing, and they remained silent. There is not a single “reporter” in Washington unaware of the fact that the main source for Ukraine news has been an operation run by the Kagan family with funding from the government through various proxies. They all knew it and they played along because their paycheck demanded it. In effect, all of Washington was enlisted as participants in the manufactured drama of politics.

That is probably the biggest part of the scandal. Most political scandals involve a small number of people breaking the rules. Their undoing is the old Benjamin Franklin line about how three can keep a secret if two are dead. What we are seeing is that Ben was wrong about that as tens of thousands were keeping a secret until now. It speaks to the poisonous culture inside Washington that no one dared mention publicly what all of them knew was happening.

This raises another question. What else have they been faking? Think about something mundane like television ratings. They used to be a big topic, but the proliferation of subscription services and cable fees changed the revenue models. Even so, they are still used to gauge the popularity of shows. The more popular a show is, the more likely new people are to give it a go. In the modern sense, it means more people are going to sign up for a Netflix or Disney subscription.

An iron law of life is that if something has value then there will be people trying to steal it or to fake it, so faking ratings has always been a thing. This video from the Critical Drinker where he and his friends discuss the ratings of various bits of bugman content just screams organized fraud. When you are talking about “minutes viewed” rather than actual people watching, it is safe to say you are trying hard to prove the old maxim, “Figures do not lie, but liars figure.”

You can probably look around and find dozens of things that are used as measures or standards that we take for granted but are probably fake. Will the upcoming Super Bowl really break viewing records for the fiftieth straight year? Is the pop star cast to perform at the halftime show as popular as they claim? Is the game itself on the level or is it also a manufactured drama? Speaking of which, how come there are no gambling scandals in sports? Did everyone suddenly get honest?

You can get carried away with this, of course, and begin to question your own grasp of reality, but we are on the cusp of a great questioning. Once the enormity of the fraud begins to sink in, people will naturally start to wonder if what is being presented to them is not part of an ongoing fraud. We already see this with medicine because of the many frauds perpetrated during Covid. Now we are about to see the same process rumble through the rest of society.

In a way, the events of the last three weeks are like what happened in the transition from communism to chaos in the old Soviet Union. On the one hand, there was the mass realization that much of what had been told to the public was an organized lie, but on the other hand an understanding that it was a necessary step to exit the world of lies and enter the period of reform. The American empire is now getting its form of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (transparency).

This should not suggest that success is assured. The blob will fight back, and it has many tentacles, so the fight has just begun. The vast amounts of fraud in the economy support millions of mortgage payments and college tuition bills, so the people benefiting from the organized fraud will not go quietly. With every window that is opened, more sunlight rushes in to expose the corruption. If the blob is to be defeated, it will be through the sorts of transparency we have seen this week.

The End Of Minoritarianism

Posted on February 5, 2025 by thezman

One of the side issues with regards to the USAID scandal is the fact that it was part of a system that has dominated the world since the Cold War. During the Cold War, this same system came to dominate the West, both as a whole, but also within the discrete parts of each member country. In fact, what happened at the end of the Cold War is this system sought to fill the void left by communism. The system was not liberalism, but rather a form of minoritarianism, minority rule.

Minoritarianism is a term coined by political scientists to describe a condition in which a minority has control of key decision-making processes. For example, the U.S. Senate requires a supermajority for certain things, which gives the minority party the power to veto these issues. This is the filibuster that the Democrats complain about whenever they need to placate their voters. In the case of the Senate, this system is to prevent the majority from abusing the minority.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been official American policy to control the politics of the rest of the world. The endless yapping about “our democracy” is always about imposing Western systems on the rest of the world. After all, we have reached the end of history and there are no more debates about the morally correct way to organize a society, so everyone needs to fall in line. Even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s people disagree, the minority demands it.

