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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about the remake of the classic film Gladiator, a post about the stupid people at the NATO summit and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

By now, everything that can be said about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend has been said in every way that can be said. Thanks to cameras being everywhere all the time, most facts were known in real time. It did not take long for the internet to identify the shooter and then for the authorities and their media platforms to confirm the details. An iron rule of life is that it is better to be lucky than good and Trump is the living embodiment of it.

Of course, the same is true to a degree for the shooter. The official story will be that he was a loner, a victim of bullying, who just snapped. Just as the FBI swears every serial killer is a middle-aged white guy, they swear ever assassin is a loner. Regardless of his motivations, many things needed to fall into place for him to get on that roof and get a chance for the glory he was seeking. Ninety-nine percent of the time these guys are caught before they get out of the car.

Putting that aside, what matters right now is the politics of this event. Sensing that this was not good for their side, the regime rolled the dice and sent Biden out to “address the nation” from the Oval Office. Anytime they put him out for public view there is the risk he reminds the world that he is a desiccated husk. Even when he avoids looking like a nursing home patient, it is clear that it is taking all of his remaining energy to get out the words they have on the screen in front of him.

It is the habit of the regime to cry out in agony as they attack, but then that tactic fails, they go for a different version. They attack then call for peace before they think the other side has a chance to respond. For close to a decade they have been calling for the death of Trump and his supporters, but now all of a sudden, they think it is time to put aside our differences and come together as brothers. Note that there was no remorse in Biden’s call for unity over the weekend.

Imagine you are walking down the street, and a guy runs up and smacks you in the head, a thing common in coastal cities. Just as you are about to respond, he starts yelling, “why can’t we just get along bro?” Then a crowd forms up demanding that you accept the guy’s offer of peace and reconciliation. It is absurd, but it is how the progressive mind operates. These are people with no scruples and no self-awareness, so they are incapable of remorse.

It is a hollow gesture, and the regime will soon be back to anathematizing Trump and everyone associated with him. When they call Trump an “existential threat to their democracy” they mean it and they are correct. What they mean by “their democracy” is rule by the semi-permanent ruling class of credentialed experts and policy makers who hide behind the democratic process. If the voters back populist candidates like Trump, then the system loses its legitimacy.

It is not that Trump will usher in revolutionary change if elected. It has never been about that for the regime. They could have cut a good deal with him at any time. It is what Trump represents that terrifies them. What these people fear is a system whereby elected officials compete for public support and then have the power to pass laws they think are popular with the public. They hate this idea for the same reason they were scandalized by the overturning of the Chevron deference.

This is one reason why there will be no going back. This is the new normal and will remain so until one side destroys the other side utterly. We have been in a cold civil war, as John Derbyshire has called it, for a long time. The war has gotten hotter over the last decade and it got very hot over the weekend. It may cool down a bit over the next few weeks, but by the time the Democratic convention rolls around, Joe Biden will be threatening drone strikes on your town again.

Of course, demographic reality plays a role. Trump is symbolically the voice of white America right now. He may live the gangster lifestyle, but he will still only get ten percent of the black vote. Every major black celebrity will take turns calling him and his voters the usual scare words. On one side of the civil war is the ruling class white progressives, the Alawites of America, leading the nonwhite hordes that will soon be a majority, against the shrinking heritage America.

On the other hand, parts of that shrinking heritage America were radicalized when they saw Trump rise like El Cid from the stage floor. It was not so much that the scales fell from their eyes about what is happening, but that they were reminded of the basic truth of what it means to be an American. It is not the Bravo Sierra that comes from creepy weirdos like Ben Shapiro. What it means to be an American is when the bullets start flying, you run toward the shooter.

A Russian blogger got it right. “In the eyes of the US population, Trump will be promoted as the living embodiment of that very “American Dream” – a self-made billionaire, an American patriot, whom his enemies tried to kill for his love for his homeland, while being protected from all troubles by the Higher Powers.” For many in heritage America, Trump stopped being a politician on that stage and became a symbol around which they can rally against the forces of darkness.

That is when the battle is joined. Until now, the cold civil war has been a one-sided affair, because white people did not know there was a war. They told each other that the actions of the regime were for money or power. Now they are starting to sense it is about something else. The “existential threat” is not against “their democracy” but against heritage Americans. If the regime thinks killing Trump is funny, they will have no qualms about killing you and your family.

