One of the strange truths about democratic governments is that they can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. This seems counterintuitive as the whole point of democratic government is to have public policy reflect the general will of the people. In theory any divergence should be rectified in subsequent elections so that over time, the majority support the policy. As we see in the modern West, this is not how things work in “our democracy.”

There is a great example of this in the UK. Immigrant crime has reached a point where even the most teary-eyed immigration romantic has had enough. All of the polling shows that the majority wants an end to immigration. The new Labour government won power largely by hinting they would be tough on immigration. They were lying, of course, and that is clear now. The government only had about thirty percent support at the election, and you can be sure it is lower now.

In other words, the current rulers of the UK have less popular support than the current ruler of Venezuela. The UK is allegedly a democracy, while the democracies all claim Venezuela is a dictatorship. While technically correct, if we redefine democracy to mean having some sort of voting process, the undeniable fact is the ruling class of Venezuela has far more popular support than the ruling class of the UK. Yet, for now at least, the UK government does not fear being overthrown.

Immigration is a great example of how democracy can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. There has never been a time when there was popular support for open borders and unfettered immigration. The issue may not have ranked high on the list of voter concerns, but there was never a clamoring for violent foreigners to be imported into the country. Now there is massive hostility to it, but the policies not only persist, but they get worse.

Immigration is just the latest example of this. The de-industrialization we saw in the 1970’s and 1980’s never had popular support. People in the emerging service industries or technology may have been indifferent, but there were no rallies in the streets demanding the government ship the car parts plant to Mexico. The people in the manufacturing sector certainly cared, but their interests were ignored because the oligarchs saw a quick buck in selling off the manufacturing base.

The point is the so-called democracies of the West have been unpopular for an exceedingly long time, but it persists due to two factors. One is the people assume they can eventually get what they want through the democratic process. The ballots at every election have two options, heads they win and tails you lose, but people insist on picking from those options. It takes a long while, as we are now seeing, for people to lose faith in the democratic system.

The other reason, and perhaps the main reason, why democratic governments can remain unpopular for so long is the people who run the democratic system grow increasingly convinced they can trick and cajole enough people to manufacture a majority in their favor. In fact, as we keep seeing, this becomes the primary focus of the people running the system. It is as if they seek to prove Lincoln wrong and find a way to fool all of the people all of the time.

The guy running Venezuela knows that a large swath of his population thinks the system is rigged. He certainly knows it is rigged. He also knows that unless he keeps that disgruntled portion of the population pacified, he will be swinging from a tree branch, so that is his primary focus. He needs to always be looking to expand popular support for his policies, while at the same time defusing the anger in the portion that is unhappy with him and his policies.

The glue that has held Western democracies together for so long, despite not being particularly popular, is managerialism. The vast administrative state controlled by a permanent ruling class of managers is an unprecedented defense against any threats to the democratic system. Internal opposition is assimilated into the system so quickly that it never has time to flower into a palace coup. External opposition is subverted through the complex network of government affiliated organizations.

If you look closely, for example, at the pro-government protests in response to the anti-immigration protests in the UK, you will see people wearing the colors of groups like Amnesty International, Hope Not Hate and various immigrant charities right next to the cops waiting to crack the skulls of native Brits. Much of the police action, in fact, is coordinated by these “private groups” who “defend our democracy.” All of them are client organizations of the managerial state.

For this reason, managerial polyarchy¹ is highly resistant to popular discontent, even when that discontent is near universal. The problem though is that it is top-heavy, which makes containing internal dissent increasingly difficult. With so many people inside the managerial system or dependent upon it, factionalism is inevitable. It is why the managerial class has its politicians chant about unifying the country. What they really mean is unifying the managerial elite and the oligarchs.

We see a glimpse of this with Elon Musk. When he bought Twitter and reopened it, the system quickly moved to suppress him. Ben Shapiro and the ADL made him pray at the pile of shoes. The trouble is, Musk is the world’s richest man and someone who does not like being pushed around, so Twitter remains largely open. Musk has now weighed in on the two-tiered justice system of the UK. Elon Musk is a serious problem for a system that thinks it needs complete unity.

