174 thoughts on “Natural Excogitating”

1. Every religious cult has a leader. It isn’t just a hive. The members form the hive but someone or some small group provided the overall belief structure and direction.

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3. While I subscribe much more to the hive mind ideology so articulately explained here, however, sometimes I think there is a hive mind working behind the scenes also influencing the people in charge of most of the world’s wealth to make decisions that affect the world in very negative ways to further influence their acquisition of wealth.

   No conspiracy is needed, say for example the destruction of the family as it existed in western civilization traditionally. I don’t think some group of evil men sat down in their stuffed chairs and decided to destroy family values, but the fact that those with large quantities of wealth are evidently only motivated by the acquisition of wealth, they then will just instinctually make decisions that influence their further acquisition of wealth. Since having a traditional family isn’t conducive to that goal, they inadvertently seek to destroy it.

   This is all to say, that while there are likely no large-scale conspiracies taking place, sometimes we get the same result as if there was one just through the intrinsic motivations of those who hold all of the wealth.

   Just my two cents.

4. Pemberton and Prescott are both named Karen.

   This is what happens when you let cunt in charge.

5. Sorry, but there is a much cleaner and more likely explanation for all that we see about us, all the chaos, the evil, the utter abandonment and rejection of everything that is good and acceptance of utterly abominable ideas and practices. One that has its roots in ancient times. It is as simple as the tableau enacted between Eve and the Nachash in The Garden. She believed the lie that she could be as a god, whereas she had been created a physical being by her Creator; she was not satisfied to be made in His Image, but desired something else. She used Adam’s love for her to cause him to succumb to her desires and when he did, everything that had been created very good was not good any longer, but had been permanently despoiled. Even so, God had a plan, one that required the sacrifice of a vital part of Himself, and so God eventually became man and dwelt among us. The continuing conflict between God and those who He created as spirits but who also rejected that status (whom some call “fallen angels”) continues to play out, and the end of the play is outlined in the prophetic books of The Bible. Daniel the Prophet and John the Revelator set it all down for future generations to read and understand. There is simply now no longer any room in the created world for a Christ-believing nation-state; its fall is certain, in order that the Man of Sin, The Despoiler, the Antichrist might arise and take his place at the head of nations. Believe this or scoff at it, the choice is yours. But know that your belief or skepticism is irrelevant to the working-out of God’s plan. You can either take your side with Him or against Him, your choice. But as someone in a movie somewhere said, “Choose wisely.”

6. The hive mind has been fragmenting for a very, very long time. We saw this in the last election. The majority of Donks hate Biden and Kammeltoe, and the inner party literally had to impose them on the outer party. It makes sense when you look at the ages of their leaders. They’re out of touch geriatrics with no real contact with the real world. The deep state can no longer cover for the failing hive mind, or execute its orders contradict each other almost daily now. They are going to start turning on each other soon.

   Only the radical partisans can track with the hive mind now.

7. I think the murmuring is the method of control, lead the top and they all follow. However the flock always flies in the direction of the stated goals of the WEF . why do they always fly in the direction of ruining the west and us in particular? If it were natural , they would fly in our direction at least once in a while because probability demands that it would . Even by mistake the would be right once in in while like a clock is stopped clock is right twice a day. But they never ever do. I have no idea who the power is behind the WEF. Their agenda is further ahead in Europe . Germany is wrecked , the UK is following , and France is too. I would Love to believe it is random herd movement , that is a lot safer than the belief that there really is a group out there that wants a LOT less of us in the world .

   • The key difference I see in the following of the edicts of the WEF between US and Europe lies in the banks. Outs directly own and control the Fed. In Europe the Central Bank is purely a political tool. In Europe they are heading toward a CBDC: Central Bank Digital Currency, that system leaves no room for the Banker Rentier Class of Dimon et al to cream their 3 % off the top of the entire economy . It beggers belief but Citibank and JPMorgan may save us from total ruin: Europe is fucked beyond redemption.

8. Fun fact:

   I recently went to a stadium Gen-X rock concert at a major southern metropolitan venue. Before the show and during intermission, I chatted with a married couple of 49/50 year olds who were ex-journalists for the city newspaper. The woman works as a cashier at Wal-mart now and says she’s happier, despite the cut in pay and status. They quit their journalism careers because of the leftist hive mind. She used the word commies more than once and bemoaned the lack of open mindedness in the field. Funny, the wife was the most vocal about the leftist crap.

   This was a “white pill” experience, but it struck me as another form of “white flight”, and the VERY reason that leftists have taken over all the institutions. Just as blacks in cosmopolitan areas now run the social security office and are the principals of our kids schools, the left has no check on itself within the media, and the hive mind that exists there may well be a creation caused by right-wing abandonment just as much, if not more-so than a “March through the institutions”

   • No one now living is old enough to have made a difference by not fleeing/abandoning enemy territory.

     By the time I got into an Ivy League school over thirty years ago, it had been fully long-marched for fifty years already. The “Great Awokening” was in 1969. I’m *astounded* that any righty thinks it happened recently—and I enjoy insulting them about it, especially smug crypto-shitlib Sailer types, because it means they couldn’t get into a Good School™ where they’d have seen the future (present) clearly.

     There are things we can do, things we could always have done, but they’re not institutional reforms, holding ground, voting, “voting” with our dollars/feet, standing up for what’s right, etc. We lost the war a long time ago. But losing isn’t always permanent.

     • That’s what I’m getting at.

       I fully realize that some things are too far gone. The two ex-journalists I spoke of would probably have been ardent leftists had they been around in the 60s. Their conservative sensibilities probably reflect left leaning “moderate” positions from 25 years ago before “transgender”, gay marriage, 8 years of a black president, and unchecked immigration.

       My ultimate point is that the knee jerk is for rightist thinking people is to quit, stop voting, give up, move out into the woods, yank their kids out of college, and only worsen the problem.

       • Memebro: BS. Back when we used to attend organized church regularly, I remember the women who sent their children to public school (we debt financed our sons’ Christian private schooling) claiming the little ones provided ‘salt and light’ to the unwashed masses when they bowed their blonde heads and prayed over lunch. Not one of them would ever admit they sacrificed their kids in order to virtue signal so they could continue to be a ‘working mom.’

         My older son was already identified as a wrong-thinker in public high school, and we supported his adamant refusal to go to college despite his near-genius level IQ. He would have gone mad listening to the general drivel and would not have been able to hold his tongue for four years. And for what – to end up working for Globohomo or marrying a Han?

       • I know a far left career woman who calls herself “childfree” and supports abortion up to birth.

         Recently she seems to have snapped and has moved to the right wing. Homeless junkies shooting up heroin on the street, daily shootings by vibrants, and the constant reminder of her genetic inferiority caused by her Whiteness seems to have hastened the change.

         Obviously she is a crazy, far left extremist and always will be. But even somebody like that is noticing. It’s just interesting. Women seem to be further right than men when they do move that way.

   • Maybe, but there again, I think the main institutions are beyond help. For example, does anyone really think Washington DC can be turned around? We have to create out own alternative structures and make sure the Bolsheviks never again infiltrate them.

9. A few thoughts on this…Very successful people are highly individualistic. That is why they have several confabs every year. They try to find common ground for their mutual benefit. That is why Trump was so hated. Not because he had millions of “Joe Six-packs” behind him. He represented a small but growing minority group of breakaway elites. He could not be controlled through bribery, as he was a member of the top end of the NYC commercial real estate market. His crimes were the same as every other major player in commercial real estate. Do you really think that the political class would go after major players in their big cities? There goes the tax base.
   For a little historical perspective, go back to the 30 Years war in Europe. It’s commonly defined as a religious conflict, Catholics vs. Protestants. But that isn’t true. It was actually a fight between various European elites over their difference in how to rule and the distribution of goodies and power. The lesson learned from that is that all elites lost enormous amounts of actual wealth, mainly through the devastation of the peasant population. Valuable land was left fallow, disease ran rampant, and mercenary armies, which did most of the fighting, wreaked havoc on those communities long after the official cessation of hostilities.
   Right now, “wokeness” is good for the bottom line. It is keeping the majority of the herd happy. The problem is those of us who keep trying to keep things going, who make things work against all obstacles. We are our own worst enemies, because we steadfastly refuse to let the system fail. And hey, I get it. We are builders and creators, so destruction goes against our very natures. The elite knows that. Every successful elite leader is a shrewd judge of character. They wouldn’t be so successful if they weren’t. But consider this, what if we start amplifying wokeness?
   An example: in the Universities, white professors screech about racism, white supremacy, white privilege. OK, attack them for being beneficiaries of institutional white privilege. They don’t deserve their positions. Get them fired. We know what wokeness is, let’s push it to its real endpoint. When the yachts have no fuel, and the planes don’t fly, and there are no utilities for the estates, only then will changes happen. The reality is, we will suffer first. Are we willing to do that?

   Mike

10. Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Thursday boasted that the Israeli pressure campaign with Washington over the Iran nuclear deal has had a positive effect in Israel’s favor.

    In her series of articles about Jeffry Epstein, Whitney Webb wrote extensively about an interconnected group of people collaborating for their collective benefit. Part of the network includes the megagroup, a group of twenty fuzzy hat billionaires, including such as paul singer who collaborates with IDF unit 8200 to migrate technology to the “start up nation,” Les Wexner who provided Jeff with a mansion to generate blackmail information and Lauder who is head of world jewish congress.

    Merely random birdies on a power line going tweet tweet tweet?