Assassinations are often triggering events. The most famous was the assassination of Archduke Frans Ferdinand. That kicked off the Great War. The assassination of Kennedy kicked off the cold civil war that still rages today. Perhaps in time the failed assassination of Trump will be seen as the turning point in the cold civil war, the point when the good guys finally figured out that they are under attack and begin to organize a resistance against the gathering darkness.

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

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

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

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

Note: If you are interested in hearing me gas on about a variety of things, then you are in luck as I was on Coffee and Mike Tuesday. Listen here.

The oldest argument against democracy is that it is essentially mob rule, which means it is susceptible to the terrible dynamics of the mob. Something excites the mob and the members of the mob compete with one another to show they are more excited than anyone else inside the mob. In his Lyceum Address, Lincoln warned that the mob is the antitheses of the rule of law, because inevitably the mob comes to see the law as a barrier between itself and its goal.

It is why ruling classes have always feared mobs. Mobs are fickle and once they get going it is not clear where or how they end. It is a sign of our decline that the Cloud People caught the democracy bug and they have been chanting the phrase “our democracy” as if they have a strange form of Tourette’s syndrome. Everything they do is in defense of “our democracy” while even the slightest push back is called a threat to “our democracy” which is always a signal to the mob.

The promiscuous use of mobs has been the main tool of the regime going back to at least the Obama years. The entirely fake antiwar movement in the Bush years might be the first use of an official mob. It was, however, in the Obama years that the official mob was perfected. The rape on campus nonsense set mobs of internet feminists upon the remaining white boys in college. Then we got the BLM mob, which unleashed a one-sided race war on the white middle class.

Cancel culture is another form of official mob. First, they unleashed the “me too” nonsense, which set mobs of digital lunatics on men who were accused of being too normal around the ladies. That moved to digital kooks chasing after imaginary fascists and racists online. Antifa can probably be viewed as the first digital mob to break into the analog world or maybe it is the other way around. Either way, like the antiwar mobs, it was a creature of the regime.

The thing about the digital mobs is they took what existed in the analog space, the media frenzy, and then democratized it. Instead of a gaggle of credentialed press people chasing a guy down the street shouting questions, the digital mob is internet characters filling up the timeline of the victim with accusations. The dynamics are the same, except now one does not need a credential. You just have to possess a weak mind and access to social media.

It is what makes the present crisis around Joe Biden amusing. The people who have profited from the mob are now being eaten by the mob. The great and the good are taking turns telling their favorite media actor that Biden is too old, too feeble or too narcissistic to be president. The same people who brought us the Russian collusion hoax and the Covid panic are now hammering away at Biden. It would take a heart of stone not to see the humor in this.

This has always been the problem with mobs. Once the mob forms up it keeps going until it either burns itself out or is snuffed out. The former only happens after they have tasted the blood of their victim. The latter happens when they taste enough of their own blood that being a mob is no longer fun. Since the White House is not going to start shooting media toadies, which would be a welcomed result, it means this mob ends with the head of Joe Biden on a pike.

This brings up the other problem with mobs. The mob exists purely in the moment, which means anyone in contact with the mob exists in the moment. The reason Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and wounded a third is no one in the mob, including himself, could even think, much less act outside the moment. If Rittenhouse could have saw one step ahead before the mob set upon him, no one outside his family would have reason to know his name.

The mob chasing Biden is not thinking about what comes next. They can only think about the joy they will feel when Biden steps aside. The chaos that will erupt in the regime when suddenly they do not have a body to parade around as the official nominee is outside the event horizon of the mob. What if the mob forms up in favor of someone that turns out to be worse than Biden? What if the mob splits into warring tribes organized around the various parts of the regime?

No one can think about that right now. All that matters for the members of the mob is creating some new way to yell “get him” at Joe Biden. They sense that time is running short, so they have to put everything into it, or Biden will escape. Realistically they have until the end of next week to drag his corpse from the ticket. After that, the mob will run out of steam and the regime will run out of time to stage a fake process to name a replacement, so they will be stuck with Biden.

From the Dirt People perspective, this is all to the good. The more intense and grinding this mob fury is over Biden, the deeper the anger between factions of the regime after the frenzy is over. One of the ironies of the mob is the longer it goes, the more destructive it becomes of its own ends. That means the nastier this fight gets, the more the regime damages its own interests. With any luck the Democratic convention is an even more chaotic replay of 1968.