Why is Elon Musk a serious problem? A society in which the majority is disgruntled but lacks a leader and a method to compel change is like dry leaves and wood in the underbrush of a forest. It is a forest fire waiting to happen. The disgruntled inside the managerial system may look at the disgruntled masses as an army in waiting and decide it is a good time to stage a palace coup. This is why the British government is one step away from declaring war on running dog deviationists.

In the end, government, regardless of form, must not only satisfy the majority, but pacify those unsatisfied so they will not revolt. The present systems in the West have proven quite resistant to this reality, but reality must always prevail. The crisis in the West is over the central question of managerial polyarchy. Can it adapt and reform itself to comport with the demands of the people over whom it rules? If not, then what happens when these long bottled-up forces finally explode?

¹Managerial Polyarchy refers to the fact that large complex society does not have central control. Instead it has nodes that control specific domains, like banking, the media, the academy, and so on. These are networked together by a common understand of their role in society. This polyarchy of institutions shares the ideology of managerialism, thus we get the term Managerial Polyarchy.

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

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

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

The ongoing saga over who is actually running the White House and who will be the opponent of Donald Trump in the fall is a good example of how the political class lacks second order thinking. When they bumped off Biden, they did not think about what comes next, so they are now stuck with Harris. It also reveals that these people have no institutional memory, so they repeat past errors. In the case of Harris, they seem to have learned nothing from the Obama experience.

Back during the great interregnum, when issues like race, affirmative action, and demographics could be discussed, it was obvious that the main failure of affirmative action programs was not that they did not result in more blacks in the targeted area, but that the blacks themselves often resented it. Everyone just assumed that these people got where they were through affirmative action, rather than merit, so those who thought they earned it hated the stigma that came with affirmative action.

It is an important and overlooked part of race politics. The white saviors who create and implement these race programs are not counting heads looking for the correct number of brown people. They are looking for salvation. That comes, they assume, when the black recipients of their programs are grateful to the people behind them. The “failure” of affirmative action was that it created black resentment, the exact opposite of what the white saviors were expecting.

That aside, there were second and third order effects that no one thought to consider, and they also contained an internal contradiction that could not be covered up with moral language. You cannot have a meritocratic, egalitarian society and at the same time have special rights for certain people based on dubious claims about the suffering of their ancestors. Good intentions and righteous indignation could not obscure this reality nor stop people from acting on it.

Not only do our betters not think past their first move, but they also never learn from their past errors, so affirmative action was rebranded. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, no matter how they frame it, is just another set of lectures about how whites must overlook merit in order to fill the ranks with nonwhites. The libraries full of books soaked in emotive language on this topic delight and confuse the promoters of DIE projects, but the fundamental facts remain. It is affirmative action.

This is why people like Christopher Rufo have found it so easy to anathematize the term DEI and use it as a club to beat the managerial class. The fact that this new branding easily converts to DIE made it even easier. When a company CEO proudly states that his company will replace whites with nonwhites in order to meet the goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, in the minds of white people, the “great replacement” move from abstraction to a direct threat.

In other words, the whole DEI program that evolved in response to the moral failure of affirmative action pleased the people behind it, but they never thought about how it would play outside the hothouse of the academy. They never pondered the contradiction between mandatory association and the internal logic of a society that strives to be an egalitarian meritocracy. All they could see was the wonderfulness of their first trick and the assumed ends that must come after it.

This is all coming together with the Kamala Harris campaign. Apparently, not one remembers her 2020 primary run. No one remembers why they carefully groomed and insulated Barak Obama. Instead, they just bumped off Biden and assumed all their dreams would fall into place. Instead, they have the face of DEI as the default option for the Democratic nomination. Kamala Harris is the embodiment of everything the critics of DEI have been saying for a decade.