    • It’s called the Talmud and give it a read sometime, or read this excellent treatise on it by the Holy father Rev. J.B. Pranaitis. Very quickly the nature of our conflict becomes clear as well as the actions of the people in the little hats which seem only to harm whites. The following 120 years from its publication, the “Jewish Century” as yids like to say (to each other), only serves as confirmation of this author’s righteousness. I understand for those who move in upper strata social circles that anti-anti-semitism is a requirement for you to keep your 6 figure job, but they will take that from you along with everything else they’ve already taken. They are the people responsible for no-fault divorce if your parents aren’t married by the way.

      • The book is called “The Talmud Unmasked” by the aforementioned priest.

11. A while ago I read a series of blog posts called The Gervais Theory, which was trying to model how a corporation works using characters from The Office as the archetypes. The author divided the company into three categories: losers, who are managed by the clueless, who are managed by the sociopaths.

    The losers do all the productive work as the proles, but they also tend to be cynical and dismissive of office politics and direct their energies into their outside friends and hobbies. The clueless are the low level managers who believe in the mission statements and enforce the pointless meetings and procedures that develop in a large company, essentially herding the losers and keeping them under control by hectoring them about TPS reports. The sociopaths operate as upper management and ignore the rules in favor of playing the Great Game among each other. While a loser might get fired for incompetence, a sociopath only gets fired when a rival sociopath gets one over on him.

    I suspect this model applies fairly well to the GAE: the elites to whom we are exposed are the hive-minded mass of clueless who instantly adopt The Current Thing and have no real thoughts of their own. They herd us by using the media to make sure the losers are afraid to wander outside the pasture, since even if we don’t believe in Keev or woke we still need to keep our jobs.

    The sociopaths are largely hidden from us in that they don’t tweet their insanity out constantly. They plant the Keev thing in the heads of the clueless in the first place because they have investments in Ukraine, the clueless squawk Keev because it’s the hive morality. All the wars and political intrigues start with the sociopaths trying to outmaneuver one another, the clueless’ job is to reframe that intrigue as a moral crusade, and our job as losers is to be taxed and occasionally go die in a pointless conflict.

    • Ploppy-

      Those were eventually packaged into a short book titled The Gervais Principle that can be had cheaply.

      The author wrote a companion book, Be Slightly Evil that is also worth a read.

12. I found this article confusing. There isn’t really a deep state but we should think of “people in charge as members of a religious cult and part of that cult is a hatred of normal people”? Sounds very deep-statish to me. Sorry, but there is a concerted and coordinated effort to destroy the global economy, push people into digital servitude, cut off our fuel and food supplies and push the Woke and PC garbage on to us at every opportunity. There is no way that the MSM, leaders of Western nations, heads of NGOs and “charitable” foundations are not in direct or indirect contact with each other on this one. And when we plebs pop our clogs, whether it is called the Deep State or Karl Heinz Rummenige, it won’t matter a damn. Because the results will be exactly the same.

    • Are you saying KHR is a deep stater? Dang, he was one of my favorite players. His ’82 performance against France in the semifinal was legendary.

      • FFS, Matt, the signs were ALL there, and you fell for his charm! Bad haircut – check; authoritarian moustache – check; immensely popular with German hausfraus – check! As for the ’82 final, I’m sure I saw a younger Klaus Schwab in the crowd giving him instructions via an earpiece. 🙂

    • Point well made, but we are not in a war of semantics. This is the real deal and the root issue is . . . what are you going to do about it? Why waste mental energy debating the nature of an abstract moniker for the root of the problem? We should be expending our mental resources on how best to address the problem in the tangible realm. Yes, this is not something to be discussed in the open, but nothing stops you from working the problem solely within the confines of your cranium.

      And what you can do out in the open is to share good ideas for becoming a better man. Isn’t that called self help guidance?

      • “what are you going to do about it?”

        Indeed!

        You must choose between what you “believe” in and your 401k, your home ownership, your clubs, your friends, basically life as you’ve known it. Which is more valuable to you? We either all hang separately by a death of a thousand cuts (current situation) or we all hang together and defend what we believe 😉

      • Ancient chinee wisdom say: A man who cannot define his enemy does not know who is enemy is, and will therefore lose every fight.
        TomA, how on earth can one “remove diseased cells” as you always state, if you do not know what a “disease” is?

        • I don’t know if you’ve ever been exposed to microbiology, but you can find lots of information on the internet if you do a search. What you will learn is that no two cells are identical, there is always some ambiguity. Yet, the antibodies still find a way to target disease cells and eliminate the threat. Which is why people recover from illness routinely. You may be suffering from analysis paralysis and remaining on the sidelines because you lack a perfect picture of what to do. There are infinite excuses for doing nothing, and they all lead to nothing, which is the worst form of losing.

      • Exactly. A few years back I almost died from a chest infection. The medics weren’t sure what it was (now don’t be shocked!): pneumonia, a very bad bronchitis or something more sinister. Lying there on what I thought might be my deathbed, I really didn’t give a damn. It hurt like hell and was on the point of killing me. Ditto with the Deep State. While we worry over semantics, they are hard at work.

    • “There isn’t really a deep state …”

      Most people are human cattle. We work, eat, defecate, and virtue signal in attempts to raise our our relative social status. Sometimes the reason we stampede will be internal: no evil mastermind behind it. One individual engages in a behavior and other emulate it in a chain reaction, often in the hope of raising their social status.

      Mass media has changed social network architecture and greatly facilitated propagation of social chain reactions. Some people noticed this (Bernays and those who learned from him) and learned how to create externally imposed human stampedes.

      Convincing most people that they are being stampeded like cattle and that they should learn to think critically seems a difficult challenge. An easier task might be diminishing the effectiveness of the mass media as a stampede initiator by undermining its legitimacy.

13. I’ve always been a believer in the emergent behavior theory because I saw it all the time in academia. College campuses are near-perfect labs for doing freelance sociology. It’s not just political — you see these weird fads in dress and slang and whatnot emerge out of nowhere, and disappear just as fast, because everyone is living in dorms and one of the cool kids started doing X, so by the following weekend they were all doing X.

    Same way with the professors, obviously, but much worse. But what’s really hilarious is when one of them doesn’t get the memo for whatever reason. I remember someone had been out with the flu or something. She came to the next faculty meeting and started virtue signaling in the usual way… but the catechism had changed while she was out with the flu, and so now the same people who would’ve been beaming at her yesterday were now looking at her like she was a leper. It was glorious.

    Indeed, you probably saw it yourselves. Remember when Stephen Colbert, I think it was, didn’t get the memo that James Comey was now a hero? He’d been a villain up to that morning, for going after Her Nibs’s emails. But then Trump fired him, so now he was a hero. Colbert (or whoever) didn’t get the memo, so the same “jokes” that would’ve had them arfing like seals just that morning now brought gasps of shock and outrage.

    That’s not conscious coordination. That’s pure, hindbrain, school of fish shit.

    • It was the clapping seals of his audience that didn’t receive the overnight update. Colbert had was shocked and quickly schooled them on the new change.

    • That’s actually a hybrid of both the Deep State and emergent behavior. Comey became openly anti-Trump because his Deep State handlers told him to do so, in part to keep their leftwing NPC’s on board with the police state apparatus. Colbert swam easterly as emergent behavior, and encouraged his fellow fish to do the same, which of course they did.

      The whole incident is a perfect illustration of how the Deep States uses, and, yes, sometimes engages in emergent behavior such as you described within the university faculty and administration.

    • Severian, what you are describing there is not emergent behavior. Emergent behavior is when the group engages in actions that cannot be explained by the characteristics of the individual constituent members. In your example, that is not the case: they are a community that lives, eats, and sleeps together, giving a clear channel of communication for ideas. It is easily explained as the conscious propagation of a characteristic that exists within one of its members, and the followers are copying a leader or the leaders. The leaders being whoever proposes the new idea or type of jeans or new way of introducing yourself. It might be “emergent” if you were unable to trace the trend down to an instigator, but that’s not going to be the case in your example (and for anti-social development trends, determining the size of the hats of the instigators are left to the reader as an exercise). What you are describing is “fashion” and when consciously carried out, “marketing,” not “emergent behavior.” “Emergent behavior” would be five white guys that can’t play basketball to save their lives, but when they all are on a team somehow we are able to beat other teams.

14. Both of these views have merit, and ultimately both are correct. There is a deep state which animates the hive mind. In the Bible it is called the Beast Kingdom. Seducing spirits and all that. It is correct to reject the view that this is just a group of men animating this evil, and that by exposing/defrocking/killing them etc. this will go away. If we destroyed everyone worldwide involved in this evil, it would return with a vengeance again within 40 years. This is the history of the world. The evil we face is far deeper and not as easily defeated. But it will be, and is worth opposing now.

15. All those lapel pins had to come from somewhere.

    • Perhaps they have warehouses full of lapel pins ready to go for any eventuality. Every flag in the world, hammer and sickle, alien ant overlords, swastikas…

16. I know, let’s get all Jungian and suggest that both conscious and unconscious play a role. Unconscious is the hive mind in various archetypes operating together. Conscious is the cabal of deep-state movie villains.

    But which witch is which?

17. Wokism and woke capital emerged for two reasons. 1). The overall culture of the country and the indoctrination camps called universities are turning out cookie cutter soy people. and 2). Capital itself, in a big enough pile, can’t fail right now. These people would cause it to fail in a “normal” environment.

