Category Archives: Politics

The Blanche DuBois Problem

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Over the last thirty years, many people have noticed that all moral claims within the public policy sphere can be reduced to a few time periods. In the realm of foreign policy, it is always about 1938 and the events around that time. If it is a domestic issue in the United States, then it is always 1968. Perhaps the slow Progressives will try to make it about the 1980’s when their hero was president. For Americans, public policy is trapped in one of three historical frameworks.

On the foreign policy side, it is easy to see how this works. There have been so many new Hitlers on the stage, no one can keep count. Every foolish and destructive misadventure by Washington involves a Hitler figure. They are not just a generic bad guy in the propaganda sense of it, but they represent the re-emergence of the timeless enemy and the timeless struggle. Everything about American foreign policy since the Cold War is about preventing an imaginary past.

This cognitive defect has made its way across the ocean to Europe. Whenever there is a meeting of the local satraps of the American empire, they take turns looking worried in front of the cameras, talking about the possible reemergence of you know who and the danger of resembling Neville Chamberlain. This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region.

In the United States, the other great moral framework is the Civil Rights movement, into which every local issue is jammed. Every black politician imagines herself as the you-go-girl version of Martin Luther King, which means even mundane issues like maintaining the roads is a civil rights issue. Every man in a dress not being called “ma’am” by the clerk is Rosa Parks. This framing has gone so far that nonwhites are routinely called white supremacists.

One of the features of those who have crossed the great divide is that they see the past as the past, not as an emotional support framework. Whatever lessons can be learned from the past in order to navigate the future are studied, but otherwise, the modern dissident accepts that tomorrow does not lie in yesterday. For those trapped in the 20th century, it is an endless singing of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” and morality tales where they are the hero.

This irrational attachment to the past is ironic, in that the whole point of the Progressive ideology was to advance human society forward, with forward defined as an advanced state of moral existence. While Progressives of the past often focused on material improvement, the spring has always been eschatological. Better stuff was proof of better living and better living was always a normative issue. It is why they continue to see themselves as the Elect.

The thing about ideology is that it tries to replace something that the Christian West eventually took for granted. Within Christianity there is an assumed point to living within the bounds of Christian ethics. Live a Christian life and your reward is eternal life at the feet of God. Ideology cannot offer this because ideology rejects God as the moral authority, so there must be some other reason to follow the moral demands of the ideology, which becomes the project of the ideology.

Marx probably understood this when he described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” He was criticizing specialization and its dehumanizing qualities, but he was also describing a world where men were liberated from the human condition, free to be what they chose. Communism always imagined an end point that recreated heaven on earth.

At some point, every ideology must at least imply a vision of the future as a reason to continue to live within and fight for the moral claims of the ideology. If the point of the ideology is more of the same, then why bother? Therefore, central to every ideology is a point to the struggle, a destination that promises to liberate people from whatever vexes the ideology. Therein lies the reason why the modern Progressive remain trapped in and obsessed with past struggles.

Progressivism was always a weird hybrid of Protestantism and liberalism, so it could leave unsaid the promise of Christianity, while refashioning the ethics of Christianity around claims to universalism, egalitarianism and eventually the blank slate. At its peak, it was a restatement of Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” but stripped of all Scriptural references. It resonated with an audience that continued to be informed by the vestigial Christianity they inherited.

The implied destination of Progressivism no longer works on an audience lacking even a basic Christian frame of reference. This void has been filled with a circular version of history in which events of today are recast as versions of the old glorious struggles of the past, where the good guys won, and the bad guys were sent fleeing. The Elect in this arrangement are those who can imagine themselves wearing the white rose of resistance or riding a bus in the Jim Crow South.

In this regard, Progressivism has become a hive without a queen. The queen is the promised land, and the hive is the habits of mind that form the ideology. They are the Christian zealots with no conception of God and only a vague understanding of what lies after this moment in time. This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.

This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality. Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past. The rest of us are now struggling to figure out what to do with them. They are an unwanted and useless presence to the people of the present, trying to move into the future.

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The Ghost Of The People’s Party

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Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

Most of the ideas that shaped 20th century America boiled up during the 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War. Some arrived from the Old World before and during the war, things like nationalism and socialism, but most were homegrown ideas that arose out of American Protestantism and the struggle with secularization. Interestingly, the Progressive ideology that emerged was sparked by the populist forces at the time and is now threatened by the same populist forces.

