Category Archives: Politics

The Slaves Of The South

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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.

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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!

Understanding The Blob

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The term “deep state” remains a popular way for newly awakened normies to think of how their government operates. It is not the people on the ballot at election time who are running things, but a shadowy cabal of people who operate outside the bounds of the political system. Whenever something goes wrong, they naturally assume it is the work of the deep state. The problem is that the deep state, as most people imagine it, does not exist. It is a useful fiction.

The dismantling of USAID is a good example. The reporting on it in the unofficial media made it seem as if this entity was controlling large swaths of the government, when in fact it was just a money laundering scheme. Instead of cleaning cash acquired through illegal means, it put government cash in the hands of media activists, lobbyists, not-for-profits, and policy shops tied to permanent Washington. It was a clearing house and networking hub for permanent Washington.

In a way, the economy of permanent Washington is something like the economies of ancient city states. Those city states operated what is called palace economies where agricultural products flowed into the palace of the ruler and were then distributed back to the populace as needed. Farmers, craftsmen, and traders maintained their own economy, but a substantial portion of their economic output flowed into the palace to be redistributed as the ruler saw fit.

That is how USAID functioned. It got tens of billions from Congress and used some of that to draw in tens of billions more from other sources in the government and private donors, which it then directed to friendly sources. This was not a formal scheme where they sat around in a hollowed-out volcano figuring out how to use the money to further their evil agenda. It was more like an extended network of friends who networked within this large community, underwritten by tax money.

Imagine if the Church of Scientology had infiltrated the government. Members got positions in the administrative state and the political system. They then directed money to organizations run by fellow cult members. Those organizations then used some of the money to lobby for more money from the system in the form of government contracts, but also by influence peddling to private actors. They would then organize these resources to control public policy.

That is the nature of the “deep state.” The people in it do not think of themselves as part of the deep state. From their perspective, they are just normal people working in the media, government, politics, and policy. Everyone they know is a normal person working in one of these areas. This is how they know they are normal and the people talking about the deep state are not normal. All the normal people they know agree with them that the deep state is a conspiracy theory.

As an example, look at the LinkedIn profile of Maggie Mitchell Salem, the current Executive Director of something called IRIS. That stands for Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services. It is an open borders not-for-profit located in Connecticut with a fifteen-million-dollar budget. According to the organization’s website, “IRIS inspired and is one of the seven organizations implementing a new national resettlement program, Welcome Corps.” They want your town full of Somalis.

Now, if you scan down Mx. Salem’s resume, you see that open borders is a new advocation for her. Five years ago, she was the Executive Director of something called the Qatar Foundation International. According to their website, they promote learning the Arabic language, using donations from the Qatari government. That is nonsense, of course, as its real purpose is to buy influence in Washington. They hire people like Mx. Salem to put their money in the right hands.

We know this from a story in the Tablet. According to that report, Mx. Salem was writing anti-Saudi stories for a man named Jamal Khashoggi, who was supposedly a Saudi journalist working for the Washington Post. He was a dissident, in that he did not like new ruler of Saudi Arabia. The Qataris do not like the Saudis, so they paid Mx. Salem to handle Mr. Khashoggi to place anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, the Washington Post.

If you scan down further in Mx. Salem’s resume, you will learn that she started out in life as a foreign service officer, stationed in Tel Aviv. You will note that technically, USAID was under the supervision of the State Department. Mx. Salem used her government job to cultivate friendships in the Middle East and in Washington, so that one day she could get one of those good jobs at good wages in the deep state. By all accounts, the Qataris are very generous with their American friends.

Eventually, the Saudis grew tired of seeing anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, so they kidnapped Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul and then chopped him up in their consulate. One of the reasons the Saudis are planning for a post-America world is they have grown weary of the perfidy of the deep state, which will fink on anyone for money. This is a feature of managerialism. Everyone is for sale, so anyone can buy what they want from the deep state.

This level of bungling by Mx. Salem in the dreaded private sector would have resulted in termination and banishment from the industry, but in the deep state where everyone knows your name, it is a minor bump in the road. She bounced over to the immigration rackets before getting a job in the Biden years running a not-for-profit in Tunisia and then back into the immigration rackets. The lines between the government and those who lobby the government are never very clear.

What you see in this one example is how the managerial state operates like a community that rules over the country. It is why voting does not matter, as the people running the thousands of entities that make up the system are always going to be people who have as their top priority the preservation of their class. It is not a deep state so much as a broad state that overlays everything. Every silo of power is controlled by people who believe the same things.

This is why the first bullet out of the Trump barrel this time was at USAID. It is also why they are attacking elite colleges like Harvard. These are important nodes of a system that organized the antibodies against him the first time. It is why they have systematically broken up the media connections within the government. The point is to destabilize and dismember this broad community of people who operate as the unofficial government of the American empire.