This is why her polling is terrible, worse than Biden’s, and why she may have to be replaced before the convention. White people see in Kamala Harris the face behind those dreadful diversity seminars at the office. Black people see the patronizing white women behind those same programs. For both races, Harris is what middle-aged cat ladies imagine is the ideal black woman. It is not that she is inauthentic, which is certainly true, but that she is genuinely offensive.

Of course, the people who created this mess are now tasked with finding a remedy to it, which means more obtuse shortsightedness. Reportedly the Obama faction is unhappy with Harris, a member of the Clinton faction, so they are floating the idea of Senator Mark Kelly as her running mate. The problem there is it underscores the fact that Harris is a DEI candidate. Fitting her with a competent white man not only highlights her ineptitude, but confirms what critics say about DEI.

This is why there is a good chance that this scheme falls apart entirely and the Democrats are left with a chaotic scramble at their convention. The thing they hoped to avoid would be made possible by their thumbless attempts to engineer a result that prevents an open convention. They keep stepping on these rakes, because they never think past the first move, and they learn nothing from past errors. The Democrats are now a collection of high time preference amnesiacs.

All of this brings up a larger issue, one that will not go away when this present fiasco has gone down the memory hole. Popular government can only work in an orderly society, and you get an orderly society when the people who make up that society agree that following the rules is of paramount importance. This is not possible in a diverse society, which must devolve into tribal factionalism. This is why the Framers warned about the threat of factionalism to the republic.

The ongoing demographic collapse of America, and the West in general, means the underlying requirement of Western style government is collapsing. The chaotic, big man government we see evolving with the Democrats is simply a product of the people who make up that party’s coalition. In time, this will be the reality of American society, if the demographic trends continue. The real choice behind these election dramas is between order and diversity. You cannot have both.

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

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

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

Going back to when the regime selected Joe Biden to “win” the Democratic primary and then “win” the general election, there have been jokes about his health, making references to the movie Weekend At Bernie’s. Just about every way to call someone a corpse has been used to describe Joe Biden. In what could be final proof that we do live in a simulation, Joe Biden is now hiding out, incommunicado, at his beach house in Delaware, supposedly suffering from Covid.

Now, he is not entirely cut off from the world. He supposedly wrote that letter, a scan of which was posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, in which he bowed out of the presidential race. Someone who sort of sounded like Biden supposedly “called” the Harris campaign to pledge support. Amusingly or alarmingly, depending upon your point of view, Harris flubbed her lines and started to say it was a recording, but then caught herself and played along until the end.

Now, the letter Biden allegedly wrote is a huge problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we have no idea who wrote it. The official version is his longtime friend “helped” him write it, but then why was it not on White House letterhead or even the letterhead of the campaign? Why does the signature look like it was written by another person or possibly generated using Microsoft Paint? Resigning by scanned letter posted on social media is also bizarre.

What the letter suggests is that Biden is either dead or in a coma or maybe in and out of it mentally, so people around him wrote the letter to distract people. If they had not posted this letter on Sunday, there would be media camped out in Delaware doing what they have been told to do, which is hound Biden out of the race. The letter was to shift the focus from Biden onto Harris. The trouble is, everyone in Washington seems to understand this so they started calling for proof of life.

That explains the bizarre show they put on yesterday. The whole thing looked like a poorly done high school play. Of course, faking a voice is now quite simple thanks to the explosion of cheap software tools. Someone with free time was able to make this video that looks fairly good but sounds even better. A professional with the right equipment would be able to create a fake Joe Biden recording that would fool even his family, so it is well within the realm of the possible.

In fact, all of this fakery is well within the realm of the parsimonious. A good rule of life is that people who have lied to you everyday up to this point are probably lying to you now and will continue to lie to you in the future. Everything about the Biden campaign, presidency and re-election campaign has been a lie, so it is wise to assume that what is happening with him right now is a lie too. What we can assume at this point is the official version of events is false.