    How many people remember “too big to fail?” excuses for the 2008 bailouts of the financial industry? You’ll soon hear that expression again next year. But it’s not just the financial sector. Cheap capital, artificially low interest rats, implied bailouts and subsidies for “essential” companies, merged oligarchy (see United Airlines) and captured regulators who would have imprisoned half our CFOs 60 years ago, create an eco-system where “capital” is socialized. And that’s where we are. This is NOT a free market. This is NOT a free society. This is NOT a free country. I say this all the time and get mostly blank stares, and derision from the over 60 crowd.

    • Chrysler was once too big to fail.

      • True. And that’s also why the 80’s Alzheimer’s patient in the White House had a checkered record at best, and is not some deity in clown makeup and a dog sh. t brown suit who should be worshiped.

    • But there’s also a lot of “nudging.” Most big capital funding, largely due to Larry Fink, requires ESG scoring for financing. If you’re a C-suite with millions of personal bonus money on the line based on getting the right corporate debt rollover, it’s pretty hard to say no to some NY banker offering 15 basis lower if you’ll hire the “hairy dude in a sundress” for some make-work position. Just take the ticket and you’ll be set. Sure, that will eventually cause huge problems, but that’s in the future, so it’ll be Other People’s Problem. You’ll have 8 figures in your cash accounts by the time that bill comes due….

18. Is there perhaps a third “hybrid” group – one that believes a “small” (let’s say .01%) who are master manipulators and carry an undue influence, and know how to use that influence to manipulate the hive? This does not deny the existence of either a relatively small but influential group or the hive/emergent behavior. They may not pull levers in the sense that their will is mechanically implemented, but they know which buttons to push to get the hive going and have nearly exclusive access to said buttons.

    • Put otherwise, believing that there are generals does not preclude believing that there are privates. Just because every E-2 isn’t an O-8 doesn’t mean there are no O-8s. Good point, but I propose a third alternative.
      The odd thing here is the “managerial state” nature of most of the controlling faction: it’s networked cloud people for the most part, not a bunch of “fat cats in smokey rooms,” that drive almost all of the Current Year things and actually control the development and management of macro-level events (Ukraine, covid, etc). For example: nobody thinks Joe Biden is leading our national policy on Ukraine; it’s not the guy at the top. There are some of those “hollowed out volcanoe” sorts (Bill Gates and Soros most prominent), but for the most part it’s the Kagans at CNN, who are related to the Rosensteins at Justice, who work in the cubicle next to the Roosevelts at State, who have dinner with the Clinton’s cousins, whose kids go to school with the Morgans. It’s a a takeover by a collective of upper-middle managers, a soviet of majors and captains instead of one five-star Caudillo. They are a networked coterie of cloud people. (So perhaps the “deep state” is in fact its own “hive mind.”) They socialize together, work together, go to sportsball parties together, are facebook friends, went to school together, their kids go to school together. There is no “magic signaling” explanation required for how ideas and motivational thrusts get propagated through the “upper crust” or “deep state” cloud people. They don’t need the Bat Signal and secret decoder rings, they just talk to the other parents when they pick up the kids at Stuyvesant, or share facebook posts, or had the same journalism professor back at Yale.

19. Regardless of what positions we take in the discussion, we can all agree that it’s not some transitory stage. The managerial revolution is permanent until it burns out all the resources of cybernetic systems it occupies. It won’t be “voted out”, voting can only serve as confirmation of victory over the Destroyer Hive and it doesn’t matter whether it is manipulated or not. As long as you can get away with it, you win.

    It seems that we have settled fully into the new system at least in the infosphere. Covid and Ukraine mass psychoses proved how easily it is to spread propaganda despite easy to reach alternatives in the Internet and that people will take care of keeping each other in line with the latest orthodoxy. Public opinion always suffers from collective stupidity, but today it became infantilized to unprecedented levels. We live in aging societies that try to behave like youngsters and will lap up every ideological novelty, no matter how ridiculous. Rising apathy is probably the only good/bad thing, depending how we look at it.

    • You’ve got me wondering if the alternate sources provide some sort of pseudo confirmation bias (“Obviously Fox News wouldn’t lie about that because those independent fact checkers would call them out!”)

      • Confirmation bias exists on all sides, although expressed to different degrees. Fanatics, cheerleaders and contrarians display it to the most glaring degree.
        I had encountered an opinion from one young, univeristy-educated person that they believed in Ukrainian victories because they wanted then to be true and for Russia to lose. It wasn’t even about trusting the source and appeals to authority, but open an expression of sentiments as pre-condtion to accept the information. Wishful thinking at its finest, Polish form.
        Another person plainly stated that spreading lies and overestimating Ukrainian successes is a good thing because “we’re in a war” (We both aren’t Ukrainians). The same person believes in “national borders as constructs”.

        Dissidents have their fair share of confirmation bias themselves, since they often intuitively embrace narratives running contrary to the mainstream without double-checking. To many, rejecting the mainstream information is a religious signifier which is why many kooks flock to the dissident side where they can feed their disdain for the “sheeple” and cultivate their own following. The rest is grift.
        Most people are followers so they will embrace any narrative they feel is right, gives them social brownie points or that protects them from wider ostracism in their circles.
        In the end, every group have their own echo-chambers for those purposes and it’s not a bad thing in itself. Society needs cohesion and standards guarded by natural aristoracy.
        Liberal propositions of inclusive dialogue in free society is one of the greatest pipe dreams in history. As prof. Legutko wrote in “The Devil in Democracy”, the end result is not a growing sophistication (as dreamt by John Stuart Mill), but primitive conformity. Alternatively, I like to put it as a collective race towards the pig slop, instead of ambrosia. If higher standards are abolished for their exclusivity then what kind of opinions gain most traction? Coperincus-Gresham’s law in action.

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21. “Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

    • Wolin’s book on inverted totalitarianism is worth reading.

      I would only caution that he needed a stronger editor and that he did buy into the red-blue paradigm.

22. Zman:

    The hive mind from your description really makes me think of “the invisible hand” with regards to capitalism. My question to you is, in our current economic system, which i would not describe as capitalism, does the invisible hand exist?

    • Maybe at the fringes. The invisible hand people need to explain why we have two phone companies, one operating system, five bankers and so on before I can consider the invisible hand business. Hell, we are down to two beer companies. If the invisible hand exists, it appears to move toward oligopoly.

      • Or a deep state 😉

        Wasn’t the praetorian guard during the times of Rome a form of Deep state?

      • Agreed. Capital is being centralized at a rapid pace, and that pace has quickened considerably since the Covidarity. Just look, for instance, at the restaurant industry. In my small city, Covid restrictions wiped out a number of independent local restaurants, yet the corporate chains experienced not the slightest upset. Their share of the local market increased substantially as a result. This phenomenon, I’m sure, was repeated all across AINO, and in most other sectors of the economy as well.

        • I was told during the Panic of 2009 that the large, top 5 corporation I was subcontracted to planned on substantially expanding market share, pounding the crap out of the little guys with threadbare operating capital.

          Then the founder died,and his kids had all graduated from Yale.

          After their improvements, that former titan is a ghost of what it was.

          Their bright ideas lost major national account after major national account. I didn’t see them change course, either.

          There is an energy corp based in Spain, a giant with 400,000 employees that does much biz in the EU. How in hades are these Bigcorps going to keep operating?

      • The Austrian school economists argue that the increasing volume of tax code and regulations are an enormous hinderance to small company competition. They argue that only the large mega corporations have the resources to hire the staff necessary to effectively navigate all the government red tape. So the argument goes.

        • It’s undoubtedly true. The Megas are always pro regulation. Watch what happens in the Marijuana legal States. Big Pharma is quietly pushing regulations “for the well-being of the stoners” of course and will be gobbling up the little guys within a decade.

          In PA back in 2008 my local little bank was looking at expansion opportunities in Jersey when the next raft of Fed regulations on National Banks” came through they gave up their ambitions and became a State, not National bank.

23. Charles Mackay needs to return and add a chapter on “transgenders” to his 1841 classic work “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”.

    • There are billions, possibly even trillions of dollars behind the current lunacy.

      There is a book about this titled, The Transgender Industrial Complex.. Sadly, I forgot the author’s name.

      • Scott Howard is the authot.

      • Wild Geese: And like it or not, it is easily traceable to its roots in Weimar Germany.

        • What an odd coincidence that the same people drive the same culture.

        • The Soviet Union, prior to Stalin’s ascension, was also awash in various forms of sociocultural lunacy. AINO in 2022 looks rather like the USSR in 1922. No famine though. Not yet.

      • The name isn’t important. The question is, did you remember xim’s pronoums?

        • Aw, shucks. I thought xi was a xir this week.

24. This is incredibly helpful.
    The hive mind itself is the emergent system; the deep state is *a* hive mind.

    But what about our alien overlords?
    You know, Them.
    Since They will inevitably come up-

    They too, are a hive mind. That’s right, the JQ is a hive mind. Long ago, it *was* emergent; like any hive mind, it is organic, evolving along with the environment that it shapes, reacting as its environment shapes it.

    The flesh the day shapes as the day the flesh shapes.

    The Deep State is a hive mind, unique to a specific environment–one that it shapes.
    Races: Liberal White Jen Psaki and Peter Strozk, convergent with Vicky Nuland and Robert Kagan.

    The Wokeness is a hive mind, unique to a specific environment–one that it shapes.
    Same races as the Deep State, except these would be Karen and Prescott, Jennifer Rubin and Horam Yazony.

    The Christian churches are hive minds, unique to a specific environment–one that they shape.
    Races: mostly segregate ethnicities.