It sounds like an impossible task, given the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who make up this blob. The Khashoggi story, however, points to something else about this system. It is has grown increasingly incompetent and corrupt since the end of the Cold War. Hard times breed hard men and easy times breed perfidious women incapable of maintaining the structures of power. Trump is a symptom of a system that is collapsing in on itself.

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Shelley v. Kramer v. Brown v. You

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The story of Shiloh Hendrix has brought to the surface things that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. The most obvious is the general fatigue with regards to race among white people. The media is doing the usual point and shriek, expecting the lynch mob to chase after this woman, but instead money is flowing into her fundraising account with messages of support. The white population is using this event to make a point about race in America.

For most white people, this is not a moral issue. It is a practical issue. They wonder why we have Somalis in Minnesota. No one campaigned on bringing tribes of Somalis into the country and dumping them into white communities. No one was organizing pressure groups demanding the importation of Somalis. The people who made this decision never mentioned it to the public and the public was never consulted. Suddenly, we have this new problem, and we are expected to adjust to it.

Even putting aside the immigration issue, why are white people expected to adjust to black behavior at all? The core assumption of our racialized society is that it is the duty of whites to adjust to the other races. No one ever demands that the other races try to act white, as saying such a thing has been declared immoral. On the one hand whites are expected to venerate nonwhites, while on the other hand nonwhite are encouraged to harass and assault whites.

If you are white, a central part of your life is navigating around nonwhites. Maybe it is knowing where the black areas are, so you avoid crime. Maybe it is teaching your children about dealing with the nons in their school, so they do not get jammed up by the morality police. Maybe it is educating the old people in your life on how to spot Indian scammers. Of course, the background noise of the public square is the endless drone of race talk.

The question is how did it get to this? Like the Somalis in Minnesota, the public was never asked about any of this. The people who decided on the new rules never campaigned on them or asked for public support. They just did it. They kept doing it one court case, one new law at a time. The place to start is the landmark Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kramer, where the court declared that restrictive covenants violated the 14th Amendment.

In 1945, a black couple named J.D. and Ethel Shelley attempted to purchase a home in a white neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. The property was subject to a restrictive covenant that prohibited nonwhites from occupying the property. This was a deliberate setup to get another case in the system on this matter. McGhee v. Sipes was a similar case out of Michigan. This is a common trick by the usual suspects to help fast track a case to the Supreme Court.

Of course, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the blacks, declaring that while restrictive covenants do not violate the rights of the parties to the contract, any enforcement of these covenants violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In other words, homeowners are free to make any rules they like about who can live in their community, but no court will enforce those rights if they discriminate on race.

What the court did is shift from a position where it enforces private contracts to a position where it decides if the contract is acceptable. In one decision we went from a world where private parties were free to make contracts with one another for whatever reasons they liked to a world where private parties must seek permission from the state before entering into a contract. If the court could selectively enforce contracts, as in the Shelley case, then they could do it with every type of contract.

This marked the beginning of the general shift away from a rights-based society where the state is a neutral arbiter in disputes between citizens to a permission-based society in which the state regulates the behavior of citizens to achieve goals never imagined or considered in the Constitution. Ten years after Shelley, the Court sealed the deal with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, where they enshrined this entirely new moral paradigm into law.

Brown took the basic concept of Shelley, where the courts get to decide which contracts to enforce, and extended it to the law. Specifically, they declared that any law or private action that discriminates is assumed to be unconstitutional. Any law or behavior that furthers an open and inclusive society is assumed to be constitutional. This has been the moral framework of race communism ever since. The reason Shiloh Hendrix is famous now is because of this moral framework.

The great frustration that white people sense in that clip of Ms. Hendrix using colorful euphemisms is the result of the American false consciousness. We are regularly told we live in a rights-based society, that we are free to live our lives as we see fit, but in reality, we live in a permission-based society. If anything you do or say is deemed to be discriminatory by the courts or someone empowered by the courts, you can find yourself in a jungle of moral contradictions.

It is a good example of how reform within the rules is probably impossible. To fix the race issue it would require tearing down this moral edifice erected by the courts that now dominates the old Constitutional arrangement. That means removing the moral authority of the courts entirely. To do that would require a revolution in the law where lawyers cease to be a secular clerisy. Such a revolution in the law will require a revolution in the streets.

That aside, the tension between how we want to act and how we are told to act is why Ms. Hendrix blew her top in the park. She does not want to live in a world where she and her children are harassed by Africans. She thinks she has the right to not be harassed by Africans. She does not live in that world as the people in charge think she should be harassed by Africans. That video exists because we are about to find out who shall overcome whom.

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!

Sulla Or Jugurtha

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The Trump administration has reached the one-hundred-day point, an historically important point in every presidency. For Trump it is uniquely important as his second term is something of a do-over of his first term. Trump 2.0 is supposed to be a better, improved version of the original, having had a break to learn from the mistakes of the first term and having spent four years under assault from The Blob. This one-hundred-day mark is one of the most important since FDR.

