Monthly Archives: April 2025

Essential Violence

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Note: Paul is back from vacation, so that means we are back tonight for the Wednesday livestream, which you can find here and here. You can also watch on Twitter, but there is no link until it is live. Just go to Paul’s Twitter page. The show kicks off at 8:00 PM EDT and the topic tonight is AI.

In 19th century America, it was popular to argue that there are four boxes for maintaining political liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge. There is also a version that has just three boxes, which drops the jury box from the model. The soap box is public speech used to persuade the ruling class. The ballot box is the democratic process. The jury box is the legal process, and the cartridge box is violence. The order of the boxes is important as it is both a warning and a promise.

The warning here is directed toward the public. Skipping any of these steps will inevitably be self-defeating. The sorts of people who want to litigate everything, for example, are the sorts of people who will litigate away your liberty. We see this with the inferior court judges. They are like all self-defined underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people they opposed. These people are always more dangerous than present tyrants.

The other side of this is directed at the people in charge. Their status as a ruling elite depends on making sure that the traditional rights and protections of the people are maintained in those first two boxes. Once the people abandon the soap box and the ballot box for the jury box, it is not long before they reach for the cartridge box, and there is no turning back from that one. Of course, an elite that uses the jury box to undermine the ballot box is asking for the cartridge box.

That is what we see in the West: the use of lawfare by the managerial class to both circumvent the soap box and the ballot box. The latest example is in France, where the courts have willy-nilly decided that the most popular politician in the country is no longer allowed to participate in politics. Marine Le Pen was found guilty of trumped-up charges and sentenced to what amounts to internal banishment. Her punishment is like what happened to Khrushchev in the 1960s.

This is the pattern in the West. Romania arrested and then banned the most popular politician in the country for the crime of winning the election. Germany is planning to ban the AfD for the crime of being popular. The new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has publicly stated that one of his goals will be to work with the EU to overthrow the Hungarian government. Of course, the UK has declared itself an apartheid state by imposing a two-tiered legal regime aimed at the opposition.

The most famous example of the managerial class abuse of the jury box to circumvent the soap and ballot box is Donald Trump. They tried to remove him from office in his first term, then rigged the 2020 election to deny him a second term. When he did not get the message, they used lawfare against him in the same way we see in Europe, except that Trump managed to win at the jury box. Note they reached for the cartridge box when they failed at the jury box.

The assassination of Trump is a good reminder that it is almost always the case that once either side of the political system reaches the jury box, one side or the other will reach for the cartridge box. The jury box is where irreconcilable differences are confirmed to both sides, no matter the result. The reason there is always the smell of sulfur around attorneys is not only due to who they serve. It is also because sulfur is an essential element of gunpowder.

What we see happening in the West is a reminder that the last box in that formulation is essential to preserve the three other boxes. The 19th century French social thinker, Georges Sorel, explained that political violence is not a sign of chaos, but a healthy antidote to political oppression. It is often the creative destruction needed to free the political marketplace so it can produce healthy politics. Violence also has the effect of energizing the people to defend their ancient liberties.

Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in his famous letter to William Smith from which we get the famous quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Jefferson was not justifying political violence for its own sake. He pointed out that violent resistance is often a necessary reminder to the ruling class of what lies ahead if they ignore the soap box and the ballot box. Shays’ Rebellion was a warning and a promise.

It may be why American oligarchs joined the Trump team. When Luigi Mangione popped out from behind the car to gun down that insurance executive, it let every oligarch know the cartridge box remains an option. If French judges and politicians suddenly come down with lead poisoning, maybe the poseur class in Paris will suddenly rethink their position too. If not, then it guarantees the French end up at the cartridge box anyway.

This is the most likely end for the West as a whole. The Trump reforms will surely fail, as reform is almost always an effort to relieve the pressure of general discontent while maintaining the status quo. In Europe, the ruling class is nakedly hostile to the native population, hellbent on pulling the roof down to spite the people. They will not be talked out of their positions, and they will not be voted out of them. Since the courts are now owned by the managerial class, it leaves the last option.

The irony of all this is that the great lesson of Western history is that liberty only comes when the people join to spill blood. As the sun sets on Western man, this truth is becoming clearer with each outrage by the ruling class. The people endlessly yelping about “our democracy” are killing the West. It is only through the blood of these parasites and vermin that the new Western man will regain his lands and liberty. After the jury box comes the cartridge box.

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!