This is where programs like USAID and NED are used. Their job, in many cases, is simply to sow chaos in targeted countries. Once it is determined that the majority is unlikely to get onboard with liberal democracy, Western aid programs go in to stir up trouble in the name of helping the poor or promoting rights. It is why they love sponsoring things like women’s rights in Muslim countries. The point is to undermine the unity of the majority in the country.

The same approach is applied to regime change. In Georgia, for example, the majority of the people wanted a patriotic government that would strike a balance between East and West, but that was bad for the people running American foreign policy, so USAID was dispatched to regime change the place. What followed was a year of protests and unrest, until the government kicked out the foreign aid workers. Once the USAID money dried up, the protests dried up.

The funny thing about the regime change operations is they rarely result in a stable government, but that is not seen as a bad result. If Slovakia falls into chaos after toppling the Fico government, that is fine. That is viewed as a better result than having a pro-Slovak government. The goal is always to prevent a majority from forming anywhere, whether it is inside a country or among a group of countries. The goal of minority rule is to keep the majority in chaos.

This makes a lot of sense from an American perspective. The United States is a small population compared to the rest of the world. If the rest of the world, or even a section of it, united against the empire, it would be big trouble. This is why both Israel and the United States work to keep the Arabs fighting each other inside their countries as well as among the countries of the Arab world. As much as Israeli and American politicians talk about peace in the region, they prefer the chaos.

We can probably date the birth of minoritarianism as an essential part of popular rule to the post-Civil War period in America. The ruling elite of Yankee New England became the ruling elite for the new country that was formed up after the war. That became even more explicit with the progressive revolution in the late 19th and early 20th century, culminating in the New Deal. Suddenly, the people making decisions would be educated experts from the best schools, all of which exist in the Northeast.

The story of 20th century domestic politics in the United States is one of discord and friction over race, region, and religion. Over and over one group is pitted against another preventing a majority forming up against the ruling class. Conservatism, for example, evolved so it could prevent a white majority forming up against the social policies preferred by the ruling elite. The many progressive causes were promoted to keep the coalition of fringes under control.

Everywhere there is turmoil there is the crisis of minoritarianism. Europe is in crisis because the big important countries have no role in decision making. Instead, you have girl bosses at the EU calling the shots. Estonia has more say in decision making than France, Italy, and Germany. Of course, the crisis was precipitated by the Ukraine war, which is the result of Ukraine being ruled by a non-Ukrainian with the support of the ultra-nationalist who make up ten percent of the population.

There is something to say in favor of minoritarianism. Most people are average to below average in their abilities. Collectively they are not magically above average. This has always been the fatal flaw in democracy. In fact, the majority tend to operate below the average of the whole. You need the smart fraction to run things, but the smart fraction needs to act in the interest of the majority. Otherwise, you get chaos, which is what we have seen over the last thirty years.

What we may be seeing now is the end of minoritarianism. The rest of the world is figuring out how to defend against it. This is why the American empire is beginning to withdraw from the frontiers. The American economic elite seems to be seeing the danger, which is why they have backed Trump and his plans to dismantle the managerial state. Even the minority, or at least enough of it, is figuring out that they must act in the interest of the majority.

The curse of the eighth decade is an observation that Israel becomes unstable in the eighth decade of its existence, in whatever form it takes. The first Jewish kingdom, led by King David, lasted for 80 years. The kingdom of the Second Temple lasted roughly eighty years before it was conquered by Rome. The modern state of Israel was formed in 1948, which means it is reaching its eighth decade. The current troubles in the Levant are rooted in the growing instability of Israel.

Perhaps something similar is happening to American minoritarianism. In his book, The Jewish Century, argues that the modern age is the Jewish age, by which he means the post-war world created by America. That is a good starting point for when minoritarianism became the defining feature of America. Eight decades of turmoil later and we are reaching the end of minoritarianism. The curse of the eight decade is now coming for the organizing principle of the American empire.