Roosevelt is a good comparison, as what Trump is trying to do is usher in a new period for the country that closes the books on the managerial era that started under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. It is Roosevelt that gave us this concept of the first one hundred days as a measure of a president. Roosevelt was the new model President for the new model age, one that was active and ambitious, using all the powers of the executive to effectuate change for the people.

There are a lot of parallels between the MAGA and New Deal era, but there is a crucial difference and that is The Blob. Whether they understood it or not, the Roosevelt project was about laying the foundation on which The Blob would be built. The Blob being the vast managerial state that operates outside government and that has subsumed the political system. The army of experts Roosevelt brought to Washington to deal with the Depression created the managerial state.

In contrast, MAGA is about swinging a wrecking ball through the managerial state to remove its tentacles from the throat of the American people. The subtext to the MAGA movement is that this collection of people is responsible for the decline and removing them will restore the conditions in which the people can flourish. While FDR promised a new framework in which the people can flourish, Trump promises to tear down that framework so the people can flourish.

Therein lies the major difference between Roosevelt and Trump. The former did not have an established organized system to obstruct him. The old order was disorganized and discredited. It was ready for a new beginning. Trump, in contrast, has a paranoid and highly organized old order that sees Trump not as an agent of renewal but as a threat to its existence. The Blob views the strong executive, any strong executive, as a threat to its existence, so it will fight to the death.

Unlike FDR, where the rules were being written as needed, Trump is dealing with a system so laden down by rules that even the most skillful manager in the system can only hope to know a part of them. This is the primary defense mechanism of managerialism, a system of rules that operates as defense in depth. Even if one can figure out how to get around and through the rules toward a goal, the rules reform around you like antibodies. You are simply assimilated.

You see this with immigration. The Trump people are appealing to an old law to expeditiously remove criminal aliens. On the surface this is a clever use of the existing rules to achieve a goal contrary to the whims of the system. The court system, however, has now wrapped its tentacles around the Trump people, dragging them into the swamp of endless litigation, court cases, appeals and re-appeals. The clever end run using an old law has led to a new thicket of rules and process.

This raises another parallel for Trump. From the perspective of Washington, Trump is something like Jugurtha, the Numidian king who was a thorn in the side of Rome from 160 BC to 104 BC. Numidia was in North Africa, which was not controlled by the Romans at the time. Jugurtha was unusually skilled at exploiting the moral weaknesses of the Roman elite to get what he wanted from Rome. He came to symbolize what was wrong with the Roman system.

For example, after his first war with Rome, Jugurtha offered to settle things peacefully and walked away with a highly favorable deal from Rome. Bribery was assumed to be the cause, so the local Roman commander was summoned to Rome to face corruption charges and Jugurtha was invited to give testimony. Jugurtha bribed Roman officials who then vetoed the whole thing. In other words, Jugurtha bribed Roman officials to get out of a bribery scandal.

What Jugurtha represented was not an external threat to Rome in the conventional sense, but an existential threat. His existence suggested an irreconcilable flaw in the Roman system. As a result, the Romans determined to eliminate Jugurtha and the tool they used was a man named Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. Known to us now as Sulla, he was a gifted general who beat Jugurtha at his own game, by getting one of Jugurtha’s allies to turn on him.

Sulla was also a key figure in the long political struggle between the optimates and populares factions at Rome. The former were the Cloud People of the day, while the latter were the Dirt People. This dispute was due in large part to the corruption among the Roman elite. Sulla eventually revived the office of the dictator to purge the elite of corruption, reform the Roman constitutional laws, restore the supremacy of the senate and, interestingly, limit the power of the consuls.

This is the fork in the road for Trump. He can be like Jugurtha and continue to try and exploit gaps in the managerial system to get what he wants, or he can take on the system itself through the use of hard power. In the modern sense, this means defying the courts and using the law to drive off the people who think litigation against Trump is a proper use of their time. In other words, Trump must become the sort of dictator his opponents claim, to restore republican rule.

Historical comparisons are never perfect, and Trump is certainly not Sulla, but the underlying comparison still works. If there is any hope of saving the United States from plunging into the eternal darkness, the problems created by the discredited managerial system must be quickly addressed. This mean rapidly clearing out the alien population, restoring normal economic policies and withdrawing from the many outposts of the Global American Empire.

These are not things possible within the rules because the rules are designed to prevent such an outcome. This means these changes must not only happen outside the rules, but in direct contradiction of the rules. There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do, which is the core motivation of the people called the right. The results we see and hate are the point of the system, so the system must change.

That can only happen against the will of the system, because the people in the system have anchored their lives to assumption that the system will never change. This is the problem Sulla faced and the problem Jugurtha was able to exploit. Within every corrupt political system there is a Jugurtha and a Sulla. The question is which one emerges victorious, and this is the question at Trump’s 100th day mark. Will Donald Trump be forgotten as Jugurtha or will be he remembered as Sulla.