No Peace

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After a flurry of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, the Trump peace initiative regarding the war in Ukraine seems to have run out of steam. The last round of talks stalled over the conditions required to create a Black Sea ceasefire. The Russians laid out the conditions they would require, the conditions they agreed to in 2022 under the Black Sea grain deal. Ukraine flatly rejected those terms this time. The Europeans have also made clear that they will never agree to peace.

After Ukraine and the EU rejected the terms, Putin said some things that got little note in the West but were clearly a signal to the Trump administration. The first was at a meeting of Russian industrialists where Putin told them that despite talks with Washington, they should not expect the end of sanctions. The new world order, so to speak, is one in which the Russian economy will operate independently of the West and within the framework of BRICS.

That was a clear signal to the Trump people that ending sanctions was not a carrot and new sanctions are not a stick. The Russians have moved on from the old model where their economy was connected to the Western model. Despite the last three years, the West remains convinced that sanctions are working, and that Russia desperately wants back into the Western economic model. Until the Trump administration sees the folly in this, negotiations with Russia will go nowhere.

Another thing Putin said was in response to a question at a public event about the Trump effort to get a ceasefire. Putin said there will not be a Minsk 3. This is a reference to prior deals with the West over Ukraine. In Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, the Russians agreed to get trapped Western advisors in the war zone free of the Donbass militias in exchange for a peace deal that never materialized. In both cases, the West just poured more weapons into Ukraine.

This is a very sore subject for Russians. They see these prior deals as efforts to trick and humiliate them. When Trump publicly asked Putin to let the trapped Ukrainian troops in Kursk escape, it set off alarm bells in Moscow. It looked like the same old tricks from the Western tricksters. That is the reason Putin made a point of saying there will never be a Minsk 3. He was telling the Russian public and the Russian elite that he will not be fooled a third time.

That has led to two other things Putin said last week. One is he said the Russian army is ready to finish off the Ukrainian army. That is a bold statement, out of character for Putin. He has been warning of a five- or ten-year war since the West cancelled the Istanbul agreements. To now talk about a quick end of the war suggests that something big is on the drawing board. It could also mean the Ukrainian army is in far worse shape than is being reported.

This comment about the end of the war came with a comment about putting Ukraine into what amounts to receivership. Putin suggested that the post-war process would start with the removal of the Kiev government and put the administration of the country into the hands of a UN group. This caused Trump to call NBC’s Manjaw Crazyeyes and rant about being “pissed off” at Putin. He said he is planning to apply new sanctions to Russia in response to these statements.

What all of this points to is that the Trump peace initiative is dead. The Russians were willing to listen, but now that it is clear that Trump has no leverage over Ukraine or Europe, there is no point in continuing the charade. The war in Ukraine will end by military means and then maybe there can be a negotiated settlement. That was the point Putin was making last week. Whether or not the Trump administration understands this is unknown.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, at least the permanent elements, independent of the administration, does get this. They wrote a long, mendacious thriller for the New York Times where they blame the failure of Project Ukraine on the Ukrainians and to a lesser extent the Trump administration. It is a long post worth reading for no other reason than it is a great example of narrative fantasy. It is written like a spy thriller because it is mostly self-serving fiction.

If you want to know why Western politicians seem to be so clueless about so much, it is because they rely on the storytellers called the media for their version of reality. All over Washington, staffers for elected officials read that Times story, shocked to learn that the American military has been running the war from the start. Normal people have known this since day one because the internet exists and people use it, but elected officials get their reality from the media.

The main point of that work of fiction is to make clear that the Ukraine failure was not the fault of the Military Industrial Complex. All the weapons were, in fact, wonder weapons that totally crushed those primitive Russians. NATO tactics were the best and completely baffled those drunken Russkies. The people who brought you the F-35 want to make clear that when the Russian flag is in Maidan Square, it was the fault of the people who refused to let the American military win the war.

As an aside, if you can get past the self-serving fiction, the article reveals just how close we were to extinction. There were people willing to go all in on attacking Russia, which would have provoked a nuclear retaliation. Unsaid, but implied, is that there were people willing to go nuclear, maybe even preemptively. If the Trump administration is serious about changing foreign policy, a top priority must be hunting down those people and permanently removing them from society.

Putting that aside, what all of this tells us is that there will be no negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war, at least not until things on the battlefield change. Perhaps when the Ukrainian army begins to break in a major way, reality will get over the media firewall into the brains of the political classes in the West. Maybe the Trump administration understands this, maybe not. It does not matter because they are not in control of events, so they can only stand by and watch.

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!