The Blob War

Posted on February 4, 2025 by thezman

The most surprising and most consequential event of the President Trump sequel has been the USAID scandal. No one thought that part of his revenge tour would be a direct assault on one of the main centers of the foreign policy hive. Until now, few people had any knowledge of this entity. Now it is in the center of the news because Trump has shut it down and put Musk and his whiz kids to the task of auditing the organization while the staff paces outside in the streets.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was sort of created by Congress in 1961 as a way to regulate foreign aid. Congress did not actually create an organization to do this. It directed the White House to create an organization, which is how the independent, not-for-profit entity called USAID came into existence and how it has operated ever since. It gets money through the State Department for its various programs, but it also raises money on its own.

To this point, there has been no oversight of USAID. It has been free, for example, to give money to George Soros organizations that do things like back candidates for state prosecutor in the United States. That seems like an odd use of foreign aid, but it really is the tip of the iceberg, which is why Trump is closing it down. That lack of oversight plus decades of existence created an organization that was operating like a government outside the government that financed it.

Of course, much of its activity was aimed at foreign governments. USAID backed the failed color revolution in Georgia last year. It was through the many local operations it supported that it was able to get people into the streets. The reason they did this is the Georgia parliament passed a law banning foreign money in politics. Georgia did not want to be the next Ukraine. The 2005 Orange revolution in Ukraine and the 2014 Maiden coup in 2014 were both underwritten by USAID.

It is why in the Biden years people started tracking the whereabouts of Samantha Power, the then head of USAID. Wherever she turned up, say Hungary before its elections, bad things happened for the local patriots. If you look up the career of Power, it reads like a road map to a position in permanent Washington, but also as a skeleton key for how the deep state operates. The people who actually run things jump from one node to another inside an informal network.

Powers was not running USAID in the Biden years because she brought an expertise in running a large enterprise. She got the gig because she was a trusted member of this informal group that runs foreign policy. She had been at the right stops at the right nodes and been vetted by the most trusted people in the system. She was plugged into the hive mind of this system. Its thoughts were her thoughts. Therefore, she would run this $50 billion dollar entity according to its wishes.

This is what the normies on Twitter fail to grasp. They think this about the money given to characters like Bill Kristol through one of his operations called Defending Democracy Together. Normie thinks in terms of money because he thinks in terms of the stuff he can buy with money. People like Bill Kristol think about the ways they can advance their people’s agenda with that money. As you would expect, the neocons are dug in like ticks in the network supported by USAID.

There is another aspect of the USAID scandal. One of the organizations it funds is called National Endowment for Democracy, which like USAID is an independent not-for-profit that was created by the National Security Decision Directive 77, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. The alleged purpose is to spread democracy, but in reality, it is just another wealthy node in the informal network of formal and informal nodes that make up the shadow government.

Half of the budget of NED is allocated to the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (AFL–CIO), the Center for International Private Enterprise (Chamber of Commerce), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Democratic Party), and the International Republican Institute (Republican Party). If you are curious as to why Joni Ernst tried to block Pete Hegseth’s nomination, check out the board of the International Republican Institute.

There you see how this thicket of not-for-profits and quasi-government institutions not only control foreign policy, but domestic policy. Hundreds of billions flow out of the Treasury through the budgets of the government agencies into this massive ecosystem that uses that money to control domestic politics. If you want to know why voting has had no bearing on public policy for decades, there is the answer. What matters to the politicians is this massive ecosystem, not your vote.

This is why the elected officials in Washington have been relatively quiet about what is happening not far from their offices. The party sent out some extras and understudies to perform in front of the USAID building, but otherwise they have remained quiet because they imagine Musk digging through the files, seeing things that they would prefer remain out of the public eye. USAID is just one problem. The DOGE team is analyzing every penny going out the door at Treasury right now.