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 Old Tricksters

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One of the tricks played upon the American people since the middle of the last century has been to take unreasonable ideas and cloak them in reasonableness so that reasonable people will embrace them. The main tool for doing this has been the people we call conservatives. One of their main tasks is to take the radical ideas of the people they claim to oppose, make these ideas sound reasonable and then offer up a plan to implement these ideas in a reasonable way.

A great example of this is civil rights. Conservatives eventually came to defend and promote the cause on the grounds that it was always a conservative value, as equality before the law is a first principle of conservatism. You see, civil rights were about applying the existing law to all people. Specifically, it was about granting equality before the law to black people in the South, where those bad whites have been willfully excluding black people from the constitutional order.

Of course, the civil right agenda was vastly more radical and utopian. That is made clear in the Brown decision, which declares all discrimination is assumed to be immoral and unconstitutional by default. Therefore, anyone seeking to exercise their freedom of association must first get permission from the court. Further, it says that diversity is the highest goal, so all public policy must bend towards it. Three generations of social destruction have been the result of this new moral order.

We are now seeing the same trick being played with regards to DEI. At its core, what DEI does is take the open society claims in Brown and formalize them as a set of rules and measures that apply everywhere. It is not enough for you, a white person, to not discriminate against nonwhites. You must commit your life to rooting out those who continue to discriminate and you must seek to remove anything that can cause something other than the ideal open society.

This is, of course, complete madness, which is why reasonable people have concluded that the people behind it are crazy. As these pogroms were unleashed on the public, the public found ways to revolt, even when questioning the goals and policies of DEI was said to be worse that slavery. The general disgust with these programs and the people promoting them is what made it possible for the President of the United States to go on the offensive against the federal civil rights regime.

Luckily for the crazies, the conservatives have a solution. Their task now is to take these repugnant ideas and make them seem reasonable. You see it in this Heather MacDonald column that seems to support Trump’s efforts to remove antiwhite policies from the government. She repeats the familiar critiques of the diversity agenda, which is refreshing, coming from a conservative. Then she slips in the poison pill that goes unnoticed under all the reasonableness.

Down near the bottom, she writes, “The White House needs to persuade Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination.” Most reasonable people would not think much of that line, but it is the most important sentence in the whole piece and the most racial thing you could read anywhere. It is the core claim of the race communists since all of this started almost century ago. It is the upending of the core idea of the liberal society in favor of utopianism.

Rights, as normal people understand them, are things you have as a feature of you being a human being. No one must do anything for you to exercise your right to speech or your freedom of religion. Rights are negative rights because they prohibit others, mostly the government, from preventing you from exercising your rights. It is the reason the First Amendment starts with the words, “Congress shall make no law.” You have your rights unless someone tries to deny them to you.

Now, consider the claim that you have freedom from discrimination. The only way you can be free of discrimination is if everyone else does something and that something is associate with you. In other words, everyone must do something for you to have this right, which is the opposite of our notion of rights. Of course, the only way this can happen is by force. People will naturally wish to associate with who they like for any reason they like, so they must be prevented from doing this.

What MacDonald is doing is the old conservative trick of affirming the moral claims of the people they claim to oppose, while pretending to oppose them. Every time one of the anti-DEI conservatives cries racism over these programs, they are affirming the central moral claim of the race communists, which is that any discrimination for any reason is immoral. Therefore, any means necessary is justified in preventing people from associating as they see fit.

Civil rights rely on the ethics of the penitentiary. The foundation of a prison is that the inmates must always seek permission to move inside the prison. Their freedom of movement and association comes at the permission of the guards. This is exactly the model the race communists imagine for society, as it is the only way for create a world where people are free from discrimination. You can only be free from discrimination in a world where such a thing is not possible.

None of this should surprise anyone, given the background of the Manhattan Institute and the man who underwrites it. Paul Singer is an open borders fanatic who embraces the same open society ethos as George Soros. He also helped fund the Russian Collusion Hoax through the Washington Free Beacon. Another feature of conservatives is that they tend to be bankrolled by the same people who bankroll the people conservatives claim to oppose.

That aside, it is an example of how conservatives are like a drug-resistant virus that even when they are despised still manage to cause trouble. The reason for this is there is always a need to make the unreasonable demands of the radicals seem reasonable enough so that normal people will go along with them. If DEI sounded unreasonable to you, no worries, the conservatives have a reasonable alternative that wreaks the same havoc, but in a gentler sounding way.

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!

Old Lessons

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Wednesday, April 23 was supposed to be a big meeting of Western countries and Ukraine in London where the Trump administration would make its final push for peace to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting was canceled due to the Ukrainians announcing in advance that they were not interested in any deal that would require them to make concessions. This prompted Marco Rubio to cancel the meeting, at least the portion involving decision-makers from the administration.