The 19th century was a wild time in America. Prior to the Civil War, it became increasingly clear to the industrializing North that the Constitutional framework was not working for them. The Hartford Conventions, largely erased from the history books now, were a series of conferences in the North to debate leaving the Union. This process was short-circuited by the War of 1812, but the sentiment merely found a new home in abolitionism and finally flowered in the Civil War.

The post-Civil War period was no less tumultuous. Reconstruction was a failure, but a foreshadowing of what would be a feature of the progressive ideology. That is the belief that societies can be reordered in such a way that the people in those societies change how they think about themselves, their neighbors, and the state. The abolitionist fanatics did not abandon these beliefs after the failure of reconstruction. They continued to refine this belief as progressivism flowered in the 20th century.

Of course, progressivism itself is a 19th century phenomenon. It emerged out of American Protestantism as a belief that human society can only advance through relentless social reform. The same people who were sure they could reinvent society to accommodate the freed slaves as equals were now sure they could use the lessons from industrialization to reorder America and the world. Religious social reform became a secular political movement.

The engine that made progressivism possible was populism, which was not unique to America or even unique to the 19th century, but if you look at the populist movements of the 19th century, you see many of the features of what would later be the progressive movement and then progressivism. The populists were not angry mobs assembled outside of the homes of the rich, demanding redress of their grievances. They had an agenda that was mostly crafted by elites in waiting.

For example, the Ocala Demands were a platform of economic and political reforms that became the basis of the People’s Party. It was “produced” by the various farmer’s alliances that had sprung up as mutual aid societies following the Civil War. These groups were brought together in the Marion Opera House in Ocala, Florida, where they approved this list of demands. This was formally called the Ocala Demands and was adopted by the People’s Party.

When you read the demands, the first thing that is clear is that they were not written by a collection of dirt farmers in the South. It was not the work of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union either. That was a real group that participated in the Ocala convention, along with the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. These were not people debating the abolishment of the futures markets, the regulation of the money supply or the imposition of a graduated income tax.

The platform was the work of intellectuals and reformers who saw an opportunity to ride the wave of populism to power and influence. They saw a grassroots movement of disaffected farmers as a vehicle for building a coalition in support of their reform ideas, so they attached themselves to it. It is not an accident that the populist agenda looked a lot like the progressive agenda that would emerge in the 20th century. Progressivism would not have been possible without populism.

It is why it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.

The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.

Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.

The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.

In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.

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The Long Way Home

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One of the many failings of conservatism was the insistence that with just the right argument using just the right data points, the people they called the left would throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. At the core of what later became known as civic nationalism was the assertion that all political actors are looking for objective truth and therefore would respond to it. The reason for political disputes was the failure to flesh out the facts.

Politic is about morality, not facts. It is also about power, specifically the power to impose your moral vision on the rest. Facts have little to do with politics and are often seen by ideologues as a threat. The diversity cult looks at the FBI crime stats as a direct threat to their project, so they worked to suppress them. The flat earth people insist that intelligence testing is a conspiracy of some sort. They label it “race-science” because adding the words “race” to anything anathematizes it.

Another thing that the conservative view of politics got wrong is that it left people with only two choices when evaluating left-wing rhetoric. Either the people chanting about white power structures were lying or they were deeply confused. In both cases, it was assumed that they had to know the truth and that the truth would either set them straight or force them to stop lying. Untold man hours were wasted trying to explain the truth to crazy relatives because of this.

Even now, with all that is happening, it is hard for people to accept that the crazies are in fact crazy enough to believe the nutty things they are saying. This post in the New York Times feels like parody, but it is written to soothe the nerves of the believers while they huddle together plotting how to respond. The writer genuinely believes Washington is being taken over by a Stalin-like figure and he and his coreligionists are the beginnings of a great resistance to it.

This is the precursor to the forming of a narrative. The cult we call the left operates like all cults in that it has a story to explain itself and its destination. Within the story are stories to address the bumps along the way as well as the victories. Soon, others will take this framework in which the good guys are being oppressed by the bad guys and create a narrative that fills in the details, especially the part where they finally vanquish the monster and everyone cheers.