    The Trumpening is a hive mind, unique to a specific environment–one that it shapes.
    Race: Trad Chad and Becky.

    All five can be called churches.

    They seem to include (sub)-race, physical environment, political circumstance, united by a dialect.

    A dialect contains very large elements of what would seem to be gibberish, but are not. They are codified shorthand, a condensate that evokes an emotional resonance. The hoots and barks of one’s particular Tree; thus, the “facts” are subordinate to the needs of the Tree.

    These churches allow navigable paths of opportunity, of ambition, of status and breeding. One can find a position, a partner, a job, a babysitter, some friends.

    The dialects they use also are guidelines that demonstrate certain skillsets, valued in that Tree (or tribe.)

    CivNat values, for instance, used to demonstrate civic-mindedness, depend on being a fair manager; thus, one tries to find grounded facts as a guide, AND, to justify one’s values. But, CivNat has failed to provide a rooted identity.

    We can trace the layers or classes of opportunity in these groupings- call it a church, a tree, a tribe, an identity- but its organic nature is apparent. So also is its competitive-cooperative nature.

    Thus, an emergent movement may originate as a conspiracy, but that conspiracy itself might have been born of emergent circumstance.

    Either way, I think the Zman has identified the core mechanism of the Herd Who Hunts: outlier fringe packs bark loudly until one of them become the new core herd, and the former herd is reduced, to packs barking on the fringe.

    As Paintersforms reminded us, we must remember who we are, as Russia has done.
    Then, as yo says- “okay, what now?”

    What now? Start the clarion call for defensible Red states within the Union.

    The breakup may be inevitable (see again, Russia), but it may be navigable, too.

    • I think Z-man touches upon an element which often confuses the discussion. Most phenomena of an interesting nature is “multi-variant” and as such difficult for humans to talk about and understand. We are as a intellectual species kind of uni-variant in nature.

      When teaching stat’s way back when, I discovered this in discussing example problems in research. Two significant variables were stretching the discussion, three-way interactions were almost always misunderstood and defied reasonable discussion—with most people ignoring one of more of the variables to discuss a uni-variant cause and effect model, which was precisely the antithesis of the lesson plan.

      It’s the nature of the beast.

      • And is this not exactly what we do with medicine? No wonder the cure is worse than the cause.

        • Yep, that’s perhaps a better and more pertinent example. No one died from my failure in class to teach folk through made up examples. Many obviously did with doctors’ misunderstanding of the problems with Covid.

          On the other hand, there were many top tier medical folks who “did” understand the problem. They were the early vanguard to call for resistance so someone was successful in their training. Or maybe better intellects discover this naturally.

      • Thanks, Compsci, that the Cabal or Conspiracy is itself a hive mind is what I found intriguing. An egregore, as Ali reminded me.

        (This relates to the oogily-boogily I’ve tried mentioning.
        The mechanism of its function. Would that I too were educated as the fierce minds here.

        Specifically, of the purgatorio and the damnatio, the Wheel of dharma and the hells within the greenhouse. The collective memory spaces structured as as radiant dna,
        embedded in wave plasmas rooted in magnetic basalts.

        The spirit layer both is generated by, and influences expression in, the living. The ‘gods’ of the genetic spectrum are well described as ‘cloud’ networks.)

        • Edit: the river-muck of the hells

          (re the recycling layer and composting layer, purgatorio and damnatio, Wheel and hells)

          The biosphere is a thin as paint on a basketball in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

          The function of the Lord of Hell, as one would call it, is to drag back in, reclaim, and recycle every scrap of structure, due to the sparse material available.

          The Wheel interacts with exo-atmospheric formation, creating the continuous rain of viruses, of fragmentary information strings on our heads.

          We live in a boiling soup and think it’s a calm, cloudy day.

          • Hell’s bells, might as well tell ye.

            The growing madness is most certainly a consequence of population and pollution, but more:

            Hell is overfull.

            The plasma runnels of the hells have never contained this many minds before.

            This is the gasses in a dungpile building up, ready to blow and scatter the elements and nutrients back into the soil.

            Normally, meteor strikes or a supervolcano would do it. But the explosion of sentient minds- thanks to white people- has accelerating the pressure beyond waiting for chance.

            The Infection has become a pandemic, the festering wound is trying to burst.

          • p.s.s.- goddam right we have a plan.

          • further edit:
            Wave plasmas are better described as ròoted tesla toroids constrained within ionosphere bounds, but I am tired, lazy, and exceedingly f**king stupid

    • Well, shoot, overlong- I neglected to add that opportunity exits within whichever identity tribe as long as one follows the rulesets of that tribe.

      Different rulesets look for different temperaments, thus, identity.

      And that identity can pay off quite handsomely, one can be honored or respected and quite a few, prosperous.

25. Irrespective of which train of thought, those atop the pinnacles in nearly all fields wear small hats. There are not many small hat wearers in existence. Why do you believe that condition persists through the generations?

    • Someone figured out that if you can get the antibodies to kill off each other, then the disease is left alone.

    • “The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.”

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CIrYV1Bt1Y

      https://www.unz.com/wwebb/leslie-wexners-inner-demon/

26. Please allow me to offer a third explanation of what the Deep State is.

    I prefer to use the disease analogy. Our society can be modeled as similar in concept to a human body; lots of complexity and order bundled up and striving to stay vertical for as long as possible, and maybe prosper and have some fun along the way. Occasionally, injury or disease afflicts the body, and ancestral robustness is the first line of defense. And it works most of the time.

    But some types of injury or disease can be a game changer, and losing robustness is a recipe for early death. So how does this relate to the Deep State meme (which is really just a moniker for an amorphous thing that is difficult to pin down)?

    Well, the Deep State is a disease that has infected the body and is killing it in slow motion. KInda like a cancer. It started out as a few virus strings (or perhaps renegade cells) that took root and have been festering and growing ever since. And one of the byproducts of this slow emergence has been that it went largely unnoticed in the beginning and has been rotting out the ancestral robustness in the process. Double whammy. Does the disease have a “leader”? Of course not. Does it have component elements that are more lethal that other parts? Very likely YES! Where should the main remedy be focused? Absolutely on the worst elements first, because it does the most good the fastest.

    Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that we can’t solve the problem because it’s too amorphous to attack with a discrete remedy. All disease is amorphous when it’s running around loose within the body. Nature gave us targeted antibodies to fight it and we’re still here, so it must work. Be the antibody.

27. “One camp, the dominant camp, thinks there is an organized campaign run by a small group of people. The so-called deep state pulls the levers resulting in the things we see happening in the world. The other camp, the much smaller camp, subscribes to the emergent behavior doctrine. What we see is the result of the hive mind that dominates the managerial class.”

    I think you have not yet grokked the notion of deep state. It is not about a small group of people pulling the levers of power — “emininces grise” if you will. The notion of deep state is probably closer to the idea of hive mind. Probably yet closer is the occult idea of an “egregore” — something that develops a consciousness of its own and a concomitant desire to survive. US institutions like the CIA, FBI, and the sprawling military-industrial complex are egregores. They wish to survive as collectives. They have their own institutional consciousness. Their constituent cells — the upper-level and mid-level apparatchiks — want to survive as well: the comfy offices, the do-nothing sinecures, the pensions. This collection of egregores constitutes the deep state and is the heart of the US empire.

    • AA: “Probably yet closer is the occult idea of an “egregore” — something that develops a consciousness of its own and a concomitant desire to survive.”

      That sounds very similar to what I’m talking about below here: A meta-darwinism wherein phenotypes of personalities begin to cluster with one another socially, and eventually come to act as one, in, at first shunning, and then, later, as the phenotype condenses and congeals and hardens into an outright distinct psychological tribe, actively seeking to harm [socially, financially, violently] the foreign [unlike] personality types.

      When I’m in blue turf, I sense it everywhere now.

      Heck, I’d probably sense it every bit as ominously if I still mingled with professional Republicans [although apparently GOP Inc is 110% sodomite these days, so I’d have the added problem of trying to keep them away from my backside].

    • The late great Joe Sobran clearly examined in a series of articles on the Hive mind and how it works. Everyone do yourself some good and read them, all pretty quick reads.

      http://www.sobran.com/hive/

      • We stand on the shoulders of giants

      • upvoted for referencing Joe Sobran.

    • You nailed it. This is an extension of basic biology, or even evolution. A living organism’s sole (or at least primary) purpose is to make at least one survivor for the next generation. Natural Selection is an implacable bitch: you either survive, or you don’t. Simple as that. There are many variations on the theme: survival of the family or tribe. Social Darwinism. Applied to governments, corporations, or other large entities, I’m not sure what the technical term is. But the fundamental rule remains: These organizations (nearly) always have as prime motive to at minimum survive and (usually) to protect and expand their interests. The motive may be overt or covert, but it’s there.

    • Still a little fuzzy on the various meanings of “Deep State” myself. In my mind, it is a reference to the semi-permanent bureaucracy that inhabits government, academia, media and industry. The “elites” would be those sitting atop such bureaucracy with the ability to influence its direction. Thus, the “Deep State” is comprised in large part, and depends in large part, on hive mind characteristics of the constituents. Seems like the Deep State v. Hive Mind is the two guys groping an elephant in the dark and describing the part they see.

      In this sense, we don’t really have a DS/HM problem; we have an elite problem. The only two solutions I see, and both are nearly impossible without a lot of “discomfort”, are replacing the elite or dehiving the Mind.