Of course, the counter to this is why would they do this? The whole point of the lies to this point was to keep him in the race so the vote-rigging machine could get him re-elected and his team could carry on for another term. If he is unable to fill that duty, then why not finish him off and rally around Harris? It is not as if she is a genius who will outwit these people and install her own regime. Even in his vegetative state, Joe Biden is smarter than Kamala Harris.

Therein lies the mystery. One clue to all of this is that Harris was never part of the Obama crime family. When she ran in 2020, her staff was composed of former Clinton people, not Obama people. Amusingly, it is just assumed that because she is not white that she is in the Obama crime family. This is not the case at all, and it is why the Biden people dunked on her to the media. Putting Harris in the White House would be bad for the Biden-Obama people who are running things.

That raises another question. Why are the people around the dead or comatose Biden saying he endorses Harris? One reason is it would look even weirder than any of this stuff looks if he did not endorse her. That and an open primary could result in violent street battles in Chicago. Both parties remain haunted by the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, but especially the Democrats. Even a mild version of that would sink the party up and down the ticket.

The other reason is that there seems to be a consensus that Harris is simply too stupid and obnoxious to win. From the perspective of the Obama crime family, Harris running a shabby campaign and losing to Orange Hitler would put an end to the Clinton crime family as a viable force in Washington. In another of life’s amusing ironies, the Clinton wing is now seen as the old white leadership, while the Obama wing is the new, diverse and ascendent leadership of the party.

The main problem with all of this is that at some point, Biden will have to either make an appearance or be replaced by Harris for the remainder of his term. At least that is what the normal rules would dictate. We live in a bizarre age, so it is possible that the regime media simply refuses to discuss the fact that the president has not been seen for however long it takes to pull off this caper. They are not all that curious at the moment when the topic is at the center of the public stage.

It is an example of the lack of second order thinking. The people around Biden are like conmen who lie to get out of a jam, but each lie creates a new jam, for which they have to come up with another lie. The result is they get carried along by their river of lies without any concept of where it leads. That has been the history of the Biden presidency thus far. In this case, they cannot figure out what lie to tell now, so they remain under the cone of silence.

What we know now is Biden is either too dead or too sick to meet with the Lizard King’s chief emissary on earth. If he cannot make that meeting, then it is safe to assume he is too sick or dead to do much of anything. This raises the obvious question of who is making decisions in his name. You can get away with this for a week, but any longer than that is too absurd even in our clown times. Sometime soon, Biden must make an appearance or step down from office.

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

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

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about the dullness of political conventions, a post about the normal people who still live in heritage America and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note: I jumped onto a Twitter space hosted by Pete Quinones Friday night. I had just returned from a nice dinner and a long drive in the country, so I was a bit tired, which means I was a bit incoherent, but not too bad. Listen here.

The term “conspiracy theory” has been a popular and effective slur against anyone skeptical of official narratives for a long time. The main reason it has been effective is it was always used against people with implausible theories. While the official narrative may not hold up, the alternatives ranged from unlikely to absurd. We have now reached a point where the poles have reversed. The “conspiracy theories” are often far more plausible and sober minded than official narratives.

Yesterday, Biden announced he was not going to run. He released a letter on Twitter, now stupidly called X and a supporting tweet. Others chimed in to say that he had a long think about things while recovering from Covid and decided that it was time to retire and pass the torch to his most trusted understudy, Kamala Harris. Regime media then set off memorializing the great man and his bold decision, thus setting the stage for the Kamala Harris campaign.

The problem is none of this actually happened. The letter Biden supposedly wrote was not written by him, but by some guy named Steve. Reportedly he worked with Biden in the middle of the night to craft the letter. Then he told the family that Joe had decided to call it quits. Then a chubby girl in the White House was given the task of posting a scan of the letter on Twitter. The letter is not on the official White House letterhead nor is it on the campaign letterhead. Just plain paper.