It is hard for normal people to accept that the writer is as crazy as it seems. After all, he had to have sat in meetings at the New York Times where people boasted of ruining critics of the Biden regime. He must be aware of the doxing campaigns and the hooded terrorist gangs sent to harass dissidents. It is inconceivable to a normal person that this guy does not see the irony in what he is writing. The truth is he is that crazy and the audience is right there with him.

Part of how cults respond to disconfirmation and setbacks is they create new pleasing narratives for why things have not gone as predicted. A month into the Trump presidency and the crazies have settled on an economic collapse as the most probable end to the Trump tyranny. According to the Times, the economy is already reeling from policies that have yet to be implemented. The Telegraph reports that the really smart people foresee disaster for the Trump economy.

This gets to another thing that people struggle to accept. These people lie. They will make up whatever whoppers they think they need for their narrative. Extreme partisanship rewards sociopathy, so over time the movement will be overrun by people who see no moral distinction between the truth and a lie. All that matters is whether it serves the cause, by which they mean does it strengthen their side or does it cause harm to their opponents?

Despite all that has been revealed so far, as well as the massive media gaslighting campaign last year, people still think there is truth in the media. There is little doubt that the Harris campaign turned many people from civic nationalist into something else, but for many, the whole thing was forgotten after the election. It is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which is when you see something in the media that is an obvious lie but then forget that story and trust the next story in the same media site.

What all this tells us is that even though normal defeated crazy in November and the Trump admin has a plan to defeat the Blob in order to restore sobriety back to politics, the road back to normal will be long and full of trouble. Scan the fever swamps and it is clear that events have had no impact on the crazies. If anything, they have become crazier now that they have shuffled off mainstream platforms into places like Bluesky and Reddit where they are free to fly their freak flags.

Similarly, the media has learned nothing from the last decade. They put everything they had into dragging Harris over the finish line but failed because not enough people trust them anymore. Despite the massive rejection that was the November election, they are now leaning into the same tactics that brought them to this point. The employees of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post still think they get to tell the owner of the company to buzz off and leave the running of it to them.

While it does appear that we have reached the end of a cycle of madness, perhaps several historical cycles that culminated in the last decade, it is going to be a long road back to normal. The crazies will not simply go away. They must be defeated, caged, and only released when the conditions that created them are eradicated. The normals will have to be trained in the new way of engaging in politics. Much like Russia after communism, America is on the road to recovery, but it is a long road.

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 Escapists

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An iron law of the universe is the opposite law of liberalism, which states that whatever the left is saying, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. It is not a perfect rule in that the opposite is obvious or correct. It is just a good place to start when trying to figure out what they are doing. Projection plays a central role in the interior life of the progressive hive mind, so they inevitably accuse the enemies of the hive of doing what the hive is doing or has done.

An old example comes from the heady days of the Tea Party, which was a genuine populist and grassroots response to the cultural revolution. Normal, middle-class people started to organize against the Obama administration, but also the sissies of conservatism who were hiding under their beds at the time. Suddenly, people were turning up to protest and fight back against the gathering madness. It was a foreshadowing of what would come in 2016.

The response by the left was to accuse these people of being part of a conspiracy organized by the enemies of history. Nancy Pelosi famously said it was not a grassroots movement, but an AstroTurf movement. For those who do not know, AstroTurf is a genericized brand name or proprietary eponym for fake grass. Of course, what was true at the time and true to this day is the “grassroots” support of the left was bought and paid for by tax dollars laundered through the Blob.

It was one of those moments that revealed something about the sorts of people who end up in left-wing social movements. They always assume that the enemies of the hive operate as they do and will act like they would if given the chance. It is why they were sure Trump would trample your civil rights after he won in 2016. They knew that if they were in his position, that is what they would do. After the color revolution that toppled Trump and installed Biden, it is exactly what they did.

Now that Trump is back, we see the opposite rule kicking in as part of their coping strategy and effort to organize a response. The crazies are now free speech warriors, claiming Trump is going to start censoring people online. The very same people who chanted “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” as anyone with a sober thought in their head was evicted from Twitter are now carrying on as if they are Ann Frank, hiding in the attic from the MAGA police.

This story about how a handful of zombies turned up to yell at a Congressman is framed as a populist rebellion. These are people made angry by their television, so they show up on command at this event to be angry. A defining feature of these old, white progressives is they have no idea why they are angry. The person on their television is angry, so they are angry. They are the sort that started saying “keev” the weekend the war in Ukraine started, as if they always said it that way.