28. It boils down to whether what is admittedly emergent behavior is coordinated by a control group, which we call “The Deep State.” This seems undeniable. The propaganda organs are used to enforce The Current Thing and academia and the corporate world, and you have to include organized religion in the latter now, follow suit. The Ruling Class Cult’s deeply held religious faith has to be reinforced constantly, and when it decides to tinker with the creed/Current Thing, that also starts with propaganda and extends to the larger society, not as a correction or sudden revelation but as something immutable. For example, I suspect there will be enough negative repercussions from transgenderism to force a change in belief on that front in the future; as you point out, this is happening with Covid even now. Transgenderism marks a rare occasion where the Deep State control group really got ahead of its skis with a fantastic way to manipulate and was not able to extend emergent behavior to a wide enough group.

    So we are seeing two new things at play. First, there is abject terror (overwrought, in my opinion, but still there) in the Deep State that its ironclad grip on propaganda may be slipping away. The second is that the first is just true enough that a few more people have caught onto the manipulation. Oddly, this does not correspond at all with educational and professional achievement and may reflect the inverse to some degree in many if not most cases; I think of Trotsky’s brilliant line about propaganda being more effective with the educated classes because all they require is the attachment of some authority, however spurious, while the proletariat will smell the bullshit.

    As if this all were not terrifying enough, bear in mind that most religious fanatics, like those who comprise the Ruling Class and its immediate subordinates, often resort to violence, murder and suicide when their faith either is threatened or seems to be. The current situation in the Ukraine, which is deeply humiliating to the Deep State and shakes its philosophical foundation to the core, very well may end in nuclear conflagration as a result. If a new version of “Better Red Than Dead” starts to emerge, watch out.

    So I will grant there is both a Deep State and emergent behavior, but the latter flows in a directed manner from the former, and makes the current situation quite dangerous. It will burn out in time, and all we can do is survive through it, an option that may be taken from us if the Ruling Class decides to go full Jonestown.

    • In re: transgenderism getting ahead of the zeitgeist:

      It’s much, much worse than you think. They may have “rushed it”, but there’s no stopping it.

      Have a neighbor who is a very senior engineer at a national engineering firm. She supervises (or did supervise) dozens of engineers, with hire/fire authority, so not just window dressing; has done it for more than a decade. (wicked smart)

      Management solicited questions from her managerial level for a an online Q&A session that were supposed to be 100% anonymous. She submitted a question regarding how women should feel if supervised by a transgender “woman”. Delicately and respectfully phrased.

      One week later she was relieved of her manager role without explanation. The question was not answered in the Q&A. Because she’s a woman, she did keep her current salary (considerable); one gets the impression if she were a man she’d have been fired outright. Currently some backdoor skullduggery to get to the bottom of what happened, but it’s pretty obvious.

      Point being: Transgenderism is deeply rooted in the the upper echelons of all major corporations: even the “hard sciences” like engineering. The school board stuff is a sideshow.

      How did this happen? How did our elites go stark raving insane?

      • In any group, it helps to have a way of separating the true believers from those who aren’t so sure.

        Requiring people to affirm an obvious absurdity— that guy in the dress is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body— is a good way to do that.

        The content of the mandatory belief doesn’t matter, except that it be absurd. The absurder, the better.

        • Dalrymple’s formulation that humiliation at will is the true exhibit of power:

          https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/124952-political-correctness-is-communist-propaganda-writ-small-in-my-study

        • That was basically what the great Professor Asch’s test did. In most cases, the subjects of the experiment were too terrified of being seen as outsiders to affirm the blatantly obvious fact that one of the lines on the cards was indeed shorter than the rest.

      • Whom the gods wish to destroy first they make mad

        • Yeah, well, I’m waiting for the “destroy” part to kick in. 🙁

      • Jeez she can’t be that smart if she thought an HR Q&A online session was going to be 100% anonymous. Who falls for that?

        Event the squadies know you don’t advance a criticism of the brass when invited to do so in “strictest confidence” by the other officers.

        • Have you ever met an engineer or real scientist?

          Smart, but, my god. The better they are at engineering, the more “on the spectrum” they are.

          James Watson (DNA/Nobel prize winner) a good example … bankrupted because he publicly spoke about awkward realities about IQ.

          It’s why physicists like Feynman or Von Neuman were so incredible. They straddled both worlds.

          • Sure I work in a very technical engineering field. Even the most autistic person in the dept knows HR “anonymous” Q&A are not going to be on the up and up.

          • Waaay back when, my major professor in grad school was asked a question in his measurement class regarding IQ. He was asked basically if it was true that one person or race was really superior to the other intellectually. It was a legitimate question in such a class, but fraught with danger in response.

            Today of course, such a question is a death sentence if the “wrong” answer given. In those days, who knows—but he was not taking the bait.

            Without a moment’s hesitation, he responded with an allegory: “We are all born with “cars” in life. Some of us are given Chevy’s—like me—and can tool down the road at 65 mph. Other’s, are given Ferrari’s and can drive at 120 mph. Regardless, the universal speed limit is 55 mph.”

            No further questions were asked.

        • There is no such thing as off the record.

      • Uh, there hasn’t been such a thing as an, “anonymous,” internal corporate survey since they moved those online in the ’90s.

        One should always approach those as a loyalty test rather than a good faith effort by the controllers to solict input from subordinates.

        Totally agree that corporations are almost totally Woke from the Director level through VP and all the way up to the C-suite.

        It is a bizarre situation. Yet, these geniuses fail to understand why they struggle to hire people, retain them, or meet their production deadlines.

      • That’s horrible and edifying, ProZNoV. Still, this gets to the heart of the Deep State/emergent behavior distinction. I don’t disagree at all with your description of how widespread and deep this madness is, and no doubt the directed emergent behavior has exploded. I expect, though, this has caused a great enough riff between the deeply faithful and the agnostic/unfaithful that it is counter-productive to control, so it will be reeled back out of necessity since it makes total manipulation difficult.

        As others have pointed out before, the Cultural Revolution only came to a stop after the Chinese put down the Red Guard remnants, mostly women, with deadly force. It will not be that extreme here with the excesses, I think, because the propaganda is so carefully controlled and curated. Look for experts to declare transgenderism can be treated at childbirth or something along those lines to scale it back.

        Regardless, geez, what a story. It is amazing that there remain any vestiges of trust even now, as demonstrated by your neighbor’s misguided belief in anonymity. Of greater concern, there is a distinct possibility she was dimed out if not initially identified outright (which is most likely). Of all the outrages that flowed from Covid, neighbors (usually women) reporting to police what was claimed to be excess visitors at the party next door was the most chilling. I saw glowing segments on local propaganda outlets that lauded these reports of naughtiness. That was when I knew we lived in a completely totalitarian society at this point.

        I do expect the transgenderism insanity to grow much worse before it has to be dialed in, if I’m right about the latter. We very well may see school and camp settings dedicated to fostering kids into transgenderism.

        • “Regardless, geez, what a story. It is amazing that there remain any vestiges of trust even now, as demonstrated by your neighbor’s misguided belief in anonymity.”

          For most people, they can’t let go of trust because the alternative is not something their mind can deal with. It’s partially why some people will not fight even when death is obviously looking them in the face while being fed lies. IE its only a shower, no need to worry, coming from the guy who greets you off the cattle car. Most beliefs held by average people are not from actually seeing them play out in real life and confirming they are true, they just gotta believe!

        • Jack Dobson: We already there via most public schools, but most parents are oblivious. The think voting in the school board election actually makes a difference, regardless of the admissions officers and instructors at ‘schools of education’ or who writes the textbooks.

          • This very much under appreciated.

            Those few publishers who control the root education material in the form of official text books control the ideas and realities implanted early on that most people never revisit later in life.

          • Spot on about the textbook publishers.

            The thing to bear in mind about the NoVa parent uprising is that they would have been perfectly fine with it if the rubes in the Turkey Neck of Virginia had been the targets rather than themselves.

          • Trumpton, I wonder if this is more of a “chicken and egg” thing. My experience/readings have been that publishers are enslaved to State and Local school curriculum boards wrt what is included in their text books—like less George Washington and more Martin Luther King. They’d put in flat earth theory if the local school board wanted it and they were large enough to make it worthwhile.

            At higher levels, I heard they do interact with faculty as to what will “sell” in their manuscripts. Just about every faculty member I’ve known has had *one* book it them. After which, they find it’s way too much work for any remuneration obtained. Not sure how online publishing has perhaps changed things.

        • Having read Frank Dikotters book about the cultural revolution in China, I agree with you on this:

          Only a firm crackdown by the military will ever end this endless purity spiral.

          Current cultural and military trends don’t leave me feeling very optimistic about his happing soon.

      • Good evidence that we are ruled by a cult intending very bad things.

        Shocking, though, that its grasp and reach is so far.

        Good lord, that was a lightning fast response in a critical field. As if there were no thought to the consequences.

      • It’s like at this point, concerning those who are impressionable enough to go trans, the advice would be “Can’t you just stick to being gay or lesbian? Try doing that for a time before you make the leap of claiming you’re the wrong sex”
        One would prefer a person maintain reality, but if one’s going to be insane, couldn’t you choose a little insanity over full insanity?

    • The new formulation:

      “Better erased than based.”

      • Nice! For newer folks, “based” is the opposite of “debased”.

        Positive, healthy, family-friendly.

