Monthly Archives: February 2025

The End Of Minoritarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Blob War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Destroyer Of Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!