Of course, nothing about this is on the level. That is the great lesson of the populist rebellion that started with the Tea Party. Our politics have been entirely fake for decades, manufactured and controlled using government money. These efforts to repeat what worked in the past affirm it. Our politics for the last several decades have been pretty close to the opposite of what was beamed to us. “Our democracy” was absolute party control.

All ideologies rely on lies to fill the gap between their vision of the moral society and the reality of the human condition. This habit explains the violence that comes when the ideologues gain control. The lies are replaced by a program to fill the gap between ideology and reality. That gap is always filled with corpses, but it is never completely filled, so the lies return as the cost-effective option. In time, they become so comfortable with the lies that lying is the solution to everything.

We are seeing this in the “resistance” being rolled out in the media. It is not connected with reality but dreamed up by the same people who claimed they were defending democracy when they were harassing people for Facebook posts. The same narrative makers who swore all their failed schemes were working right up until it was obvious that they were not working are now busy imagining a scenario in which they are carried back to power on the shoulders of the people.

Things like the opposite rule are part of the essential appeal of ideology, which is an escape from reality. This is what ideology inherits from Christianity. The losers drawn to the new religion spreading around the Roman Empire were attracted to the promise of escape from this life. If they followed this new religion, they would one day stand shoulder to shoulder with the great men of this age in the sight of God. Ideology says the same thing but stops at the bit about God.

Libertarians imagine that one day they will be yeoman farmers, totally self-sufficient and liberated like the rich guys they admire. The antifascist imagines herself as a stunning and brave member of the committee, as respected as the men who never pay much attention to her. The conservative believes he will one day be rich like Donald Trump, but classy like Bill Buckley. The fascist imagines himself in a snappy uniform in charge of men, instead of a loser playing video games all day.

This is what brings us back to the opposite rule of liberalism. The last ideology, like all ideology, requires the suspension of disbelief. Accusing the bad guys of doing what you have done or are currently doing is a way to escape the reality of politics. It is not a fight for power, but a great crusade between white hats and black hats. To think otherwise is to be back in the reality from which you are trying to escape. The “resistance” to Trump are not losers, but the heroes of a story they are now writing.

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 End Of Ideology

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One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

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 Game of Chicken

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the blob, a post about big stupid trucks, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Last Wednesday was the kickoff of a show with Paul Ramsey, which you can watch on Paul’s channel. I also did an appearance on the Mike Farris show, which can be seen here.

The Trump administration’s opening of direct talks with the Russians setoff panic in Kiev and the capitals of Europe. The reason for that is Project Ukraine was centered on the acceptance that there could be no direct talks with Moscow, until the Russians surrendered their country to the control of the usual suspects. Trump’s call with Putin and then the meeting in Saudi Arabia violated this central assumption. First there was panic and now there is a game of chicken.

The Trump administration has concluded, after assessing the situation inside and outside the issue of Ukraine, that normalizing relations with Russia is in the best interest of the United States. One of the obstacles to that is the war in the Ukraine, so logically they are looking to wrap up the war as quickly as possible. The Russians have agreed to talks with Ukraine but insist on elections in Ukraine first. They point out that by the laws of Ukraine, Zelensky does not have the power to sign a deal.

Russophobes argue that this is a stalling tactic, but they are the ones demanding the unconditional surrender of Russia before any talks can start, so this is the usual projection that is a feature of the post-liberal West. The Russians, having been burned by the Minsk agreements charade, want the next deal to have teeth, so they are insisting that it be signed by the internationally and domestically recognized leader of Ukraine, which means new elections.

The Russians would probably drop this demand if the EU were willing to co-sign whatever deal is struck, but such an offer will never come. The reason is the whole project relies on never having direct talks with the Russians. This is the trap setup in 2023 to keep everyone committed to Project Ukraine. Ukraine passed a law forbidding direct talks with Russia in exchange for unlimited support. Europe signed on in exchange for unlimited support from Washington.

The reason the Biden administration expedited the remaining weapons and money allocated to this project was an effort to prevent the incoming Trump administration from rethinking these arrangements. They would not have time to do that, as Ukraine would immediately need more money and weapons. The assumption was that they would have no choice but to go along with more money and weapons, thus entangling Trump in the Ukraine trap.