Joe Biden has not made a public appearance in many days and is not scheduled to show up anywhere at the moment. A sitting president choosing not to run for re-election is highly unusual. For the president who makes this decision, or any politician for that matter, it is the biggest event of his career. The first sentence in Biden’s obituary will now include his decision not to run for re-election. That requires more than a tweet from a chubby intern and a letter written by your lawyer.

Adding to the official version is the fact that his campaign chair was on television Sunday morning demanding the party fall in line behind Biden. His top people were running around Washington whipping support among donors and important party officials on the basis that Biden was the nominee. Once news hit the internet, many of these people told the press that they had no idea this was in the works and only heard the news from their interns who are on social media.

In other words, nothing about the official narrative rings true. In fact, it is so implausible that in a different time it would have been one of the conspiracies floating around in response to a much more plausible official narrative. This is the sort of thing Alex Jones says on his show. The mystery guy named Steve Ricchetti, by the way, is a long-time fixer and bag man for the Democratic Party. He is a boring version of The Smoking Man from the old conspiracy series The X Files.

The trope from gangster movies is that when the mafia decides to whack a guy, they find someone the victim trusts to do the deed. Steve Ricchetti has been around Washington for almost as long as Biden and he has been friends with Biden for decades. He has been in the White House with a minor title, but he is one of the family’s closest advisers and he is also keeps an eye on them for the regime. No doubt he was tasked with delivering the bad news to the family.

It is unlikely that there was a scene at the family home where Steve Ricchetti presented the already written letter to Biden and said, “I either get your signature or your brains on this letter” but this decision was obviously not a voluntary. The fact that Biden is unable to speak publicly about it suggest he is in worse shape than we are being told, which is probably why regime flunkies from the Republican Party are now demanding he resign from office, or they invoke the 25th amendment.

Given that Biden has not been in charge of things in any meaningful sense since he was installed, having him serve out his time in a coma or worse is not troubling to the people running things. It may be a problem for them if Harris is installed, as it is known that the Biden staff despises Harris and her people. In other words, the soft coup may be a modified limited hangout to buy some time. The people running the White House agreed to this, but not to Harris becoming president.

Alternatively, the people who engineered this soft coup did not think too much about how it looks as they just wanted Biden out of the race. They had Biden endorse Harris, but they can deal with that later. They now have a month to figure out how to find someone who is plausible enough as a candidate so that when the rigging machine kicks in on election night, the results are plausible enough to accept. Maybe they simply have not thought this far at all.

That is the other thing about our conspiratorial age. Not only are the official narratives more ridiculous than the conspiracy theories, but the people engineering the official narratives are thumbless screw-ups. Even the guys lining their clothes with aluminum foil would have cooked up a better story than the official narrative of how Biden decided to quit the race. The official narratives are not just implausible, but they are also stupid which makes the conspiracy itself stupid.

Of course, what all this points to is more ham-fisted shenanigans as the regime plotters try to sell Harris as a plausible alternative to Trump or find a suitable replacement if she flops this week. In other words, we will get a firehose of nonsense and lies from the regime, which will turn the conspiracy theory machine up to eleven. We have reached the point where only a fool accepts the official truth, which opens the door for everyone with a clever imagination to conjure alternatives.

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

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

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

Most of the people who use the phrase “America First” do so emotively, as a way to indicate that they like or dislike something. They will use this phrase, for example, when dismissing something or someone from the left. Alternatively, they will use it as a way to restate allegiance to their cause. “I’m America First” reduces to “I’m on the side of the good guys and those people are the bad guys.” Beyond this basic political signaling the phrase has little meaning for the users.

This is not true of everyone. Trump and his more reliable supporters use the phrase to mean a radical reorientation of the political class. What Trump means when he says he wants an “American First” foreign policy, for example, is that he looks at foreign policy in service to his domestic policy. The same is true with trade. He promotes the use of tariffs, for example, because he thinks about trade as a means to an end and that end is the promotion of the American domestic economy.