It is also why the activists are going crazy over this. Most of them had no idea that their paycheck was coming from the government. They got grants and jobs at not-for-profits with important sounding names and “independent media outlets” run by people “passionate for the cause.” It turns out that most of it was underwritten by operations like USAID, which used government grants and corporate donations to control this vast ecosystem of radical activism.

When Trump halted all funding payments from USAID, for example, ninety percent of “independent media” in Ukraine had to close. Most of the pro-Ukraine accounts on Twitter suddenly fell silent. This is just one example, but it points to the enormity of the corruption centered in these quasi-government organizations. Much of what has been presented to the public as “democratic politics” has been theater staged by this swarm of not-for-profits and non-government-organizations.

One of the least surprising aspects of this is the realization that the people endlessly yelping about “our democracy” have been part of a system that works to prevent the will of the people. Similarly, it is no surprise that the lunatics screaming about fascism in the streets were underwritten by a network of organizations funding by the government and corporate donors. USAID was big into “gender” politics, for example. It was all a show, but also a massive fraud on the people.

Time will tell if DOGE is able to dismember this network. It appears to be a top priority for Trump, owing to the fact that it was this system that derailed his first term and nearly got him killed. At the same time, a lot of mortgage payments and ideological projects rely on that system. There will be a counterattack. The glimmer of hope here is that the oligarchs are backing the war on the blob. The blob controls billions, but the oligarchs control trillions and now they control the blob’s billions.

The Destroyer Of Worlds

Posted on February 3, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the practical impact of what is called AI, a post about how I encountered Old Scratch in West Virginia, a video from my back porch and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

When Trump first appeared on the scene as a politician, a brilliant observer compared him to a character in the Asimov novels called The Mule. This was a character called the “destroyer of worlds” because he literally destroyed whole worlds, but he also destroyed the conception of the world. In fact, his very existence was a threat to accepted understanding of the universe, because the universally accepted conception of the universe precluded the existence of The Mule.

This has been the issue since Trump arrived on the scene. The people atop the post-Cold War world and the post-Cold War world itself, were all based on the assumption that a political character like Trump was impossible. The days of populist, nationalist and picaresque political actors was done. The present and future belonged to the Davos persons, the boys and girls who were produced by and benefitted the most from the managerial ideology that dominated the West.

What Trump’s success in 2016 represented was the nullification of the managerial order because according to the logic of managerialism, men like Trump had no place in the system, so they could never be a threat to the system. Instead, they were marginalized to the fringes of managerial life, the place where things are made, fixed, and created to keep the mechanics of the world going. They had no place in the world where decisions were made by the great and the good.

It is easy to forget that the best and the brightest smirked at the very idea of Trump running in the Republican primary. They were sure he was just another foolish businessman from the fringes, who thought he understood how things worked, but would quickly learn he was in over his head. Instead, the destroyer of worlds first destroyed the Republican primary. and the conservative ecosystem that controlled it, then he destroyed the system itself.

Like all monster movies, the story of this monster had that period where the good guys think they finally killed the beast, only to find out that it was still alive. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the regime was sure they were done with Trump. Then he reappeared, determined to run again in 2024. It turns out that the destroyer of worlds can never be destroyed because his mere existence depends entirely on his fulfilling his mission as the destroyer of worlds.

Thus, we have entered the final chapter of The Mule. The first two weeks of Trump’s return to Washington have been revolutionary. Things not thought possible are happening on a daily basis. The latest happening is the assault on the financial structure of the neocon war machine. Right now, members of Elon Musk’s team are combing through the records of USAID, the hive mind of the NGO collective that has controlled American foreign policy for decades.

Few appreciate the enormity of what is happening right now with the vast not-for-profit network held together by government entities like USAID. Suddenly, their very existence is threatened due to the suspension of funds from the American government, but also by the revelations to come about what they do with that money. There is a reason Elon Musk is posting about USDAID being a criminal organization. They were doing much more than keeping the Kagan family in donuts.