The underlying assumption was that Trump would not walk away from Project Ukraine and risk the image of Russian tanks rumbling through Kiev. This is the assumption the Europeans and Zelensky are relying on as they deal with Trump. In fact, Zelensky is so confident of this that he is going out of his way to jerk around the Trump administration on the mineral rights deal. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are coming to Washington this week to set Trump straight.

Reportedly, Starmer and Macron will present a plan to Trump that has the UK and France putting troops into Ukraine, while the United States provides air cover from bases in Poland and Romania. In effect, the United States must create a no-fly zone over Ukraine and go to war with Russia if the Russians violate it. The madness of the scheme is so beyond the pale it is hard to accept as real, but the Europeans are operating in an alternative reality from the rest of us.

The Trump people see that the main obstacle to their plans for normalizing relations with Russia is Zelensky. Anyone who has dealt with a deadbeat knows Zelensky and the best way of dealing with this type is to get rid of them. Elections will remove him from the picture. The end of American support will also remove him from the picture, as the only reason for him to exist is as a facilitator of money and arms into Ukraine, mostly the money, which is stolen by Ukrainian officials.

The danger of pulling the plug on Ukraine is that it could be bad public relations, which is where the mineral rights dispute comes into play. The point of this is to make it appear as if Zelensky is unwilling to make a deal for more money and make it look like he is the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump’s team has figured out that Zelensky cannot sign the mineral deal, and he cannot agree to negotiations, so they are pressing on both in order to shift the blame to him.

What is setting up is a game of chicken. On one side we have Zelensky and the Europeans, who are sure Trump will never walk away from Ukraine. It is why they are getting bolder in their demands. They think Trump is bluffing. On the other side we have Team Trump who is sure the Europeans will fall in line, rather than risk a break with Washington, even if it means abandoning Ukraine. Zelensky is sure he has fooled everyone with his latest schemes.

For their part, the Russians are making the prudent bet. It costs them nothing to talk with the Trump administration and there is a good chance it leads to a positive outcome, so they will follow that route to the end. Similarly, the Chinese have made positive noises about the start of talks between Moscow and Washington. Like the Russians, the Chinese welcome the return of normalcy to Washington. China and Russia are open for business and ready to make deals.

It is too soon to know how this ends, but this game of chicken revolves around Zelensky being the ruler of Ukraine, which means the way to avoid a collision is to remove him from the equation. The Russians figured this out two years ago. The Chinese figured it out last year when they had talks with him. Now the Trump administration has arrived at the same conclusion. That leaves the Europeans and the bet in the White House right now is they will choose Washington over Zelensky.

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 Think New Think

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One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

Once you look at the war the way Trump has been looking at the war since it started, his approach makes perfect sense. He is doing now what he would have done if he were in the White House for a second term. He opened a dialogue with the Russians, and he minimized Zelensky. The reason for that is this war is not about Ukraine or some abstract concepts from the past century. It is about how conflicts between the great powers will be settled in the future.

Here is where you see the two class of people. Zelensky is operating from the old model where moralizing about world affairs was the rule. It was about those old 20th century ideas of good guys and bad guys. Trump is operating from the new model where everything is about business. Project Ukraine is bad business, so it must end and there is nothing more to say about it. Zelensky is the project manager who thinks the project is about something other than business.

Zelensky is not alone in this. His friends in Europe are also trapped in the past, thinking that they are skillfully playing the old game, when in reality they are soon to join Zelensky in the room of formerly relevant figures. The British figurehead Keir Starmer is coming to Washington next week thinking he is going to explain things to President Trump with regards to Zelensky. In reality he is going to be sat down by Trump subordinates and told he has been demoted.

Trump signaled as much when a reporter asked him about Starmer announcing his trip to Washington last week. Trump casually said that Starmer wanted to visit, but he was unsure of when he was coming. He treated it like the pool guy called and said he had to do something about the algae. That should have been a signal to the Brits that Starmer will not be welcomed as an equal, but like everyone else in Europe, they are struggling to come to terms with the new world order.

The same thing is happening locally. Scan many conservative sites or their accounts on Twitter and they are carrying on like it is 1985. Granted, this has been their act since 1985, but it is clearly not 1985 now. They are still doing the “If we use our power then the we are no better than the Democrats” act. The dumbest ones are still singing from the neocon hymn book. Dissidents have often joked that conservativism is a museum to the Reagan years, but now it is painfully true.