29. Speaking for myself, I noticed the media ran interference for the Ruling Caste decades before I ever heard the term ‘deep state’ being bandied about. When the FedGuv murdered 70+ American citizens at Waco on live TV and the zombie slaves clapped like trained seals it became inescapably clear that ‘the media’ serves as the software installation system for the hapless American peasantry, who need to be constantly told what their opinions are lest they stray into placid productivity and stable communities based on tacky Christian morality.

    Nobody called it ‘the deep state’ back then, and nobody I knew IRL agreed with my alarmed and horrorstricken assessment of the Waco situation and its implications. The 90s rolled on, like an overflowing Porta-Potty at Honest Jim’s Taco Stand at Woodstock, and the Clinton Cabal committed outrageous crime after outrageous crime while the media clamored their innocence at ear splitting volume. Nobody attributed this to ‘the deep state’ and, once again, the people I knew IRL pooh-pooh’d my assertions of media collusion and conspiratorial control from off the stage.

    Since then, we’ve seen lies piled upon lies piled upon more lies, which are piled upon a sticky, sodden mass of fairy tales they fed us in grade school as their base. 9/11 with its Magic Passport silliness, the Patriot Act, fables of killing Osama bin Laden numerous times (take THAT, Towelhead!), Seal Team 6 (oh my! The heroism!). White countries (and only White countries) flooded with Muds and Orcs of every shade and every flavor of vicious criminality. Whites being attacked AS Whites from Brisbane to Johannesburg to Paris to London to Green Bay to Honolulu to Mumbai. A globally coordinated response to the weaponized flu they named Covid 19; in nearly every modern, mechanized nation on earth the same draconian (and patently absurd) lockdowns and restrictions: stay in your homes!!! (unless you wanted to rush on out to Wendy’s for a Buffalo Obesity Burger with Extry Cheese, that’s ok!), mandated mask wearing, said masks delivered in boxes clearly labeled to not prevent viral transmission. Everywhere, all over the world, the same idiotic rules. And everywhere, the peasants swallowed them en masse as the TV Man harangued the nay-sayers. (I could go on but I know the regulars here could easily provide more examples than I can if I labored for an hour).

    I have never partaken in any debates about the deep state vs the Hive Mind. I noticed, all on my own, the collusion, coordination, and signs of conspiracy 25 years before “the deep state’ became the buzzword du jour. I call it the Shadow Cabinet in the privacy of my own mind, and I find it a far more accurate term for conveying my beliefs and assumptions concerning the global and insidious nature of the world today.

    And experience hath shown that it is pointless to argue about it. Hey, you have people walking the streets of every major city in the nation who believe that Scientology is the only hope of mankind, and that Xenu is real. People ultimately believe whatever they WANT to believe, and if TOTAL LOCKSTEP among multiple, diverse (in the original sense of that word) nations for the last few decades in response to !The Latest Thing! does not suggest to you the existence of collusion at the highest levels, then I am not going to try to convince anybody otherwise. If the Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, WEF, Skull and Bones, and Masonry on display in every facet of our lives is just harmless happenstance, well OK then!

    Maybe I am just a stupid ignoramus who doesn’t have enough education to grasp the nuances; maybe my mind is too feeble to swim in the headwaters of this cataract of subtleties; maybe I am a fool who is only proclaiming his stupidity in the public square. Well then, I accept that. I can only interpret the world through the filter my mind provides me, and it appears to me to be simply incontrovertible that this planet is ruled by a cabal who does not emerge into the public eye for White House photo ops.

    My only question might be: IF there is a Hive Mind that explains the Satanic insanity everywhere now, from whence did this Hive Mind arise? Fashions come and go: nobody wears bell bottoms; disco is dead; grunge and its atrocious affinity for plaid has withered away. But this Hive Mind, with its implacable hatred of Western Christianity, its insatiable lust for Trotskyite chaos, its perpetual motion machine of lies– that just naturally arose, did it? Like the short lived fad for clear Pepsi; it’s just something that got briefly cool for awhile and then, what– lingered on somehow for 70 years, without any deliberate attempts to maintain and propagate it?

    It appears to me that denying ‘the deep state’ while attributing it to the Hive Mind is akin to denying the existence of the Mafia while blaming the local vice crimes on the Sicilians.

    • Mostly agreed. Whether Waco was a turning point or the point where the existence of the Deep State became undeniable is my only question, and it seems very unclear.

      • Waco is just what made it clear to me. The Kennedy assassination should have made it obvious long before, but the America of 1963 was made up of mostly white, mostly Christian people who probably could not grasp the existence of that level of evil, quite apart from its existence in their very midst.

      • Maybe it’s overstated in the media, but isn’t that essentially what Trump tried to do with his executive order regarding Schedule F employees?

        If so, it was far too little and too late, like his realization about the need for patriotic education. That was something that needed to be implemented in the early 80s to stem the tide of what we are seeing now.

      • Waco was a coming-out party.

        “Ambush in Waco,” the NBC propaganda movie, was filmed either simultaneously with (said the press) or in anticipation of the actual events. The ending is oddly unlike the rest of it, incoherently patched together from the movie-cliché expectations of stupid cops. The credited writer’s belated “apology” doesn’t add up:

        https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/righting-waco-confessions-of-a-hollywood-propagandist/

        He doesn’t even get the network right.

        Waco™, the full-spectrum media event, was the announcement by the [cabal of whatever size or character] that they were ready to kill us all and wallpaper the world with in-your-face unbelievable lies about it.

    • It was always referred to in England as ‘The Establishment’.
      Everybody understood that it meant pols, bbc, the great and the good.
      You are either in the club ‘old boy’ or you are not.

      • Back in the 1970s, 1980s when dissidents mostly were informed by various “newsletters,” Dad (and I, out of boredom) learned of some of the skullduggery. They were labelled various ways, depending upon the venue: the Eastern Establishment, the CFR or Trilateral Commission (both of those, by the way, are by no means secretive and have existed for decades, and some but perhaps not all of their product is available for public inspection.), internationalists, and so forth. Any or all with the ever-popular optional Jewish [Banker]] conspiracy.

        I’m not saying it’s all right, but for us dissidents, it should come as no shock that there probably has always been a secret cabal who controls much behind the scenes.

        • “I’m not saying it’s all right, but for us dissidents, it should come as no shock that there probably has always been a secret cabal who controls much behind the scenes.”

          I think it’s been the same crew since Nimrod and Semiramis. All that stuff about the Enlightenment and the Founders and good ol’ Jonny Appleseed is just so much applesauce to fool the drones into playing along and doing the heavy lifting without too much fuss or static.

          Realizing this makes it easier to come to terms mentally with the destruction around us. The distress arises from imagining we are losing some Golden Utopia established by the Wise Old Birds in powdered wigs.

          But no, it’s just business as usual while the Ruling Caste doesn’t bother painting the backdrops and putting the makeup on the cadavers. Corona demonstrated they can get the same results with 1/64th of the effort, so why bother?

    • Of course there is a deep state. OF COURSE THERE IS!

      Take feminism. Pushed by Rockefeller foundation under guise of equality for the rubes.

      Real reason: double the work force and increase taxes, lower wages,destabilize families, and put kids in government brainwashing schools earlier.

      This model applies to everything from blacks, borders, porn, schools, covid, wars . .you name it! They’re all rackets made to destroy people and extract wealth.

      “The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.” ― J. Edgar Hoover

    • Came across both of these back in the early 2010’s because mine eyes were opened in 2008 😉

      You might enjoy them:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Elite

      And

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

    • Excellent post Stephen. You and trumpton have eloquently laid out the reality of the situation. I mean you both just nailed it.

    • Thank you, that comment was magisterial.

    • “ Maybe I am just a stupid ignoramus who doesn’t have enough education to grasp the nuances; maybe my mind is too feeble to swim in the headwaters of this cataract of subtleties; maybe I am a fool who is only proclaiming his stupidity in the public square.”

      Or maybe you’re the “child” who tells the Emperor he “has no clothes?” As they say, some things are so ridiculous as to only be believed by an “intellectual”.

    • It beggers belief that anybody denies the existence of the Deep State
      Bernays started his 1928 “Propaganda” with:
      CHAPTER I
      ORGANIZING CHAOS
      THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the
      organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
      important element in democratic society. Those who
      manipulate this unseen mechanism of society consti-
      tute an invisible government which is the true ruling
      power of our country.

      What the fuck is that if not the Deep State?

      Get the freebie here.
      https://www.docdroid.net/uIvqryK/bernays-propaganda-pdf

30. The old economics take – or the take of the old economists – was that it didn’t matter if people don’t really act like utility-maximizing economic agents. You could get useful predictions about things if you pretended it was true, so you might as well pretend it was true.

    If, for example, you believe trees are trying to get their leaves in the place where they can get the most sun, it doesn’t matter at all that your belief is wrong. Trees, lacking self-awareness, aren’t trying to do anything at all, but so what? You can still predict where the leaves are going to be.

31. More than once in his essays, C.S. Lewis pointed out the tremendous pressure many (most?) people feel to be part of the “inner circle”, part of the elite, in whatever world they find themselves. The unspoken requirements for membership in the elite inner circle invariably includes believing the right things and affirming the proper dogmas.

    So yeah: all that’s necessary in a situation like that, is for someone to alert the hive mind as to what the latest mandatory beliefs are, and *their innate urge for acceptance and conformity takes care of the rest*

    So inquiries about the Deep State revolve around the question of whether there’s an unseen group at the top, managing the hive mind, priming it for each successive wave of focused attention: last week it was Ukraine, this week it’s a “trans” swimmer, next week remains to be seen.