The vast informal network of formal and informal power centers that make up the real government, the shadow government, is now under assault. This is something that could never happen according to the logic of managerialism. With the owners of American society marginalized and the workers under control of the synopticon, who could possibly challenge this system? The answer is The Mule, the figure who should not exist in the managerial system.

It is hard to imagine it possible, but this is the calm before the storm. The tariff war with Canada and Mexico is just getting started. The system of free trade created forty years ago, which benefitted the ruling elites of all three countries, but was paid for by the people of all three countries, is now under direct assault. It turns out that the great sucking sound Ross Perot warned of thirty years ago was not a sucking sound after all, but an early warning of something terrible to come.

Team Trump is moving quickly to dismantle the post-Cold War world and the understanding of it. Marco Rubio is out giving speeches about how the unipolar world was an anomaly and we are returning to a multipolar world. On the domestic front Trump’s team is quickly working to dismantle and anathematize the bizarre social fads inflicted on the people by the managerial class. When the president blames diversity for a plane crash, the world has truly changed.

It is a bit ironic that the concept of The Mule was created by a man who was the creation of a world that emerged in the 20th century America. The post-national, post-liberal world that arose with the American empire was only possible with the evolution of the managerial ideology. Progressivism evolved to give managerialism moral agency, and together they made the American empire and for a while, came to defined the post-Cold War world, but now that is coming to a close.

What we are seeing is the long-anticipated end of the 20th century. Russia and China have moved into the 21st century, but America and the West have remained moored to the prior century, convulsively resisting any attempt to abandon it. That world, however, is gone and now, thanks to The Mule, it is being destroyed. For now, the destruction is the show, but soon, what comes next is what will matter. Everyone needs to remember that The Mule is the destroyer of worlds, not the creator of them.

The Body Of Lies

Posted on January 30, 2025 by thezman

The confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services were yesterday and they offered some interesting insights into how the world has changed over the last few years. In many respects, it was a blast from the past, with the more ridiculous performers dusting off their old routines. Elizabeth Warren, for example, did her angry chicken dance in the hallway after she did her raging old crone routine in the committee room.

Warren and the other senators who took the opportunity to make fools of themselves for the cameras during the hearing were a reminder not only that things have changed, but why they have changed. Warren’s act was just an act. It was clear at certain points that she did not understand the words she was reading from her script, but it was clear she practiced delivering them with the correct angry face. If her handlers had required it, she would have accused Kennedy of colluding with Bigfoot.

That is one reason why we are here. The public, at some point over the last few years, began to turn on this sort of performative politics. According to recent polling, the Democratic Party has its lowest approval rating ever. Meanwhile Trump is enjoying his highest approval ratings. The reason for that is Trump, whatever you may think of him, is a candid and sincere form of politics. People like Elizabeth Warren are just paid performers who will say anything for a buck.

Of course, the fact that Kennedy was there at all is remarkable. Not long ago, Kennedy was a fringe character trafficking in “conspiracy theories.” At least that was the accepted narrative around him. Most people no longer accept that narrative. For many, if not most people, he is now part of this general questioning of those narratives. No one benefitted more from Covid than RFK Jr., because all the trusted sources for public health abrogated that trust, thus validating Kennedy’s critique.

Once you start questioning the official narratives, you inevitably start questioning the people responsible for those narratives. In the case of Kennedy, that means the public health establishment, which plays an enormous role in life. In fact, it is one of the key pillars of the managerial system, right there with “first responders.” There have been libraries full of televisions shows and movies about the glories of the public health experts saving the day. People are now questioning those claims.

If you looked closely, you could see it in the hearing. One of the Senate performers mentioned the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease.” Kennedy has been open to the possibility that it turned up fifty years ago as the result of a lab leak. Not far from where it first made its presence was a military laboratory that specialized in using insects to carry infectious diseases. That is the connection at the heart of the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease”, which should sound familiar.