In fairness, the dancing partner of the conservatives are struggling as well. This tweet from a progressive chattering skull is emblematic. He is working from the old playbook that says the “left” calls out the “right” about not following the rules and the “right” then uses that to fink on their voters. The people operating in the new way of things just shrug at this stuff. The whole point of the present moment is to flip over the tables in the temple of politics and usher in a new age.

This is not just a struggle for the establishment. Old think is a problem for people who claimed to be dissidents. The people called “right-wing influencers” are struggling to maintain an audience because their act is suddenly irrelevant. Many are now becoming Trump critics because it is the only way to get attention. It turns out that they were never for anything, just against things. Remove those things they oppose, and they are left with a gaping hole in their act.

Where all this leaves us is we have two classes of people now. There are those who are embracing the new way of doing things, even if how it all works is not all that clear, and then there are those who wish to remain in the past century. Perhaps this will be the new political spectrum. The left will be the dead-enders who continue to look backward, and the right will be those facing the future. Regardless of the labels, the future will belong to those who embrace it, leaving the past in the past.

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 New Deal Bookend

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The assault on the Blob has taken up most of the attention in Washington, along with the reproachment with Russia, but the biggest item on the Trump agenda is the restructuring of the American economy. If you listen to what Trump says when asked about what has been happening thus far, it often circles back to the economy and how he imagines it to be after his changes. The thing is no one in the media follows up on it so Trump is never asked about that end goal.

There were some hints in the Russia coverage. One of the participants from the Russian side was the head of their sovereign wealth fund. This is something Trump has said he wants to create for the American government. A sovereign investment fund is a state-owned investment fund that does the same things a private investment fund, except it also has an eye on policy. A sovereign wealth fund acts as an additional level in both foreign and domestic policy.

This is not a thing you typically see in the West, as the Western economic model is built on the assumption that the government should not meddle in markets. This is a big lie, of course, as Western governments regulate everything. The thing is the regulations are dictated by the market makers through the miracle of regulatory capture, so the political class has limited control of the regulations. A sovereign wealth fund would put the political class on an even footing with the market makers.

That brings us back to the administrative state and the Blob that has consumed it over the last thirty years. In theory it regulates the economy in the interests of the people, but in reality, it has been a conduit so that the parasites within the blob can suck the blood, as in money, from the system. That money is used to maintain control of the host and launch projects abroad. Trillions are sent into the system, but what comes out does not make any sense to anyone, even the people inside it.

Take the Department of Education, for example. It was organized under Jimmy Carter for the purpose of housing all educational programs under one agency. Today it has a quarter trillion-dollar budget and employs 3900 people. Now, that does not mean those employees have a sixty-million-dollar salary. Most of the money gets sent to the states via grants and subsidies. Put another way, a tiny number of people in Washington dictate education policy to the country through this agency.

Trump has ordered its dismantling, but it is not about the money. Pell Grants, for example, are not going away yet. They would be shifted to another agency and eventually either automated or killed off by Congress. The reality is things like Pell Grants are a subsidy to colleges and universities, not students. All government subsidies end up in the pockets of the industry getting the subsidy. If you create grants for buying BMW’s, then BMW raises its prices by the amount of the grant.

From the Trump perspective, the federal government meddles in the economy far too much, but even worse, it meddles in the wrong things, while at the same time it ignores the big things that it should be managing. The federal government spends hundreds of billions subsidizing colleges and universities but ignores the bizarre trade relations we have with Canada and Mexico. In other words, Trump-o-nomics is not rebranded conservatism or libertarianism. It is a radical reordering of priorities.

One way to think of what Trump has in mind is the corporate model, but the start-up variety rather than the late stage decline model. American Inc. is an aging company like IBM that is bogged down in old rules and old thinking. It survives, not on making new and better products, but on the proceeds of past success. If you were to revitalize IBM, you would strip out the good stuff into a new company and hand it to smart people and leave the old stuff to the investors.

That is the goal of the Trump program. The new model for American Inc. is to be like a startup where the people running it, the Executive branch, set the general goals and the broad operational outlines, but the people inside of it, the states, business, and the people, are left to figure out the rest. Things like tariffs, global trade deals and the sovereign wealth fund are tools for setting the broad agenda and correcting imbalances that arise inside the economy.