    So what that means is that the hive is always attentive, eagerly awaiting their next set of ‘instructions’, which manifest in what everyone else is focusing on this week. Once it’s clear what those ‘in the know’ are talking about this week, the scramble is on for who can exhibit the most perfect conformity, and thus increase their chances for admission into the Inner Circle.

    Always in the background, and taken for granted, is the mutual unspoken agreement to despise the Dirt People, who will never be a part of the in-crowd. A stance of unspoken-but-taken-for-granted superiority is one of the perks of counting yourself among the elite.

    • Z: “The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.”

      TRB: “Always in the background, and taken for granted, is the mutual unspoken agreement to despise the Dirt People, who will never be a part of the in-crowd. A stance of unspoken-but-taken-for-granted superiority is one of the perks of counting yourself among the elite.”

      I’m at the point now where, psychologically speaking, when out amongst the chi-chi crowd, I can feel the Passive Aggressives noticing me, and glancing at me, and their hind brains lighting up when they recognize my physiognomy of Active Aggression, and their minds being alerted to the existential danger which my presence poses to their dominion.

      I can sense psychological phenotypes subconsciously melding together into vast mental tribal structures, hellbent on imposing darwinian extinction upon those with competing psychological phenotypes.

      It’s a meta-darwinism which we are encountering in these psychological phenotypes and the existential psychological warfare which they seek to wage upon the other.

      • It is a spiritual war, and it has always raged. Today, with the technological advances such as instant, world wide communication, the the ways in which these tools can be used to almost effortlessly disseminate the schemes and impulses of sociopaths directly in the the aching voids of the spiritually adrift multitudes, weaponizing them to serve their cruel ends, has attained a level and ubiquity never before seen. Nihilistic cultic practices such as those of Sabbatean Frankism have certainly had their play in the past; but their studied, civilization-spanning thrust to a commanding position is daunting, and its current sway in the world tries our souls.

        Kyrie eleison
        Christe eleison
        Kyrie eleison…

    • The real Bill: A good illustration of your point is the modern fashion industry. Somehow, all the designers will suddenly embrace a new trend simultaneously – no matter how outlandish or impractical – and within weeks all the models and actresses are sporting this latest thing. Then it filters down through mass merchandising and into children’s clothing, time compressed via cheap overseas manufacturing.

      I remember the first time I saw a girl in junior high (now called middle school) wearing high waisted, wide-legged jeans. I thought they were the ugliest things I had ever seen (this was when the rest of us were still wearing low cut, hip-hugging bell bottoms). Yet by the end of the school year they were in all the stores and everyone was wearing them.

      Of course, there’s a reason fashion and most of advertising is directed at women and children – people ruled by emotion and the herd instinct rather than reason. The level of subliminal messaging and predictive programming, coordinated among the platforms of media and movies and social media and gaming, is staggering and vastly underestimated.

      • it’s why a decent pair of men’s jeans runs $30, but no self-respecting woman would be caught dead in a pair less than $90.

32. Deep state isn’t a small group of people. It’s the huge permanent state bureaucracy and gov contracted private managers, who take care of the day-to-day operations of the country, with easy benefits, lucrative retirements (by middle-class standards) and an almost impenetrable set of rules preventing them from being fired. Wokeism is the religion used to enforce conformity from top to bottom, so that nobody rocks the boat too much.
    On top of all that are the international billionaires who use the most sociopathic members of the deep state (politically nominated heads of agencies and departments) to push whatever agendas they have. Their success depends on the top-down conformity, which took time to achieve.
    Whoever is able to mass-fire and replace the whole hierarchy of the state bureaucracy wins.

    • “Whoever is able to mass-fire and replace the whole hierarchy of the state bureaucracy wins.”

      This probably cannot be done. It will have to implode from within, and eventually will. There may be a lot of suffering until that day arrives.

      • I have seen it happen in Eastern Europe a few times after elections. It also happens every time after a successful color revolution. Usually preceded by the existence of at least some parallel structures.

        In the US, it would be seen as “totalitarian” and “like the third world” etc., but it absolutely must be done. You’re right though, that it would be extremely difficult under normal or semi-normal circumstances.

      • Instead of mass replacement of the bureaucracy, the more permanent fix should be mass incarceration and confiscation of everything those people have. I’d be open to worse for the worst of them too. They have a lot to answer for over the last 50 or so years.

        • That is even more unrealistic.

          Replacing the bureaucracy/deep state IS possible and realistic. It has been done many times in other countries and quite rapidly.

          “mass incarceration and confiscation of everything” can only be done in a revolution or military coup. Both are very unlikely in the US and if they somehow happened, they would probably done by the wrong side (commies)

33. I understand the hive mind thing for the lower levels once the instructions have been issued. Makes sense for the NPCs to behave in this way. But you can’t run a complete NPC organized society this way.

    Humans are not starlings, or fish. They do not work that way. flocking is brief and not something that runs for decades in a single direction.

    Even the most mental cults throughout history have a hierarchy with leaders and inner circles of elect that hand out stuff for the minions to implement. If its a religion, then religions have this aspect in spades. The more extreme the belief, the more this true to keep on message.

    So its time to start naming who is the elect in the religion, and not stopping at the fence intentionally with a hand wave as if its no importance.

    • One thing I would add is that if you look at the christian heresy wars in the middle ages, the way to crush a religious movement , as the vatican well understood, was to identify and attack the leaders and elect, round them up and preferably execute them in public.

      This caused a drift off for the most part of its adherents looking to glom onto another cult, often went back to the old establishment and the remaining maniacs could be purged later, or died off.

      The ones that survived were those used and funded as a power balance by other elites in their regional disputes with the pope.

    • Well said trumpton.

34. I’m just waiting for the math to take effect. It’s increasingly looking like it will and within the next thirty years. This causes me grief though, because I’m now paying much closer attention to how involuntary integrated my life and that of those I care about is into the system that is doomed. I’m trying to take precautions but I have a sinking feeling it won’t matter one bit…

    However we have this blog that provides us with joy… What a turn of phrase this is: “It was as if someone updated their firmware overnight.” 100% on the nose.

    • Thirty years is being generous; we have half that, at best.

      I actually went to HR a few years ago and asked them to reduce the amount of my paycheck going towards my 401K. Retirement seems out of reach at this point.

      • I’ve often considered this. I’ve saved my whole career for retirement and made a lot of sacrifices to do so. I’m no longer convinced that was smart.

      • Maniac: I’ve been urging my husband to use his 401k money for years. He’s finally doing so. While he claims we’d have a lot more money if he’d left it in stocks for longer than he did, he now agrees that it’s constantly losing value due to inflation. He also agrees it will eventually prove too tempting a target to the global corporatist governments, although he does not believe this is imminent.

        Either way, we’re swallowing the painful tax penalty now in the hopes of getting ourselves best situated (physically and financially) to ride out the difficult years we see ahead. With no mortgage or car payment or various utility bills, one doesn’t truly ‘need’ a substantial retirement fund. Medical bills are another story, unless – like us – you have neither plans nor desire to survive into decrepitude dependent on machines and modern pharmaceuticals.

        For those who know my husband in real life it’s quite a dramatic shift.

        • Yeah, it’s time to cross off as many of those “bucket list” items while you still can.

          • AsIi’m in europe I’ve got

            heating
            animal protein
            electricity supply
            indoor plumbing
            no nuclear fallout

            I hope to get at least 3 during the winter.

          • Maniac: I was fortunate enough to do many of the traditional ‘bucket list’ things while young (international travel and living, scuba and skiing) although alas, I doubt I’ll ever make it to Alaska or take a cruise down the Fjords.

            My priorities now are getting as far away from diversity as I can, living amongst natural beauty rather than in a cookie-cutter suburb, and being primarily self reliant.

        • I’ve thought about that but my work has a pretty generous match so I’d feel like I was walking away from money. I don’t know what they do in places like Argentina, but I sincerely doubt that people would put their money into tax deferred accounts so that bankers can buy chips at the market casino. Ah well…

        • “While he claims we’d have a lot more money if he’d left it in stocks for longer than he did, he now agrees that it’s constantly losing value due to inflation. He also agrees it will eventually prove too tempting a target to the global corporatist governments, although he does not believe this is imminent.”

          I’m not certain what is meant by “imminent” here, but the first time the opportunity presents the money will be seized purportedly for your own protection. I suspect the 87k new armed IRS agents will spend an inordinate amount of time monitoring 401k and IRA withdrawals and auditing people about it as a deterrent to early withdrawal. Inflation, as you point out, works against delaying the purchase(s) as well. Take the tax hit. Taxes and penalties only going to get worse.

          If someone doesn’t have, say, a water well or propane gas generator and has enough tied up in an IRA/401k to pay for one or both, they should buy them. If someone has enough in a retirement account to buy land and build in a remote, racially friendly location they should do so. Everything we have done and thought about future financial security–I hesitate to write “retirement” because that is a relic of the past–has changed completely in recent years. The concept of wealth has done a 180, too.

          It is obvious the future plans are to stripmine Whites, starting with the most vulnerable, of assets. The bottom line is that it’s a helluva lot harder to seize a propane generator than $10,000.00 sitting around somewhere.

          I don’t have the link but there was an interesting piece a while back that posited that the only reason for the delay in seizing 401ks and IRA’s in the very near future is it would accelerate pension plan collapses, which are almost a certainty. I can’t boil down the particulars other than the theory made perfect sense, and also suggested the largely White private and public sector retired union members would be sacrificed along with everyone else in due time.