Up until a month ago, the “lab leak theory” regarding the Covid panic was a conspiracy theory, one that can still get you banned from YouTube. Now it is the official position of the United States government. Just a few years ago, being open minded about the causes of Lyme disease would have been disqualifying, but it was overlooked entirely in this hearing and Kennedy was even allowed to point out several so-called conspiracy theories that have turned out to be true.

This hearing was possible because the world has changed. Suddenly, as if someone flipped a switch, it is cool to question the narratives. A big reason for that is Donald Trump, who survived one conspiracy after another, including one involving a would-be assassin who just happened to be in a Blackrock commercial. One thing Trump proved is that there is a limit to how many coincidences people can tolerate before they start thinking about alternative theories.

That aside, what the Kennedy hearing reveals is that the moral authority of the people behind the official narratives is crumbling. Elizabeth Warren can carry on like a crazy old church lady all she likes, but no one believes her. In fact, no one believes any of these people because they have lied too much. It turns out Lincoln was right. You cannot fool all the people all the time and once you set off down that road, it leads to a place where you cannot fool anyone at all.

Perhaps one day when the AI historians are writing us stories about the American empire, one narrative will be about how the body of lies necessary to maintain the managerial system simply became unsustainable. It moved from condemning those questioning the more outlandish claims from the authorities to condemning anyone who questioned anything, even when their doubts were confirmed. In such a world, no one can trust anyone and the system collapses.

What probably comes next is asking what else about the past is a lie? Did the CIA sell drugs in the United States to fund covert operations? People like Maxine Waters were condemned for making the claim. It is most certainly true, by the way. They worked with the Mexican drug cartel in the 1980’s to fund the Contras. Here is an interview with a former high ranking DEA agent on that subject. Amazon also did a much longer treatment of this topic last year.

What all this points to is that we are heading into one of those clearings of history in which we exit one forest of lies and must evaluate that time, before we can enter a new forest of lies. The Russians went through this after the Cold War. There was a great reexamining of what had happened under communism. The United States did not have this period after the Cold War but is about to have it now. To close the door on the past, you must revisit the body of lies that is the past.

The War On The Shadows

Posted on January 29, 2025 by thezman

One of the early features of Trump 2.0 is that it is nothing like the first version of Trump and nothing like what his adversaries imagined. Despite the evidence that this version of Trump would be different, his antagonists inside and outside the regime were certain he was the guy they imagined. Therefore, his victory was a shock, but they were sure what worked the first time around would work again. The weird silence from regime outposts is due to having been wrong yet again.

This version of Trump is a very different thing from the original version. We are seeing this in the realm of foreign policy where Trump 2.0 has been executing a plan rather than doing battle with the hydra that is the foreign policy community. It turns out that his refusal to have any dealings with the foreign policy community as a candidate, and his decision not to use government resources for the transition, has provided him with the element of surprise upon taking office.

You see that with his initial appointments. Marco Rubio was an out of the blue pick for the State Department. It seems to have been a shock to Rubio as well. Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon is another bolt from the blue. In the case of Rubio, he is an easily controlled lieutenant running an agency in need of radical reform. Hegseth comes to the job with his own radical ideas about reforming the Pentagon. The semi-permanent staff at the top of both agencies are now in a crisis.

Then you have Trump’s peculiar moves regarding the Ukraine war. He appoints Keith Kellogg as his personal envoy on the issue, but Kellogg is in no big hurry to get the ball rolling on Project Ukraine. He initially set up a tour of Europe and meetings with Kiev but then cancelled all of it. Trump has answered some questions about the Ukraine war but has not had any discussions with Europe about it. In fact, no one in the Trump administration has talked to the Europeans about the war.

At the same time, there is a purge underway of certain parts of the foreign policy establishment with some novel tools. For starters, Trump is cleaning house of neocons by assigning them to new positions intended to encourage their departure. This is an old corporate trick. He has frozen spending on just about everything, pending a review of how the money is being spent. Since all of government exists to spend money, it has thrown the usual suspects into a panic.