The lead-up to this now-canceled meeting has been a microcosm of how the Western political system now operates. For example, the period before the meeting featured stories in prominent nodes of the Western information control system about the secret details of the Trump plan. The sources for these stories were never mentioned, most likely because they did not exist. Instead, it was members of the Kagan cult, former Biden people, or schemers in the British government.

It was clear that these stories were coordinated as they all featured the same narrative and much of the same language. For example, they dusted off the old 2024 narrative of a freeze along the front line, something Russia has always rejected as both unacceptable and impossible to implement. The stories also all framed the deal as a major concession by Putin, the subtext being that he is now desperate for a way out of the war he started for no reason at all.

One point of these stories is something seen constantly in the West. There is the belief among the managerial elite that they can meme things into reality. If they just pack enough versions of their desired truth into the information control system, at some point this becomes reality. This has been repeatedly seen with the war in Ukraine, but it has been a feature of every major event. During Covid, they operated as if the news stories they made up were true for a couple of years.

One possible explanation for this is that a key pillar of the managerial state is the assumption that people respond to information, so if one controls the information, one controls the people. Since another pillar of the managerial state is that reality is made by people, it follows that one can control reality, or at least the perception of reality, by controlling the people through control of the information. The old expression, perception is reality, has become an article of faith among the elites.

Another part of this story illustrates how Western elites are only capable of thinking one move at a time. The reason for the media campaign was that they wanted the Russians to reject the deal, so they framed it as negatively toward them as possible, assuming the Russians would publicly respond. There was no thought given to the possibility of the Russians remaining silent. They simply assumed it was inevitable because this was a pleasing narrative to them.

This meant there was no backup plan. Instead, they had to have Zelensky preemptively reject the deal to avoid a public catastrophe. This last-minute cancellation is about buying time, which is another feature of managerialism. Western elites now operate as if time is always on their side. If they cannot shape reality to their liking now, then they just need to wait until reality comes to its senses. In the case of Ukraine, they remain sure they can outlast the Russians.

This sense of time probably stems from the fact that managerialism is a world measured in process rather than tangible accomplishments. Normal people measure their lives by what they have done. The managerial class measures their lives by the networks and processes in which they are a part. There is never any pressure to do anything in this world, so there is no need to worry about time. There can always be another meeting to discuss the things discussed at the last meeting.

This sense of timelessness has infected their approach to Trump. In his first term, the plan was to put the brakes on everything and wait until he either quit under relentless pressure or was removed. When he refused to go away, they peppered him with lawsuits, figuring time was on their side. Now in his second term, the court system is tasked with throwing sand in the gears to wait out Trump. The same thing is happening with the Ukraine war. It is endless stalling.

This is what gives the West the same feel as pre-revolutionary France. The ruling elite of France assumed they had time, which allowed them to avoid dealing with the serious problems facing the system. One reason for the radicalization of the masses during that time was the sense that no one in charge cared about the growing problems because no one could see any action to address them. The apparent indifference to what was happening became part of the indictment.

A similar situation happened at the end of the Soviet system. Gorbachev was something like Jacques Necker, in that he was in his position to fix the problems of the system, but the system refused to be fixed. His failure set in motion the process that toppled the Soviet system. Similarly, Trump exists because of systemic failure with the expectation that he can fix the system. Like the reactionaries of old, the managerial elite assumes it can wait him out.

Historical analogies are never perfect, and that is true here. The French elite, for example, understood the system’s problems. These were mostly smart, educated men with a deep knowledge of the system. The modern managerial elite is populated by mediocrities skilled only in the sort of scheming that is the basis of drama. They also possess a stunning lack of self-awareness. The people thinking they just need to wait out Trump also think they are loved and adored by the masses.

Wars tend to be what break dysfunctional political systems. That may be the case with the Ukraine war. Everyone assumes Trump lacks the resolve to walk away from this situation and leave the Europeans to work it out with the Russians. If he walks away from Project Ukraine, the managerial elite of the West will have a chance to learn that they cannot meme reality into existence and time is not on their side, or they will cling to these beliefs as they head to the dustbin of history.

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!

Girl Boss

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If you consume any of the content from Hollywood produced in the last decade, you no doubt are familiar with the concept of the girl boss. This is now the main character in almost every film and television show, even creeping into video games. These days, gaming is as much about narrative as gameplay, and anywhere there are narratives being constructed or undermined, you will find girl boss. This character has even jumped into the pseudo-reality of the public square.

As usual, the Democratic Party is leading the way. Versions of girl boss are turning up in their response to what is happening in Washington. Ocasio-Cortez is waddling around the country doing the girl boss act in the hopes of running for the party nomination in 2028 and perhaps becoming the ultimate girl boss. Jasmine Crockett is making a name for herself as the black version of girl boss. This is when girl boss pretends to be a character on a daytime trash television show.