The radicalism of this gets lost because both sides of the political class have mischaracterized these positions for half a century. So-called conservatives talk about “free trade”, a thing that does not exist, as enlightened policy, while tariffs are slandered as isolationism and central planning. The left now promotes endless wars around the globe as a necessary duty of the American government, even if it comes with a heavy cost to the American people.

One reason that government policy now feels anti-white is because it generally feels anti-American, but in reality, it is simply indifferent to white Americans. The thing that has consumed the Biden presidency has been Ukraine, followed by the endless wars in the Levant, and then their escalations with China. Whenever the concerns of white people come up, they are blasted with the tired old slogans that are simply meant to dismiss the concerns of the majority population.

Immigration is another example. The logic behind open borders is not that it is good for the native population, but that the people enabling it are doing a good deed for these foreigners and humanity in general. While much of it is driven by spite and ingratitude, the underlying cause is indifference to domestic concerns. For the typical person in the political system, the concerns of average Americans matter only in so far that they have an impact on these cosmopolitan projects.

This is why the usual suspects screech in horror at Trump. He is a threat not just to their specific schemes but to the framework in which they operate. For example, he looks at Ukraine and asks why Americans are paying for it. If the Europeans want to make war with each other, according to Trump, they should pay for it. In other words, he looks at the Ukraine situation purely in terms of domestic economics. The starting question for Trump is “how is this good for Americans?”

This is most obvious in his statements regarding Taiwan. In a recent interview Trump pointed out that Taiwan is rich mostly because of America, so they should pay for their own defense against China. He also criticized prior administrations for allowing Taiwan to corner the market on high end computer chips. Trump feels no moral or emotional commitment to Taiwan. For him, it is just another transactional relationship that is either good or bad for Americans.

Even with regards to Israel, the area where Trump gets most criticized by dissidents, his view is purely transactional. He looks at Israel as part of the greater Jewish lobby in America, so he treats it as such. The Jews have a lot of money and power, so Trump caters to them in the same way he caters to other powerful interests. If Evangelicals stop worshipping Jewish people, Trump will be less enthusiastic for Israel, because Israel stops being important domestically.

J.D. Vance also takes this transactional view of trade and foreign policy, which is why the usual suspects detest him. When asked about Ukraine during his senate run, he shrugged and asked why anyone cares about Ukraine. Vance has also talked about using tariffs as a way to bring manufacturing back, as well as a way to boost the American economy in general. This kind of talk around the usual suspects is like wearing garlic around a vampire.

The reason this terrifies official Washington is that all of their projects and therebefore their reason to exist rest on the assertion that overseas concerns are paramount because they serve the interest of the empire. If politics moves to a debate about what is and what is not good for the American people, suddenly these schemes not only stop making sense, but they also sound un-American. Project Ukraine, for example, is exactly what Washington warned about in his farewell address.

That is the root of the rage we see in the political class. Trump and now Vance signal a shift back to an older form of politics where candidates promised a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage. This is antithetical to the cosmopolitical politics that have dominated for at least the last thirty years. A successful politician of old actually had to know something about chickens, pots and cars. Contrast that to now when politicians take pride in having no practical knowledge.

None of this should lead to a celebration. The odds of Trump winning are not good, despite all of the good things breaking his way. The mere fact that he is in a close race with a nursing home patient shows how much damage has been done to the self-respect and intelligence of the voting public. Even if Trump wins, the political machine will simply work harder to undermine his efforts. The usual suspects are terribly smart but hey never take no for an answer.

Even so, this all points to the problem with empire. All empires are eventually controlled by an alien elite that parasites off the people who made the empire. As the cost of empire exceeds the benefit of the empire, the people at the top begin to hollow out that which makes them possible. In this regard, the Trump – Vance ticket is a symptom and a warning of what lies ahead. Either the reformist elements of the oligarchy embrace America First, or something much worse than Trump comes next.

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

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

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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