What this move is aimed at is the shadow foreign policy community that exists outside of government but is funded by government. These are the think tanks and research shops that live off government grants. They are full of former government officials and future government officials. Their job is to prevent whoever is in the White House from changing the direction of foreign policy. It is in the offices of these places that his first impeachment was organized.

These covens of mischief that were prepared to do their old tricks now find themselves in a crisis as their income is frozen and under scrutiny, while at the same time their friends and collaborators are being forced out of government. It is hard to plot the next regime change operation against Trump when you are struggling to make payroll, which is the point of this funding freeze. It is also a clear signal that Trump 2.0 is prepared to deal with these people.

This extends to the thicket of NGO’s, charities and think tanks that operate internationally, in coordination with the shadow government. Trump had Rubio freeze all work at these operations by freezing their money. The people who make regime change possible through their color revolution schemes are now starved of cash. If they cannot pay “independent media” and “opposition leaders” then those entities cannot organize “spontaneous” rallies against the government.

What Trump 2.0 is doing is attacking the vast shadow government that has evolved to be resistant to electoral politics. The Kagan family, for example, have plied their trade regardless of who is in the White House. They were able to do this because so much of what ends up as a foreign policy item on the president’s agenda is created by entities operating outside of government. Victoria did not retire when she quit the State Department. She continues her work in the shadow government.

Foreign policy is just one example. The chaos of immigration is due in large part to the vast network of not-for-profit entities that make millions facilitating the wholesale abrogation of immigration laws. These entities survive on grants from the government, much in the same way we see with foreign policy. The freeze and review of these programs is part of bringing them to heel. When J.D. Vance mentioned Catholic Charities role in immigration, it was a deliberate warning.

This is why the media response to Trump 2.0 has been so weird. Much of what they produce is handed to them by this thicket of extra-government entities who shape the media narratives around public policy. That extra government ecosystem now finds itself under direct assault by a new administration that did its homework and is now executing a plan of attack on that ecosystem. Compounding it is the fact that the donor class seems to be backing the Trump plan.

What has happened over the last several decades is that the official government of the United States was enveloped by this vast collection of extra-government entities that produce good jobs at good wages for the managerial elite. Since the number of government posts is small, relative to the number of credentialed people who think they deserve them, this network of entities has grown to serve an ever-growing collection of people who cycle in and out of government.

Since these people not only think they deserve the plumb assignments, but they think they know better than the voters and their politicians, the result has been a slow shifting of policy outside of official government into this shadow government. Foreign policy is most obvious, but this process has happened everywhere. No one can say who banned normal light bulbs, for example, because the policy bubbled up from the network of extra-government entities of environmentalism.

It remains to be seen if the Trump effort to defang this shadow government will succeed, but it helps that he has support from economic elites. The shadow government does not live only on government handouts. It also thrives by selling indulgences to powerful people and business sectors. Having friends in the shadow government is better than having friends in politics, because politicians come and go, but the shadow government is permanent.

One reason for the swing to the side of Trump by the economic elites could be that they have grown frustrated with this arrangement. People who think they are smarter than the voters are going to think they are smarter than the donors. Like a business run into the ground by management, the large shareholders are now stepping in with the support of the small shareholders, to clear out old management. Trump is like the old greenmailers; except this time the target is Washington.

The Death Of Progressivism

Posted on January 27, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about how the presentness of this age results in collective amnesia, a post how AI will destroy us, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

In certain circles the triumph of Donald Trump is being viewed as either a sign that liberalism is dying out or the sign that it is dying and the forces opposed to it are finally on the ascendant. Still others, stuck in the thinking of the last century, see the victory of Trump as a sign that the forces of darkness are ready to turn out the lights on the liberal order they are committed to defend. In both cases, there is that old problem of language in that no one seems to have the same definition of liberalism.