Even the old gals are getting in on the act. Elizabeth Warren no longer pretends to care about “working people,” whatever that means these days. Instead, she is doing her version of girl boss. She regularly turns up on social media explaining how things must be done, or she will call the manager. The old gal version of girl boss still has those vestiges of the Karen character that entertained and amazed during COVID. The Karen role was something of a proto-girl boss.

It is hard to know if this character started in the make-believe world of narrative content or if the creators of narrative content borrowed from reality. The content production mines have been run by women for a while now, so maybe the presence of girl boss simply reflects the creeping reality of girl boss. Like a terrible rash or a fungus, girl boss is slowly taking over everything. The reason girl boss is a type is because girl boss is springing up everywhere in late-stage America.

A good starting point for understanding this new character in the public square is New Hampshire congresswoman Maggie Goodlander. She won her seat in the 2024 election, defeating a libertarian goofball in the general election. Ms. Goodlander has immediately set about making a name for herself on social media, where she seems to spend a great deal of her time. Like Ocasio-Cortez, Goodlander understands how to play her chosen role in the drama of politics.

The first thing you will notice about Goodlander is that, like every girl boss, she is a calculating striver who seems to be operating from a script. Her career reads like a Hollywood sketch for the lead in a new television drama. The daughter of a rich local family, she started at Groton and then went to Yale. She joined the military to get what at the time seemed like an important credential. This was the peak of the forever war period, so every politician wanted that on their resume.

That is the thing about girl boss. In addition to being a relentless striver, she is just as relentless at box-ticking. For girl boss, it is never about accomplishing things in the conventional sense, as that is for peasants. Girl boss has a higher calling, so her focus is on ticking the boxes that the character requires. This is where the influence of Hollywood is clear. The women playing the girl boss character are following a script of sorts to create themselves as girl boss.

You see this in the post-college portion of her character profile. Her family were Bush Republicans, which is where she started ticking boxes. While she was in the Navy as an “intelligence officer,” which is the military term for desk jockey, she worked as a senior foreign policy advisor for Joe Lieberman and John McCain. Then she spent a year clerking at the Supreme Court and then a year at Skadden, a super-connected law firm that looks great on a political girl boss resume.

Frankly, if you were to describe the ideal millennial girl boss for politics, the resume of Maggie Goodlander would feel a bit over the top. Audiences might find this character to be too much of a Mary Sue, which is a young woman in films who is portrayed as free of weaknesses or character flaws. She always gets what she wants without ever having to suffer setbacks or experience self-doubt. The resume of Maggie Goodlander looks like it was written so the rest of the plot can happen.

Another feature of girl boss that you see with every iteration of the character is what you see in the bio of Ms. Goodlander. There is a lot of activity. Ms. Goodlander is a whirlwind of activity as a representative. Every day she is posting pictures of herself being girl boss somewhere. Her resume is one activity after another. She seems to have rushed from one ticked box to the other, as if having ticked the box, the only thing that mattered was moving on to the next box.

This is what makes girl boss so powerful and why she is proliferating throughout the managerial system. In managerialism, a resume is about where you were and what networks to which you are connected. It is never about accomplishments in the sense of leaving behind a product of your labor. Girl boss is the epitome of this mindset. When girl boss goes for the walk on the beach as part of the carefully planned photoshoot, she leaves no footprints in the sand.

This leads to the main flaw of girl boss. Anyone who must deal with girl boss in the wild knows why we invented a certain word that starts with “C.” Girl boss is just as relentless in her unpleasantness as she is about her ambition. That is because every relationship is a temporary means to an end. For girl boss, your value is in how you can help her tick the next box. If for some reason you are an impediment to ticking that next box, girl boss expects you to lose, just like all opponents of girl boss.

This is why girl boss always has that weird, synthetic face. It lacks the normal emotions we expect from a female of our species. Every picture of Maggie Goodlander looks like they stapled a smile onto a mask. That is because girl boss lacks anything resembling female compassion. Her mind is singularly focused on the game of going from one box to the next to become the ultimate girl boss. There is a reason no girl boss has a trail of former colleagues who speak well of her.

This is what makes girl boss the ultimate expression of managerialism. Success in the system is never about accomplishments in the tangible sense, because managerialism is a system that evolved to reduce risk. Accomplishing things brings risk, as new things bring new variables to manage. The makers and doers must be sublimated to the managers to minimize the risk they pose. This means the managers are the antidote to the doers and makers.

In such a system, never having done anything tangible is another one of those boxes on the resume, but this box must always remain unticked. Instead, the boxes for talking about those boxes and meeting about those boxes must be ticked. Girl boss is ideally suited for a world where everyone is expected to be good at forming consensus and sharing their feelings about things never allowed in the room. Girl boss makes the ideal manager in a system designed for managers.