Anyone familiar with startups or growth companies knows that the enemy of growth and innovation is management. In the 1990’s, for example, ambitious people would see the hiring of human resources people as a sign to move onto the next startup, because they understood that human resources were the death of innovation. The assault on the Blob, therefore, is like the termination of the human resources, diversity, and training departments of a struggling corporation.

There is much more to this, but the thing to take away is that what is happening is just the small setup parts for a larger reshaping of the economic order. Those meetings with the Russians are more about economics than war. In fact, you already hear the change in language regarding Ukraine away from ideology and to economics. For Trump and America Inc., Ukraine is a bad business deal. The goal now is to bring it to a quick close and claw back some of the money.

In this regard, the Trump era may one day be seen as the bookend to the New Deal era that gave rise to the managerial state. It has been lost to the need to recast the New Deal to fit modern narratives, but the FDR people were inspired by what was happening in Europe at the time. This is what gave Burnham the inspiration to write the book, The Managerial Revolution. The irony of the man they swear is Hitler bringing to an end a system partially inspired by Hitler should not go unnoticed.

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 Post Of Judgement

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For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.

On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.

The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.

Ever since, the name of the game in politics has been to make sure you manage the media, which meant hiring an army of media consultants. Often, these people came out of the media. Of course, the media was an extension of the managerial class, so this new relationship created good jobs at good wages for people long on credentials and short on practical talent. This peaked under Obama when hundreds of media members got jobs in his administration.

This is why politics shifted from backrooms and onto the pages of the media, where narratives, narrative management and narrative collapse became the defining features of the public debate. The point of politics was to create a story, in which the hero defeated the villain and everyone clapped. This was to herd the managerial class into the hero side and paint the enemies of the managerial class as the villain. Politics was all about good guys and bad guys, as determined by the media.

In the end, American politics was like a Greek drama. The players on the stage were cast in their roles not by their actions, but by the commentary provided by the chorus, which was the media. It reached the point where in the Obama years, people truly thought “healthcare” was a thing that existed in unlimited quantities, but needed to be freed from the grasp of the monster called the insurance companies. Healthcare reform was a bizarre pantomime for the entertainment of Washington.

In the digital age, it went beyond the parlor games of the political class so that media power became the tip of the spear in the cultural revolution. Every activist declared herself a journalist and dedicated her life to finding heretics. Her job was to “report on the heretic” but her hope was that major media would pick up her “reporting” and have the heretic hurled into the void. Like every political terror in the ideological age, what started with the politicians was visited on the people.

This is when ideological and theological fevers break. People can suspend their disbelief and accept even the most bizarre moral framing, when it is limited to the action on the stage. They know it is just entertainment. Even when in the form of a lecture or sermon, they believe they can take from it what they will. When the directors of the moral drama begin dragging the people onto the stage, or off to the gulag, then the people can no longer suspend their disbelief.

The natural questions of all moral disputes then begin to appear. Those questions are “Who says?” and “So what?”. These questions crept up on the managerial class over the last ten years and they were never able or willing to answer them. This became obvious in the runup to the election. The media kept screaming, “Trump is evil!” and the people kept wondering, “Who says?” When they yelled about his alleged crimes and indictments, the response was, “So what?”

A great man once said that you will know that the revolution is upon us when a conservative waddles onto the stage muttering about the various “isms” and “who we are” and the audience remains silent. Then someone giggles, then another laughs and suddenly a wave of laughter sweeps the room. The great preference cascade is unleashed as everyone all at once seems to realize that everyone else thinks what they think about these ridiculous fools.

It is what we are now witnessing. Team Trump has started smashing up the managerial system in ways thought impossible. The media rushed to their pulpits to give their sermons, but the audience just laughed. The Wall Street Journal did the point and shriek at one of the DOGE kids and the audience not only laughed but turned “Big Balls” into a hero of the cause. The Vice President now goes on Twitter and mocks reporters who do the point and shriek.

There was a scene in the movie Braveheart in which William Wallace kills a group the king’s soldiers in an effort to free his wife. The last of them is the magistrate, who had killed Wallace’s wife. Wallace initially lowers his eye when he confronts him, then looks him straight in the eye and slashes the man’s throat. It is a great scene because it reflects the reality of power. The man had power over Wallace, as long as had moral authority, but he had squandered it.

That is what is happening in the United States. The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade. Their excesses not only damaged their credibility but also discredited their moral claims. They are now on the same level as the rest of us and we are cheering as the DOGE kids put them against the post.