This confusion is not helped by the fact that for about a century the people at the retail end of politics have used the word “liberal” as a label. In the United States, people we call the left also use the term liberal. In fact, they often use the term left to mean super-liberal or radically liberal with liberal simply meaning pro-government. Liberals for example, want Medicare for all, while the left wants single payer. To confuse things even more, the right wants government regulated healthcare.

Putting aside the retail use of the word liberal, there is confusion as to what is meant by liberalism in modern discourse. The civic nationalists continue to insist it means the moral and political systems based on things like individual rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed. Critics tend to view it as the collection of bourgeois cultural and social fads that have ripped through the West. One imagines liberalism as John Locke and the other as John Rawls.

The truth is the liberalism of the 18th century has been dead for a long time. In Europe, ideology replaced liberalism in the 19th century. The triumph of ideology resulted in two great industrial wars in the 20th century and then the rise of managerialism in response to the dominance of the American empire and the Cold War. In Europe, the dominant political order is managerialism. Rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed exist only as rhetorical flourishes.

In the United States, the Lockean liberalism of the Framers quickly gave way first to a reformist Protestantism, culminating in the Civil War. This slowly gave way to what was called progressivism in the 20th century. progressivism is the reformist Protestantism of the past but stripped of its Christian overtones. The mental and moral structures remain but lacking the fixed points of Scripture and the Christian conception of God, the implementation has wandered all over the place.

Another way to think of it is that the European left travelled down a road that began with the decline in Christian faith. The first step was to use reason to arrive at the same ethical conclusions as Christianity, just without the Christianity. This then led to thinking about new ethical conclusions based on reason alone. Ideology is, after all, a set of moral claims backed by the authority of reason. The two great industrial wars in Europe were about how we ought to organize ourselves.

In the United States, reason has never played much of a role in what has often been called liberalism, because it never dropped the mental structures that it inherited from the Protestant reformers. The original progressives littered their language with references to Scripture. This stopped in the 20th century as Jews joined the elite and entered progressive politics. The moral structures stayed in place, but the authority for them simply disappeared, but has always been assumed.

It is why the people we currently call the left are so fond of claiming that they are on the right side of history. In part, this is a reference to the Hegelian historicism they experienced in college but is much closer to the Calvinist sense that the righteous act as they do because they are righteous. Instead of being on the right side of history, they could just as easily claim to be on the side of angels. They do what they do because they are trying to bring the rest of us along to the glorious future.

It is why modern progressivism is so thuggish. Without a Bible to hold up as his authority, the modern progressive has only her fist to shake at the crowd. Since she is on the right side of history, she is the white hat, so anyone in opposition must be the black hat and against the black hat, you must use any means necessary. What was called Woke was the fanaticism of the Puritan but untethered from Scripture and the reason to interpret and apply Scripture.

This explains the progressive takeover of Protestant churches. Instinctively, they seek moral authority for their claims, so they take over the old moral authority and decorate it with their symbols. Elite divinity schools are full of progressives who reject everything about Christianity, but they seek the framing of Christianity to animate their own progressive moral claims. Protestantism gave birth to progressivism and then was slowly devoured by it.

One of the oldest debates within Christianity is between faith and reason. This is the source of the phrase, Athens and Jerusalem. What we see with progressivism is the end result of that debate. The people called woke are briming with faith, but devoid of reason, so what they believe cannot be expressed in words. Woke was a visceral expression of progressive faith. The often-comical irrationality of it was the logical end of the abandonment of reason.

The growing sense that the fever has broken, which some see as a sign of the end of liberalism, is something much simpler. The fever has broken, and that fever was the secular religious fervor of late stage progressivism. It was the primal scream of faith without reason. What this signals is not the death of liberalism, which happened long ago, but the death of progressivism. Like a demon leaving the body of the possessed, the old Calvinist demon is leaving American politics.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Badder Thoughts