Of course, this is the lesson of democracy. Of democracy, John Adams wrote, “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts it is more bloody than either.” Maybe that is what this mob chasing Biden signals. The democracy fever that set in after the Cold War is now reaching its natural end point.

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

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

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

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

The regime media’s ongoing meltdown over Joe Biden’s mental decline might be a bit of foreshadowing for what lies ahead in American society. What was on display the night of the debate is called a preference cascade. This is when people suddenly realize that their private doubts or preferences are shared by everyone else. One person realizes he is not alone in his doubts, for example, so he voices them and all of a sudden, this private doubt sweeps the room as public doubt.

Up to that point, everyone privately assumed that everyone else held an opinion or preference that was contrary to their private opinion or preference. This is preference falsification, which involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the privately held preference of the person. The person may disagree with what she perceives to be the collective opinion but she keeps this private. This is the underlying condition for the preference cascade.

Regarding Biden and the media, they were seeing what the world has been seeing for years, but they chose to keep quiet about it. One reason is pressure from the top of the media operations who collude with the political elites. The bigger reason is the herd mentality of regime media. The thing these people fear most is to be expelled from the system, so they invest most of their energy in making sure they never wander too far away from the rest of the herd.

On the night of the debate, as Biden stared into nothingness with his mouth open like a nursing home patient, the conflict between the privately held opinion of Biden’s condition and official opinion grew so large some people snapped. This is what set off the chain reaction we saw that night. All of a sudden, the poles have reversed and those who doubt that it is a good idea to question Biden’s fitness keep quiet because they assume the herd holds a contrary opinion.

This is creating an enormous problem for Team Biden. They are going from one regime platform to the next hoping to pressure these people into abandoning the public position on Biden’s brain condition, but that same herd mentality is preventing them from changing opinions on the matter. They are now playing the race card against regime media, with the Congressional Black Caucus leading the charge. Questioning Biden’s fitness is now the new racism.

What the regime is slamming into is a problem of their own making. Decades of lies about the nature of the regime were made possible by manipulation of the public through the herd mentality of regime media. Note how the regime worked tirelessly to remove anyone from the media who questioned official narratives. The purge of diverse opinion from Fox News is the most recent example. The regime built a herd and now the herd has broken through the fence.

This may turn out to be a good analogy for society as a whole. The two-party system that emerged from the Cold War was built around a new consensus. The end of history was the triumph of Western democracy and by extension, the triumph of the managerial elite that came to control Western democracies. One party would promote a domestic agenda shepherded by the elites, while the other party would champion an international agenda that spread that domestic agenda globally.

The glue holding it together was both their confidence in their ability to remake the world, but also their shared belief that the general public was fully committed to what the elites now call democracy. For thirty years the public has been subjected to a firehose of propaganda about how “our democracy” works. You have to accept the results because it is the result of democracy and no one better question “our democracy” or you are worse than Hitler.

The truth is though, this process and slowly undermined public trust in the institutions associated with democracy. Only kooks and simpletons accept anything from regime media at face value. Most people think the political parties are corrupt. If not for Trump, the Republican Party would be facing the same fate as the Tories. Even the military has lost the trust of the public. Recruitment is in a crisis because the people who used to buy the flag waving no longer wave the flags of their fathers.

In other words, we have a condition similar to that which prevailed in the media with regards to Biden’s mental health. The gap between what people think privately about their political system and what they will state publicly is growing. Every fake news item about it, each dodgy election result and the increasing despair at daily life are widening that gap by undermining trust in the system. The conditions for a preference cascade are just about in place, waiting for the match.

Wild fires start because no one can easily predict which spark at which location will set the woods ablaze. The solution is to prevent the conditions that can lead to a wildfire, rather than police the sparks. The regime has chosen the other path. They invest their time in preventing sparks. The reason regime media looks like a zombie horde is anyone with a spark of curiosity was forced to hide his own misgivings for fear of being ostracized, but that just created the conditions for this media wildfire.

We see the same in the general public. In the fullness of time, we may look at this ongoing populist revolt as a genuine defense of the system by the public because they still believed in the system. The real peasant revolt that comes next will start with the preference cascade when everyone all at once realizes that everyone else detests their rulers and the system that makes them possible. History says these sorts of wildfires end only one way.