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 Universe Smiles

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Tomorrow the Trump team arrives in Germany to participate in the Munich Security Conference, where they are expected to inform the Europeans of their plans to bring Project Ukraine to an end. No one knows what Trump is planning, but the Europeans are braced for bad news. That bad news is either a plan for peace brokered without them or a plan that hands the whole mess over to them. Team Trump had made clear that their first priority is accounting for the money.

As a general rule, anytime the guy giving the money starts making angry noises about accounting for the money, the guy receiving the money is in trouble. This type of scene is always part of gangster movies for a reason. It means the giver is unhappy with the receiver and has come to a conclusion about the arrangement that is going to be bad for the receiver. Imagine some DOGE kids stuffing Zelensky into a locker and you have a good idea of what is coming.

To make matters worse, Trump just had a long call with Putin and both sides described it in very positive language. There has been an exchange of prisoners, with Trump indicating the Russians asked for little in return. He was making clear that he understood their gesture and was ready to reciprocate. It is the sort of thing that is done when two sides are looking to build a larger relationship. You do small deals to build trust and develop a process for larger deals.

What is clear is that Trump has looked at his options with regards to Ukraine and did not see a deal worth pursuing. The Russians are not interested in anything but the deal they feel was done in Istanbul in 2022, plus some extra to cover the costs of litigating it on the battlefield for the last two years. They will get that deal either at the table or on the battlefield and there is nothing to be done to prevent them. Trump seems to understand this and accepts it.

Deal making always starts with discovery. You must first learn if there is a deal to be had, otherwise you are wasting your time. The number one rule in deal making in the private sector is that time is your most precious asset. The best salesmen maximize their time by not wasting time chasing bad business. For Trump, Project Ukraine, as constructed by his predecessor, is bad business. The goal now is to get this off the agenda as quickly as possible.

Most likely, the starting place this week is to inform the Europeans and Zelensky that the deal for them right now is Istanbul plus some other things. If they are ready to take that deal, then the Trump Team will hammer out the deal with the Russians and at some point, the Ukraine government will be invited in to sign it. Who the representative of that government is will be determined by elections to be held immediately. That means Zelensky will not be part of the signing ceremony.

This is why they are talking about the money. Imagine the bosses from Chicago coming out to Las Vegas to talk to the guy they sent out to oversee their operations, and their first question is, “Where’s our money?” Zelensky made the fatal mistake of saying he will never be able to account for it. That sealed his fate. There is simply no way Trump will do business with the guy. It now means any support requires elections and repayment of the money.

Like the guy who cannot pay in the gangster films, this leaves Zelensky and the Europeans in an impossible position, which is the point. Team Trump is prepared to work with the Russian on other issues, even if they cannot get a deal on Ukraine, so they are prepared to walk away from Ukraine entirely. If Europe wants to keep the United States engaged, then it means elections and an accounting of the hundreds of billions sent to Kiev over the last three years.

Now that the Trump plan is coming into focus, the girl boss running EU foreign policy issued a statement declaring the unconditional support for Ukraine. Not having come to grips with what is happening in Washington, she seems to think Team Trump will sit down with her to talk it out and come to a compromise. Instead, this will be used to justify handing the whole mess over to the Europeans so Trump can move onto matters far more important than Project Ukraine.

This is the other thing coming into focus. The war caused the Russians to rethink their relationship with Europe. They stopped taking calls from people like Macron and Schultz, because there was no point in speaking with them. The Chinese have gone out of their way to humiliate European leaders who turn up in Beijing. Men close their doors to the setting sun and that is what is happening to Europe. The emerging great powers of the new world order are ignoring Europe.

Now we are seeing Trump do the same thing. Vance was in Paris this week, in advance of the Munich meeting, and he told the Europeans in no uncertain terms how things are going to be going forward. They were properly offended, and that was most certainly the point of his speech. Friday, the Trump delegation is going to tell the Europeans how it is going to be with regards to Ukraine. If they do not like it, they can go it alone, but everyone knows they lack the ability to do it.

It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor. Four years ago, the Eurocrats were congratulating themselves along with Biden people, telling each other stories about the new world order and how they would build back better. Now, the guy they thought they had vanquished will be telling them their place in the new world order. The guy building back better, will be the guy they were sure was the final boss in their quest to spread the managerial revolution around the globe.

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!