Of course, girl boss also seems to be the ideal symbol of the end. The rise of girl boss has led to declining content from Hollywood. They made Snow White into girl boss, and audiences are still laughing at it. The sure sign a company is about to enter the death spiral is when girl boss arrives in the C-suites. The sudden rise of girl boss in Democratic Party politics comes as the party is on the ropes. President girl boss would surely mean the end of the American experiment.

For those looking for something positive out of girl boss, it is entirely possible that she is the Boudica of the alien tribe that rules America. Boudica was a queen of a British tribe who led a failed uprising against the Roman Empire in AD 60. She was a last-gasp effort to resist the Romans. Perhaps that is what we are seeing with the rise of girl boss in the Democratic Party. They are vying to go down in history as the last gasp of resistance to the forces of restoration.

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!

Preachers

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about David Hogg taking control of the Democratic Party, a post about the younger generation of males, and no Sunday podcast as it was Easter. Subscribe here or here.

One of the amusing sideshows since Trump has taken power is the pearl clutching from the usual suspects about the law and process. The people who sat silent as lawfare was waged against Americans for the crime of holding unapproved opinions are now suddenly concerned with the rule of law. The people who took money from tech companies to remain silent about tech censorship are now carrying on as if they are dissidents because they no longer control the discourse.

Hypocrisy is a feature of man, and it has always had a central role in American politics because America is a nation of moralizers. The one thing we have always overproduced is preachers ready to wag their bony fingers at the people as they lecture them about their many moral failings. The United States is a giant outdoor revival tent where preachers take turns performing for the crowd. When not lecturing the locals, our preachers travel the world to lecture foreigners.

Preachers need to believe they are special, perhaps even called or chosen to lead the sinners out of sin into the land of salvation. You cannot think you are a wretch and at the same time be a preacher. You can be a wretch and confess your wretchedness to the people in the pews as part of your redemption. You can testify about your former wretchedness and how you rejoined the mass of ordinary sinners. You cannot preach unless you are sure you are something special.

After all, the point of preaching is to inform. The preacher not only knows the nature of sin, but he also claims to know the nature of grace. He claims to know the road that leads from sin to salvation and grace. If everyone had this knowledge, then there would be no need for the preacher. Everyone would be free to decide if they want to take the path to salvation or take some other path. This is why every preacher is sure he has been called to lead the sinner down the righteous path.

This is why the fallen preacher is a stock character in our morality tales. In a land full of preachers, we have a superabundance of preachers who turned out to be worse sinners than the people in the pews. Given that democratic politics is just a long running morality play, it is no surprise that our politics features the hypocrite, and the endless cries of hypocrisy are the Greek chorus of our politics. Democracy is a viper’s den of preachers and hypocrites hissing about hypocrisy.

This has been a defining feature of the Trump era. His every utterance seems to draw out the preacher-hypocrite. Here is Jonah Goldberg hilariously claiming he is what stands between the mean orange man and the sacred Constitution. He and his fellow cult members were chanting about the “unitary executive” back in the Bush years, when they intended that phrase to mean, “Ignore the laws.” After all, they preached, the righteous cause of forever war was too important for due process.

Goldberg is typical of the modern preacher. He is a mediocrity’s mediocrity who spends his days smearing people opposed to his cult. In the Bush years, he would preach about the need to rally to a clown like George Bush out of party loyalty. Those questioning this were disloyal deviationists or secretly in league with Old Scratch. When it was his turn to return the favor with Trump, he slanderously claimed Trump and David Duke were buddies in the secret KKK.

The most egregious example of the modern preacher is David French. This chinless weirdo is what not-for-profit politics produces. He imagines himself to be a blend of James Bond, Clarence Darrow, and Jesus Christ. His Twitter feed is dripping with sanctimony as he lectures the world about sin, but it is mostly about the righteousness of David French. It is no surprise that this ridiculous mediocrity is at the New York Times. It is the main chapel of our media.

These two festering lumps of mediocrity are famous examples, but the public square is littered with people who dream of one day standing in front of the masses, lecturing them about their failings. The Covid Karens of a few years ago made clear that behind the pleasant looking face of every stranger could lie the pursed lips of a vinegar drinking scold ready to pounce at your moment of weakness. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God named Karen from Human Resources.

The preacher plays a vital role in human society, but he must be locked up in his church where we can visit him for inspiration. The preacher provides inspiration when inspiration is needed to continue the task of living. In modern America, the preachers have been let out of their churches to run wild in our lives, making sure no one can enjoy the simple act of living. They nose about looking for sin and when none can be found they create chaos that can lead to sin.

The task before the country, if it is to escape this hell of proselytizing, is to herd the preachers back into their churches. Living is about trade-offs, the choice between practical benefits and equally practical costs. For a people to live, they must embrace living, not sit quietly while preached to about the sins of living. That is what we are seeing with the Trump administration. It is the long overdue effort to round up the preachers and put them back in their rightful place.