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

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

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

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

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about my annual trip to the doctor, a post about the Biden crisis that is vexing our beautiful people and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Ross Douthat wrote a column where he contemplated the reality of the modern president, which probably serves no real purpose to the functioning of the managerial state. He makes some obvious points but then quotes Curtis Yarvin and his brain falls out of his head. The rest of his column is nonsense. This is the risk of reading Curtis Yarvin. Your brain cells begin to die at an alarming rate, mostly as an act of suicide in order to avoid reading Yarvin.

It is interesting how all of a sudden, the kept men of what we call conservatism use Yarvin when they want to sound edgy. There was no need to name drop Yarvin in this post, but Douthat wants his readers to know that every once in a while, he puts on the leather jacket and rides his Vespa without a helmet. Back when Yarvin was Moldbug and had an audience, so-called conservatives had no idea he existed, but now all of a sudden, they are all big fans.

Putting that aside, Douthat raises two valid points with regards to whether the job of president matters. One is the system found a way to work around Trump, thwarting his reform efforts and inserting their shenanigans into his program. With Biden, it is clear that he has been incapable of doing much of anything since the 2020 election, yet the machine has trundled along regardless. That is eight years where the machine of state has operated in spite of the president and without a president.

There is nothing novel about this. America has been a corporate state for a long time and corporate systems are designed to operate leaderless. Large companies often go extended periods with no one in the big chair. Maybe they have a caretaker or maybe it is a committee doing the basics, but the system rolls along until a new CEO is found to sit in the big chair. Often, the process of hiring the CEO is about finding someone who will not change anything important.

If you think back to the end of the Cold War, both parties were set up to prevent an undesirable candidate from winning the nomination. The stakes were too high to risk having a madman with the nuclear codes! Since the Cold War, both parties have tried to select for neo-liberal dullards like Bush and Obama. Look past the superficial and there was not much of a difference between Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Nothing of consequence changed with each “new” president.

That is the main reason the system freaked out over Trump. It was not just that he comes from outside the managerial class, but that he wanted to use the power of the presidency to do things. The people who actually run things were scandalized by the suggestion that an outsider could take the job and make the machine do things they did not want it to do. In other words, the managerial state has been running itself for a long time now and it is what is viewed as normal.

In this context, the twentieth century takes on a new look. The managerial system that emerged with FDR was born in the crisis of war and economic collapse, but it emerged from those times as the moral default. This base assumption that everything could be managed outside of the electoral process slowly gave way to a view that everything must be managed outside of politics. This led to the second phase of managerialism, which is consolidation.

You can probably date that to Watergate. The last president with real power who actually used it was Nixon. He was run out of town, in part, because of the “imperial presidency” claims by the managerial class. As someone noted in the comments behind the green door, this was also when they passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. This handed power to the agencies, rather than the president, with regards to administering spending.

It was also in this time when the media lost its working class character because it was fully professionalized. In the 1960’s the typical Washington reporter was a high school grad, but by the end of the 1970’s they were not just college graduates, but graduates from elite colleges like Columbia. With professionalization came credentialization across the managerial system. What we think of as politics now operates within the corporate structure of the managerial state.

In theory, Congress controls the purse strings, but no one in Congress reads the bills that get voted out of Congress. These are written by staff that work with the agencies and the special interests linked to the agencies. Most of the rules that impact the citizens are crafted in the agencies, away from public view. Thus, we have arrived at a system that not only has no need for a president, but it can run fine without a House or a Senate. All of them could be replaced with code.

Note also that few House or Senate seats are competitive now. About ten percent of seats can go either way in an election. The most common way to lose you spot in Congress is quitting for a lobbying job. Death is the next most common exit. The third way to lose your place is to anger the system. Then you get a well-financed primary opponent and banishment from Washington. It is another reason the system seems to be on autopilot, immune from the voters.

This brings us back to the main question. Not only can the system operate without a president, but it also operates without a Congress. The theater of democracy is not just a pithy expression but the literal definition of our politics. It is just a show that provides a fig leaf for the managerial class. It is not unique to America. It is true of all democratic systems, because in the end, no society can last with the people having a final say on things, so every society has a ruling class.

The solution to this conflict between the ethos of democracy and the reality of human organization is the managerial state. Through this the economic elites run society, but the curtain behind which they stand is the theater of democracy. As America declines, the willingness and ability to maintain this illusion declines with it, thus we go from the theater of democracy to the farce of democracy. The penultimate stop in this process is the theater of the absurd we see emerging with Biden.

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

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

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

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