          • Jack: Our thinking is totally synchronous here. Those are the same arguments I’ve used on my husband for years. His change in thinking really began with the 2021 Texas deep freeze, and concomitant supply chain issues and increasing inflation cemented the shift. Problem was we had bought raw land and the intricacies of trying to get a driveway put in or a well and septic dug were rather daunting from hundreds of miles away.

            That land is shortly to be put on the market since we recently purchased the same size acreage about 10 miles north with higher elevation, and including a house, outbuildings, well, and generator among other things. When/if finances permit and opportunity arises, we hope to be able to make further land purchases contiguous to where we will be living. Many other needs/desires before that, however (exterior window shutters, a bedroom and basement addition, etc.). We’re extremely blessed to have found this property and only hope we can sell our suburban home for a reasonable price now (timing sucks given current market, but needs must).

35. Generally support the “emergent” thesis. Too many decades in the midst of Cloud managerial class of the F-500 world. Until you’ve been in the middle of it, you can’t fully appreciate how fast “signaling” moves through these places. A week after the St. George of Fentanyl shit, get pulled into an exec committee meeting, where after our division President confessed her “white privilege”, we were going to go on a small group “listening” tour to help ease the pain of the diverse employees. Just one example. Meanwhile I’m getting 1:1 questions from staff I’ve known a long time along the lines of “my parents were dirt poor shanty Irish, worked my way through school to get an accounting degree—where, exactly, is my “white privilege?” About 6 months into Covid was warning the same exec team that inflation was going to be a real problem (our business is sensitive to it). Got the “two heads growing out of shoulders look”…. Then the CEO mentions it (late of course) in an earnings call—suddenly “OMG inflation!” Most people are sheep.

    • The executives aren’t stupid. They ‘admit’ their white privilege because otherwise they would have to discuss why all that diversity doesn’t do as well as whitey. The only three answers are racism, culture, and genetics, and guess which two explanations would get you fired?

      I’ve also noticed these executives don’t have the F’U money one would expect. One of my uncles, high level executive who made obscene amounts of money yearly, had to rescind his promise to help one of my other uncles with a measily 5 thousand dollars because otherwise he would not be able to make payments for his son’s tuition bill.

      Living rich sucks you into the system, and makes them even worse slaves to the winds of elite opinion.

      • Yep. Seems most everyone gets sucked in and becomes a wage slave. Few make earnings beyond subsistence. Now we can argue just what “true” subsistence is, but it seems a moving target and matches whatever your salary is currently. 😉

        I am told that perhaps the latest generations are not falling for this ploy. Let’s hope so. Regardless of their perceived status, they’ll be happier in the long run.

    • People who have spent time in very large companies are much more open to the emergent behavior approach. Things just sort of happen and no one can identify the origin. That is because in a human system, ideas merge with currents in the system and appear to take on a life of their own.

      I have been in many meetings where people decide to do the obviously stupid thing as if they are victims of a drugging. The wave of affirmation sweeps the room once the boss, maybe, comes down in favor of the crackpot idea. A month later, everyone has amnesia and is looking for ideas to fix the results of the dumb idea.

      • I work [well, now contract, thank God] at a v large such company. Emergent behavior was a thing 38 years ago when I worked for said company. Now, it truly is a religion, ridiculously easy to discern for those with eyes to see and ears to listen. Lately, we’re back on the mask, and [most] all hands are fine with it, even though the rest of the county and state have moved on to newer idiocies.
        The hive is alive and well, my previous post notwithstanding

        • I saw Georgetown was requiring masks in their classes yesterday and was stunned. I thought all that insanity had been memory holed. They are also requiring students to be maxed out on their booster shots. Did this company ask you for proof of vaccination?

          • Nope, as a contractor, I was able to refuse to take the needles. I’m what ya call a “essential employee,” meaning I actually show up to work five days a week, plandemic or no, performing at least marginally valuable work; thus they were afraid to push it.

      • Lost my innocence early in my career after I developed a good idea. Strategy, details, operational plan – whole thing was beloved by the whole chain up to the SVP. I’m a goddamned genius, man, solver of problems. Let’s present this to the C-suite!

        C-suite guy was like, “Meh.” Senior executives were all like, “Yeah, it’s kind of a stupid idea. Let’s move on.” Took four minutes. Tough lesson to learn.

        • I had a similar experience, but the opposite. I got frustrated with being stonewalled so I tried the opposite approach as I was frustrated. I recommended against the obviously right answer and that seemed to convince the bosses to take a second look. I later learned from others that this was a known tactic in the company. The bosses needed to believe they were the idea men. That is when I first heard the line, “First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.”

          My boss was a third rate man who got promoted twice before doing something so monstrously stupid they had to fire him. He then got a job with the government.

          • The bosses needed to believe they were the idea men.

            The most valuable career advice ever.

      • I’ve only survived because I like what I do and have evolved into a “fixer/consigliere” role for the last couple of decades. Which gives me a lot more latitude, but also effectively caps progress beyond a certain (albeit well paid) point. It also requires C-level officers that know they need someone around to discreetly tell them they are wrong.

        • I have fallen into a similar role, but from the outside and not terribly well paid. I often find myself like the Wolf character in Pulp Fiction. People do something stupid that has an obvious remedy, but it has to be said by someone from outside the circle that created the problem. It pays the bills and I do not have to repeat things that are obvious false, so it could be worse.

      • So emergent behavior is peer pressure facilitated globally by technology

        • You could not have phrased
          Any better, my dear chum:
          You nailed it – ‘fo sho!

        • Whitney: Almost perfect. May I suggest the addition of “with direct intent backed by enormous funding”?

      • In a sense what you call the “deep state” or perhaps more accurately, the system, depends upon emergent behavior. Our schools and culture train and select for it. Like the school of fish that jerks this way and that to tossing a stone into a pond. But who is tossing the stones?

      • I ran sales & marketing for a large software company. This meant the social media team reported to me during the passing of Saint Floyd. It took an aggressive and persistent backbone on my part (with support from my non-American CEO) to stop them from making the usual pandering apologetics and promises. I score high is disagreeableness so it probably made this resistance and insistence on my part a bit easier. I can imagine a more agreeable person would have just given them free reign to align and keep up with emerging behavior. If I were to hazard to guess, as a result, my company was maybe one of only the 5% of tech companies that didn’t pander during those times.

36. Can’t help but wonder whether the hyper-socialization of reality has something to do with it. When you can communicate with anyone you want online, even people you have no idea of anything about them other than political leanings, it creates an incredibly distorted image of the person. Our host also mentioned that in one of his recent subscribestar posts.

    Where before someone would encounter a soy-faced lib and avoid them, simply based on aesthetics and mannerisms alone, now these same people can foster an online image of intellectual, propped up by strong money powers.

    The hypersocialization has, paradoxically, made relationships far more hollow and superficial, and the gutting of traditional institutional gathering spaces have just accelerated the demise. We’re becoming a people who can communicate with anyone in the world, all the while having our abilities to bond in a meaningful way being destroyed. As we’re seeing in real time, even family has turned into nothing more important than random online colleagues, just products to consume and discard at will.

    The truth is the hivemind would not be this powerful without technology, and it’s arguable their power was inevitable with the dawn of social media. Now it’s just a question of how to stop it before they engulf everyone into their vortex.

    • Excellent insight.

      Everyone knows the constant online “connection” is a net terrible for the individual, but no one knows how to stop it.

37. Z man: I admit you are smarter than me on these things but you spent an entire article talking about semantics.

    “It is NOT deep state. It IS hive mind”

    But the effect on Joe 6 pack is still the same so what difference does it make what you call it?

    I am assuming you distinguished between hive mind and deep state as 2 different diagnoses because each would require a different treatment plan?

    • Hive mind requires good psyops to win. If it were fully deep state you’d need a lot of rope….or helicopters.

    • Isn’t it likely that there’s more than one “hive” and more than one “hive mind”? Isn’t it also likely that these multiple hive minds have very much different viewpoints on various issues? A member of a particular hive doesn’t consider his beliefs to be part of a hive mind but instead an actual part of his culture, shared with others of his hive, or his culture. Only someone outside that culture would call it a hive mind. It’s a matter of perspective.

    • Yes, he is smarter than you and me. But one of the rhetorical go-to bits around here is the false dichotomy. Which is fine as a construction if it gets you closer to reality.

      Unfortunately this morning’s false dichotomy is a misfire, as seems to have been realized by the end of the piece. But even Z’s spiritual ancestor James Brown flubbed a note once in a while.

      Putting that aside, strategies of rhetorical avoidance (“deep state” “coastal elite” “Hollywood”) are way past their sell-by date.
      My sense is that this is understood by millions of normal people.

      Did you catch Steve King out there trolling the vampiric Attorney General? Herr Doktor Johnson brought this up in an interview on Smilin’ Jim’s Political Cesspool, which I recommend people listen to.

38. I recall Rush pointing the hive mind stuff years ago when he’d have a soundbite of various media talking heads chanting the exact same words or catch phrase – it really was and is remarkable. The GWB “gravitas” was a good one. They’re further so insulated in their hive, they have no idea how stupid it all sounds – but I guess that’s one of the hallmarks of a cult.

    • I used to love when he’d play those sound clips

39. I note that [hive] colony collapse disorder is a phenomena biologists have fretted about these past years. One wonders if some of the cracks in the hive we’ve witnessed of late is the political analog, a hierarchy top heavy with credentialed worker bees which cannot support itself.
    Art imitates Nature, one hopes.

40. “Of course, both sides of this debate can be right”

    Yeah. Most likely

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