The price for this freedom will be the endless hypocrisy from the pearl clutchers and bony fingered ministers, now suddenly concerned about law and order. They were silent when the law was ignored but now pretend to care when the law must be ignored to restore order, the only ground in which the law can flourish. That means sidelining the preachers until the coast is clear. Then they can be let loose to preach the gospel of republican virtue to whoever will listen.

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 Long Retreat Continues

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A funny thing happened when Netanyahu arrived in Washington to tell the Trump administration about how they would proceed with Iran.  The Trump side told Netanyahu that his longed for war with Iran was not happening. Instead, the Trump administration was starting talks with Iran concerning a negotiated settlement to their nuclear program and the sanctions imposed on Iran. When Trump announced this during the press conference, Netanyahu looked like he had seen a ghost.

Netanyahu was poleaxed because he was sure he had maneuvered the Trump people into a corner on Iran. He thought he had done the same thing with the Biden people, but instead of an American strike on Iran, the Iranians launched their own missile strike and the Biden people looked the other way. With Trump he was sure he had a president who hated Iran as much as he did, but it turns out that Trump was leading Netanyahu on so he could buy time to make a deal with Iran.

It is a good example of how the Israel lobby, which backs Trump completely, is not the same as Israel. The two sides frequently disagree on what is best for Israel, and the Israel lobby typically prevails in these disputes. Given the source of funding for the Israel lobby, this is logical. For American Jews, Israel is their symbolic homeland, but it is not their actual home. It is a place where they send their children for the summer after graduation or perhaps where they take an occasional family trip.

For the Israel lobby, an agreement that fosters peace in the region and ensures the long-term security of Israel is the goal. They do not share Israel’s aspiration for a greater Israel or of subjugating local rivals merely out of spite. The manner in which Israel has conducted itself concerning Gaza has been detrimental to the Israel lobby, as it significantly undermines support for Israel among average Americans. Israel now has the lowest approval ratings among Americans since the issue has been surveyed.

This is also another one of those examples of how the second coming of Donald Trump is much better than the first one. No one saw the reproachment with Iran coming until it was about to happen. This meant that Trump did not discuss it publicly and ensured it remained a need-to-know matter among his trusted confidants. Consequently, the usual suspects could not leak it to the media. All those people who lost security clearances are no longer conduits to the Washington Post.

We see the same thing with Russia. No one outside of Trump and a few trusted people know what is happening in those dealings. No one knew Trump was planning direct talks until they were announced by both sides. Even now, no one has the slightest idea what the two sides are discussing. Instead, the media runs nonsense stories like this one fed to them through Keith Kellogg by the neocons. Team Trump has kept everyone off balance regarding Ukraine.

The essence of all this is not a change in policy with Trump but a transformation in his approach to governance. For instance, Trump has never been fond of Netanyahu. Worse yet for Netanyahu, Trump does not trust him. Similarly, Trump never forgot that Ukraine was central to his impeachment. Trump always wanted to do a deal with Russia and has always got along with Putin. What is novel this time is that Trump is far more astute in how he navigates the den of vipers that is Washington.

Regarding Iran, there is also the reality that no military solution exists. This has been made evident with the Houthis. The days of launching volleys of missiles at an adversary and achieve its objectives is over. To address the Houthi issue militarily would necessitate an invasion and an occupation. A military solution to Iran would require a million-man army and the risk of destabilizing the oil markets. It is not entirely clear that the United States could accomplish this, even if the will existed.

Instead, Trump has allowed the Israelis to believe that the Trump administration supported a strike on Iran’s nuclear and leadership centers. These stories were leaked to the media and then amplified by online geopolitical analysts. Meanwhile, Trump’s trusted advisors were utilizing backchannels to arrange direct talks with Iran, which occurred last week in Oman. There is a strong likelihood that Russia played a role in persuading the Iranians to attend the meeting.

What we may be witnessing are the results of a transformation in the Israel lobby and in Trump’s governing strategy. The same populist forces that spooked the oligarchs into supporting Trump’s political and economic reforms may have prompted the Israel lobby to reconsider its approach to Iran. If war is not an option, then another method must be found to secure Israel. The obvious solution is to resolve the Iran issue that has persisted for half a century.

In many ways Trump is the closing of a chapter in American history that started fifty years ago, and Iran is one part of it. The Iranian revolution was caused by the failure to manage the Israel issue properly. Fifty years ago, smart people warned about tilting to far in favor of Israel. The result has been fifty years of turmoil, including several major wars. That chapter in American history may finally be coming to close with the normalization of relations with Iran.

Of course, this is another indication that we are at the end of empire. Even if relations between the United States and Iran cannot be normalized, it is evident that the days of the American empire ruling over the region with absolute authority are over. The cost of empire has long surpassed the benefits to the American people, and that deficit is now disrupting domestic politics. What Trump represents is a dignified withdrawal from empire, rather than an ignominious one.

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!